INFORMATION TO USERS
This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter 6ce, while others may be from any type of computer printer.
The qualify of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pag%, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
Oversize materials (e g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each orignal is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back o f the book.
Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. EGgher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Infoniiation C o m p aiy 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Arbor MI 4S106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600
RAPE AND THE RHETORIC OF FEMALE CHASTITY IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Nancy Weitz Miller, B.A., M.A., M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University 1996
Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor John N. King, Adviser
Professor Lisa M. Klein Kr Advise Professor Christopher Highley epartment of E n ^ h UHI Nimber: 9630937
VMI Microform 9630937 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. AU rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48109 ABSTRACT
This study analyzes the textual construction of female chastity and its relationship to beauty in works of English literature, written by men and women between 1529 and 1675, highlighting conduct books and narrative poetry by Vives,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. When read together, both discursive treatments of chastity and narrative depictions of beautiful chaste women fending off sexual assault help to provide a window into underlying inconsistencies in the virtue: the apparently seamless rhetoric of these didactic texts conceals conflicting ideologies which inherently condemn sexually-assaulted women for bearing a degree of responsibility for their own victimization. Women were admonished to remain chaste even while they were told to attract a husband; the moral worth of women who were sexually assaulted was tautologically judged according to whether or not a rape occurred; and women were told that their beauty was a gift from God as well as the gateway of the devil to lead themselves and men into deadly sin. My focus texts offer remarkably similar definitions of the "chaste woman," an ideal that was logically and ideologically impossible for female readers to imitate and for all readers to expect from women.
These internal conflicts accord with the clash of two ideological positions in the culture. The residual position is a holdover of medieval misogyny, which
ii constructs women as unreasoning creatures whose control over their sexual appetites is unreliable and who use their beauty to lure men into sexual sin. In opposition to this malicious view of women is the emergent Neoplatonic philosophy which was especially influential with courtiers and Petrarchan poets and eventually entered the popular rhetoric of beauty: women were perceived as beautifiil objects which when contemplated could bring the (male) gazer closer to divinity. The juxtaposition of these two attitudes creates an unresolved tension: men are fully justified in gazing upon women, but women are held responsible for any sexual desire this gazing engenders. Readers thus internalize this double-bind that makes it all but impossible for women to follow the advice and imitate the examples found in conduct books and other forms of didactic literamre.
Ill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although it bears the single authorial inscription, my dissertation is the product of much collaborative learning and effort. Not the least of my debts is the one that I owe my hard-working dissertation committee: my adviser, John King; Lisa Klein; and
Chris Highley. Other mentor-friends cannot be forgotten, particularly John Norman.
I am also grateful for the financial support from Ohio State University that allowed me to travel to England and gather many of my primary materials—grants from the
Elizabeth G. Gee Fund for Research on Women and the Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies.
My brothers- and sisters-at-arms in the great melee that is graduate school also deserve my thanks: Irmgard Schopen; Paula Weston; Tom Olsen; Jennifer Cognard-
Black; and the women who survived the razing of 502—Roxanne Mackie, Mary
Wagner, and the memory of Carol Virginia Pohli; Paul Hanstedt and Ellen Satrom.
My personal debt goes to my patient and supportive family—Mom, Dad,
Chuck and Isabel, and Bob and Michelle (and Lacey and Tyler). Finally, my biggest debt goes to my partner in love, life, and work, my husband, Scott, whose own commitment to learning was my model and whose influence shaped who I am today.
Without Scott, I would never have come back to college at all. Thank you.
IV VITA
April 24, 1961 ...... Bom - Detroit, Michigan
1985 ...... B.A. Theater, Humboldt State University
1988 ...... M.A. Theater, Humboldt State University
1992...... M.A. English, Ohio State University
1991 - present...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University
PUBLICATIONS
1. N.W. Miller, "Sloth: The Moral Problem in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.” The International Journal o f Moral and Social Studies 7 (Aummn 1992): 255-66.
2. Nancy Weitz Miller, "Chastity, Rape, and Ideology in the Castlehaven Testimonies and Milton’s Ludlow Mask." Milton Studies 32 (1996): 151-166.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: English TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ...... ii
Acknowledgments...... iv
V ita...... V
List of Figures ...... viii
Introduction ...... I
Chapters:
1. Women Readers and the Conflict of Chastity, Beauty, and Rape ...... 11
1.1 Women Readers and Virmous Exempla ...... 12 1.2 Chastity ...... 17 1.3 Beauty ...... 22 1.4 Rape ...... 26
2. Metaphor and the Mystification of Chastity: Vives and the Conduct Book Tradition...... 39
2.1 Instruction of a Christen Woman ...... 42 2.2 Later Conduct Books: English Authors ...... 60
3. Allegory and the Fragmentation of Chastity ...... 88
3.1 Spenser...... 91 3.2 Castlehaven and M ilton ...... 110 3.3 Milton...... 119
4. Blazon and the Eroticization of Chastity: Lucretia and Susanna on Display ...... 142
VI 4.1 Lucretia ...... 146 4.2 Susanna ...... 164
5. Ethos and the Struggle for Chastity: Women W riters ...... 194
5.1 Ethos, Virtue, and Female Authorship ...... 196 5.2 Rhetorical Virtue and the Power of Chastity ...... 209 5.3 The Chaste Life Devised and Displayed ...... 226
Bibliography ...... 249
vu LIST OF FIGURES
Page
1.1 Cesare Ripa, "Purity" ...... 33
1.2 Ripa, "Virginity" ...... 33
1.3 Henry Peacham, "Pulchritudo faeminea" ...... 34
2.1 Wenceslaus Hollar, "Summer" ...... 79
2.2 "Virtue" and "Vice," frontispiece ...... 80
3.1 Portrait of Castlehaven, frontispiece ...... 132
4.1 Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia ...... 184
4.2 Treatments of Lucretia’s suicide ...... 185
4.3 Frontispiece, The Ladle’s Blush ...... 186
4.4 Willem Van Mieris, Susanna and the Elders ...... 187
4.5 Annibale Carraci, Susanna and the Elders ...... 188
5.1 Frontispiece, Natures Picture ...... 241
V lll INTRODUCTION
A woman hath no charge to see to but her honesty and chastity. Wherefore when she is informed of that, she is sufficiently appointed.^
There dwels sweet love and constant chastity. Unspotted fayth and comely womanhood. Regard of honour and mild modesty. There vertue raynes as Queene in royal throne. And giveth lawes alone. The which base affections doe obay. And yeeld theyr services unto her will. Ne thought of thing uncomely ever may Thereto approch to tempt her mind to ill.^
The high value set upon her virginity by a man wooing a woman seems to us so deeply planted and self-evident that we become almost perplexed if called upon to give reasons for it.^
In early modem England, a woman’s chastity was the mainstay of her character, the mark of her social and spiritual worth. Whereas other aspects of the namre of woman were under dispute, writings from surprisingly diverse religious, social, and political perspectives all vehemently agreed that chastity was the primary identifying trait for good women.'^ The existence of so many published works that reiterate chastity mandates poses certain questions: Why were these lessons on female sexual purity deemed so necessary? What defined chastity for contemporary writers and their readers? How are these injunctions imbedded in moral and social ideologies?
And how did the sexual attraction of female beauty complicate expectations for
1 women to remain chaste even in the extremity of rape? To ask why the virtue became so crucial to the construction of womanhood is to seek the source of chastity deep within the murky origins of western attitudes towards women (which depths have been and continue to be plumbed by others)/ However, to question the definition
(the "what") of chastity and its operation (the "how") can add much to our understanding of attitudes towards women and sexuality in early modem English culture.
Whereas previous studies of early modem women agree about the dominance of chastity in constmctions of femininity, none focus exclusively upon that virtue as a site of contradiction and inconsistency.^ This study closely analyzes how chastity itself was textually constmcted and what relationship it bears to female beauty in works of English literature, written by men and women between 1529 and 1675, highlighting prose and poetry by Vives, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Margaret
Cavendish. Conduct books, histories, narrative poetry, marriage manuals, theological tracts, and autobiographies, all testify to a preoccupation with defining, exhibiting, glorifying, and questioning female chastity. Although representations of chastity appear in all genres of literature during the period, I have chosen to focus my attention on advice books and narrative poetry that explicitly display the chaste woman as an exemplar of the virtue. When read side by side, both discursive treatments of chastity and narrative depictions of beautiful chaste women fending off sexual assault help to provide a window into contradictions in early modem conceptions of chastity and the virtue’s problematic relationship to physical beauty. The apparently seamless rhetoric of these didactic texts conceals conflicting ideologies, deeply embedded in constructions of chastity, which inherently condemn sexually-assaulted women for bearing a degree of responsibility for their own victimization.
As chastity was the primary sign of virtuous womanhood in early modem culture, it warrants the status of an ideology, which feminist theorist Rita Felski defines as "the mobilization of structures of signification to legitimate the interests of hegemonic groups. The "hegemonic groups" whose interests chastity serves are not sharply distinguishable: certainly female chastity serves a patriarchally hierarchized culture by ensuring that bloodlines will be known and women, as property, will have clearly defined masters; but beyond that broad identity mostly associated with the upper classes, chastity appears to serve no particular group.^ The virme was diffuse in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture, largely
"mobilized" discursively through the cultural practice of writing. I envision the
"rhetoric" of chastity along Patricia Parker’s lines, seeing rhetoric "not just as a system of tropes and figures but as a motivated discourse. The agency of diverse authors and readers is intricately bound up with the transmission of ideology; I find in my focus texts both the ideology of chastity and an appearance of authorial subjectivity, which suggests a dialectical relationship between ideology and individual agency.'” Thus, for the purposes of my study, subject and ideology, agency and culture are all textually located, and I understand authors and readers both as products of and agents acting upon their culture." The text, as the medium of transmission. is the locus for the meeting of the author and the reader as well as the clash of a structure which seeks to totalize and an individual who seeks to assert agency.
Textual representations of chastity and rape thus provide sites for identifying conflicted ideological positions.
In accordance 'with Felski, I maintain that "the very purpose of a critical theory such as feminism is to uncover concealed determinants and consequences of actions and to examine critically the seemingly natural and self-evident truths of everyday life."^^ The discourse on chastity found in early modem texts has been largely taken for granted as self-evident. Yet, women were admonished to remain chaste above all other considerations even while they were told to attract a husband; the moral worth of women who were sexually assaulted was tautologically judged according to whether the rape occurred or not; and women were told that their beauty was a gift from God as well as the gateway of the devil to lead themselves and men into deadly sin. By focusing on these contradictions in the ideal of chastity, I find within remarkably similar definitions of the "chaste woman" an ideal that was logically and ideologically impossible for female readers to imitate and for all readers to expect from women. I suggest that an understanding of this ideal virtue as it is texmally inscribed, replete with contradictions, provides a necessary ground from which to launch other studies; indeed, how can we begin to recognize what is subversive until we recognize the problems inherent in the hegemonic?
These conflicting judgments and expectations generally accord with the clash of two ideological positions in the culture, one residual and one emergent.'^ The residual position is a holdover, still immensely popular throughout the Renaissance, of medieval misogyny, which constructs women as vice-ridden, unreasoning, sensual creatures whose control over their sexual appetites is unreliable and who use their beauty to maliciously lure men into sexual sin."' In opposition to this malicious notion of women is the emergent neo-Platonic philosophy that was especially influential in the more elite circles of courtiers and Petrarchan poets and eventually worked its way into a more popular rhetoric of beauty: women were perceived as beautiful objects which when contemplated could bring the (male) gazer closer to divinity.'^ The juxtaposition of these two attitudes toward women creates an unresolved tension in early modem texts, in which men are fully justified in gazing upon women, but women are held responsible for any resulting sexual desire this gazing engenders. This juxtaposition also creates a tension between the passive objectification of women in the neo-Platonic ideology and the allowance of women’s subjectivity (albeit vicious) in medieval misogyny. As virtue for women is largely defined as passive, women are discouraged from taking action in pursuit of virtue: decisive activity is more likely than not attributed to vicious intentions. Readers thus internalize this double-bind that makes it nearly impossible for women to follow the advice and imitate the examples found in conduct books and other forms of didactic literature.
In the following chapters, I highlight particular works and rhetorical tropes or strategies they employ which indicate the ideological gaps in their representations of chastity. I begin this task with a broad survey of texts that separately illustrate the conflicting attitudes towards chastity, beauty, and rape in Renaissance England.
Following that, I analyze the way Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman and subsequent conduct books attempt to synthesize the various attitudes by burying the ideological gaps under mystifying language. I then examine the way the basic inconsistencies are further embedded in imaginative literature to the point of overtly eroticizing what purports to be a virtue that deflects sexual attention. In Spenser’s allegorical project. The Faerie Queene, the virtue fractures into major iconic components, represented by personifications who have a particular response to male sexual assault: Britomart and Florimell represent two widely-used metaphors, the
"armor" and the "treasure" of chastity. This fracturing dramatizes the impossibility for chastity to be contained by a single representation. Milton’s allegorical A Mask
Presented at Ludlow Castle attempts this containment and infuses chastity with a type of "divine grace. " By locating the virtue wholly in the spirit of the "elect" individual,
Milton denies the possibility of rape for truly chaste women, and his adherence to individual responsibility proves to be at odds with the traditional gender constructions he employs. Chastity is also a favorite subject of other forms of narrative poetry and receives erotic treatment in the blazoning of two particularly popular chaste matrons, the Roman Lucretia and the apocryphal Susanna. In Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, the tragic heroine’s chastity as well as her beauty entice her rapist; likewise, Susanna is depicted in the anonymous The Ladies Blush and in seventeentli-century visual art as an erotic nude even while she is praised for her unswerving chastity. The poets who eroticize chastity question whether desire can in fact be separated into distinct moral categories (i.e. lust as opposed to nonsexualized love). Finally, I survey a number of female-authored texts that reclaim chastity as a source of female power.
These works, however, also contain tensions: female figures are allowed more agency to act virtuously and with less blame for the effect their beauty has upon men, yet women writers continue to represent the virtue using the conflicted language of the male-authored texts. Moreover, their awareness that the act of publishing their writings calls into question their own chastity through a pervasive conflation of speech and sexuality leads to intricate rhetorical strategies to assert their own virtue. NOTES
1. Juan Luis Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, tr. Richard Hyrde (London: 1529?), sig. B2.
2. Spenser, Epithalamion, 11. 191-99.
3. Sigmund Freud, "Contributions to the Psychology of Love: the Taboo of Virginity," Collected Papers, tr. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, p. 217.
4. Recent studies of the popular debates about women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries include Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind 1540-1620 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984); Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Suzanne C. Hull Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640 (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982); Pamela Joseph Benson The Invention of the Renaissance Woman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 191992); and Simon Shepherd’s The Women’s Sharp Revenge (London: Fourth Estate, 1985).
5. Comprehensive histories of attitudes towards women include Gerda Lemer, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University press, 1986); Vem L. Bullough, et al. The Subordinated Sex (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); and Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University press, 1988).
6. Previous studies that treat chastity do so as either one small part of a larger project or examine chastity in one particular work. Studies devoted to women’s history and male attitudes towards women include Joan Kelly-Gadol’s seminal essay "Did Women have a Renaissance?" m Becoming Visible: Women in Western History, eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 137-64; Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for a Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Margaret L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Mary E. Weisner, Women and Gender in Early Modem Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Treatments of chastity in specific works are cited in later chapters. English studies include Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Pamela Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman; Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Rosemary Kegl, The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
8 7. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 56.
8. Sherry B. Ortner posits a relationship between chastity and the emergence of state structures, and women are the means by which families increase stams and position within the state: "the purity of the women reflects on the honor and stams of their families; and the ideology is enforced by systematic and often quite severe control of women’s social and especially sexual behavior." See "The Virgin and the State," Feminist Studies 4 (1978): p. 19.
9. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 1.
10. I adopt Felski’s definition of ideology rather than Althusser’s because hers leaves a space for individual agency. Sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests that "social strucmres are both constimted by human agency and yet at the same time are the very medium of this constimtion. " Felski expands upon this theory: "human subjects are not simply constructed through social and linguistic strucmres, but themselves act upon and modify those strucmres through the reflexive monitoring of their actions. " See Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 57.
11. Similarly, Wolfgang Iser’s reader response theory locates the production of meaning in a halfway point between the reader and the author’s text. See The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1978).
12. Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 61.
13. Raymond Williams suggests that culmral process is "epochal," with dominant, residual, and emergent ideologies working simultaneously and in various degrees. See his Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chapter 8.
14. For more on medieval misogyny, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and an anthology of excerpted primary materials, Alcuin Blamires, ed. Women Defamed and Women Defended (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Despite the widespread medical belief that conception depended upon both parties reaching orgasm, which coincided with a protestant rejection of asceticism, moralists continued to be hostile toward female sexuality. See N.H. Keeble, ed.. The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 33-5; Martin Ingram, "The Reform of Popular Culmre? Sex and Marriage in Early Modem England, " in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Barry Reay (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985): 129-65; liana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modem England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), chapter 8; and Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982). 15. For a study of the relationship between the neo-Platonic and Petrarchan objectification of women through love discourses and the power of Queen Elizabeth, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London and New York: Methuen, 1989): also Ian MacLean, Renaissance Notion, p. 24. On Petrarchanism and the objectified woman as the beloved, see Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79; Vickers, "The Body Re-Membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description" in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons, et al. (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982): 100-109.
10 CHAPTER 1
WOMEN READERS AND THE CONFLICT OF CHASTITY, BEAUTY, AND RAPE
In a woman, no man will look for eloquence, great wit, or prudence, or craft to live by, or ordering of the commonweal, or justice, or liberality. Finally, no man will look for any other thing of a woman, but her honesty, the which only if it be lacked, is like as in a man if he lack all that he should have. For in a woman, the honesty is instead of all. It is an evil keeper that cannot keep one thing well committed to her keeping and put in trust to her with much commendation of words, and specially which no man will take from her against her will, nor touch it, except she be willing herself. '
Wherefore doeth Beauty shine especially in women. . . . Perhaps to the end she taking knowledge of these her perfections, should the rather bee guided by the zeale of honour, and bridle of shamfasmesse, not to violate so unspeakable a treasure, being assured that so great a grace was never given her from heaven, to defile with Luxury, but rather to bee a Bridle to that heate of concupiscence, which in her weak nature would gather strength. Or Perhaps because having receaved so great a blessing, shee should leame of her mother nature, to hide it, which covereth every faire, and prêtions thing, under a thousand shells, and barks: yea in hard rocks and bottomless depthes, and not to lay it open as a thing common.^
One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims.^
Chastity in early modem England did not exist in isolation and so must be viewed according to its mode of transmission from culture to individual readers via literature. The inconsistencies inherent in the textually-constmcted virtue, which are
11 caused by conflicting positions on beauty and women’s responsibility for arousing desire in the male beholder, are passed down to the reader of didactic literature via precepts and examples. Thus, it is useful to begin this study with a look at women readers and the exempla male writers created for their imitation before moving on to define chastity and discuss the ways early modem attitudes towards female beauty and rape impinge upon the seemingly consistent virtue.
Women Readers and Virtuous Exempla
Women comprised a significant portion of the early modem reading public.
According to Suzanne Hull, "In the period from 1475 to 1640, at least 163 books in some 500 editions were specifically addressed to women readers. Eighty-five percent of them were published after 1 5 7 0 .This list, Hull acknowledges, does not include books that may indeed have been read by women even though they do not contain particular addresses to female readers. Although the specific lessons differed, women were thought to receive knowledge in much the same way as men, and time spent in the company of good books was considered time well spent whether the reader were male or female. Even the act of reading, itself a passive and goodly practice, is infused with the virtue of chastity. Dorothy Leigh advises her children, "who so is chaste . . . is always either reading, meditating, or practicing some good thing which she hath leamed in the Scripture."^ As reading was the principle locus for leaming, education manuals frequently include a list of books conducive to good leaming.
12 Giovanni Michele Brute explains what reading matter was fit for the proper young gentlewoman:
She may read . . . besides the bookes of holy Scriptures . . . the workes of Plutarch written touching women of renowne, who in times past lived in the world: and that which many long time after, and Boccace himselfe have written, with other Authors that lived in our time: and shall read in faire pictimes and painted tables, which with great efficacie moove the mindes of children that are tender and delicate. By this reading she shall find not onley wordes . . . but also the notable actions and glorious enterprise of famous and renowned women, wherewith shee may increase the notable vertues by nature liberally bestowed upon her.
For, in fact, "All histories as well ancient as moderne, are full of the valiant actions of rare and excellent ladies, who as well by notable examples of chastity, as by noblenes and magnanimitie of courage, have deserved praise. "*
But here we see an inconsistency regarding the relationship between passivity and virtue: the commonplace use of exemplars who perform active herioc deeds poses problems for a female readership, as the ideal woman was construed as largely passive. Since both precept and example were standard devices employed by authors to influence a reader’s behavior, the problem for women that activity denotes vice while virtue is passive comes to bear upon the ways women were expected to internalize what they read: example was meant to illustrate and make seem possible the abstractions presented in precepts. Robert Codrington, in 1664, insists that
"Discourse and Imitation do teach above any Precept, and do invite with more ardour, and do promise to our selves that Excellence which we learn to imitate. Timothy
Hampton describes the way Renaissance writers used the exemplary figure from history: "The heroic or virtuous figure offers a model of excellence, an icon after
13 which the reader is to be formed. The representation of the exemplary figure functions as the occasion for reflection on the constitution of the self. " Narrative, a sequence of actions, is the means by which the exemplar proves his or her virtue.®
The reader’s task is to reflect upon the narrated deeds and reconstruct him- or herself in imitation of the exemplar who performs them.
Yet, since Aristotle insists that woman can act morally. Renaissance writers set out to reconcile this incongruity. The Renaissance offered three models of female virtue. The first two models, by far the most widespread, held that virtue was gender-specific: in one, entirely different virtues obtain for each sex, and in the other, the sexes strive for the same virtues but to different degrees and with different behaviors or duties appropriate to each sex. Thus, a woman who exhibited what was considered masculine virtue was monstrous unless her actions were beneficial to the patriarchy, in which case she would have been praised for her "manly" soul. The third model accepted that both sexes were equally capable of the same virtues, but this idea was relatively rare.® The female exemplars often chosen by Renaissance and early modem authors are women who have shown great patience and fortitude in bearing their burdens and those who have successfully defended themselves or their honor against attack. Brato suggests that women should read to "find examples of all vertues, religion, holiness, and loyaltie, in so many sacred virgins whose names are renowned among us, as in Cecile, Agathe, Theodore, Barbra, and infinite others."'®
Abraham Darcie catalogs women "who by their vertue have ingraven their names in the Temple of eternity," such as Susanna, Lucretia, and Matilda." Some authors
14 choose to concentrate on a single figure: Robert Greene allows his exemplar to teach her maids about virtue in Penelopes Web, and in a dig to fellow poets Daniel,
Hey wood, and Spenser, Michael Drayton introduces his poem in praise of Matilda by claiming that his exemplar overtops the virtues of those exhibited by Rosamond,
Lucrece, and Britomart.^-
Although active (often warrior) heroines such as Judith and Deborah, Amazon queens, and England’s own Boudicea figure prominently in catalogs of heroic women, they are most often held up as examples of virtue in a "manly" soul, unusual and unexpected in the typical Renaissance woman. As Ruth Kelso explains, "The heroic woman transcends in virtue not only all women but all human beings, delights only in prudent and brave operations, and her virtue is not the imperfect but the perfect virtue, not the mean virtue but the whole virtue.'"^ Moreover, even the most heroic and active of female figures would frequently stand as examples of the traits thought most fit for Renaissance women: chastity, patience, silence, constancy, sweetness, obedience, mildness, and modesty. Richard Brathwait tells his reader that, "you may find women, though weak in sex and condition, yet parallels to men for charity, chastity, piety, purity, and virtuous conversation."*'* Castiglione’s discussants tend to agree with Julian that "it is not comely for a woman to practice feats of armes, ryding . . . [and] manly exercises so sturdie and boisterous," and Lord Cesar suggests that the kind of virtues seen in exaggerated form via examples of "manly" women can be put into effect in everyday life: "Truth it is that these so great effectes and rare
15 vertues are seen in few women: Yet are they also that resist the battailes of love, all to be wondred at."^^
Most English histories of exemplary women strive to reconfigure the "heroic" to fit with contemporary standard of ideal feminine demeanor. Whereas the readers are being asked to construct themselves as imitations of the examples, the examples themselves undergo similar reconstimtion at the hands of the writers in accordance with ideology. Thus for female exemplars, the "heroic" is construed as more or less passive. Thomas Hey wood expects women "to take delight to hear of the vertues and memorable acts of those of thy own sex," and he asks "what properer object can there be of womans emulation then the deeds of other famous women, who no less then men have ever afforded examples of all sorts of gallantry"; however, he goes on to reconunend imitation of the heroines famous for relatively passive virtues:
Wives here may read how to demean themselves toward their husbands in all conjugall affections, in Berenice, Phile, and Portia. Daughters may here be taught examples of obedience and chastity, from Iphigeneia, Virginia, and the Vestall Votaresses. Matrons may find here that decent deportment which becomes their gravity, and Widows that constancy which befits their solimde.^®
Indeed, writings in praise of contemporary "ordinary" women tend to concentrate solely on the passive virtues. John Batchiler, in a eulogy to his "close relation,"
Susarma Perwich, describes her as "very discreet, wise, and pmdent in her actions; not passionate, nor retentive of anger, never over merry, but modestly grave and composed. . . . For disposition, so affable, kind, and courteous," qualities which make her "a very imitable example to all that shall hear of her. The tension between activity and passivity exists in such texts, despite the authors’ attempts to
16 tailor the classical conception of heroic virtue to a female model, through the use of negatives to define positive traits: Perwich is not passionate, not retentive of anger, not over-merry because passion, anger, and mirth threaten the quality which defines
"woman"—quiet self-containment. And chastity is the virtue that most exemplifies self-containment.
Early modem readers were thus surrounded by examples of proper feminine behavior, which they were intended to internalize and either imitate themselves or expect from their female relations and friends. But once we recognize that the chastity encoded in these examples and mandated by precept is internally conflicted, we are left wondering how early modem women could attempt to live up this standard. As chastity supposedly protects women from unwanted sexual attention, it becomes the first and foremost desirable trait for women.
Chastity
To begin an examination of the inconsistencies in early modem constmctions of chastity, I tum to the OED for a digest that shows just how all-encompassing its definition was: purity from unlawful sexual intercourse; abstinence from all sexual intercourse; ceremonial purity; exclusion of meretricious ornament; exclusion of excess or extravagance. The adjective form, "chaste, " adds to the definition: free from guilt, innocent; firee from indecency or offensiveness; restrained, subdued. The verb form ("chaste") bears a relationship to "chastise" or "chasten, " and was still in use (though rarely) as late as the early seventeenth century to denote rebuke, restraint.
17 and infliction of corrective punishment. Juan Vives, whose pre-Reformation educational manual was the first complete conduct book translated into English for secular women, says of chastity:
She that is chaste is fair, well-favored, rich, fruitful, noble, and all the best things that can be named. . . . Chastity is as the queen of virtues in a woman, and inseparable companions ever follow it, and of shamefastness cometh soberness of which cometh all the other sort of virtues belonging unto women, demureness, measure, frugality, scarcity, diligence in house, cure of devotion, meekness.
Dorothy Leigh’s advice to her children demonstrates that this all-inclusive definition of chastity was still in place in the seventeenth century, and obtained even for a woman writer:
Chastity, a virtue which always hath been and is of great account, not only amongst the Christians and people of God, but even among the heathen and infidels, insomuch that some of them have written that a woman that is truly chaste is a great partaker of all other virtues and, contrariwise, that the woman that is not truly chaste hath no virme in her. The which saying may well be warranted by the Scripture, for who so is truly chaste is free from idleness and from all vain delights, full of humility and all good Christian virtues; who so is chaste is not given to pride in apparel nor any vanity, but is always either reading, meditating, or practicing some good thing which she hath learned in the Scripmre.^^
Besides encompassing all maimer of other virtues within the concept of chastity, early modem writers concerned with women’s morality frequently used "honesty, and
"honor" as synonyms for "chastity": "a woman hath no charge to see to but her honesty"; a woman should not "give her eye leave to wander, lest it should betray her honour to a treacherous intruder. Moreover, the virtue of chastity applied to all women, regardless of marital stams: Vives explains of his lessons on chastity that
"this I would not that only maidens should think spoken unto them, but also married
18 women and widows, and finally all women. And Puritan theologian William
Ames agrees: "Chastity is virginall, conjugall, or viduall. William Hergest, expands his definition to include men (although his book is dedicated to his female cousins): "Chastitie, is eyther to live in single life without camall knowledge of any person, without buminge of sensuall lust, and without any abuse of minde or body: or els in Marriage to keepe the ordinance instituted of God. Married chastity, unlike the sexual abstinence of virgins and widows, requires sexuality at least to the extent of ensuring procreation; thus chastity is considerably more complex than simple virginity or celibacy.
A general definition of chastity—one that provides a springboard for comparing the interpretations of different authors-must include the notion of purity, which is a common element for all discussions of the virtue.^'^ According to William Ames,
"Chastity is a vertue whereby the purity of the person is preserved in respect to those things which pertaine to generation. Cesare Ripa, whose emblems were widely disseminated and copied in the seventeenth century, shows a correlation between chastity and purity in his emblem illustrating "Purity" (See Figure 1.1):
a Woman all in white, holding a white Tulip in one Hand; has the Sun on her Breast; with the other she scatters Com, pick’d up by a white Cock. Whiteness denotes Chastity. The Sun denotes Purity, illustrating the Microcosm. The white Cock, as they say, scares the Lion; so Purity subdues the Power of a turbulent Spirit.^®
Likewise, Ripa’s emblem of "Virginity" is closely tied to the concept of purity (See
Figure 1.2):
A pretty Girl cloth’d in white, and crown’d with Gold; her Wast surrounded with a Girdle made of white Wool, which in old time
19 Maids wore, called Zona virginea, not to be loos’d but by their Husbands on the Wedding-night. The white Cloths, and the Emerald she has about her, and Golden Crown denote Purity}'^
The Renaissance woman could claim chastity as a link to godly perfection, and despite the widely-acknowledged place of moderate conjugal sexuality in the godly life, the ideal woman, married or unmarried, was expected to appear virginal. We find a striking similarity between descriptions of the early medieval virgin and the early modem housewife. Ambrose, as quoted by Augustine, describes the virgin thus: "There was nothing sharp in her glance, nothing bold in her words, nothing unseemly in her conduct; her bearing was not sensuous, nor her gait too free, nor her voice petulant, so that her outward appearance was an image of her soul, and was a picmre of purity."^* Similarly, Richard Brathwait’s 1631 conduct manual describes his version of the ideal woman, a wife:
She never learned to tinkle with her feet, to wander with her eyes, to staine her spotlesse honour with a painted blush . . . her desire is to expresse herself in action more than discourse . . . in her whole course shee expresseth her inward beauty. . . Virgin-Decency is Vertues Livery.^^
It is remarkable that these descriptions of the exemplary woman, written more than a thousand years apart and from vastly different culmral perspectives, contain so much that is similar. In both, behavior and appearance are the outward signs of the inner state, which ideally consists of silent, self-effacing purity. The only substantial difference implied in the descriptions lies in the married woman’s need to conceal her sexuality beneath a veneer of "Virgin-Decency."
20 That a concept denoting sexual purity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
England also signified the entire scope of female virtue testifies to the degree of contemporary paranoia that female sexuality threatened to escape male control. Even a breach of other mandated behaviors—silence, modesty, obedience—was often taken as a sign of a woman’s sexual incontinence.A woman who displays any sort of impropriety is in danger of having her chastity called into question, and so literature insists that she must vigilantly monitor her behavior, ever restraining herself from displaying a questionable appearance or action. This paranoia underlies much of the misogyny displayed by antifeminist writers, who seem to function as amplifiers of patriarchal unease. John Featley’s 1632 sermon on chastity claims that, "the female sexe growes strong onely in allurements; and takes off the edge of man’s goodnesse, by a sharper edge of temptation." To Featley, there really is no such thing as a virtuous woman: "Yea, a Woman in honour (invested with the Ermins of Religion) is all white, and goodnesse of her selfe: though not without some black spots of malice and corruption. Likewise, Joseph Swetnam, whose popular seventeenth-century antifeminist pamphlet inspired a number of rebuttals, claimed,
A man may generally speake of women, that for the most part thou shah finde them dissembling in their deeds, and in al their actions subtill and dangerous for men to deal withall: for their faces are lures, their beauties baites, their lookes are nets, and their words charmes, and all to bring men to ruine.^-
Swetnam’s imagery, by no means original, was commonplace in the Petrarchan descriptions of the female beloved of the sixteenth- century English court poets. The
21 beloved was chaste, but she was also fair—a duality which leads to much of the tension in the poetry
Beauty
The quality that most significantly creates conflicts with the workings of chastity is beauty. Female beauty was as highly regarded as female chastity, and writers quibbled about whether chastity and virtue were incompatible, complementary, or inseparable. The neo-Platonists considered beauty the pinnacle of divine creation.
To Ficino, a man’s love for a beautiful woman allows him to ascend the ladder of love to an eventual ecstatic reunion with God, and beauty in a woman was therefore elevated beyond a concern for her particular virtue.^'* Thomas Buoni’s neoplatonic musings assume that chastity and beauty are inseparable companions in a woman. He takes for granted that chaste women are more beautiful than unchaste women when he asks, "Why is the Beauty of a light woman lesse esteemed?" and he answers his query, "Perhaps because shee hath wronged that naturall gift of hers, and darkened the light thereof by her deformed actions.
Although beholding female beauty was considered a path to divinity for men, the relationship between a woman’s beauty and her own virtue was hotly contested.
Francis Bacon exhibits his indecision thus:
Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set; and surely virtue is best in a body that is comely, though not of delicate features, and that hath rather dignity of presence than beauty of aspect. Neither is it almost seen that very beautiful persons are otherwise of great virtue, as if nature were rather busy not to err than in labour to produce excellency.
22 And therefore they prove accomplished, but not of great spirit, and study rather behaviour than virtue. But this holds not always.
After a brief discussion of those of great virtue who were also praised for beauty.
Bacon generally decides in favor of the position that beauty is not only compatible with virtue, but adds luster to it: "if it [beauty] light well, it maketh virtue shine and vice blush. In his book of emblems, Henry Peacham shows his ambivalence toward female beauty by symbolizing the quality, thus (see Figure 1.3):
A virgin naked, on a dragon sits. One hand out-stretch’d, a christall glasse doth show: The other beares a dart, that deadly hits; Upon her head, a garland white as snow. Of print and Lillies. Beautie most desir’d. Were I her painter, should be thus attir’d.
Her ntdcednes us tells, she needes no art: Her glasse, how we by sight are moovd to love. The woundes unfelt, that’s given by the Dart At first, (though deadly we it after proove) The Dragon notes loves poison: and the flowers. The frailtie (Ladies) of that pride of yours.
Peacham balances the joys of beholding the beautiful woman with the pain of the wound she inflicts on the beholder and the pride she naturally takes in her power over her captivated suitor. The sin of pride here automatically accompanies female beauty, and there is no room for virtue in this figuration. Misogynist Joseph Swetnam, not surprisingly, insists that the two qualities are wholly incompatible: "A woman which is faire in shew, is fowle in condition. In other words, fair women are always evil (and it’s debatable whether virtuous women exist at all).
23 Finally, some moralists attempted to work out a way for beauty to signify virme by positing different types of beauty. In a funeral sermon, preacher Stephen Geree makes distinctions between true and false beauty;
Next to birth that which commends a woman is Beauty, wherewith men are much taken, and even bewitched as it were, sometimes to the losse of their wits and lives also, if they cannot obtaine. Now there is no beauty to the beauty of holinesse, which is the blessed Image of God, Ephes. 4.24, and makes us like our Lord and Saviour, who is altogether lovelie. Cant. 5.16. All other beauty is but blacknesse to this, which is the true beauty of every gracious woman fearing God, and which she most of all prizeth and seekes after.^^
Most descriptions of chaste women, however, praise their physical beauty as a matter of course (which will be illustrated in the following chapters of this smdy).
Despite frequent concerns displayed by male writers, female beauty was as firmly embedded in conceptions of the ideal woman as chastity. Kelso remarks in her iandmark smdy of the ideal Renaissance woman, "beauty by general consent is particularly the crown of woman, the most important condition of perfection in her"; yet she also notes, "The quality most frequently praised is chastity. Enough could not be said of it as the foundation of womanly worth. Let a woman have chastity, she has all. Let her lack chastity and she has nothing.
But Kelso is silent about the inconsistencies that a simultaneous elevation of beauty and chastity produces. Although women’s passivity was both a sign of weakness and virtue, and their activity was a sign of strength and vice, there is much ambiguity and inconsistency in this formulation: women’s external beauty (a passive quality) was frequently said to entice (an action requiring definite agency) male desire.If the chaste woman is typically (if only by convention) physically
24 beautiful, the purifying and protective quality of chastity-designed to keep away the evils of male lust—is nullified. It is the "snares" and "lures" of physical beauty that inspire lust. R. Howard Bloch speculates that this problem originates with Tertullian, who "shifts the ethical burden of sexuality toward woman, making her the passive agent—and this by natural condition and not by conscious moral choice—of the seduction of males. Not only are women themselves considered carnal creamres, given to uncontrolled sexuality, but they are also responsible for the downfall of men.
Moreover, many writers allow that chastity produces its own beauty, and not merely a holy one at that. As an abstract, platonic concept, beauty has long been the sign and receptacle of all that is good and all that is desired, and, as women’s only reliable social capital, chastity is too fundamental not to have become a locus for ideals of beauty by the sixteenth century.
Indeed, as women’s beauty and chastity vied for preeminence, the distinction between them began to be questioned, blurred, and, in some cases, eradicated completely; female chastity, the fount of women’s goodness, becomes desirable for its own sake. Bloch recognizes the roots of this problem in the Middle Ages: "Though virginity may represent the antithesis of the cosmetic, it remains an adornment in its own right." As an adornment, virginity is attractive: "To the extent that virginity is conceived as a quietude of the senses, an escape from desire, it itself becomes a source of desire'"*^ By the Renaissance, the beauty and desirability of the chaste woman, whether virgin or wife, had become so commonplace in literature that the inconsistencies created by linking beauty and chastity so closely would remain largely
25 unquestioned. And even the most conscientious writers would be unable or unwilling to explain who is ultimately responsible when a chaste woman is raped.
Rape
The assignation of responsibility for rape was shrouded in indeterminacies regarding the victim’s consent, her ultimate (willing or otherwise) provocation, and the far-reaching definition of adultery. Those in the law perceived rape as foremost a crime against property; moralists, however, considered rape as primarily a crime of adultery, which carried within its totalizing schema the idea that anyone involved in an illicit sexual act is polluted by that act.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, rape was officially a capital offense; however, the assize records report very few rape prosecutions. Whereas, larceny, burglary, and homicide cases were frequently brought to trial, charges of rape constituted less than one percent of all indictments. Throughout a span of nearly
150 years (1558-1700), only 48 cases of rape were prosecuted in Sussex and 21 in
Hertfordshire. Moreover, such legal loopholes as benefit of clergy allowed many offenders to escape justice even if charges were brought.'^ Although we may read such statistics as a sign of the rarity of the crime, they are far more likely to signal the perceived difficulty in proving both that an unlawful sexual act actually occurred and that the victim was in fact unwilling. Thus most rapes went unreported, as victims were reluctant chance the ruined reputation that would probably be the only result of reporting the crime. Contemporary opinion considered rape the extreme
26 result of a man’s inability to control his passions, which is evident in the following speech by a justice in a seventeenth-century rape case, who defines and relates the history of the crime thus:
[Rape] was accounted by our Fore-Fathers, so Detestable and Abominable a Crime . . . that those who were guilty of it, were punish’d with the Loss of their Eyes, and their Privy Members, that they might at once be deprived of the wicked Inlets, and Instruments of their Base Lusts.
The victim was rarely free from some degree of culpability as well, whether due to her passive beauty which entices her assailant by entering his "Inlets" of "Base Lust" or her active and willing participation in the sexual act (which would make her equally guilty of uncontrolled desires). When a woman is forced to participate in sexual intercourse, whether through physical force or other coercion, she is involved in a complex interrelation of responsibility and victimization. In the epistemology of desire that obtained in early modem England, the question could be framed as, who is the perpetrator and who the victim when a man’s inordinate desire for a woman leads to her sexual violation through force?
The progression of rape laws from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth century can shed much light on attitudes toward the rape victim. The thirteenth- century Statutes of Winchester show evidence of the way property rights and the underlying moral judgment against both parties involved in rape affected the outcome of a trial. At issue were the victim’s moral status (whether she were a virgin or a
"whore") and the abductor’s willingness to marry the victim (provided her family considered him a suitable match). Theft, kidnapping, and rape are all blurred
27 together in the statutes—the victim is represented as a spoiled or stolen commodity— and the issue of the woman’s consent is effectually erased from consideration in prosecuting the crime. Whether the woman wishes to accompany the man is immaterial if her family feels wronged by the elopement, and she may or may not be as thoroughly responsible as the man who carried her away. Marriage was considered the optimum restitution (regardless of the victim’s desires), and if marriage were not deemed possible and the victim were a virgin in her father’s household or a married woman, reparation was usually made to the father or husband as proprietors of the damaged goods. J.B. Post remarks.
The Statutes of Westminster turned the law of rape into a law of elopement and abduction, which inhibited the purposes of the woman herself—whether outrage at a sexual assault or the desire to avenge a consenting relationship—and fostered the interests of those who wanted material recompense for the material disparagement wrought by self- willed womenfolk and suitors.'*®
The victim was ignored as an injured party, and she had no right to seek justice whether she were brutally raped or whether her family stopped a consenual elopement. In either case, she was considered stolen goods.
By the seventeenth century, a series of additions and modifications to the laws under succeeding monarchs somewhat strengthened the punishment of offenders and filled in some of the loopholes that allowed even those who were caught to escape scot-free, but little changed in the general conception of the crime. Statute 18 under
Elizabeth I made it more difficult to plead benefit of clergy, which had apparently sheltered rapists from punishment before its passage. T.E., The anonymous compiler
2 8 of The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights, a compendium of laws affecting women, praises this statute:
I can but marvel that when so damnable a crime as rape had given so often to the whole realm such cause of bitter complaint and men in sundry ages had beaten their brains so carefully in finding out remedy against it, how it was possible, so long space together to leave such a privilege to him that could read the blessed psalm of Miserere, etc., that though he had ravished the fairest lady in the land, he might almost go away without touch of breast for it. Therefore the eighteenth of Queen Elizabeth, for repressing of felonious rapes and ravishments of women and of felonious burglaries, it was enacted that they which were found guilty by verdict, or by confession, or outlawed . . . should suffer death . . . without allowance of privilege, or benefit of clergy.'*’
Yet, how beneficial were these measures when prosecutions were so rare? Bashar reports.
Of the 274 rape cases for the five home counties between 1558 and 1700 which did come to court, 45 men were found guilty, and 215 were not; 14 verdict unknown. Of the 45, 31 were hanged, 6 pleaded clergy and were branded and released, 6 were reprieved, and 2 sentences were not given on the document. Of the 215, 141 were acquitted outright, 6 were released or 'delivered by proclamation’; 15 remained at large and 53 cases were rejected ‘ignoramus’ [insufficient evidence].'**
Moreover, contemporary physiology held that orgasm was necessary for conception, so any rape victim who became pregnant was perceived as having given consent.'*^
In short, it was so difficult to prove rape that the majority of offenders remained untouched by legal action, no matter how stem the ostensible punishment, and rape continued to be an act with little consequence for tlie perpetrator yet great devastation for the victim.
29 That the law continues to connect rape with burglary right into the seventeenth century can be understood by examining the etymology of the words most often employed to describe sexual violence, rape and ravishment, which I.E . distinguishes in his definitions of the two types of sexual assault:
One be called by the common people and the law itself, ravishment, yet in my conceit it borroweth the name from rapere, but unproperly, for it is no more but... a hideous hateful kind of whoredom in him which committeth it when a woman is enforced violently to sustain the fury of brutish concupiscence, but she is left where she is found, as in her own house or bed as Lucrece was and not hurried away as Helen by Paris or as the Sabine women were by the Romans, for that is both by nature of the word and by definition of the matter. The second and right ravishment, [is when anyone abducts a woman of honest fame, whether she be a virgin, a widow, or a nun, and it is done against the will of them in whose power she is].^°
Indeed, the OED lists as the first definition for "rape, " "The act of taking anything by force; violent seizure (of goods), robbery. " The second definition reads, "The act of carrying away a person, esp. a woman, by force. " The third definition provides our modem usage: "Violation or ravishing of a woman. Also, in mod. usage, sexual assault upon a man." By the seventeenth century, "rape" was frequently used in a figurative sense, and came to mean "to rob, strip, plunder" or "to transport, ravish, delight." To "ravish" was foremost "to seize and carry off (a person); to take by violence, to tear or drag away from (a place or person)"; commonly, "to carry away
(a woman) by force"; and finally, figuratively, "to transport with the strength of some feeling, to carry away with rapture; to fill with ecstasy or delight; to entrance. "
Clearly, bound within the concept of rape is the conflation of theft and sexual force, but even within the idea of sexual force, we can identify a conflation of
30 violence and pleasure signalled by the frequent figurative uses of the term "ravish."
The use of the term to denote ecstasy or delight is rooted in early attitudes toward women and sexuality to which T.E. alludes here:
So drunken are men with their own lusts and the poison of Ovid’s false precept, ["It is allowed to call it force, (but) it a force which pleases girls"] that if the rampier of laws were not betwixt women and their harms, I verily think none of them being above twelve years of age and under an hundred, being either fair or rich, should be able to escape ravishing.^'
Popular opinion often expected women to enjoy sex whether or not they initiated it, an opinion that found its way into figurative descriptions of the raptured or ravished maiden as well as the raptured or ravished soul.^^ Kathryn Gravdal sees this conflation in medieval French literature and language, which describes a similar etymological progression:
In twelfth-century canon law, as in literary texts, we see a blurring of distinctions between forced and voluntary sex, between love and violence. If, in the legal text, raptus can be the legal prelude to marriage, and if the victim could conceivably consent to marry her rapist, just how serious was this crime? If, in the literary text, the violence of the raptor can be construed as an expression of conflicted desire, the rape plot can become the basis of a romantic narrative.
Conflicted representations of rape are found in other genres of literature as well as the imaginative and are the result of the lack of distinct boundary between that which desires and that which is the object of desire.^'* Bloch has noted in the writings of early theologians, "according to the patristic totalizing scheme of desire, there can be no difference between the state of desiring and of being desired; a virgin is a woman who has never been desired by a man. That desire itself had become the locus of sin has been noted by Foucault: "evolution tended to make the flesh into
31 the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire. The root cause of a man’s desire for a woman was the question that writers so often decided in favor of the traditional belief in woman’s over-abundant sexuality and the "baited hook" she held out to catch unwary, innocent men. This does not mean, however, that women were always blamed directly for being raped—on the contrary—but even in the most generous narrative accounts, women’s beauty (passive quality or active lure?) plays a significant role in rousing their assailants’ desire.
Although early modem writers do not always agree about who is ultimately responsible for rape, they all tend to accept that lust pollutes the souls of both the perpetrator and the victim, no matter who lusted after whom. This perceived pollution is what makes it so difficult for moralists to absolve a rape victim of culpability—regardless of origin, the victim has become infected with sin, and her purity—the common ingredient for definitions of chastity—is defiled. Thus we are left with an immensely complicated and conflicted ideology of chastity, which purports to protect and purify even while its attracts sin by the beauty of the chaste woman, and the rhetoric used by the authors who write about chastity signals these conflicts.
32 %
Figures 1.1 and 1.2: Cesare Ripa. "Purity," and "Virginity," Iconologia, nos. 253 and 316.
33 Vuklirltttdo fjiTHÎntA.
A VIRGIN nakcdjOnaDragonfics, , One hand ouc-ftrccch'd, a chrifbll glalle doth fliow : The ocher beares a dart, that deadly hits j Vpon her head, a garland white as Inpw, * Alba Or * print and Lillies. Beautie molt dcfir’d , ca«icoe —• W ere I her painter, {hodd be thus attir'd. Her nakednes vs tells, (he needes no art : Her glaOe, how wc by figlii are mooud to loue, The woundes vnfelt, that's giiien by die Dart At F.rft, ( though deadly we it after prooue ) The Dragon notes loues poifbn : and the dowers, The frailtie ( Ladies ) o f that pride ofyours. Cumcue aliquii diect, Ritt hsc fôr:r.ofi , dolîbis ; C : z. dc Ar» E: Ipcculuuj u’.cr.dax, clTc qucrcrc . Ncc fo:nper violz, ncc Pttnpcr Lilia fiotsr.t : Etrigct and tie Ipina rcliébarofâ. K l. A'//
Figure 1.3: Henry Peacham, "Pulchritido faeminea," Minerva Britanna, p. 58
34 NOTES
1. Vives, Instruction, sig. G4.
2. Thomas Buoni, The Problèmes of Beautie and ail humane affections, tr. S. L. (London, 1606), pp. 4-5.
3. Freud, "Femininity," New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, tr. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), p. 115.
4. Hull, Chaste, Silent & Obedient, p. 1.
5. Dorothy Leigh, The Mother’s Blessing (London, 1616), p. 40.
6. Bruto, The Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a Young Gentlewoman (London, 1598), sigs. G6, F6''.
7. Robert Codrington, The Second Part of Youths Behaviour: Or, Decency in Conversation amongst Women (London, 1664), p. 13.
8. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. xi, 23.
9. Benson, Invention, Introduction; Kelso, Doctrine, chap. 2; Maclean, Renaissance Notion, 55-7. Kelso adds a fourth model that argues women’s superiority to men, a position occasionally taken by some authors in tracts of the debate about women. However, since this position was both rare and extreme, we should keep in mind the distinction Linda Woodbridge posits between rhetorical strategy and the sincere beliefs of an author.
10. Bruto, Necessarie, sig. G6''.
11. Abraham Darcie, The Honour of Ladies (London, 1622), p. 97.
12. Robert Greene, Penelope’s Web (London, 1601). Michael Drayton, Matilda. The Fair and Chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater (London, 1594), sigs. Br-B2''.
13. Kelso, Doctrine, p. 277.
14. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), p. 241.
15. Baldassar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. Thomas Hoby, ed. J.H. Whitfield (London: J.M. Dent, 1974), pp. 193, 241.
16. Thomas Heywood, The Generali Historié of Women (London, 1657), sigs. A3''- A4.
35 17. John Batchiler, The Virgins Pattern in the Exemplary Life, and lamented Death of Mrs. Susanna Perwich (London, 1661), pp. 8-9. See Chapter Four for more on this work.
18. Vives, Instruction, sigs. L4'', M2.
19. Leigh, The Mother’s Blessing, p. 38.
20. Vives, Instruction, sig. B2; and Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, p. 203.
21. Vives, Instruction, sig. G3''.
22. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1642), p. 369.
23. William Hergest, The Right Rule of Christian Chastitie (London, 1580), sig. D2\
24. See Mary Douglas on purity and pollution: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1978).
25. Hergest, Right Rule, p. 368.
26. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (New York: Garland, 1979), p. 63, no. 253. For studies of the Renaissance emblem, see Patricia Vicari, "Renaissance Emblematica, " Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (1993): 153-68.
27. Ripa, Iconologia, p. 79, no. 316.
28. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, in The Rhetorical Tradition, eds. Patricia Bizzell anmd Bruce Herzberg (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1990): 386-416, p. 407.
29. Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, sigs. 2G2'^"'.
30. This is particularly true of women’s speech. See Chapter Five.
31. John Featley, The Honor of Chastity (London, 1632), pp. 8, 31.
32. Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (London, 1617), p. 4.
33. See Nancy J. Vickers, "Diana Described," and "The Body Re-Membered"; and Lisa M. Klein, "‘Let us Love, Dear Love, Lyke as We Ought’: Protestant Marriage and the Revision of Petrarchan Loving in Spenser’s Amoretti,” Spenser Studies (1992): 109-37.
34. Maclean, Renaissance Notion, p. 24. Philippa Berry perceptively notes.
36 however, that in this neoplatonic formulation, woman is merely the "mediatrix of the masculine search for identity." See her Of Chastity and Power, p. 37.
35. Buoni, The Problèmes of Beauty, p. 18.
36. Francis Bacon, "The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, 1625," in Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: MacMillan): 45-196, pp. 157, 158.
37. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), p. 58.
38. Swetnam, Arraignment, p. 12.
39. Stephen Geree, The Ornament o f Women, Or, A Description of the true excellency of Women. Delivered in a sermon at the funerall of M. Elizabeth Machell (London, 1639), pp. 15-16.
40. Ruth Kelso, Doctrine, pp. 192, 24. Kelso’s words about the importance of chastity closely echo Vives, whose conduct book I examine in Chapter Two.
41. Maclean, Renaissance Notion, p. 17.
42. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 39.
43. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, pp. 106, 108.
44. Nazife Bashar, "Rape in England between 1550 and 1700," in Sexual Dynamics of History, (London, 1983), p. 34.
45. The Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin, Lord Audley Earl of Castle-haven (London, 1699), p. 10. Suzanne Gossett, examining rape in Jacobean tragi-comedy, suggests: While rape is verbally condemned when it occurs, the structure of the play identifies rape with all sexual impulse as it is treated in comedy. It becomes a natural instinct which must be brought under social control by marriage. . . . Rather than being a tragic crime rape becomes a comic error cured by being brought into the social order. . . . More and more these plays suggest that rape is just an unfortunate side effect of that valuable commodity, manliness. See "‘Best Men are Molded out of Faults’: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama," ELR 14 (1984): 305-27, p. 324.
46. J.B. Post, "Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminster," in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J.H. Baker (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 150-64, p. 160.
37 47. T.E., The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights, in Joan Larsen Klein, ed.. Daughters, Wives, & Widows (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992) pp. 60-61.
48. Bashar, "Rape in England," pp. 34-35.
49. Bashar, "Rape," p. 36. On orgasm and conception, see also Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
50. T.E., Law’s Resolution, pp. 55-56. The material in brackets is Klein’s translation from the original Latin.
51. 'Ï.'E., Law’s Resolution, 55. Klein’s translation in brackets. The quotation is from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.
52. For example, see Donne’s Sonnet XIV: Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free. Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. (11. 12-14) Also Sonnet XVII: Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt To nature, and to hers and my good is dead, And her soul early into heaven ravished. (11. 1-3)
53. Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Litearture and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 11.
54. For studies of relationships between rape, violence, aesthetics, and representation, see Susaime L. Wofford, "The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli" in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint, et al. (New York: MRTS, 1992), pp. 189- 238; Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape ofLucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Sylvana Thomaselli and Roy Porter, eds. Rape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds.. The Violence of Representation: Or, "How the West Was Won" (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, "The Metaphorical Logic of Rape" Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 2 (1987): 73-79.
55. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 99.
56. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Part I, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 19-20.
38 CHAPTER 2
METAPHOR AND THE MYSTIFICATION OF CHASTITY: VIVES AND THE CONDUCT BOOK TRADITION
Socrates . . . affirmed that the greatest fortresse and defence that nature had given to a woman for the preservation of her reputation and honour was Chastity . . . So that woman which is adorned with Chastity, is safely armed against all inordinate affections whatsoever.’
All richest Pearles, Gold, Jewels heere below. Are nothing to this Gem of Chastitie.^
The accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent independent of women’s consent.^
By the Restoration, the practice of textually constructing and anatomizing the exemplary woman had resulted in the creation of a large body of literature directed to both male and female readers.'’ Alongside these catalogues and histories that offer readers embodiments of "female perfection" as models for emulation grew a tradition of literature designed to teach the reader, by precept and example, how to develop the virtues that were becoming ideological commonplaces for proper female conduct.
Conduct books, invariably addressed to gentility and nobility, are founded upon the notion that social conduct reflects not only one’s moral state but also one’s social position (or the position to which that individual aspires)—that, in fact, the upper classes are themselves examples of a society’s level of civilization. As outward
39 appearance and behavior were apparent signs of class affiliation, social rank
(arguably) signified and rewarded familial virtue/ Conduct books attempted to ensure ±at the upper classes would continue to present an image of the apex of civilized society/
English conduct books, however, in contrast to Continental instruction manuals for "female courtiers," make little distinction between the behaviors of the middling gentility and the noble classes, although they pointedly ignore the "meaner" segment of society. The English manuals also resemble one another very closely. The advice proffered in Juan Vives’s pre-Reformation Instruction of a Christen Woman appears to have remained hegemonic right through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries despite the sweeping changes in English society; conduct books published after Instruction give remarkably similar advice about proper female behavior to that propounded by
Vives.’
There is a notable and important trend, however, in the way these manuals present their subject matter and, consequently, how their advice may have been received by their readers. As the tradition of female conduct literature develops through the period, the directives encoded in the books become increasingly vague, in stark contrast to advice found in the parallel tradition of male conduct literature.
Female conduct literature developed as an offshoot of the humanist educational project that sought to educate not just intellectual but moral and social virtues as well.
Though girls were largely excluded from the curricula of formal study established for boys, humanist educators did develop regimes intended to improve the moral sense of
40 the "weaker" sex.* De Civilitates, the conduct manual for boys developed within a few years of Instruction by Vives’s friend Erasmus, explicitly connects social conduct with the project of education and contains practical advice for controlling bodily functions, achieving pleasant table manners, and conducting polite discourse: "Let him close the fart under color of a cough"; "To lick thy fingers greasy or to dry them upon thy clothes be both unmannerly; that must rather be done upon the boardcloth or thy napkin"; "To interrupt any man in his tale before it be ended is against manner."®
Conduct literature for women and girls, though, thoroughly avoids such practical advice, concentrating instead upon the retention of chastity and the presentation of a modest demeanor, without however explicitly describing how to achieve such ideals. By the Restoration, the tensions and inconsistencies created by the simultaneous exaltation of beauty and chastity as feminine ideals lie hidden below layers of abstract and figurative discourse. Vives and subsequent authors juxtapose incompatible metaphors to illustrate chastity, which works to construct the virtue as contradictory, particularly in regard to the conflict between chastity and beauty. As
Patricia Parker notes, "The multiplicity of plots contained within metaphor— transference, transgression, alienation, identity—suggests why metaphor can be at work in so many genres not just as a figure of speech or rhetorical ornament but as a structuring principle.'”® Instruction of a Christen Woman provides the clearest evidence of the disjunctive relationship between feminine ideals and introduces the imagery which would be absorbed by the later manuals.
41 Instruction of a Christen Woman
Juan Luis Vives’s Instruction of a Christen Woman, though possibly not intended as such, makes an interesting companion piece to Erasmus’s De Civilitates, as it attempts to formulate a regime for rearing and educating girls.” Originally written in Latin in 1523, Instruction was commissioned by and dedicated to Catharine of Aragon as an educational manual for her daughter, Mary Tudor. Its readership, however, did not end with these royal patrons: Instruction was widely-published throughout Europe in thirty-six English, Castilian, French, German, and Italian translations.” Moreover, the first English translation (around 1529) by Richard
Hyrde, a tutor in Thomas More’s household, ran to eight complete editions by
1592.”
The advice contained in Instruction, with its overarching concern for the retention of female sexual purity throughout the entire span of a woman’s life (as virgin, faithful wife, and celibate widow), structured a way of thinking about women and their relationship to sexuality that rapidly dispersed through the middling and upper reaches of the female populace. But the seemingly simple message to retain one’s chastity that Vives preaches to his female audience is founded upon an inconsistency that would make it impossible for his readers ever to approach his ideal of moral excellence. Hidden below the layers of abstract and figurative discourse that
Vives employs to convey his message with eloquence and confidence lie tensions stemming from the author’s attempt to account for the neo-Platonic belief in the appreciation of physical beauty as inherently good while perpetuating the medieval
42 misogyny that distrusts women for leading men into vice/'* These battling ideologies simultaneously objectify and subjectify women, who are at once the passive objects of male desire as well as the agents that create that desire. The juxtaposition of two conventional metaphors to represent chastity signals this ideological clash as
Instruction's rhetoric conveys to its readers the "mystery" of chastity; this strategy attempts to textually contain the virtue and evade its contradictions by maintaining
Manichean oppositions. In effect. Vives locates the impetus for male sexuality in women, and then instructs those women to become asexual, a quality which is supposed to deter lust and inspire "holy" love. Thus Instruction holds women responsible for male desire in toto, even in the extreme case of rape.
The sheer length of the work somewhat belies Vives’s prefatory comment regarding the simplicity of a woman’s need for instruction: "a woman hath no charge to see to but her honesty and chastity. Wherefore when she is informed of that, she is sufficiently appointed" (sig. B2).^^ Janis Butler Holm offers a possible explanation for Vives’s copiousness on this mandate for chastity when she writes,
"Vives’s practice of copia could be viewed as decorous, as effecting a masterful elaboration of a simple social formula while attempting to compensate for the insufficiency of that formula, its failure to be definitive."'* Yet, not only does this social formula fail to be definitive, it also fails to be inherently, logically stable, which could very well impel the author to write at length, forcing the concept to hold still under the sheer weight of his words. Instead of the straightforward practical advice that Erasmus’s pupils receive. Instruction's readers are lectured, wheedled,
43 goaded, and frightened into always keeping their chastity foremost in their minds
through a variety of examples and maxims.
Although it would have been a relatively simple matter for Vives to instruct convent-bound women to remain chaste, his task is a more difficult one: the women he addresses are and will continue to be intimately connected to men for most of their lives, in both sexual and non-sexual relationships. Vives insists, "this I would not that only maidens should think spoken unto them, but also married women and widows, and finally all women" (sig. OS'). Even Book One, which addresses the rearing of young virgins, constructs a chastity that is contingent upon virginity’s temporary state (surprisingly, this pre-Reformation text does not refer to a woman’s choice to remain virginal in a monastic life): the chastity of the virgin delineated in
Instruction is intended to lead to marriage. Thus, she must achieve that careful balance between drawing the attention of one man (her future husband) and maintaining asexual purity to discourage other men, a dilemma addressed by a series of patristic and neo-Platonic dualistic distinctions between "true" virtues, which can be known by certain signs, and "false" virtues that are evil masquerading as good.'’
Of particular interest are the distinctions between true and false beauty and sacred
(spiritual) love and profane (fleshly) desire. Vives’s earlier Introductio ad Sapientiam
(1524) establishes his thoughts on human nature, which includes a divine soul, containing the seats of intellect and passion, and an animal body, all of which must retain their proper order. Sin comes from disorder—the rebellion of the animal
44 passions, and wisdom consists in recognizing the "true" value of whatever appears to be "good."^*
Vives endeavors to construct chastity as a barrier, ostensibly impenetrable from both sides, that separates a woman from sexual passion and saves her and the men with whom she comes into contact from the dangers of lust. Chastity also becomes the locus for the entire gamut of positive attributes that define feminine perfection, subsuming all other qualities into and beneath it: "Chastity is as the queen of virtues in a woman, and that two inseparable companions ever follow it, and that of shamefastness cometh soberness, of which two cometh all the other sort of virtues belonging unto woman." (sig. M2). In this genealogy of virtue, chastity begets shamefasrness, which begets soberness, and other virtues (e.g. frugality, devotion) stem from these last two scions of the reigning matriarch. As such, no other virtues can exist in a woman if chastity is not initially in residence, and once gone, the others vanish with it. This, of course, is tantamount to saying that there are no other female virtues; qualities such as shame and sobriety are merely building blocks assisting in the erection of chastity as a cultural monolith.
The success of such a monolith depends upon mystification, which lends it an aura of divinity and makes incomprehensible the ideology that drives it. As chastity ostensibly forms a spiritual barrier for his reader, Vives’s use of figurative language aids mystification by keeping his readers from recognizing the inherent contradictions in his construction of chastity. This project is largely dependent upon metaphor to initiate a chain of deferral, which facilitates the signifier’s drift away from the
45 signified.^® Despite its copiousness. Instruction's precise definition of chastity actually remains elusive, as its metaphors both define and defer: they seem to clarify and concretize the abstract concept, yet they expand chastity to encompass contradictory significations. These metaphors signal that a gap indeed exists in the apparently seamless logic of the text. Two categories of metaphor dominate the discussion: the economic metaphor likening chastity to a "treasure" or "prize", which constructs the virtue as a desired commodity; and the martial metaphor, the "armor" or "fort" of chastity, which highlights the perception that male sexuality seeks to conquer a resistant woman and chastity is the power that allows her to resist that assault. Used in conjunction, as Vives does, the metaphors produce a conflict in internal logic: chastity is simultaneously a defensive force protecting women from injury and a defenseless object itself in need of protection from theft.
The economic metaphor transforms chastity from an innate quality, a mode of being or behaving, into a material object that a woman carries enclosed within her body. This transformation gives a woman agency—in fact, sole responsibility—for whatever may befall her, as it allows Vives to heap blame upon women who "lose" their chastity. The virtue is thus, in the language of the economic metaphor, a woman’s most important possession, her greatest treasure or prize: A maid "hath within her a treasure without comparison" (sig. F2''); "thy price cannot be esteemed if thou join a chaste mind unto a chaste body" (sig. F4). As the receptacle of a woman’s entire social value, nothing could be worse than to lose this prize:
She that hath once lost her honesty should think there is nothing left. Take from a woman her beauty, take from her kindred, riches,
46 comeliness, eloquence, sharpness of wit, cunning in her craft; give her chastity, and you have given her all things. And on that other side, give her all these things, but call her a naughty pack; with that one word, thou hast taken all from her, and hast left her bare and foul. (sig. G41
Without this treasure, a woman is empty of all that belongs to her sex, and, as the protective vessel is meant to remain sealed until marriage, the loss of her prize requires an intentional opening of her body. Yet, "one word" spoken against her chaste reputation can strip her of her treasure, and according to Instruction, only the truly ignorant or thoughtless virgin would allow such a self-negating loss: "The ungracious maid doubteth not to lose that which . . . she shall by no means recover again when she hath once lost so great a treasure that ever she had" (sig. G2).
Moreover, the economic metaphor correlates with the traditional notion of a wife’s function in marriage, as her main duty is to be a "keeper" of that which her husband brings home: "Aristotle saith that in housekeeping the man’s duty is to get, and the woman’s to keep. Wherefore nature seemeth to have made them fearful for the same purpose, lest they should be wasters, and hath given them continual thought and care for lacking" (sigs. i2''-i3). Instruction asks the virgin to always have her future function in mind: "If a woman remember, it shall cause her to take better heed and to be a more wary keeper of her goodness, which alone, though all other things be never so well in safety, so lost, all other things perish together therewith" (sig.
G4). Only the "wary keeper," the woman who understands her economic role, is a fit marriage partner, will perform her wifely duties properly, and truly deserves the appellation "woman."
47 To frighten the maid into retaining her prized chastity. Vives supplies a negative example of the shame and community ostracization that are the consequences of engaging in premarital sex. The grand rhetoric of this dire warning resonates with language that objectifies chastity and makes the virtue material:
Everyone shall think themselves dishonested by one shame of that maid: what mourning, what tears, what weeping of the father and mother and bringers up.... What cursing will there be of her acquaintance, what talk of neighbors, friends, and companions, cursing that ungracious young woman; what mocking and babbling of those maidens that envied her before; what a loathing and abhorring of those that loved her; what fleeing of her company and deserting, when every mother will keep not only their daughters but also their sons from the infection of such an unthrifty maid. (sig. G2'’)
The rhetorical tactic works on the fear that other young women (and men!) can in fact
"catch" unchastity from the unfortunate young woman who has "lost" hers. The economic metaphor is here disrupted by an image of pollution: a woman who engages in adultery is ipso facto polluted by that sinful act.^° It is not so much the absence of chastity but the presence of sin that leads to pollution: the notions of retention and loss obvert into a paradox in which the absence of chastity is necessarily the presence of sin (and vice versa). The presence of sin consequently destroys a woman’s value.
Instruction offers several examples of men who have seen fit to kill their unchaste female relatives:
I know that many fathers have cut the throats of their daughters, brethren of their sisters, and kinsmen of their kinswomen. . . . In Spain . . . two brethren that thought their sister had been a maid, when they say her great with child, they dissembled their anger . . . but as soon as she was delivered of her child, they thrust swords into her belly and slew her, the midwife looking on.... Histories be full of examples and daily ye see. (sigs. G2'’-G3)
48 As the sole purpose of the young woman’s life is to be married well, the unchaste woman is a worthless commodity: common, cheap, easily attained, a contagion or blot to her community, unable to enhance her family’s social status, unworthy to live:
"If it be well considered, women be worthy these punishments, and much worse, that keep not their honesty diligently" (sigs. G3''-G4).
The keeper of such an insecure object (the loss of which leads to pollution) must therefore be instructed in the ways of preserving it, not only from possible theft, but, more crucially, from her own desire to give it away: not only as a passive object, but as a desiring subject must she be constrained. The contemporary misogynistic discourse that represents women as vice-loving, sensuous creatures without a dependable faculty of reason to rein in their desires is at the heart of this necessity to protect women from themselves. Vives’s De Officio Mariti, a marriage guide for men, attests to the author’s opinion that women are naturally defective in passion control, and, while women can be improved by male guidance, they cannot be profoundly changed.-' Thus much of Instruction aims to get virgins to protect their chastity from their own sexuality, as young women are susceptible to lust: "When they begin to grow from child’s state, hold them from men’s company, for that time they be given unto most lust of the body" (sig. GT). Thus Vives supports the custom of sequestering virgins within the confines of the house: "A maid should go but seldom abroad because she neither hath any business forth and standeth ever in jeopardy of her chastity, the most precious thing that she hath" (sig. KA)P This
49 custom serves not only to keep men away from the virgin, but to keep the virgin away from men.
In keeping with the neo-Platonic hierarchized relationship between soul and body, Vives’s Manicheism constructs chastity as double-natured, "the pureness both of body and mind" (sig. F2''). Thus even a virgin in body may be polluted by her fleshly desires:
Be not proud, maid, that thou art whole of body if thou be broken in mind, nor because no man hath touched thy body, many men have pierced thy mind. What availeth it thy body to be clean, when thou bearest thy mind and thy thought infected with a foul and an horrible blot. O thou maid, thy mind is withered by burning with man’s heat, (sig. F3H.
The sight of men brings on the burning heat of desire, a form of penetration that, despite the virginal body, infects the soul.^ The fire imagery, heavily-laden with connotations of hell, also draws from contemporary physiology: when her humors are properly balanced, the virgin is cool and moist.^'* The penetration of dry masculine heat leads to her physiological imbalance and a sickness of the soul. Yet sin is a form of disease that is brought upon oneself, not innocently encountered.
Responsibility for sin lies entirely with the maid who allows herself to "bear" a mind
"infected" by gazing upon men: the maid’s subjective gaze opens a conduit between her and men that actively invites penetration.
As her physical beauty is a danger to herself, it brings ruin upon the men who see her as well. This dual endangerment creates a tension between subject and object
(between the desirer and the desired), as Instruction’s discussion is subtly undergirded with the idea that whether through negligence or determination, women are
50 fundamentally responsible for the reaction that men have to them: "What guard of chastity can there be where the maid is desired with so many eyes, where so many faces looketh upon her, and again she upon many. She must needs fire some, and herself also be fired again if she be not a stone" (sig. Pl''-P2).“ To see and be seen is to desire and to be desired (and lose a firm hold on chastity), and such negligence is morally indistinguishable from the deliberate will to reject the virtue. A maid’s appearance to the male beholder (when she cannot avoid venmring out into public) must thus be carefully controlled. To go abroad clothed in costly and beautiful apparel—to adorn the body to catch the eye—is to be deliberately unchaste;
If thou array thy body sumpmously and go gaily forth abroad, and entice the eyes of them that behold thee, and draw the sight of young men after thee, and nourish the lust of concupiscence, and fire and kindle the smell of sin, insomuch that though thou perish not thyself, yet thou shalt cause others to perish, and make thyself as a poisoner and a sword unto them that see thee. Thou canst not be excused as chaste in mind; thy evil and unchaste raiment shall reprove thee. (sig. KIO.
In a reversal of the usual power-relationship between the gazer and the object of that gaze (where the process of being objectified removes agency from the object), the object is here entirely responsible for "enticing" the sight and "drawing" the eyes of men. A virgin whose appearance draws the male gaze is an agent of destruction to the soul of the man who sees her and is attracted to her: she is responsible for the gazer’s response to her. In a monstrous inversion of the proper order (as Vives would see it), the visible maid penetrates the mind of the gazer, "like a sword." In addition, her body (and the way she adorns it) is an enemy to her prized chastity— simply by existing, the body which houses the treasure, endangers it.
51 Vives’s solution to this problem is to erect a barrier between the maid and the gazer, between the treasure and the thief. To do so, he calls on the very thing that he
(so forcefully) insists needs guarding. Alongside its figuration of chastity as a treasure that needs protection. Instruction constructs the virtue as a protective power through its use of the martial metaphor. By extending the argument, we recognize that the maid’s attractiveness necessarily brings her into the danger of enticing lust in a man who may be unable to control his passionate response, who may in fact take her by force. The martial metaphor implies that the maid is figuratively furnished with shield, armor, and weapon to fend off the possibility of physical attack.
The martial metaphor derives from the Pauline "armor of faith, " and, while it, like the economic metaphor, provides a material analogue to the abstract concept, its principal image is that of shielding or veiling the woman, principally from the gaze.
A chaste woman is a type of defender of the faith, one of the milites Christi, doing battle against evil. She must arm herself with "holy chastity," the quality that allows her a measure of divine protection against the "darts" of evil lust:
Before she go forth at door, let her prepare her mind and stomack none other wise than if she went to fight. . . . Some thing shall chance on every side that shall move chastity and her good mind. Against these darts of the devil, let her take the buckler of stomach, defended with good examples and precepts, and a firm purpose of chastity and a mind ever bent toward Christ, (sig. N3)
Instruction's portrait of the warrior virgin resonates with the legends of medieval virgin martyrs, in which the virgin’s chastity is the source of her resistance to the lusty devils that threaten her.^® In medieval thought, as the devil’s power manifested
52 itself through the sexual organs, a Christian’s power to resist the flesh and the devil lay in her virginal integrity, spiritual self-contaiiunent.^’
The visible face of chastity, the quality that opposes the allure of the adorned body, is "Shamefastness," the source of "true" beauty. This companion virtue works with chastity’s armor, protecting the woman’s viitue by veiling the physical body, and replacing her physical image with an image of the purity of her chaste mind:
She caimot be chaste that is not ashamed, for that is as a cover and a veil of her face. For when nature had ordained that our faces should be open and bare of clothes, she gave it the veil of shamefastness wherewith it should be covered, and that for a great commendation, that who so did look upon it should understand some great virtue to be under that cover, (sig. L4'’-M1)
Shame works to keep a woman constantly aware of her body, the part of her being that remains associated with pollution, while her soul, or "mind," is the potentially purifying agent. Sumptuous raiment notwithstanding, simply to allow a man to look upon her bare face is for the maid to act as an agent for evil: "Her face doth inflame young men’s minds unto foul and unlawful lusts, whom she knoweth not whether she can withstand" (sig. 01). As her body is a threat to both her own chastity and the soul of the gazer, the spirimal covering of the veil of shamefastness offers the only protection: "They say that the holy virgin, our lady, was so demure and sad that if any man cast a wanton eye upon her, that foul heat was all quenched as though a man had cast a firebrand into the water" (sig. N3''). Shamefastness, by presenting the image of cold chastity, thus defends against the heat of lust inspired by viewing the physical body.
53 If the truly shamefast virgin can defend herself against the fires of lust so successfully, what happens to the concept of rape in Vives’s philosophy of chastity?
Sixteenth-century definitions of "rape," which include both seizing and carrying away and sexual force, reveal how directly that concept is implicated in the mystification of chastity. A conflation of theft and sexual force is bound up with the concept of rape that obtained in England contemporaneously with the publication of Hyrde’s translation of Instruction. In this case, the woman herself is perceived as a commodity stolen from her male guardian: she as victim is a neutral object of male conflict. Instruction’s economic metaphor constructs rape in accordance with that primary definition—theft as opposed to bodily injury—but in terms that shift blame onto the victim: the object of value is stolen from the woman, which in turn destroys her value, but which could only occur if the victim were a negligent keeper.
Moreover, the martial metaphor does away with the problem of rape altogether by so mystifying the protective properties of the virtue that the truly chaste woman is by definition fully shielded from ever becoming the object of sexual assault in the first place: only the unchaste can be so victimized. Vives claims that the virgin’s pure condition is universally cherished: "How pleasant and dear to everybody is a virgin.
How reverent a thing, even unto them that be ill and vicious themselves" (sig. Gl).
This insistence that even the vicious are awed by the power of chastity sets up a situation in which the virgin can only be self-defiled. By combining the chastity metaphors, Vives implies that no man would attempt to steal that virginity, which itself is so divine that even the word, the mystifying sign, inspires dread:
54 How much then ought that to be set by that hath oft times defended women against great captains, tyrants, and great hosts of men? . . . We have read of women that have been taken and let go again of the most unruly soldiers, only for the reverence of the name of virginity, because they said that they were virgins. For they judged it a great wickedness for a short and small image of pleasure to diminish so great a treasure, and every of them had liefer that another should be the causer of so wicked a deed than himself, (sig. G2, my emphasis)
When approaching the issue of rape. Vives appears unable to describe the virtue without a logical inconsistency: the use of both economic and martial metaphors in the same passage highlights their contradictory nature. Apparently, even the most hardened man of war is deterred from assaulting a young woman because of the mystery contained in her virginity, which is both protection and treasure, both deflective and attractive. Likewise, the ardent lover will refrain from his attentions:
For there is none so outrageous a lover if he think she be a virgin, but he will always open his eyes and take discretion to him and deliberation, and take counsel to change his mind. Every man is so sore adread to take away that which is of so great price that afterward neither can they themselves keep nor restore again, (sig. G2)
Whereas a maid may "keep" her chastity, the man who "takes" it is left with nothing: materiality dissolves the moment the "prize" is transferred from its rightful owner to the thief. Vives generously attributes discretion and reverence for a woman’s virginity to all men, making no exception for either the heat of a lover’s passion or the violence of a warrior’s rapaciousness. Yet, he does not bestow the same measure of discretion upon the virgins themselves, who are always in danger of letting their passions rule them and so need constantly be reminded of their duty to their chastity.
Indeed, it is the virgin’s only responsibility (and hers alone) to protect herself from sexual assault by remaining pure of mind and body in expectation of her
55 prospective spouse. She is, in fact, given an exaggerated amount of agency and attributed with far too much power over others, as if she alone could entice or repel any man, as if she were in complete control of all men’s desires as well as her own.
The loss of her virginity before the marriage night is also her responsibility and hers alone, regardless of the manner of its loss. In Instruction, there is no possibility of forced coition; the woman is always willing, and only the most vicious maid would toss this treasure aside: "Oh, cursed maid and not worthy to live the which willingly spoileth herself of so precious a thing, which men of war that are accustomed to all mischief yet dread to take away" (sig. G2). Thus, rape is impossible. The truly chaste woman is defined by her protection from lust, and a woman who cannot repel sexual assault is clearly not chaste: "It is an evil keeper that cannot keep one thing well committed to her keeping and put in trust to her with much commendation of words, and especially which no man will take from her against her will, nor touch it, except she be willing herself" (sig. G4). In no uncertain terms. Vives asserts that a man will not assault a woman; she is always complicit in the loss of her virginity, the act is always consensual.
There is, of course, one time in the life of a woman when it is proper for her to give her "treasure" away, and that is on her marriage night, when she surrenders her virginity to her husband. She must marry the man whom her parents approve, a man ostensibly discriminating enough to recognize and love the truly virtuous woman, and such a union is dependant upon sexual consummation. The virgin’s chastity is certainly the first quality to recommend her to her prospective spouse: "If she have
56 [chastity], no man will look for any other [virtue], and if she lack that no man will regard other" (sig. L4''). Her untouched nature makes her social capital: valuable, elite, exclusive.^® Her chastity is also what makes her truly beautiful, in contrast to the false lures of clothing and jewelry: "It is to be judged of chastity in women that she that is chaste is fair, well-favored, rich, fruitful, noble, and all best things that can be named, and contrary, she that is unchaste, is a sea and treasure of all illness"
(sig. L4'). Vives, who follows the neo-Platonic formulation that the soul is naturally drawn to beauty, explains in De Anima how we can recognize true beauty:
As we judge inward goodness from outward deeds, so too we think that the face is an image of the soul and are naturally inclined to love beautiful people. . . . The most enticing looks are not the pretty ones but the graceful, the pleasant, those enhanced by modesty and admiration. Such looks are proof of a properly formed mind.^^
The "true" beauty of shamefastness, besides veiling the body and quenching the fires of lust, attracts a kind of pure love: "No man should see [her face] covered with that veil, but he should love it, nor none see it naked of that, but he should hate it. (sig.
L4'’-M1).^° In fact, the chaste woman’s entire body is so covered, beneath which veil she is abominable:
You wives, when you put off your smocks, put upon shamefastness, and keep always-both day and night, both in company of other men and of your husbands, both in the light and in the dark—that most honest veil of nature. Let never God, let never angels, let never your own conscience espy you bare of the cover of shamefastness. For there is nothing more foul and loathsome than you be, if you be naked of that cover, (sig. fl)
The removal of this image of female humanity produced by chastity renders a woman beastly. The necessary relationship between the moral quality of the soul and the
57 consequent beauty of the body is a problematic one, as Vives insists there is a distinction between "desire, " which seeks union with the beloved only for selfish reasons, and "love, " which seeks union with the beloved simply because the soul naturally craves what is good and beautiful.The question is whether the desirous response of the male gazer upon the chaste woman can indeed be distinguished from his response to the unchaste woman.
Marriage, as inscribed in Instruction, is founded upon the pure craving for union with the beloved that is not sexual in nature, presupposing that procreative sexuality is indeed distinct from lustful sexuality. The holy love that the husband feels for his wife. Vives describes, produces a moderate and reasonable coupling only for the purpose of engendering children, rather than the irrational and ultimately fruitless desire of lust. Instruction consistently attests to a profound distrust of sexuality as beastly and "unworthy of the soul," even in marriage.^^ Husbands are admonished with Paul’s directive, "they should have their wives as vessels of generation in holiness and not in unlawful concupiscence or immoderate, as the pagans do that know not God"; likewise wives are told, "Let them not defile the holy and honest bed of wedlock with filthy and lecherous acts" (sig. e4). How then does one recognize which sexual acts are "holy and honest" and which "filthy and lecherous?" Though male desire is dualistically (and problematically) constructed in terms of that which is inspired and sanctified by spiritual holiness and that which is generated by evil bodily lust, women are simply to be devoid of all desire whatsoever. Zenobia (despite her "pagan" status) exemplifies this perfect state;
58 [She] was of so great chastity that she would not lie with her husband without she had proved before whether she . . . had conceived, and if she had not, then was she content to suffer her husband’s will again. Who would think that this woman had any lust or pleasure in her body? This was a woman worthy to be had in honor and reverence, which had no more pleasure in her natural parts than in her foot or her finger. (sig. e 4 ^ .
For Vives, the companionship of marriage is clearly a holy alliance of the souls, whereas procreation requires an essential, if distasteful, union of the body. To compensate for this necessary sexuality. Vives constructs a moderate, divinely inspired love on the part of the husband for his chaste, utterly undesirous wife, who accedes to the act in proper compliance with her husband’s will and in order to fulfill her whole duty as wife and mother.
Ultimately, Instruction sets out to desexualize women, who had long been thought too weak in reason to competently resist the powerful animal urges of the body. By concentrating on chastity as the single most important physical, moral, and spiritual virtue that a woman can posess—by worrying it, expanding it, and mystifying it-Vives becomes a new and powerful voice on the eve of the Reformation in the struggle to maintain a degree of Christian asceticism while accounting for the
Renaissance celebration of physical beauty, which invariably leads to sexual desire.
By locating the root of sexual sin in women. Vives absolves men from the greater share of responsibility for their own sexual desires, leaving them free to comtemplate beauty without being tainted by lust. Vives’s problematic representation of the ideal woman would be read and digested by a large readership throughout the sixteenth- century, and whether or not they were directly responding to Instruction, writers of
59 conduct and imaginative literature alike would explore the concept of chastity in ways that resonate with the image presented by Vives.
Later Conduct Books: English Authors
Few female conduct books were published in England between Hyrde’s translation of Vives’s Instruction and the end of the sixteenth century, and those that did appear were, like Instruction, translations of Continental booksIn the seventeenth century, however, the genre became increasingly well-represented by
English authors who adopted the majority of Instruction’s advice and made surprisingly few modifications to it despite the religious, political, and social upheavals that England sustained during the century. Vives’s rhetoric of chastity remains at the core of these later manuals, which continue the project of mystification by burying the contradictions between chastity and the lure of beauty and between female agency and sexual assault under language that grows increasingly vague and abstract. As the kind of Roman Catholic piety found in Instruction becomes demonized in England in the centuries after the Reformation, the impetus for female chastity imperatives shifts towards secular and social considerations at the same time the virtue adopts a more private spiritual value, working as an internalized self monitor, than the publically-displayed virtue of Vives’s Instruction. Even the word
"chastity" declines in usage in the later manuals, replaced by the more secular, less specific, and less sexually-charged term, "modesty. " Thus the underlying presence of the contradictory ideologies surrounding chastity are compounded by a tension
60 between the public, social significance of female chastity and its private, spiritual value.
Though it follows Instruction closely, Richard Brathwaite’s The English
Gentlewoman (1631) is the first full-length conduct book for women written by an
Englishman (which distinction alone merits it extensive analysis). Brathwaite’s manual was also immediately popular, with at least five separate editions between
1630 and 1 6 4 1 . The English Gentlewoman clearly illustrates the tensions created by expecting the reader to internalize chastity as an intensely private virtue even while instructing the reader to display chastity as social capital on the marriage market.
The contradictory advice is not immediately obvious, as it is obscured by elaborate rhetoric. The overt shift in emphasis from the public to the private is bolstered by
Brathwaite’s claim for nationalism, as a move toward creating a sober, distinctly
English code of behavior and rejecting the garish, public ceremony of the codes of conduct inscribed by continental authors. Though highly conventional even compared with Instruction, The English Gentlewoman makes a nationalistic appeal, ostensibly offering thoroughly English advice in opposition to the "forraine fashions" espoused by the preceding Continental writers. This proclaimed nationalism, coupled with a highly elaborate rhetorical style, allows The English Gentlewoman to extend Vives’s mystification of the ideological conflicts within chastity by obscuring both the neo-
Platonic and the residual misogynistic associations, even to the point of diffusing chastity into every aspect of an English gentlewoman’s life. This nationalism
61 primarily appears in The English Gentlewoman as a conventional disdain for the latest
Continental fashions coveted by the English:
We usually observe such a fashion to be French, such an one Spanish, another Italian, this Dutch, that Poland. Meane time where is the English? surely, some precious Elixir extracted out of all these. She will neither relye on her own invention, nor compose her selfe to the fashion of any one particular Nation, but make her selfe an Epitomized confection of all. Thus becomes she not only a stranger to others, but to her selfe. (23)
This dogged patriotism exposes the fear that England is and will always be perceived as trailing behind the rest of Europe, copying the behaviors of other countries in order to make up for a lack of native panache. Brathwaite calls for the establishment and observation of a native culture, free from the influence of foreign nationals (who are, after all. Papists). By disparaging the fashions of the European gentility, Brathwaite nominally distances his book and its advice from that of the Continental conduct book authors who had become familiar to readers by the seventeenth century via English translations.^^ Brathwaite’s stance implies that truly proper behavior—"the seldomest erring Index" of inner goodness (28)-is distinctly English and can be perfected only with the aid of a homegrown advice manual. This proclaimed shift away from the maimers advocated by such received authorities as Vives, Guazzo, and Bruto strategically allows Brathwaite to offer conventional advice in the guise of exclusivity and novelty. Moreover, he distances The English Gentlewoman from the Papist origins of these books by locating it in a protestant English tradition, which is subtly evident in the emphasis placed on pious self-contemplation.^®
62 Despite, however, its proclaimed adherence to a wholly English philosophy.
The English Gentlewoman contains much that belongs to Instruction. The economic
and martial metaphors frequently surface in The English Gentlewoman, indicating a
fundamental rhetorical and philosophical connection between the two manuals, but the
effect of keeping the literary and doctrinal origins of such images hidden is to mystify his subject matter: "Pleasure cannot make you so forgetful of your honour, as to deprive you of that in a moment, which you shall never recover" (102); "The most precious things have ever the most pernicious Keepers. Nothing more precious than a
Virgins honour" (189); "Her head-tyre puts her in minde of the helmet of salvation; her stomacher, of the breast-plate of righteousnesse" (200). Such images clearly echo
Vives-if they were not in fact appropriated directly from that earlier work-though
Brathwaite never cites Instruction. The English Gentlewoman’s treatment of chastity builds upon Vives’s foundation tacitly: Vives’s mystification of the tensions between chastity and beauty quietly supports Brathwaite’s elaborate figuration of female virtue and further mystification of orgin. Though harder to detect, the contradictions that
Vives struggles to synthesize are fully operational, even compouiided, in The English
Gentlewoman, and occasionally break through the surface of rhetorical embellishment.
While chastity is rarely named in The English Gentlewoman, the book follows
Instruction in that a woman’s unswerving chastity is the tacit goal for chapters ostensibly devoted to "Appareil," "Behaviour," "Decency," "Estimation," "Fancie," and "Honour. " These chapter headings encourage the reader to expect a rich variety of information and, more importantly, a great range of possibility for action within
63 the bounds of propriety, but The English Gentlewoman is deceptive: Brathwaite’s rhetoric disguises his single-minded message, allowing chastity to diffuse into every section of his book and control discussions that appear to treat other issues. Although he leaves the particular subject unnamed, it is clear that such passages as that which follows treat chastity in much the same way as Vives’s more forthright discussions:
What an excellent impregnable fortresse were Woman, did not her Windowes betray her to her enemy? But principally, when shee leaves her Chamber to walk on the publike Theatre; when she throwes off her vaile, and gives attention to a merry tale; when she consorts with youthfull bloud, and either enters parley, or admits of an enter-view with love. (43)
Brathwaite relies upon the conventional metaphors, here the martial metaphor, to do nearly all the rhetorical work; instead of explicitly connecting the martial metaphor to chastity, the signified is deferred, left abstract and unspoken but clearly the driving force behind such Vivesian images.
The English Gentlewoman's treatment of the gaze differs from that of
Instruction through an implosion of subjectivity seen in Brathwaite’s increased emphasis on self-contemplation as a means of discovering and conquering the evil that lurks within the soul. In Instruction, the maid’s behavior is directly linked to the way men react to her, which reflects on her moral state. In The English Gentlewoman, however, men are almost entirely erased from the subject matter: a woman’s behavior
(as a reliable sign of her moral state) is instead linked back to her own salvation without the explicit mediation of the male gaze. Instead, the gaze that concerns
Brathwaite is a woman’s own. The reader does, in fact, briefly glimpse a male gaze lurking beneath the rhetorical surface, but (as with Instruction) the woman is endowed
64 with complete control of a potentially sexual situation. Curiously, the woman that concerns Brathwaite is not one who is sumptuously attired but one whose eye seeks beauty:
The Lascivious [eye] makes beauty her object, and with a leering looke, while she throweth out her lure to catch others, she becomes catcht herself. This object, because it reflects most on your sexe, let it be thus disposed, that die inward eye of your soules may be on a superiour beauty fixed. (86)
Using a Petrarchan "net" or "snare" conceit. The English Gentlewoman reformulates the maid’s own sense of sight as a locus of susceptibility to "beauty," whether earthly
(assumedly in the form of attractive men) or the "superior beauty" of God. Sight works as a metonymy for desire, which, in early modem physiology, enters through the eyes. For Vives, the appreciation of beauty is a predominately male characteristic as it corresponds to a rational yearning for goodness. Brathwaite makes the appreciation of beauty a concern that "reflects most on [the female] sexe, " which must choose whether to remain mired in fleshly desire—what Brathwaite euphemistically calls "vanity"— or ascend to a spiritual desire that nourished the soul:
Shee will not . . . give her eye leave to wander, lest it should betray her honour to a treacherous intruder. How weake prove those assaults, which her home-bred enemies prepare against her? Her looke must bee set upon a purer Object than vanity: Shee will not eye it, lest shee should be taken by it. . . . Occasions wisely shee foresees, timely prevents, and consequently enoyes true freedome of minde. (203)
In an ironic figurative foreshadowing of civil war, the maid’s "home-bred enemies" are thus her own passions, which revolt and lay seige to her chastity, the rightful ruler of her soul. In an implosion of subjectivity. The English Gentlewoman eliminates male desire as a danger to the maid and employs the martial metaphor, not
65 in Instruction’s conventional sense of male attack against a female fort, but as an internal battle between the maid’s own passion and her chastity: "[Self-governance] is all the Combat that is of you desired; wherein many of your Sexe have nobly deserved. Stoutly have they combated, and sweetly have they conquered" (220).
As a tool for salvation, the eye takes on a particularly panoptic quality, which invokes the sense that one’s actions are constantly monitored either by oneself or by others.^’ The two meanings of "observation," as a visual act of watching and as an act of obeying rules or laws, fuse together in Brathwaite’s use of the sight metaphor.
However, the specific behaviors and desires that require observing are left largely unidentified, as if to imply that readers will instinctively know when their thoughts cross the line into sinfulness. Self-governance requires that women turn their attention inward, ever contemplating and controlling their emotions: "Should you, by a due examination of your selves, finde any bosome-sinne secretly lurking, any subtill familiar privately incroaching, any distempred affection dangerously mutining: Be your owne Censors" (205). The copiousness of employing three parallel terms,
"bosome-sinne," "subtill familiar," and "distempred affection," does very little to concretely identify what specific sins and affections must be expunged by the maid’s vigilant self-censorship unless the reader taps into the vein of misogyny that runs below the surface of the text. The bosom sin that women have been traditionally accused of harboring is that of sexual desire: Brathwaite need only skirt around the edges of sexuality in order to fully invoke that particular chimera. Occasionally The
English Gentlewoman plainly states its objective in terms Vives would advocate, as
66 here Brathwaite employs the favorite alliterative term of medieval moralists: "As it
[the eye] is a member of the flesh, so becomes it a servant of the flesh; apprehending with greedinesse, whatsoever may minister fuell to carnall concupiscence. This you shall easily correct, by fixing her on that pure and absolute object, for which she was made" (87, my emphasis). The way to accomplish self-censorship is by turning the soul’s eye toward God in an eternal battle with the fleshly eye, and whether or not the maid (or matron) is aware of her own sinfulness, God always knows. Brathwaite clearly echoes Vives when he declares that God sees all: "Tell mee, yee deluded daughters, is there any darkenesse so thicke and palpable, that the piercing eye of heaven cannot spye you thorow it?" (116);
Be you in your Chambers or private Closets; be you retired from the eyes of men; thinke how the eyes of God are on you. Doe not say, the walls encompasse mee, darknesse o’re-shadowes mee, the Curtaine of night secures me: These be the words of an Adultresse: Therefore doe nothing privately, which you would not doe publikely. There is no retire from the eyes of God" (49).
When male desire receives direct discussion in The English Gentlewoman, it appears in a largely positive light through the use of the economic metaphor:
Brathwaite makes the blanket assumption that the maid wants to attract male attention in her quest to find a husband. This worldly attitude, wholly absent in Instruction, clashes with the dogmatic rhetoric of the eye, undermining the sincerity of the pious message by introducing the possibility that what one seems to be is, finally, more important in the daily life of the English gentlewoman than what one «; behavior is not after all a reliable indicator of the disposition of the mind, nor is that the ultimate aim of proper behavior. The cultural imperative that drives maids to "catch"
67 husbands takes precedence to "true" and "honest" signification. Even an encomium to virginity turns abruptly into advice for ending the virginal state:
Are you Virgins? dedicate those inward Temples of yours to chastity; abstaine from all corrupt society; inure your hands to workes of piety, your tongues to words of modesty. Let not a straid looke taxe you of lighmesse, nor a desire of gadding impeach you of wantonnesse. The way to winne an husband is not to wooe him, but to be woo’d by him. Let him come to you, not you to him. Proffered ware is not worth the buying. Your states are too pure, to bee set at sale. (106)
Purity and value are directly linked in the eternal paradox of acquisition: the maid who offers herself as "ware" is not valued, yet the pure maid who is not on offer, not for sale, is the one worth buying. Ultimately, any woman can be acquired in the patriarchal marriage trade, but the "English Gentlewoman" must maintain the veneer of untouchability, notwithstanding Brathwaite’s stem admonition that "You are to be really, what you appeare outwardly" (106). To attract the male gaze, the maid must do her best to deny that she attracts: the beauty that captivates most. The English
Gentlewoman insists, is the beauty of shamefast chastity: "Truth is, there is such sweet and amiable correspondence betwixt vertuous beauty, and shamefaste modesty, as one cannot subsist without the others society" (168):
Some Pictures, I know, will doe well in white; yet it is colour that gives them life. Beauty never darts more love to the eye, nor with quicker convoy directs it to the heart, then when it displayes her guiltlesse shame in a crimson blush. There is one flower to be loved of women, which is the chiefest flower in all their garden; and this is a good red, which is shamefastnesse. These standing colours are slow wooers to discreet Lovers. Vertues Coat then is best deblazoned when a shamefast red breathes upon it. (167)
68 This Petrarchan figuration of the colors of beauty echoes Shakespeare’s treatment of the heroine in The Rape ofLucrece, wherein we find a complicated conflation of virtue and beauty, love and lust.^*
Whereas Vives maintains a problematic distinction between love inspired by virtuous (true) beauty and passion inspired by fleshly (false) beauty, the distinction here collapses to the point wherein desire (love and lust together) is sparked by a single construction of female beauty—that which has the appearance of shamefast chastity. In its moral message to the English gentility. The English Gentlewoman has metamorphosed the strict Christian virtue of chastity into a coquette’s ploy for catching a husband, saving the use of the name of chastity for moments rhetorically fit to evoke a conventional piety: "Tempt not Chastity; hazard not your Christian liberty" (43). That a chaste appearance, named "shamefastness," "mildness," or
"modesty," can be donned like hat, gloves, or veil according to occasion signals an undercurrent of theatricality in The English Gentlewoman, which even surfaces in the language of piety: "Make then your Chamber your private Theatre, wherein you may act some devout Scene to Gods honour" (48). According to the text, action is the basis for all behavior, but whether one can "act" without dissembling—without swerving away from the "natural" and toward either the expedient or merely the expected—is a question left unanswered. "Imitation, " as a crucial part of the traditional process of educating children into members of their society, is implicated in this question-aren’t imitation and dissimulation really two aspects of the same act?
Brathwaite tells young women: "Conforme yourselves to such pattemes as are
69 imitable; imitate them in all such actions as are laudable; So live, that none may have occasion to speak evilly of you, if they speake truly!" (30-1). If acts can be performed in conscious imitation of another in order to meet societal expectations, then a chaste appearance can be "put on" to please a prospective mate: "Let modesty suit you, that a discreeter mate may chuse you" (24). The "veil of shamefastness" has by the mid-seventeenth century resulted in the revival of the veil as proper attire for going out into public, regardless of the intentions of the woman who dons it (see
Figure 2.1):
Women in sundry Countryes, when they goe into any publike concourse or presse of people, use to wear vayles, to imply that secret inscreened beauty which best becomes a Woman, Bashfull modesty. Which habit our owne Nation now in latter yeares hath observed: which, howsoever the intention of the wearer appeare, deserves approvement: because it expresseth in it selfe Modest shamefastnesse, a Woman’s chiefest Ornament. (50, my emphasis)
Whereas Vives insists that the chaste woman seldom or never appear in public,
Brathwaite acknowledges that societal expectations have changed to the point of no longer sequestering women in the household.^® A virtuous woman (modestly veiled), we are told, should in fact put herself in the public eye if only to make herself available as a model of good behavior—as the imitable woman to which young women should "conform" themselves:
Yet far be it from me, to be so regularly strict, or Laconically severe, as to exclude Women from all publick societies. Meetings may they have, and improve them, to their benefit. . . . A modest and well Behaved Woman may by her frequent or resort to publike places, conferre no lesse benefit to such as observe her behaviour, than occasion of profit to her private family, where shee is Overseer. . . . These are such mirrors of modesty, pattemes of piety, as they would
70 not for a world transgresse the bounds of Civility. These are Matrons in their houses, Models in publike places.(50, 52)
That The English Gentlewoman's "modem" attitude toward genteel behavior is in direct conflict with the book’s adherence to the residual discourse of the disorderly, sinful, and sexual woman is signaled most clearly by a negative exemplar, a rape victim, twice employed as a warning against the dangers of desire. Brathwaite borrows the Old Testament figure of Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob. Briefly,
Israelite Dinah leaves home to visit friends and is spotted on her travels by Canaanite
Shechem, who rapes her and falls in love with her. Jacob accepts the offer of
Hamor, Shechems’ father, to marry Dinah to Shechem and set a precedent for
Israelite/Canaanite intermarriages. Dinah’s brothers pretend to agree to this arrangement but secretly revenge Dinah’s "defilement" by slaying the Canaanite men and spoiling their city.'^'
The discussions of Dinah in The English Gentlewoman are as follows: "Had
Dinah never roaved, shee had prov’d a Diana, and had never been ravished" (50); and, "Dinah may be a proper Embleme for the eye; shee seldome strayes abroad, but shee is in danger of ravishing" (86). Both quotations imply that Dinah’s violation was first and foremost caused by her own actions. As a negative parallel for the eternally chaste Diana, Dinah’s "ravishment" leaves her unchaste, especially since it was her travelling abroad that created the opportunity for her to be seen and desired by her ravisher. This logic is in direct opposition to Brathwaite’s avowal that a chaste woman belongs in the public eye as a model for imitation. There are only two conclusions a reader can draw from the coexistence of these conflicting positions;
71 either Dinah was unchaste before she ever left home and so invited her assault through past behavior (of which the Bible offers no textual evidence); or, in Vivesian terms, ravishment is a de facto cause of unchastity, brought about by simply allowing oneself to be gazed upon by desiring eyes. As an "Embleme for the eye," Dinah is a warning to the woman of the danger of allowing her eyes {her desires) to fall upon attractive objects. Through the use of Dinah, The English Gentlewoman suggests that male desire is so deeply subsumed into female desire that the responsibility for sexual violation can only be the result of female action. Although women are properly charged with the duty to attract a husband through the lure of beauty (which has the appearance of shamefast chastity). The English Gentlewoman acknowledges women’s culpability for a mysterious "wrong" use of that beauty: "The Amorous or Lovely, in giving others occasions to be taken with their beauty: Whence the Lord by the mouth of his Prophet: Thou hast made thy beauty abhominable" (215).
Thus The English Gentlewoman offers its readers a remarkably similar ideology of female virtue to that of Instruction of a Christen Woman, despite its overt alignment with an emerging discourse that appears to advocate a wider range of female behavior in accordance with a distinctly English sense of propriety and gentility. As with Vives, Brathwaite’s copious and highly wrought rhetoric serve to obscure contradictions even while his figuration signals the existence of those contradictions.
The contrast between the conflicted and increasingly mystified advice for young women in the seventeenth century and the highly specific and concrete
72 directives aimed at young men is startlingly apparent in the joint (re)publication of two conduct books in 1664, Francis Hawkins’s highly popular (and often republished)
English translation of a French manual for boys, Youths Behaviour, or Decency in
Conversation Amongst Men, and Robert Codrington’s The Second Part o f Youths
Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women (see Figure 2.2)
Directly barkening back to Erasmus, Hawkins offers the following rules of conduct for boys: "Take heed that with thy spittle thou bedew not his face with whom thou speakest, and to that end approach not too nigh him"; and, "Clense not thy teeth with the table-cloath or Napkin, or with thy finger, fork or knife; much worse would it be to do with thy nailes but use thy pick-tooth. In marked contrast, Codrington’s
Decency in Conversation Amongst Women—published first as an addendum to
Hawkins’s book for boys—is typically abstract: "Resolution and Modesty attended with Mildness do carry a constant and a sweet Correspondency" (33). Embedded in these abstract nouns—"Resolution," "Modesty," and "Mildness"—is an assumption that young women will somehow already recognize the physical behaviors that signify— embody—these concepts.
Although it is possible that the male writers of these books are less familiar with the specifics of female behavior (and are thus unable to be concrete), it is far more likely that the overarching concern for chastity in such works makes it difficult to be concrete without speaking frankly about sexuality. As Restoration conduct books urge "modesty, " ±ey do so through an attempt at modest rhetoric. Embedded in this key term is the expectation that all such behaviors will correspond with what
73 their predecessors commonly called "chastity," a term that, while not out of use in imaginative literature after the Restoration, has become rare in the rhetoric of female conduct.Although Decency in Conversation Amongst Women follows The English
Gentlewoman quite closely, it uses the term "chastity," even more infrequently than does the earlier book, placing more emphasis upon "modesty," as follows: "Modesty chides young Maids from bold Company; it restrains them from sordid enterprizes; it teacheth them to love verme only; it aweth the uncivil Tongue, and chains up the licentious hand" (151).
"Modesty," a term likely less redolent than "chastity" of doctrinal as well as direct sexual associations is nonetheless equally as restrictive of behavior: if one is modest, she will be fully equipped with the accoutrements of self-censorship.
Restriction of action, not increased freedom, is still the expected practice for the proper gentlewoman of the Restoration, as chastity is still the ultimate goal of that practice. Codrington devotes much attention to the young woman’s conduct in company: "Society, " at home or in public, has become the rightful place for women of high birth by the late seventeenth century: "Behaviour belongeth to both the Body and Soul, and Society is the Comfort of the Living, Life without it is a kind of
Death" (32). That women’s social arena has widened, however, does not presuppose that more latitude in behavior has become acceptable. On the contrary, because women are so often surrounded by others, they are constantly in danger of committing both minor socizl faux pas and serious moral transgressions. Yet, the complex table manners, postures, greetings, courtesies, and other codes that so
74 rigorously identify those who belong to the rarefied world of social graces-the upper classes--(and which figure so prominently in the conduct and courtesy literature for men and boys) are absent from Decency in Conversation Amongst Women
Whereas Hawkins warns boys against committing social suicide through the myriad of ways one can offend polite sensibilities, Codrington foresees danger for women to appear in one form—unchastity:
What a Desart is the World without Society and Behaviour? Gentlewomen who would be observed for their behaviour, ought to beware whom they elect into the number of their Companions. . . . Young Virgins (saith Plutarch) above all things are to consort with those whose lives were never tainted with any suspicion of Incontinence. (32-3)
Codrington also advises: "To enter into discourse with strangers doth argue Lightness and Indiscretion" (33); and, "let them . . . be counselled that they neither give nor receive anything that afterwards may procure their shame" (33-4).
Where Decency in Conversation Amongst Women most clearly displays an underlying contradiction (and harkens back to Instruction) is in its discussions of beauty. Codrington cites Plato, Galen, and Cato in his praise of beauty, insisting that
"It is a humane Splendor, lovely in its own Namre, and which hath the force to
Ravish the Spirit with the Eyes" (44). Because of its reverent status, we read, "The
Judgement which we frame and collect to our selves of the Beauty of the Spirit, because it is lodged in a handsom Body, is not often, much amiss" (44). Indeed, "All do acknowledge that [Eve’s] Body was more admirable, and more beautifull than
Adams; and shall we be so prophane to think, that God would put a worse Soul into a better Body? . . . The comeliest outsides are for the most part the most vermous
75 within" (147). These panegyrics to the universal and inherent virtue of beauty jars with the particular discussions that involve women (and their weakness). Men are, by and large, most attracted to beautiful women, most likely to "assault" their chastity, but (as we’ve seen in The English Gentlewoman), male desire is almost entirely absent from the discussion of women’s danger, existing only behind the shadowy figure of the "Tempter, " which gives women the initial impetus to tempt themselves. Despite their supposed greater virtue, beautiful women are most in danger of self-temptation:
"In most Beauties there is a secret Flattery by which they do tempt themselves, and whiles they desire to be commended, they do begin to be seduced" (sig. A4). The notion of the silver-tongued and silken-voiced devils of male seducers have become, in the conduct literamre of the seventeenth century, the voices inside women’s own minds, their own weak natures urging them to sin. Richard Allestree’s The Ladies
Calling illustrates this fear, as well: "Her look, her speech, her whole beaviour should own an humble distrust of her self."'*® As Codrington’s use of the martial metaphor exposes, if women "fall, " the fault can only be their own:
Now if the Beautifull do sometimes suffer themselves to be vanquished, this reflects not on the strength and power of their Beauty, but on the Weakness of their Spirit. A place is no less impregnable because he makes a surrender of it who ought to have defended it, the Fault is in the Captain, and not in the Citadel. (44)
It follows that rape does not really exist. Codrington muses on the namre of responsibility for one’s actions, and finally concludes that one always deserves some degree of blame when involved in sin—one is always at least somewhat complicit in a particular sin because no one is free from general sin:
76 Occasion and our Natures are like two inordinate Lovers, they seldome meet but they do sin together; nevertheless if they do meet, and the Heart contenteth not, some great Scholars are in doubt, whether the offence be punishable, though the act be committed: Who wilfully doth anything evil is a wicked Man, but he that doth it out of necessity is not altogether evil. They do adde, that even actuall sins have so far their dependency on the Hearts approbation, as that alone can vitiate or excuse the act. But I am of opinion, that there is no Man but is faulty in all his actions be they what they will, at least by some circumstances, though peradventure sometimes excusable in others that seem to be of more importance. For if we shall calculate aright, Man is his own Devil, and oftentimes doth tempt himself: so prone are we to evil, that it is not one of the least Instructions that doth advise us to beware our selves (150-1).
Moreover, the attitude toward rape eluded to here (but never outright named in
Decency in Conversation Amongst Women) relates directly to that which Codrington employs to figure beauty’s effect on the gazer when he writes, it "hath the force to
Ravish the Spirit with the Eyes" (44). There lingers the sense that all sex, forced or otherwise, pleases our bodies; only a proper sense of morality keeps us from giving in to our fleshly natures. By 1664, it was commonplace to use "ravish," or "rapture" to denote ecstasy, and one can imagine a parallel "justice" in which a man’s reaction to having his spirit "ravished" by a woman’s beauty is to ravish the woman’s body.
Yet, women are expected to catch husbands with even more urgency than ever before. By the end of the seventeenth century, even discussions of virginity no longer praised the celibate life even as a near-angelic state fit for the most pious women.
The Ladies Calling acknowledges the dying breath of the ideal of the perpetual virgin, which has degenerated into the undesirable label, "old maid": "An old maid is now thought such a curse, as no Poetic fury can exceed; lookt on as the most calamitous creature in nature" (147). The celibate ideal still viable (though not the most popular
77 choice) in Vives’s time had completely disappeared for English women, leaving them prey to conflicting expectations with no possibility of escape.
Despite the increasing secularity and gentility of the rhetoric of the conduct literature of the later seventeenth century, the doctrinal roots of woman’s moral weakness combined with a sense of internal vigilance to fortify and cement the ideology that tells women that they are responsible for all sexual desire even while they are urged to attract a mate. Besides ideology’s constant struggle to eradicate (or at least disguise) internal conflict, the escalating mystification of the conflict between chastity and physical beauty in the conduct manuals may also be driven by two other causes: first, a perceived need among the upper classes to revoke the key to those codes of behavior to which the lower orders, in an increasingly bourgeois and literate society, had become privy; and second, an increasingly secular society’s desire to obscure the originary, early Christian doctrinal impems for imposing such rigid control on women’s behavior. Whatever the root causes, the seventeenth century saw no lightening of the load of guilt that early misogyny heaped on women. Beneath the mystifying rhetorical veneer of "female perfection" lay the culmral forces of animosity which peipemated this guilt.
78 /L^ry/;.;. - v.\:/c .j/;.( ;-;v.A?\v-:;/..v ; .;.'//i .V;-.V.
Figure 2.1: Wenceslaus Hollar, "Summer," from set of Seasons, 1644.
79 Figure 2.2; "Virtue" and "Vice" from the frontispiece to Francis Hawkins’ New
Additions Unto Youths Behaviour, 1664.
80 NOTES
1. Robert Greene, Penelope’s Web (London 1601), sig. E4.
2. Robert Aylett, Peace with her Foure Garders, viz. Five Morall Meditations (London, 1622), p. 18.
3. Freud, "Femininity," p. 131.
4. Suzanne Hull catalogued 85 practical guidebooks for women in English between 1475 and 1640 (a catalogue which Hull continues to supplement). This number includes all manner of books intended to teach proper skills and behaviors for middle- and upper-class women. After 1640, these books proliferated rapidly (with improvements in print technology) in the form of new books and as new editions of old favorites. It is difficult to ascertain exact numbers of conduct books published between 1641 and 1675; many new editions of older books contain much new material, and the genre itself is flexible enough to mix recipes and letter-writing models in with discussions of chastity and modesty. See, for example, Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (London, 1615); and The Gentlewoman’s Companion (London, 1673), erroneously attributed to Hannah Woolley.
5. For studies of the relationship between conduct and class, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); and Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Whigham's study examines behavioral "tropes" employed by Elizabethan courtiers to both cement and erase class distinctions in order to inhibit or ease social mobility. Of virtue, Whigham notes, "Various claims were made . . . as to the function of virtue in determining rank; established and mobile Elizabethans alike would deploy arguments on either side as need arose" (28). Robert Astley’s Of Honour (London, 1601) and Francis Markham’s The Booke of Honour (London, 1625) both uphold the conservative idea that an individual’s nobility is a reward for the virtue that passed from the seed of his or her ancestors: "Fathers, Grandfathers, and great Grandfathers have their Images and portraitures lively presented in the bodies of their children; and why not then the virtues of their minds" (Markham, p. 10). Castiglione’s The Courtier, however, offers a debate about class and virtue when they question whether the ideal courtier must be of the noble classes (see Book One).
6. At the same time, the availability of these books to the literate members of the middling and underclasses gave them the ability to successfully imitate their "betters," a source of annoyance to the aristocracy, who would respond by enforcing such (largely unsuccessful) measures as sumptuary laws. Ann Rosalind Jones argues that women were implicated in this tension between a fixed upper class and the social mobility of "upstarts" and that conduct literature acts as a mediator between dominant and emerging ideologies. See "Nets and bridles: early modem conduct books and sixteenth-century women’s lyrics," in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Teimenhouse (New York and London: Methuen, 1987): 39-72.
81 7. This similarity has been noted in a comparison of Vives’s Instruction and Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673): see John A. Thomas, "A Moral Voice for the Restoration Lady: A Comparative View of Allestree and Vives" The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 1 (1986): 123-42. Kathleen Davies remarks the similar conventionality of marriage manuals of the period: "Their most obvious characteristics are a monotonous similarity of highly generalized advice, given by authors as different as a monk of Syon (Whitford) and a fashionable London Puritan preacher (Gouge)." See her "Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage," in Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage, ed. R.B. Outhwaite (London: Europa Publications, 1981), pp. 58-80, p. 62. There were at least two other advice books for women in English before Hyrde’s translation of Instruction, the twelfth-century Ancrene Wisse, intended for women in the church, and de la Tour Landry’s fourteenth-century Book of the Knight of the Tower, aimed at the noble classes. Vives’s book, though dedicated to the queen, was the first to be widely accessible to women of the middling classes.
8. There are of course a few notable exceptions—More’s daughters (particularly Margaret Roper), Jane Grey, and Elizabeth I were taught logic, rhetoric, and languages. They, however, were not typical.
9. Erasmus, De Civilitate Morum Puerilium, trans. Robert Whitington (London, 1532), sigs. B r, C r, D l. I have modernized spelling. De Civilitate appeared first around 1526. The English translation, in catechism form and used as a schoolbook, was introduced in 1532. In all, there were more than 130 editions of Erasmus’s book in Latin and translation by the eighteenth century. For a discussion of De Civilitate, see Elias, The Civilizing Process, pp. 53-84, passim.
10. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 52.
11. The following is a selection of studies that focus on Vives, the humanists, and women’s education: Foster Watson, Vives and the Renascence Education of Women (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912); Pearl Hogrefe, The Thomas More Circle: A Program of Ideas and Their Impact on Secular Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959); Diane Valerie Bayne, "The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle," Moreana 45 (1975), pp. 5-15; Elizabeth Patton, "Second Thoughts of a Renaissance Humanist on the Education of Women: Juan Luis Vives Revises His De institutione feminae Christianae," ANQ n.s. 5 (1992), pp. 111-4; Gloria Kaufman, "Juan Luis Vives on the Education of Women" Signs 3 (1978), pp. 891-6; Valerie Wayne, "Some Sad Sentence"; and Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of Renaissance Woman (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), pp. 171-81; and Janis Butler Holm, "Struggling with the Letter: Vives’s Preface to The Instruction of a Christen Woman” in Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth- Century England and France, ed. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 265-97.
8 2 Although most earlier studies of Instruction acknowledge that, for Vives, the goal of education is to protect chastity, they focus almost exclusively upon Vives’s approach to formal education for girls (that is, formal studies of arts and languages). In fact. Vives devotes very little attention to formal studies in his plan for the education of women. Like most conduct books. Vives does delineate which books are allowable for young women to read; these are, predictably, moral authors. He also mentions that women should practice writing by copying wise sentiments into their commonplace books. For more on the Vives and women’s writing, see Valerie Wayne, "Some Sad Sentence: Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman,” Silent But for the Word. ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University, 1985), pp. 15-29.
12. Joan Larsen Klein, Introduction to selections from Instruction of a Christian Woman, in Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, I500-I640, pp. 97-98. Wayne also discusses Instruction's publication history in "’Some Sad Sentence.’"
13. The Revised Short-Title Catalogue lists eight English editions: 1529?, 1540?, 1541, 1547, 1557 (two editions), 1585, and 1592.
14. 1 see Vives stmggling with a similar problem for a female audience that Philippa Berry describes in Of Chastity and Power, her study of the male-centered courtly literature: The Renaissance discourses of love certainly attempted to deny the materiality of the ‘chaste’ woman they idealized: to exclude the female body, and feminine sexuality, from their idea of a chaste woman as exclusively spiritual (and as thereby inspiring a conviction in their own godlike powers). But the mysterious bodily presence of woman haunts these systems, insisting upon a paradoxical conjunction of nature and spirit under the sign of woman. (3-4)
15. Juan Luis Vives, A very fruitful and pleasant book called the Instruction of a Christian Woman, translated by Richard Hyrde (London, 1529?). All quotations are from this edition and signature numbers are cited in the text. 1 have modernized spelling and some punctuation for convenience.
16. Holm, "Struggling with the Letter, " p. 283. Holm suggests that the disjunction between Vives’s apology for brevity and the actual length and copia of the work signals a larger disruption of the text: Vives’s text, the purpose of which is to articulate definite limits for feminine experience and identity, defies its own professed boundaries, represents itself in such a way as to prevent itself from identifying with itself; its reason and rhetoric are at odds. (272) For convenience and to avoid confusion, 1, like Holm, refer to the text as Vives’s despite Hyrde’s mediation as translator since 1 am interested in the version that English women read. The disjunctions that Holm perceptively notes here are, 1 believe, diffused in the contemporary culture and exist beyond the limits of this single text.
83 17. Carlos G. Norena speculates upon the possible sources for Vives’s position on love, including Stoic, Platonic, patristic (particularly Augustine), and neo-Platonic (Bruni and Ficino). See Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 178-9. See also the recent (and only) English translation of Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Norena (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990, chapters 2-4.
18. Norena, Vives and the Emotions, p. 45.
19. Metaphor, as one of the primary rhetorical (and some would argue, cognitive) tropes, is a frequent object of analysis. The following are studies that F have found particularly useful for approaching early modem texts: William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, chapter 3.
20. On culmral relationships between sin, sexuality, and pollution, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.
21. Norena, Juan Luis Vives and the Emotion, p. 43. See also Margaret L. King, Women o f the Renaissance, pp. 41-2, and Ian MacLean, The Renaissance Notion o f Woman, chapter 4. In his 1620 defense of women, Christopher Newstead argues that women are "the weaker vessels: and weaknesse alwayes is the most subject to gape after pleasures, and in their bodies." See An Apology for Women: or, Womens Defence (London, 1620), p. 11.
22. Many English Renaissance and Restoration comedies take as a theme the tyrannous custom of keeping women imprisoned at home until forced to marry a man of their fathers’ choice. See, for example, Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Aphra Behn’s The Rover. Compare Milton’s view of arranged marriages: "As for the custom that some parents and guardians have of forcing marriages, it will be better to say nothing of such a savage inhumanity." See Milton, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, edited by J. Max Patrick and Arthur M. Axelrad, in J. Max Patrick, ed.. The Prose of John Milton (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), pp. 143-201, p. 161.
23. Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay on cinema helped to develop a theory of "the gaze. " Patricia Parker has recently noted how applicable this theory is to early modem literamre. See Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (1978): 6-18; and Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 64.
24. This formula is Galenic in origin. See MacLean, Renaissance Notion, chapter 3, for a discussion of Renaissance physiology.
25. Julia Kristeva posits the category of the "abject" as the boundary between subject and object, which Lynda Nead discusses in her smdy of the female nude in art: Subjectivity is organized around an awareness of the distinction and the sense of the body as a unified whole, defining the form and limits of corporeal
84 identity. . . . It is the individual’s recognition of the impossibility of a permanently fixed and stable identity that provokes the experience of abjection. . . The abject, then, is the space between subject and object; the site of both desire and danger. See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32.
26. As Constance Jordan points out. Vives would not condone women actually wearing armor, as this would be an unnatural appropriation of masculinity. See her Renaissance Feminism, p. 118. The fear of women wearing men’s clothing and donning weapons is one aspect of the more general early modem fear of female disorder and rebellion. The legendary Amazons, for example, were considered so frightening and dangerous because their government was in direct opposition to traditional patriarchal authority, whereas female Christian warriors fight to uphold the patriarchy. See Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981).
27. John Bugge, Virginitas: an Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 49-52.
28. See Sherry B. Ortner, "The Virgin and the State," pp. 19-35.
29. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, pp. 12-13.
30. In a seventeenth-century funeral sermon, preacher Stephen Geree makes such distinctions between true and false beauty: Next to birth that which commends a woman is Beauty, wherewith men are much taken, and even bewitched as it were, sometimes to the losse of their wits and lives also, if they cannot obtaine. Now there is no beauty to the beauty of holinesse, which is the blessed Image of God, Ephes. 4.24, and makes us like our Lord and Saviour, who is altogether lovelie. Cant. 5.16. All other beauty is but blacknesse to this, which is the true beauty of every gracious woman fearing God, and which she most of all prizeth and seekes after. Stephen Geree, The Ornament of Women, Or, A Description of the true excellency of Women. Delivered in a sermon at the funerall ofM. Elizabeth Machell (London, 1639), pp. 15-16.
31. Norena, Vives and the Emotions, p. 10.
32. Vives as translated by Norena, Vives and the Emotions, p. 45.
33. The most prominent sixteenth-century conduct book for women (besides Castiglione’s courtesy book, which devotes only one of four sections to female courtiers), was Giovanni Bruto’s Italian educational manual, Institutione di unafanciulla nata nobilmente, which appeared in England as Thomas Salter’s The Mirrhor of Modesty (London,
85 1579) and was subsequently published under Bruto’s own name as The Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a Young Gentlewoman (London, 1598). For publication history, see the introduction to Salter, A Mirrhour, ed. Judith Butler Holm. Bruto follows Vives very closely.
34. I have not yet found an earlier example of a comprehensive book by an English author wholly dedicated to educating women in proper behavior. A prolific writer, royalist, and Oxford-educated gentleman, Brathwaite’s other works include poetry in Latin and English, translations of Italian prose Romance, and satire. However, his conduct books. The English Gentleman (1630) and The English Gentlewoman (1631) were possibly his most successful publications.
35. Besides the Continental educational manuals (Hyrde’s translation of Vives and the two translations of Bruto), there are marriage manuals, courtesy books, and general guides for virtuous living, offering advice for both men and women, that gained popularity in England, though these are not predominately designed as educational manuals for women. These include Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, translated by William Hoby in 1561; Heinrich Bullinger’s The Christen State of Matrimonye, translated by Miles Coverdale around 1541 (and claimed by Thomas Becon as his translation in his works, 1560-64); Torquato Tasso’s The Householder’s Philosophy . . . whereunto is annexed a diarie book for all good huswives, translated by Thomas Kyd in 1588; and the third book of Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation, translated by George Pettie in 1581. Many such books were also written by English authors. See Suzanne K. Hull, Chaste, Silent, & Obedient for a bibliography of guidebooks for women between 1475 and 1640.
36. Curiously, critics have linked Brathwaite to both Puritans and Royalists: Joan Larsen Klein sees The English Gentlewoman as a guide for the "cavalier lady" to acquire social graces, while Matthew Wilson Black suggests that the book displays a Puritan piety. The DNB describes Brathwaite as "Anglican" and "Royalist. " Due to his anti-Puritan writings, it is doubtful that Brathwaite himself could be labelled a Puritan, yet the book does indeed have a pious strain that goes beyond the simple social graces that Klein observes. In either case, Brathwaite was probably not particularly sympathetic to Roman Catholicism. See Klein, Daughters, Wives & Widows, pp. 233-5, and Black, Richard Brathwaite, p. 149.
37. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), chapter 4, passim.
38. Please refer to the discussion of Lucrece and the eroticization of chastity in chapter four.
39. In his discussion of marriage, Keith Wrightson agrees that "even among the social elite, women were not cloistered" (74). See English Society, chapter three.
40. That Brathwaite utilizes the phrase "mirrors of modesty" signals his probable familiarity with the Salter/Bruto book of that title.
86 41. Gen. 34. Although the brothers’ disobedience is seen to foreshadow their later violence against Joseph in Biblical commentary, the story of Dinah is frequently employed in the seventeenth-century as a warning to women. See Cavendish’s discussion in Chapter 5.
42. Robert Codrington’s The Second Part of Youths Behaviour, Or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women appeared in at least four editions between 1664 and 1672 and is cited as a model for the also-popular The Gentlewoman’s Companion. All quotations are from the 1664 edition and are cited in the text.
43. Francis Hawkins, Youths Behaviour, Or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men (London, 1661), pp. 5, 35.
44. For a recent study of modesty in the eighteenth century novel, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
45. For an illuminating, descriptive compilation of early English maimers, see Joan Wildeblood, The Polite World: A Guide to the Deportment of the English in Former Times (London: Davis-Poynter, 1973).
46. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (London, 1673), p. 147. Allestree’s manual was periodically reprinted well into the eighteenth century, with six editions before 1700.
87 CHAPTER 3
ALLEGORY AND THE FRAGMENTATION OF CHASTITY: SPENSER AND MILTON
It can not lightly be a chaste mind that is occupied with thinking on armor and tourney and man’s valiance. What places among these be for chastity unarmed and weak? . . . Moreover, whereto readst thou other men’s love and glozing words and by little and little drinkest the enticements of the poison unknowing and many times ware and wittingly. . . . I marvel that wise fathers will suffer their daughters or that husbands will suffer their wives or that manners and customs of people will dissemble and overlook that women shall use to read wantonness. ^
They do read how this Virgin leaves her Countrey, and her Parents, to run after that Stranger; another is in love in a moment, when she reads that she hath received Letters from such and such a Gallant, and how they have appointed private places where to meet together. These are but cunning lessons, to leam young Maids to sin more wittily.^
There are many mysteries contained in poetry, which of purpose were written darkly, lest by profane wits it should be abused.^
I begin this chapter with quotations that testify to the perceived power of literature and to the deep mistrust moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries felt towards women reading recreational literature, particularly romance.'^ Whether reading the male-dominated romance of Vives’s day or following the adventures of a
Restoration heroine, female readers’ ability to differentiate vice from virtue and positive from negative examples was not to be trusted, nor was a woman’s natural
88 inclination toward vice. Even male readers were at risk: a sixteenth-century commentator on Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso warns that the reader of such a romance is safe only because an allegorical truth is concealed within its siren’s song.^
Responsible, moral writers were expected to consider the impact their words would have upon their female reader in order to lead her toward virtue, away from vice, and to hide the contradictory ideologies that made it impossible to be truly chaste.
Allegory provides just the framework for such a didactic project and somewhat recuperates romance as acceptable reading for susceptible readers.
The writer who attempts to delight a reader with the colorful adventures of the romance plot also has an elite, priestly responsibility to hide solemn and serious matters behind a flourish of rhetorical tropes and figures, sounds and rhythms in order to keep certain mysteries secret and private. The figure that most successfully achieves the highest level of disguise is, according to George Puttenham, allegory, which he defines simply as "when we speake one thing and thinke another, and that our wordes and meanings meete not. " He claims that the use of allegory, "the chief ringleader and captaine of all other figures," is so widespread and fundamental to rhetorical practice that "no man can pleasantly utter and persuade without it, " and even courtiers, counselors, and princes make use of the figure in conducting state business.® Thus allegory is the figure that serves to hide the gravest matters from common eyes while it communicates its secrets to the initiated few.
Allegory is also the figure that most successfully hides the workings of ideologically-suspect concepts. While discussions of allegory have in recent times
89 been divided by the notion of whether allegory is a "genre" or a "mode," Gordon
Teskey suggests that a "rift. . . is also at the center of the object of study—is in fact the thing that object is trying to hide . . . reaching down into the foundations of an eidetic metaphysics the absurdities of which allegory tries to repair by imaginative means, logical ones being inadequate to the task. Teskey posits that the project of allegory is to disguise, because it can never successfully heal, the rift between the ideal and the material.* Teskey’s reading of representations of sexual violence in allegorical narratives as figures of rupture, wherein the victim ("material") is captured but unsubdued by the assailant ("form"), is designed to interrogate the larger, universal function of allegory on the level of the "ideal" or the "formal." However, if we turn his reading around, peer through the other end of the telescope, to fix on the "material" or "substantial," we can see that the project of allegory also works to hide the ideological rift that drives early modem sexual relations. The tension between romantic and scholastic theories of desire that Teskey sees giving birth to allegory also produce the tension between female beauty and female chastity that fuel the substance of representations of sexual violence. Sheila Cavanagh argues that we must turn our attention to the literal level of allegory: "By ignoring or dismissing disturbing incidents in the name of allegory, Petrarchism, or Neoplatonism, we not only silence a central element both of the epic’s stmcture and of the gender-conscious reader’s experience, we also risk becoming complicit with the ideology which produced it. The material does not only exist as a place for meaning to occur (for
90 the benefit of the ideal), but the ideal comments upon the structure of the material as well.
I will argue that we see in Book m of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (the book of Chastity) and in Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (or Camus) both authors’ attempts to work out the contradictions at the heart of chastity through allegorical romance. Whereas Spenser’s fragmentation of chastity into a variety of conflicted personifications underscores the impossibility of holding together the overdetermined and bloated concept, Milton’s struggle to impose unity upon chastity, to syncretize the concept’s multifariousness within his religious vision, ultimately exposes the rift that undermines the concept. In both cases, allegory provides an elaborate structure that exposes chastity’s inherent inconsistencies even in the act of veiling them.
Spenser
Critics widely agree that Spenser mms to a different method of narrative in
Book III from the single hero allegories of "Holinesse" and "Temperaunce" in Books
I and II.“ In allegorizing "Chastity, / That fairest vertue, farre above the rest"
(Ill.Proem.l), Spenser firactures the vertue into a number of representative figures, notably Britomart, Belphoebe, Florimell, and Amoret." In his letter to Raleigh,
Spenser claims that Belphoebe, Britomart, and Gloriana all share aspects of Elizabeth
I, but the addition of Florimell, Amoret, and a number of minor characters as representative of chastity adds a complexity that has not been adequately explained.
91 William A. Oram, following Donald Cheney, argues that Spenser’s "psychological allegory" centers upon Britomart, who "exists in a world peopled largely by fragmentary personalities, clarified and simplified versions of the drives present in herself and the other major characters of the poem."^^ Similarly, Margaret Olofson
Thickstun, focusing on Britomart as a model for Renaissance Englishwomen, suggests that the other personifications of chastity are there to protect the martial maid’s fragile reputation: "Complementing Britomart’s situation, the stories of Florimell and Amoret enact her experience of fear, confusion, and desire without exposing her to censure. Susanne Wofford’s post-structuralist analysis argues that Spenser’s allegory is undermined by a gendered dialectic between poetic figure and narrative character which produces a fragmentation: "It takes many daemonic or part-ial characters to create a complex analysis, while the individual daemon remains penned in his or her limited, ’obsessive’ identity. Finally, Bruce Thomas Boehrer’s essay on Queen Elizabeth’s inescapable yet absent presence in Book in, claims that the number of chastity personifications is actually a sign of "multiplication" in a "process of organic reproductions, " from which "the substance itself is lacking, " a project that serves to displace contemporary anxiety over the Sucession.^^
The essays from which I’ve quoted above are all convincing in their attempts to work out the problem of Book Ill’s defiant refusal to cohere into a seamless and synthesized whole, wherein a Britomart, Belphoebe, Florimell, or Amoret can, if not reign as sole representation of chastity, at least join with the others to build a unified picture of the virtue. In most criticism of Book III, the arguments tends to emphasize
92 one of three approaches to reading the allegory: the universal (chastity as non-gender- specific and sometimes as a figure for a more general moral virtue);the gender- specific (chastity as sexual purity, affecting attitudes toward contemporary women);*’ or the historical particular (chastity as unique to Queen Elizabeth’s private and public personae).*® While it is tempting to find a simple pluralistic solution to the dilemma, one that claims all three approaches are at work simultaneously in the various figures, and leave it at that, it would not sufficiently explain how the one concept can be stretched to fit what Boehrer has succinctly compiled as
the radical barrenness of the queen, the potential fruitfulness of the virginal Britomart, the ’divinity’ (5.34) of Belphoebe, and the ’perfect ripeness’ (6.52) of Amoret, who like her counterparts is presented as chaste, the ’lodestarre of all chaste affection’ (6.52), and as superlative, as beyond compare, ’Sith that more bounteous creature never far’d / On foot upon the face of living land’ (11.10).*’
Boehrer has, however, left out Florimell, who also figures as "The bountiest virgin, and most debonaire, / That ever living eye I weene did see; / Lives none this day, that may with her compare / In stedfast chastitie and vertue rare" (III.v.8).
In order to approach an explanation of Book III that takes into account the universal, the gender-specific, and the particular in defining chastity, we must first acknowledge that the alegorical firacturing of chastity that occurs in Book III of The
Faerie Queene cannot be adequately syncretized—that there is, in fact, no "grand unified theory" that sufficiently explains the wide disparity of definitions. Instead, we need to turn our attention to ideology in order to understand the causes for (and the consequences of) this fragmentation. As we have seen in the inclusiveness of moralists’ definitions of chastity (Chapter One) and in the incompatibility of precepts
93 and examples of the conduct literature (Chapter Two), The Faerie Queene is not alone in its conflicted depiction of chastity. Once we recognize that the concept of chastity received by Spenser is as fragmented, indeterminate, and inconsistant as that which we receive from Spenser, we can begin to approach Book III as an important texmal instance, with an intricate and highly-wrought allegorical treatment, of an ideologically-conflicted cultural construct.
Instead of a "psychological allegory, " in which the personifications represent the fracturing of the psyche, I suggest we view Book III as an "ideological allegory," in which the personifications represent disparate pieces of the chastity complex that stem from a different attitudes toward women and sexuality—medieval misogyny,
Petrarchanism/Neo-Platonism—and which cannot be logically contained within a single figure or dispersed through figures that work together to produce a unified representation. To illustrate this problem without attempting an over-reaching commentary on the whole poem (or even a whole book), I turn to a four brief moments in the narrative which have long troubled critics, two each that illustrate the female figure’s physical beauty and the effect that beauty has on male gazers:
Britomart’s unveiling and wounding at Malecasta’s castle (HI. 1) and unveiling at
Malbecco’s castle (III.9); Florimell’s introduction (in.l) and the assaults upon her in the fisherman’s boat (III.8). Although there are many meetings in The Faerie Queene that could fairly be characterized as sexual assault, these particular episodes have proven most difficult to explain in terms of a unified definition of chastity. Singly and in combination Spenser’s construction of the virtue disintegrates under the strain
94 of opposing tensions. Cavanagh recognizes these tensions when she suggests that "In the poem, female virtue is regularly subverted. It is often conflated with beauty, which is then shown to be illusory. Yet beauty is not at all illusory in The Faerie
Queene—"tnxt" beauty in the neo-Platonic sense—is an integral component of
Spenser’s construction of chastity, just as it is to Vives and with similar consequences. Not only do the figures of Britomart and Florimell find different challenges to their chastity and each respond in different ways, each episode in isolation also points to underlying ideological conflicts between chastity and beauty that undermine the character’s ability to adequately counter the challenges.*'
Britomart
The rhetoric of the conduct literature is not completely alien to that of imaginative literature: in The Faerie Queene, too, we find the "martial" and
"economic" metaphors for chastity, but while these appear as static, iconic depictions in Vives’s Instruction, Spenser extends them into allegorical characters, fully active within the narrative. It is largely this activation of already problematic icons, themselves fragments of the chastity complex, that leads to the exposure of the conflicts, as the female characters’ actions and reactions in response to meetings with the male characters do not remain consistent. It is largely through Britomart and
Florimell that Spenser offers the two opposing aspects of chastity that we find in
Vives: Britomart embodies the defensive "armor" and Florimell the seductive
"treasure" of chastity. Whereas Britomart exemplifies the strength of the virtue as
95 both a defense against assault and an active force seeking out and overcoming vice,
Florimell is chaste beauty "chac’d" by male desire. Nonetheless, there are many points of similarity between them that serve to undermine their defining "types": both figures radiate pure beauty, both are faced with the assaults of lust, and both respond to those assaults in ways that have not yet been adequately explained.
Britomart’s strength is the power of chaste constancy both in active pursuit of her destined mate and in stalwart defense against lust’s assaults: she reinforces
Redcrosse’s battle with the lecherous knights; rescues Amoret from Busyrane’s thralldom; and frightens off Ollyphant, who fears none "But Britomart the flowre of chastity; / For he the power of chast hands might not bear" (11.6.2-3). Britomart follows Vives’s precept to the letter:
Before she go forth at door, let her prepare her mind and stomack none other wise than if she went to fight. . . . Some thing shall chance on every side that shall move chastity and her good mind. Against these darts of the devil, let her take the buckler of stomach, defended with good examples and precepts, and a firm purpose of chastity and a mind ever bent toward Christ.^
In full armor, Britomart is impermeable, but she is less a symbol of defensive virginity, which wards off all comers, than protective chastity, which allows for constancy to one. She is "defended" with "a firm purpose of chastity," but her mind is "ever bent toward" Artegall, the reason she goes "forth at door" in the first place.^
Britomart’s status as militant fiancee deviates from the image of the virginal
"milites Christi" that Vives describes and has led some critics to two anachronist ideas in discussions of Britomart’s quest: the conflation of love and lust in some
96 instances and the distinction between lust and sexual passion in others. These ideas erase the gender distinctions that so crucially affect all Renaissance discussions of female sexuality. Many studies of Book El make the initial assumption that the timlar virtue of chastity is either synonymous with or secondary to love (largely sanctified, married love, but not exclusively). The result is that the emphasis for arguments about the book shift away from the Christian virtue of chastity and toward a classical model of erotic love.^'^ While Ovidian, Virgilian, (and more directly, Ariostan) influences in the poem are well-documented and carefully-argued (as are a variety of neo-Platonic, Petrarchan, and Christian elements), an tmcritical assumption that sexual love is overtly or covertly celebrated through Britomart’s quest-that it is, in fact, the point of the book—is difficult to justify. Without doubt, physical union would be an integral part of the marriage between Britomart and Artegall (a marriage and consummation which, by the way, are never achieved in The Faerie Queene), but to claim that the chaste knight’s "aggressive" quest is "amorous" and that "chaste sexual love . . . is presented as the natural (i.e. distinctively human) form of love" is to ignore Spenser’s attempt to maintain distinctions between love and lust, particularly when the subject is a woman.“ Spenser introduces Britomart’s quest with an neo-
Platonic encomium to love that makes such distinctions clear;
Most sacred fire, that bumest mightily In living Brests, ykindled first above, Emongst th’etemall spheres and lamping sky. And thence pourd into men, which Men call Love; Not that same, which doth base affections move In brutish minds, and filthy lust inflame. But that sweet fit, that doth true beautie love. And choseth vertue for his Dearest Dame. (III.3.1)
97 Britomart’s love for Artegall is the heaven-sent, dynasty-founding union of blood—a royal marriage of like souls with profound political conseqences (ostensibly, the eventual birth of Queen Elizabeth herself). Spenser is very careful to introduce
Britomart’s musing on marriage as pure desire for such a union:
So thought this Mayd (as maydens used to done) Whome fortune for her husband would allott. Not that she lusted after anyone; For she was pure from blame of sinfull blot. Yet wist her life at last must lincke in that same knot. (III.2.23)
Thus Spenser becomes caught in a double-bind in which the virgin knight must be kept free from the taint of sexual knowledge, let alone sexual longing in order to distance her from the sinful, wanton women that abound in The Faerie Queene as negative examples; yet, Britomart must potentially conform to the role of loving, fertile wife.^^ As Cavanagh remarks, Britomart’s pursuit of Artegall "responds brilliantly to the convoluted demands of Elizabethan chastity" enabling "her to conform to a multitude of complex behavioral requirements, such as modesty, innocence, and neutralized sexuality.^^
Yet Britomart is not completely invulnerable to sexual attack, and the meaning of these assaults is completely dependent upon one’s definitions of chastity, sex, and love. In her fight with the lecherous knights at Malecasta’s castle, Britomart is wounded by Gardante, who
Drew out a deadly bow and arrow keene. Which forth he sent with felonous despight. And fell intent against the virgin sheene: The mortall steele stayed not, till it was seene To gore her side, yet was the wound not deepe.
98 But lightly rased her soft silken skin. That drops of purple bloud thereout did weepe. Which did her lilly smock with staines of vermeil steepe. (HI. 1.65)
This is a terribly ambiguous moment. In the symbolism of conventional medieval
romance, a stained garment indicates spiritual impurity; apparently Spenser accepts the idea that in certain circumstances, even the truly chaste can be harmed by lechery, but whose? Gardante's? Malecasta’s? The devil’s? or Britomart’s own as the proponents of psychological allegory suggest? Roche sees this moment as
"Britomart’s initiation into the realities of love.^® Spenser, however, is careful to keep a clear distinction between the "arrow" of love shot by "the false Archer . . . I
So slyly, that she did not feel the wound" (III.2.26), and the "deadly bow" and
"mortal steel" "feloniously" shot by Gardante with the intent to "gore."
If the multivalance of allegory creates a yawning gap surrounding the
"ownership" of lust, even reading at the literal level, accepting Gardante as a male knight burning with lust for Britomart, we are left to ponder the difficult problem of who is responsible for sparking that lust. Encased in her armor, Britomart is both disguised in masculine form and effectively veiled from men’s eyes; she is protected from harm because she incites no desire. During her battle with Gardante, Britomart is armed but unclothed: "they saw the warlike Mayd / All in her snow-like smocke, with locks unbownd" (1.63.6-7). In dishabille, luxuriant hair flowing, Britomart is sufficiently feminine and visible to inspire lust. She is also imbued with the radiance of chaste beauty: "As when faire Cynthia, in darksome night, I ... I Breaks forth her
99 silver beams ... / ... / Such was the beautie and the shining ray, / With which faire
Britomart gave light unto the day" (1.43.1,4,8-9). As Roche explains,
the problem of describing moral beauty is one that every artist must face, and the solution that springs immediately to mind is the metaphorical use of physical beauty. . . . At every point in the poem where Britomart removes her armor the effect of her beauty and chastity on her companions is described in images that make her virtue apparent to the reader as a visible force.
But he also acknowledges that "the power of beauty to draw the eyes is the basis of both lewd and chaste love. The only way to test which kind of love the chaste knight inspires when she unveils is by the response of those who view her. Krier posits that in some instances in which men gaze upon the "numinous woman, " their response corresponds to a Virgilian awe upon beholding divine beauty, a response entirely sanctioned and nonsexual. However, when Britomart takes off her armor before Paridell and Satyrane at Malbecco’s castle, the knights "With wonder of her beauty fed their hungry vew. / Yet note their hungry vew be satisfide, / But seeing still the more desir’d to see" (111.9.23-24).^°
Beauty is, for Spenser, a highly conflicted site. He does not merely use physical beauty as an artist’s reasonable facsimile for signifying spiritual beauty; the physical body itself acts as the sign and receptacle of goodness and virtue even while it "robs" men of their reason.^^ Spenser’s Hymne in Honour of Beautie, which celebrates female beauty, attests to the poet’s neo-Platonic elevation of "true" beauty:
"That Beautie is not, as fond men misdeeme, / An outward shew of things, that onely seeme" (11. 90-91).^- Yet, the "outward show" is a reliable indicator of women’s tme beauty, which heaven plants as a seed in the corporeal body:
100 Therefore where ever that thou doest behold A comely corpse, with beautie faire endewed. Know this for certaine, that the same doth hold A beauteous soule, with faire conditions thewed. For to receive the seede of vertue strewed. For all things faire is, by nature good. {Hymne, 11. 134-39)
Even in his Epithalamian, the bride’s physical beauty is blazoned as extensively as her spiritual goodness. John King suggests that "while models for the iconic portrait of the bride exist among foreign and native blazons, Spenser chastely domesticates the scriptural portrayal of the Spouse [in Song of Solomon].Spenser certainly keeps a careful balance between the physical and the spiritual in his depiction, but the response of the gazers, even the angels, to the exhibited bride raises the possibility that a woman cannot ever be displayed without the danger of attracting lust:
. . . even th’Angels which continually. About the sacred Altare doe remaine. Forget the service and about her fly, Ofte peeping in her face that seemes more fayre. The more they on it stare. But her sad eyes still fastened on the ground. Are governed with goodly modesty. That suffers not one looke to glaunce awry. Which may let in a little thought unsownd. {Epith, 11. 229-237)^“’
The angels are distracted from attending to the wedding service by the beauty of the bride’s modest blush, which lets in their own "thought unsownd"; the bride’s gaze is fixed on the ground to avoid the same danger.^® The degree of danger depends upon the moral state of tire gazer, who is more often than not, ready to make the worst use of the best gift:
And oft it falles (ay me the more to rew) That goodly beautie, albe heavenly borne. Is foule abusd, and that celestiall hew,
101 Which doth the world with her delight adome. Made but the bait of siime, and sinners scome; Whilest every one doth seeke and sew to have it. But every one doth seeke, but to deprave it. {Hymne, 11. 148-54)
Yet beauty works on all to "Move such affection in the inward mynd, / That it can rob both sense and reason blynd" {Hymne, 11. 76-77). If beauty has such raging power to deprive all men of their reason, the faculty that restrains the will from acting on bestial impulses, how does one distinguish who is at fault when those impulses are not restrained? Whereas Krier and Roche see Britomart’s unveiling as moments of truth revealed, there is just enough doubt in Spenser’s text to wonder whether, when Britomart removes her armor, she isn’t also removing her "veil of shamefastness," and allowing herself, by opening herself to unchaste visibility, to be blamed for instigating attack.^^
Florimell
Although Britomart is clearly not exempt from inspiring desire, Florimell exemplifies the seductive aspects of chaste beauty and the resulting danger. She is, in
Stevie Davies’s words, "woman as victim, prey, fleeing from the male as from a rapist but magnetically drawing the iron-hearted rapist along with her by a delicate beauty whose power is experienced by the male as temptation. While a critical conflation of love and sexual desire creates difficulties in reading Britomart, a similar assumption of the categorical distinction between lust and sexual desire has lead to the incredibly diverse interpretations of the figure of Florimell. The problem occurs the moment that Florimell appears in the text. Her chastity offers no protection from her
102 assailants; she is saved only to be assaulted by her rescuer, tossed from one to
another in turn, always in danger.^* Even the virtuous Arthur and Guy on are not
immune to her draw, and their envy and desire are thinly masked by their attempted
"rescue":
But all spurd after fast, as they mote fly. To reskew her from shamefull villany. The Prince and Guyon equally bylive Her selfe pursewed, in hope to win thereby Most goodly meede, the fairest Dame alive, (in.1.18.)
If these exemplary, courteous, and temperate kights are inflamed with desire at the
sight of her, how are we then to distinguish their response from that of the forester, the witch’s son, the fisherman, and Proteus? Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell has so often been dismissed as an unproblematic attempt to save her from the unbridled lust of the forester, yet, according to Cavanagh, Arthur’s chase, occurring in "the only book in which he does not rescue the timlar knight," suggests that "Arthur’s own relationship with the virtue of chastity is too dubious for him credibly to educate others. We cannot explain this moment as a simple rescue; the narrator himself gives us too clear an indication of the reasons behind the male knights’ pursuit of
Florimell when he tells why Britomart doesn’t pursue her:
Britomart’s "constant mind, / Would not so lightly follow beauties chace, / Ne reckt of Ladies Love" (HI. 1.19). According to Thomas Roche, the moment is simply a narrative device choreographed to draw a distinction between the male knights and the female Britomart and set up for the next episode at Malecasta’s castle. Roche calls direct attention to the problem when he insists that "we cannot suppose that Spenser
103 intends the reader to think ill of Arthur and Guyon. Indeed, we can agree with
Roche on this point: it is highly unlikely that Spenser did mean us to blame Arthur and Guyon, or even to focus upon this moment as the puzzle that we have found it to be.
Regardless of Spenser’s intentions, Arthur’s chase of the beautiful Florimell exists as another of those gaps in the text that signal the ideological conflict between beauty and chastity so prevalent in Renaissance literature. The critical problems this gap introduces involve not only interpretations of Arthur’s actions but call into question Florimell’s status as chaste, as she is usually accused of being afraid of sex, being too weak to defend herself, or actively inviting assault. Most, though not all, critics take Spenser’s narrator on his word that Florimell is "The bountiest virgin, and most debonaire, / That ever living eye I weene did see; / Lives none this day, that may with her compare / In stedfast chastitie and vertue rare" (III.v.8), but she is often condemned as overly fearful. Lesley W. Brill provides a controversial interpretation when he muses, "it seems to me more just to regard Florimell as a parody of chastity rather than a second embodiment of it, " as "Florimell represents what is essentially an attempt to escape the very fact that people are sexed. " He explains.
The comedy of the hapless Florimell demonstrates just how important a part of chastity its ’wise and warlike’ components are. . . . In her person Spenser discredits the idea that chastity is a negative virtue; that it involves no more than a steadfast refusal to be seduced. In Spenser’s terms Florimell is unchaste.
104 Dennis McDaniel, who sees Florimell as a version of the enticing, adorned woman
that Vives cautions against, offers another explanation of the discrepancy between
Florimell’s acclaimed chastity and the knights’ response to her:
Florimell, like Britomart, harbors a chaste mind and signdlemindedly pursues her one true love, Marinell, yet her unchaste appearance entices even otherwise virtuous knights. . . . The misfortunes caused by Florimell’s gaudy appearance lures Timias into danger, and we may infer that Spenser could have intended to use Florimell as an example of a more subtle mode of unchastity.'*^
That such radical interpretations of Florimell are still being forwarded is a clear
indication that the distinctions between chastity and unchastity, between love and sex,
and between true and false beauty are either terribly conflated in Spenser’s text or in
the minds of critics. Brill’s position can be problematized by asking, if Florimell is
meant to represent a parody of chastity, what then is the purpose for the False
Florimell-what are the allegorical implications of a parody of a parody of chastity?
McDaniel, however, raises the ever-present problem of beauty’s lure that we
found with Britomart.'*^ Spenser’s description of Florimell’s beauty as her defining characteristic tropes her firmly in the economic metaphor. As a personification of this aspect of chastity, beauty is crucial; it does not negate the existence of the virtue-
-it is entirely bound up with it. The first image of her freezes her iconically in mid
chase:
All suddenly out of the thickest brush. Upon a milk-white Palfrey all alone, A goodly Ladie did foreby them rush. Whose face did seeme as cleare as Christall stone. And eke through fear as white as whales bone: Her garments all were wrought with beaten gold.
105 Still as she fled, her eye she backward threw As fearing evill, that persewed her fast. (IE. 1.15, 16)
Florimell is the golden, crystalline treasure of chastity, betrothed to one man, but pursued by all male desire. Although Spenser sets up an opposition between the two primary objects of male desire, riches and female beauty, as explored through
Marinell’s rejection of women and hording of wealth, Florimell actually combines the two into the perfect object for Marinell’s desire as his destined mate. Her constancy to this reluctant knight must be read as a version of the chaste love with which
Britomart pursues Artegall, as the unchaste women in The Faerie Queene are never rewarded for their actions with even the promise of the divine rite of marriage.
Moreover, Spenser never slips so far into irony that he urges readers (particularly female readers who are so often misconstrue what they read!) to imitate the exemplars of vice. How can we possibly read Spenser’s final encomium to Florimell (in Book
HI) during her imprisonment with Proteus as parodie or ironic:
Etemall thralldome was to her more liefe. Then losse of chastitie, or chaunge of love: Die had she rather in tormenting griefe. Then any should of falsenesse her reprove. Or loosenesse, that she lightly did remove. Most vertuous virgin, glory be thy meed. And crowne of heavenly praise with Saints above. Where most sweet hymnes of this thy famous deed Are still emongst them song, that far my rymes exceed.
Fit song of Angels caroled bee; But yet what so my feeble Muse can frame. Shall be t’advaunce thy goodly chastitee. And to enroll thy memorable name. In th’heart of every honourable Dame, That they thy vertuous deeds may imitate. And be partakers of thy endlesse fame. (III.8.42-43)
106 Florimell’s determined resistance is a passive version of Britomart’s active militancy and long figures in legends of virgin martyrs whose whole claim to sainthood lay in their steadfast refusal to give in to the devil’s lures. In our appreciation of his rich classically-flavoured romance, it is too easy to forget Spenser’s investment in the
Christian interpretation of his chosen virtues. What are we to make of the narrator’s comment on Florimell’s "rescue" by Proteus, who imprisons and seduces her:
See how the heavens of voluntary grace. And soveraine favour towards chastity. Doe succour send to her distressed cace: So much high God doth innocence embrace. (III.8.29)
Benson convincingly argues that with Proteus, Florimell finally learns to seek help from God, which is granted as grace, instead of blindly running from her attackers:
"the god’s challenge to her is potentially more morally damning than the old man’s because the fisherman attacked only her body, but Proteus tries to wrench her from her chastity of mind, the only chastity over which a woman has any real control unless she is a Britomart.
We can certainly accept that Florimell’s response to her attackers is what ultimately decides her moral fate, but such an explanation relies upon the notion that
Florimell is wholly responsible for bringing this fate upon herself: her attackers are either drawn into assaulting her by the regrettable but unescapable lure of her physical beauty or they are merely agents of some great plan to test the virgin’s virtue.
Spenser’s Hymne in Honour of Beautie tries to work out the problem that allows such an evil situation to follow from the mere presence of such a good gift to the world as beauty, but, while he appears to exonerate women from bringing assault upon
107 themselves, the poet’s ambiguous posessives and his admonition to women to keep themselves pure undermine this exoneration. It is necessary here to quote three complete stanzas in order to demontrate the progression of his argument:
[23] Yet nathemore is that faire beauties blame. But theirs that do abuse it unto ill: Nothing so good, but that through guilty shame May be corrupt, and wrested unto will. Nathelesse the soule is faire and beauteous still. How ever fleshes fault it filthy make: For things immortall no corruption take.
[24] But ye faire Dames, the worlds deare ornaments. And lively images of heavens light. Let not your beames with such disparagments Be dimd, and your bright glorie darkned quight. But mindfull still of your first countries sight. Doe still preserve your first informed grace. Whose shadow yet shynes in your beauteous face.
[25] Loath that foule blot, that hellish firebrand, Disloiall lust, faire beauties foulest blame. That base affections, which your eares would bland. Commend to you by loves abused name; But is indeed the bondslave of defame. Which will the garland of your glorie marre, And quench the light of your bright shyning starre. {Hymne, 11. 155-75)
An ambiguity lies in whether Spenser is claiming that it is not women’s fault that men abuse their beauty or whether it is not Beauty’s fault that anyone (women included) abuse her gift. The insistance that women "let not" (1. 163) their beauty run afoul through fleshly lust and the agreement of a singular possessive, "beauty’s" rather than the metonoyic plural possessive "beauties’" (line 155), with "it" (line 156) hint that
108 Spenser does not generously excuse women from assault, but rather mildly blames them for tending to abuse their "bright shyning starre" (1. 175). So Spenser can praise Florimell, and all women, for keeping themselves pure and constant, but he cannot exonerate them from responsibility for assault on that purity and constancy in the first place. In a word, Florimell is a good girl for getting herself out of her messes with heavenly assistance.
Yet, why doesn’t Britomart run to help Florimell instead of merely mrning away from "beauties chace"? As Quilligan asks, "Why doesn’t Chastity also come to the aid of Beauty—surely a much more practical solution to the problem? The only answer to this question lies in the realization that Chastity cannot come to the aid of Beauty because Beauty—True Beauty—is itself chaste and is itself the seductive force. The proliferation of such puns as "chaste" and "chac’d" makes it impossible to be sure that Spenser was altogether unaware of the conflicts that he raised, yet the poet does not explore the deep and troubling implications for women who are simultaneously expected to attract and repel, and neither have most smdies of his work.'*^ Cavanagh calls attention to the tendency for critics to blame female characters:
It seems that the actions of these female characters invariably receive negative interpretations. First the maidens are blamed for attracting male sexual brutality, then their terror at the prospect of rape becomes transmuted into a ’horror of sex,’ instead of being read as a legitimate or honorable fear in response to imminent sexual violation.
But it is also fair to say that this tendency is not a sudden, modem mutation of reasoning: if Spenser’s threatened female figures have been so consistently blamed for
109 their attraction and fear of their male attackers, much of the impetus for this interpretation exists both in Spenser’s text and lingers in the patriarchal ideology received by modem critics. The defining metaphors, martial Britomart and economic
Florimell, are split into permanent fractures of the tenuous chastity complex because they simply cannot hold together in a single representation, yet the troubling elements that both share, attractive beauty and defensive chastity, cannot be completely separated either: without steadfast chastity, a woman cannot be beautiful, and without sublime beauty, a woman cannot be truly chaste.
Castlehaven and Milton
The distinction that Teskey sees between Spenser’s and Milton’s notions of
"error" in The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost applies to their approaches to chastity in The Faerie Queene and A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle: "While the whole structure of Milton’s epic turns on one catastrophic act of negation, Spenser’s large network of stories is designed to explore nuance and complexity of our ordinary moral experience. Florimell is certainly the figure that most resembles the Lady in Milton’s A Mask, but Milton adamantly attempts to fuse into one representation the fundamental Manichean oppositions that shatter chastity into the multiple figures that
Spenser creates.'*’ Whereas Milton’s act of grace allows the Lady to be set completely free of Comus’s clutches by a momentous act of divine intervention,
Spenser’s narrative refuses to let Florimell rest after each apparent "rescue," pushing her further and further until her eventual marriage. We certainly should not read the
110 Lady as a simple reworking of Florimell (or any of Spenser’s chastity figures), but we can keep in mind Milton’s reverence for his poetical forebear, whom he calls "a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas."^®
Yet, Spenser is not the "influence" that has been most often connected to
Milton’s masque. Since Barbara Breasted’s 1971 essay, which claims a direct connection between the writing and revision of Milton’s Ludlow Mask and the
Castlehaven scandal, it has become difficult to disentangle the masque from the events of the scandal that took place three years earlier: the Earl of Castlehaven, the Earl of
Bridgewater’s brother-in-law, was indicted and executed for committing sodomy with his servants, whom he forced to sexually assault his wife and step-daughter in his presence.^* In recent years, critics have either argued that this scandal is irrelevant to the entertainment or that other legal or political events were more influential in A
Mask's creation.T hese projects, however, have perversely succeeded in drawing our attention back to the scandal, if only as an absent presence. Indeed, instead of the masque purifying the Bridgewater family from the taint of the scandal (as Breasted suggests), we are now left with just the opposite: the Bridgewater family has faded from memory, but the masque carries the taint of sexual violence that threatens to undermine our reading of the triumph of virtue over vice and chastity over sexual assault. The scandal and the taint it leaves on the masque are constant reminders to the reader that something does not quite add up in Milton’s single personification of the very complex concept of chastity at the fundamental level of ideology.
I l l If, however, we lay aside the assumption that the Castlehaven scandal (or other local incident) and the masque form a chain of events or manifests a cause and effect relationship, we can attempt to gain a new perspective on both the scandal and the masque. For the present-day reader, the Castlehaven scandal consists in the textual evidence of the periodically republished newsbook accounts of the trial proceedings and execution of the Earl of Castlehaven. I read the scandal, Milton’s
Mask, and other contemporary texts all as documents that explore the same issues as
The Faerie Queene—chastity, beauty, and the culpability associated with the female victims of sexual assault—and which allow us the oppormnity to compare contemporary views on what went wrong with the individual and his or her society, and who was ultimately responsible and culpable, in situations of rape. Whether a woman’s lack of consent to engage in an illicit sexual act is necessary for Milton’s definition of chastity is at issue in the masque, and the questions this issue arouses lead to the exposure of underlying fractures in the apparently seamless allegory.
Castlehaven
The three newsbooks that contain versions of the Castlehaven testimonies offer ambiguous and conflicting representations of responsibility and victimization through their didactic narratives (see Figure 3.1). As is typical with the genre of popular newsbooks, the anonymous authors of the Castlehaven testimonies sensationalized events by distorting, omitting, and adding "facts" in order to create an example for the reader of the consequences of moral or immoral behavior. Newsbooks were often
112 written to illustrate God’s relationship to man through the belief that an individual life exemplified a moral truth/^ The three Castlehaven newsbooks display an increasing tendency toward sensational narrative, probably occasioned by the commercial interests that shaped newsmatter into a desired commodityAs the actual events of the scandal grew more distant with time, the inherent moral lesson took greater precedence over the recording of the sordid factual details. All versions of the trial agree on the basic "events" of the case: Castlehaven was tried, convicted, and executed for directing his servants’ sexual assault on his wife and step-daughter and for having committed sodomy with those same servants. Many of the newsbooks’ speeches are nearly identical, but there are some important modifications made in those of 1679 and 1699, including the appending of Castlehaven’s last speech and a description of his behavior at the place of execution. In the 1699 version there is also a change from third-person testimony-reporting to first-person, a change that may have served to increase the dramatic immediacy of the trial for a new generation of readers.
The Castlehaven testimonies participate in a popular sub-genre of newsbook literature akin to present-day "True Crime Stories. " In the early modem version, however, the account of the convicted criminal’s behavior at the gallows or chopping block and confessional dying speech, a rimal component of the commonplace and well-attended spectacle of public execution, completes the narrative and allows the reader to reach the properly religious moral conclusion concerning the life and death of the sinner.Writing on the ideological intent of "gallows literature," J.A.
113 Sharpe suggests that this "didactic and normative genre . . . illustrates the way in which the civil and religious authorities designed the execution spectacle to articulate a particular set of values, inculcate a certain behavioural model and bolster a social order perceived as threatened. The farewell speech constitutes a warning for sinful readers to mend their ways before they too find themselves on the scaffold.
Castlehaven’s dying speech, as reported in the 1679 and 1699 newsbooks, is an example of what Sharpe has found to be an anomaly—the denial of criminal wrongdoing upon the scaffold, whereby the Earl threatens to escape his social duty by refusing to consent to his role as moral example. The two versions of his speech are quite similar, and the following is excerpted from the 1679 version: "[B]ut for the two Heinous Crimes for which I am branded, condemned, and now to Suffer, I deny them upon my Death, and freely forgive those that have accused me; even as heartily as I desire Forgiveness at the Hands of God" (1679, p. 10). The earl admits to a sinful life, but his denial of guilt occasions the need for the preface to the 1699 version, which attempts to rectify the failure of the usual moral lesson drawn by the penitent siimer. The author of the preface claims his express purpose is to "oblige the
Publick . . . that by Reading the Sin . . . other Men might be terrify’d, and scar’d from those Sins." He turns Castlehaven’s denial into a topical example to Libertines of the unrepentant sinner who will not be saved. Moreover, the 1699 version adds speeches from the Lord Steward that relate directly to the sentiments in the preface regarding Castlehaven’s refusal to confess and his consequent damnation: "Persist not therefore in an Obstinate denial of the Tmth, for if you do, God will put it into’th
114 Hearts of these Noble Lords to find it out, and to do what is Just in relation to the
Punishment of the Crime" (1699, p. 5); and, "My Lord, I am sorry to see you so unconcerned, and that you discover no signs of Sorrow, or Repentance, for the
Crimes you have committed. . . . Indeavor to wash away your Crimes in Tears of true Repentance" (1699, pp. 26-27). Castlehaven, in danger of subverting the didactic ideology, must be reconstructed by the literature to bear out the customary penal process—crime, punishment, repentance, example.
Indeed, Castlehaven's rank, as well as the power which accompanies that rank, makes his perversion of the social order highly threatening. The earl’s desire that his high-born step-daughter have a son fathered by a servant flagrantly defies social codes. The 1642 and 1699 newsbooks present nearly identical versions of a speech by the Lord High Steward, which is curiously absent in the 1679 newsbook: "You caus’d your Daughter to be abused, and having Honour and Fortune to leave behind you, you would have the spurious issue of a Varlet to Inherit both" (1699, p. 26)
Castlehaven sins against his aristocratic fraternity by daring to mix the noble blood of his step-daughter with that of thoroughly mean extraction, an inversion of the tradition which seeks to ensure that only the "purest" noble blood passes along with primogeniture. Castlehaven’s utter disregard for the duties of a nobleman toward his society makes him a monster to his contemporaries. He is held responsible for the crimes, as his execution undeniably proves, and his moral "portraiture" is painted darkly in the accounts of the trial through the course of the century.
115 Yet the rapes were performed by the earl’s servants, a crucial detail which highlights a blurring of power and responsibility for acts in defiance of the social order. As a nobleman whose subjects are to obey him, Castlehaven’s sheer power and his abuse of that power undergird the trial narratives. Implicit in this tragedy of the fallen tyrant is the pervasive contemporary notion that when the great fall, they affect the lives of all those below them. Early readers of the literature certainly knew the extent of Castlehaven’s power over those in his household, family and servants alike, and would recognize that his perversion constituted a greater threat to society than that of common criminals. The servants who took part in the "ravishment" of the Countess and her daughter were held legally responsible and likewise executed, but their role in the literature is that of accomplices subject to Castlehaven’s will, as is borne out by the testimonial speech of Broadway;
I lay at his Lordships beds Feet, and in the Night he call’d for some Tobacco, which, when I brought to him, he caught hold of me, and bid me come to Bed, which I at first deny’d, but at last consented, and went into the Bed on the Lords side, but he turned me upon my Lady, and bid me lie with her; my Lord Audley held both her hands, and one of her Legs, and at last I lay with her, notwithstanding her resistance. The Lord Audley also us’d my Body as a Woman, but never Pierc’d it, only spent his Seed betwixt my Thighs. I have seen Skipwith lie with the young Lady in Bed, and when he got upon her, the Lord Audley stood by, and incourag’d him to get her with Child. He also made Skipwith lie with his own Lady, telling him he could not live long, and it might be the making of him, and the like he said to me! (1699, p. 17)
In the above passage, the victims, Anne (Lady Audley, Countess of
Castlehaven) and her daughter by a previous marriage. Lady Elizabeth, are clearly presented in legal terms as victims of evil-doing, but the newsbooks do not allow
116 them to be morally guiltless victims. In the 1642 version of the Castlehaven trial, the
Lord High Steward defines rape as, "an Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, and Abuse of a
Woman by Force against her Will” (1642, p. 10). Even, "if the party on whom the
Crimes was Committed, be notoriously Unchast, and a known Whore, yet there may be a Ravishment" (1642, p. 11). It is no longer the case that the rape of a "whore"
can be ignored by the law, but the text qualifies this point by claiming, "it is a good plea to say she was his concubine" (1642, p. 5).^*
Here we see a division between law and morality: unchastity may not disallow
legal prosecution for rape, but it undermines the moral character of the victim and represents her as somehow sharing in the guilt. Castlehaven's testimony attempts to discredit his wife as a wimess, though his attempts do not succeed legally: "He urged that his Wife was incontinent, yea before he married her, and therefore a Whore can be no Wimess: the Judges Opinions being asked in this Case, they answered, that a common Whore may be ravished, and so repelled his Answer" (1679, p. 7).
Although she is granted the legal stams of wimess and victim, the label "whore" undermines her moral credibility, and a certain amount of responsibility for her own victimization remains. Castlehaven’s smear tactics have a disastrous effect on his wife’s reputation, and a woman’s reputation was perceived as an index to her virme.
In his conduct book for gentlewomen, Richard Brathwait writes at length about the importance of reputation ("Estimation"):
Estimation, a Gentlewoman’s highest prize . . . Estimation is a good opinion drawne from some probable grounds. An unvaluable gemme, which every Merchant, who tenders his honor, preferres before life. The losse of mis makes him an irreparable Bankrupt. All persons
117 ought to rate it high, because it is the value of themselves, though none more dearly than those, in whom modesty and a more impressive feare of disgrace usually lodge/®
Brathwait insists, "You are to be really, what you appear outwardly . . . Be indeed what you desire to be thought. . . dedicate those inward Temples of yours to chastity."®’ The label "Whore" that Castlehaven affixes to his wife and the wimesses’ testimonies that both women were repeatedly involved in sexual acts sully the women’s reputations with the taint of unchastity, despite the fact that the acts were enforced. As Greaser points out, "It was not unreasonable of contemporary observers and gossips to assume that the woman and girl became corrupted and inured to their violation. The victims’ desecrated bodies begin to reflect unclean souls, and the issue of whether they had indeed consented to the acts becomes unclear — indeed, immaterial.
Consent or no consent, the women’s ruined reputations finally lead to their being held legally, as well as morally, accountable for their own victimization.
Charles I apparently considered them guilty of sexual offenses and held them as criminals, only pardoning them many months after the earl’s trial; even Lady
Elizabeth’s grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Derby, writes in her letters, "I pray neither my daughter nor she will ever offend God or his Majestic againe by their wicked Courses, But redeeme what is past, by their reformation and newnesse of life."“ Whether or not the Dowager Countess concedes to the women’s guilt as a political strategy, the sentiment she expressed was in keeping with the widespread belief in the pollution of a rape victim.
118 Milton
Certainly Milton’s attention to such issues as rape, chastity, and individual responsibility is less concerned with the worldly implications of human interaction than with the spiritual consequences of that interaction. Rape, for Milton, remains liminal, off-side: it is an example of sin or a temptation to sin, usually committed or threatened allegorically. Milton, however, is by no means oblivious to propriety in social conduct, but the social remains subordinate to the spirimal; human interaction provides a sort of evidence of spiritual status. I must therefore approach his works from a slightly different angle in order to probe them and tease out the judgment they make on the rape victim. My investigation of Milton’s texts, particularly his Mask, will address this shift in perspective from the predominately social and legal arenas of the Castlehaven newsbooks to the moral and spiritual worlds of Milton’s poetry and theological prose.
The questions most efficacious to such an investigation are, how does chastity protect a woman from sexual assault, and what happens to a woman’s spirimal stams when she is victimized by rape? Milton offers clues to the answers to these questions in his Mask, which presents a sexual stmggle as a particular example of the general claim that faith protects the goodly believer from "each thing of sin and guilt.
Catherine Belsey says in her smdy of Milton, "Comus is about rape. I would shift the emphasis slightly to suggest that the masque is mainly concerned with celebrating the power of chastity to repel sexual violence, but this theme is not without its inconsistencies. Milton may not steadfastly support Vives’s categorical
119 insistance upon the unchastity of a rape victim; "It is an evil keeper that cannot keep one thing well committed to her keeping . . . which no man will take from her against her will, nor touch it, except she be willing herself."^ However, the conflicting ideologies that allow women to be blamed for the effect they have upon men are not completely absent in Milton’s work. Milton supports the Augustinian notion that sexuality of any kind beyond the bounds of marriage necessarily falls within the category of concupiscence for both parties, consenting or otherwise, as sin infects all it touches. Thus the judgment in the masque concurs with that of the
Castlehaven testimonies: a victim is corrupted by sin and tainted by shame regardless of whether or not a woman consents to engage in illict sexual intercourse.
As with The Faerie Queene, A Mask has also defied critical consensus regarding interpretation of its allegorical figures: The Lady has been read as
"Chastity," "Virginity," and as a more universal "Faith"; however, recent studies have begun to consider the relevance of gender to Milton’s definition.^ When chastity is accepted as the major theme of the masque, its precise definition and divergence from "virginity" have also produced much debate.®’ I suggest that the consideration of gender is crucial to understanding the masque: Milton’s definition of chastity is tied to a multi-dimensional reading of the Lady, who is at once the allegory of Chastity, a young girl lost in the woods, and the daughter of the Earl of
Bridgewater. Privileging the allegorical level to the exclusion of the others can lead to the danger of over-universalizing Milton’s "Doctrine of Virginity." A reading that takes into account the public performance, that recognizes Milton’s cognizance of the
120 interdependence of drama and occasion in the genre, will find his elevation of virginity perfectly consonant with its fifteen-year-old subject. As Breasted points out,
"Lady Alice Egerton’s role in Comus is not meant to make us forget who she is, but, like other masque roles aristocrats played, was intended to be a glorified, idealized version of her public identity. While the Lady is certainly virginal, she is pre- nuptially (not permanently) so, like Lady Alice who portrayed her, and like her victimized cousin. Lady Elizabeth, should have been allowed to remain.® The loss of a young woman’s virginity would destroy her prospects (her only prospects) as a marriageable noblewoman. Comus may act as tempter to a multiplicity of sins of the flesh, but his sexual threat is gravest and serves as the explicit focus of the Lady’s trial. Central to this threat is Comus’ discussion of beauty while the Lady is imprisoned in the enchanted chair:
List Lady, be not coy, and be not cozen’d With that same vaunted name Virginity; Beauty is nature’s coin, must not be hoarded. But must be current, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partak’n bliss. (11. 737-41)
The weight of chastity, as opposed to a more general virtue, is evident in the Lady’s answer: "Thou hast nor Ear nor Soul to apprehend / The sublime notion and high mystery / That must be utter’d to unfold the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity"
(11. 784-7). Comus’s glass of magic liquor is merely the gateway to the Lady’s potential ruin, not an alternative ruin.™ The Lady’s spiritual purity, her chaste love of God before all others, is the well-spring from which she receives the strength to
121 support her dedication to virginity, the only acceptable state for a young woman not yet betrothed.’^
The brothers’ debate between bodily and spiritual purity is discussed in the language of the martial and economic chastity metaphors and forms the basis for a dialectic that proves ultimately inadequate to explain fully the relationship between chastity, sin, and victimization. Whereas Spenser allocates each metaphor to a different personification, Britomart and Florimell, the brothers’ debate shows an attempt to contain both metaphors in the single personification of the Lady. Both bodily purity and spiritual purity are necessary and necessarily linked in Milton’s conception of chastity, which he defines in Christian Doctrine as, "forbearance from the unlawful lusts of the flesh; it is also called purity. . . . Opposed to chastity is all impurity: voluptuousness, sodomy, bestiality and so on." For Milton, the virtue is one of the four elements of temperance, the one that applies to sexuality:
"Temperance includes sobriety and chastity, modesty and decency" (YP VI, p. 726).
In other words, one is chaste when his or her spirit is strong enough to rein in the body’s sexual appetites. The younger brother’s concern is for his sister’s continued virginity, here a state of the body, while the older brother is concerned for the purity of her soul, her spiritual chastity. The younger brother expresses doubt about the safety of the alluringly beautiful Lady in the woods without her male protectors:
. . . Beauty, like the fair Hesperian Tree Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard Of dragon watch with unenchanted eye. To save her blossoms and defend her fruit From the rash hand of bold Incontinence. (11. 393-7)
122 The metaphor of a golden horde needing a dragon’s ferocity for defense against theft is economic, and echoes Comus’s earlier speech about beauty as nature’s coin: a woman’s body is a valued commodity to be traded freely among men, as is the empty shell of the False Florimell in The Faerie Queene.
Despite Comus’s clearly specious argument, the lure of beauty is as much a problem for Milton as it is for Spenser. Even within the prelapsarian world of
Paradise Lost, Milton suggests chastity’s precarious position between allure and asexuality in his description of Eve; her beauty is praised as simultaneously chaste and bewitching. Inspiring Adam’s conjugal desire. Eve, in
. . . meek surrender, half-imbracing lean’d On our first Father, half her swelling Breast Naked met his under the flowing Gold Of her loose tresses hid: hee in delight Both of her Beauty and submissive Charms Smil’d with superior Love . . . ^
The tension between the seductive and the innocent resonates in this description of
Eve’s half-hidden coyness and through oppositional pairings like "submissive charms." Eve’s "loose tresses" function as a version of Vives’s veil of shamefasmess, given to woman to cover her nakedness. James Grantham Turner connects Milton’s treatment of Eve’s hair to the passage in Corinthian that calls a woman’s hair her glory and her covering (I.Cor. 11:15) and to Spenser’s nymphs who use this erotic effect to entice Guyon: "Milton is apparently fascinated by the paradox of the veil that hides and reveals at once, simultaneously enhancing innocence and desirability. But, if the Lady’s beauty is enticing to her gazers, in this case Comus who has no right to enjoy the fruits of the Lady’s beauty, the older brother asserts his
123 asserts his faith in the innate protection of her spiritual purity. He rhapsodizes, "’Tis chastity, my brother, chastity; / She that has that, is clad in complete steel" (11. 420-
21):
So dear to Heav’n is Saintly chastity. That when a soul is found sincerely so, A thousand liveried Angels lackey her. Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt. (11. 453-6)
The elder brother’s martial metaphor fuses the Pauline armor of Faith with that of
Chastity, emphasizing the divine root of the virtue. Although the elder Brother’s argument bears more weight, Milton maintains the importance of and connection (yet distinction) between both aspects of chastity by providing both arguments on the side of goodness. The elder brother does not really debate with the younger at all; he merely metamorphoses— Christianizes—the notion of protection by a dragon to that of security afforded by liveried angels. He does not deny the validity of bodily integrity when he offers his knowledge of the soul’s power. Thus according to the exchange, a woman’s body is endangered treasure, but her true armor of chastity offers protection from assault even as it protects her from her own desires.
Unlike Lady Alice, who was held down by Castlehaven (her supposed protector) while his servant raped her, the Lady of the masque’s steadfast refusal to yield to coercion, though physically bound to Comus’s chair, merits divine aid. Her chastity has passed the trial, her soul has been found "sincerly" chaste, which signals that, as a member of the elect, she is deserving of God’s grace, much as Pamela
Benson notes of Florimell: "Spenser’s application of the term ’saint’ to Florimell . . . is important because it confirms the action of grace and indicates that she is a member
124 of the elect. But our entire understanding of the masque hinges upon how we interpret Comus’s power over the Lady’s body—does this moment constimte a committed rape of the body, despite the protective purity of the Lady’s soul, as Leah
Marcus suggests?’^ Evidently not. The Lady must willfully acquiesce to Comus’s seduction in order for the sexual act to be committed. Milton closely links thoughts to actions in his theory of sin: "Each type of sin, common and personal, has two subdivisions . . . evil desire, or the will to do evil, and the evil deed itself" {YP VI, p. 388). However, the "evil deed, " what he refers to as "actual sin, " need only exist in the mind: "It can be committed not only through actions, as such, but through words and thoughts and even through the omission of a good action" {YP VI, p. 391).
Comus is unable to do more than merely constrain the Lady, as she tells him: "Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind / With all thy charms, although this corporal rind / Thou hast immanacl’d, while Heav’n sees good" (11. 663-65). The act of rape, in this case, is somewhat subordinate to Comus’s simple will to fornicate, and the
Lady’s continued will to resist and her faith in the outcome of her resistance are enough to free her:
Yet should I try, the uncontrolled worth Of this pure cause would kindle my rapt spirits To such a flame of sacred vehemence. That dumb things would be mov’d to sympathize. And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake. Till all thy magic structures rear’d so high. Were shatter’d into heaps o’er thy false head. (11. 793-99)
To which Comus answers: "She fables not, I feel that I do fear / Her words set off by some superior power" (11. 800-801). That "superior power" sends Sabrina as an agent
125 to free the Lady from the chair: "Next this marble venom’d seat / Smear’d with gums
of glutinous heat / 1 touch with chaste palms moist and cold. / Now the spell hath lost his hold" (11. 916-19). The semen-like quality of the "glutinous heat" which holds the
Lady in place has been interpreted as lust by Kerrigan, who sees this male evidence,
oddly, as an indication of the Lady’s own sexual desires. Yet, if it is lust, the lust in question must be Comus’s, not the Lady’s, because even a hint of lust in her would tarnish her chastity, prevent divine intervention, and leave her entirely (bodily and spiritually) in Comus’s power. Milton’s poetic physiology here accords with Vives’s belief that a woman’s cold and moist chastity can quench the fires of lust in others, thus: "They say that the holy virgin our lady was so demure and sad that if any man cast a wanton eye upon her, that foul heat was all quenched as though a man had cast a firebrand into the water.
We sense, however, a discrepancy between the power of the chaste woman’s will and Milton’s belief in the contagion of sin, particularly lust. To Milton and his contemporaries, lust, whatever it’s source, has a direct effect upon a rape victim and blurs the distinction between the sinner and the one who is siimed against. Milton’s concern with the progress of such pollution through an individual soul is evident in the only overt and involved discussion of rape in his poetry, which occurs in Book
Two of Paradise LostJ'^ The allegory of Sin and Death provides a genealogy and map of the advancement of sin towards eventual death, a theory that equates corruption of the body with corruption of the soul, despite a victim’s lack of consent.
Sin, describing her history to Satan, explains:
126 I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamor’d, and such joy thou took’st With me in secret. (JPL H, 762-6, my emphasis)
Whether Sin is raped or complicit in the incestuous coupling is ambiguous: the phrase
"thou took’st" implies a forcible rape but is modified and softened topossible consent by the preposition "with" which follows. If she consents, her will has actively engaged in incest, but even if the act is against her will is she infected by Satan’s sin.
There is no ambiguity, however, in the second incest, in which Sin is clearly violently raped by Death:
I fled, but he pursu’d (though more, it seems. Inflam’d with lust than rage) and swifter far, Mee overtook his mother all dismay’d. And in embraces forcible and foul Ingend’ring with me, of that rape begot These yelling Monsters . . . (PL 2.790-95)
Sin’s initial corruption leads toward further corruption: although Sin gives no consent in this second passage, her violent rape becomes the inevitable result of the earlier act committed with/by Satan, and the final outcome is the foul brood of "yelling
Monsters" which completely deform her. As Milton explains in Christian Doctrine:
"As sins increase so they bind the sinners to death more surely, make them more miserable and constantly more vile, and deprive them more and more of divine help and grace, and of their own former glory" (YP VI, pp. 395-6). Indeed, the acts change Sin physically from a "goddess" with "attractive graces" to a "detestable" monster that Satan does not even recognize: "Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem
/ Now in thine eye so foul, once deem’d so fair" (11. 747-8). The physical
127 appearance of Sin is as important to an understanding of the nature of sin’s corruption as the description of the acts themselves, and creates another problem for understanding Milton’s position; Sin’s punishment is in part the degradation of her physical beauty, that gift of God that is so readily abused. But who is the abuser?
As with Spenser’s Hymne in Honour of Beautie, we must determine that the possesser of beauty is as responsible as the gazer for sinning. Unlawful sex is the sinful act that connects the corruption of the body to corruption of the soul, whether forced or consensual. Similarly, in A Mask, lust’s progress through the soul is described by the elder brother as a site where body and soul meet to create disease:
. . . when lust By imchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk. But most by lewd and lavish acts of sin. Lets in defilement to the inward parts. The soul grows clotted by the contagion, Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being. Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp Oft seen in Charnel vaults and Sepulchers Lingering and sitting by a new-made grave. As loath to leave the body that it lov’d. And link’t itself by carnal sensuality To a degenerate and degraded state. (11. 463-75)
The Lord High Steward offers a similar philosophy in the 1642 version of the
Castlehaven testimony: "It seemed to me strange at the first, how a noble man of his quality should lust to such abhominable sins, but when I found he had given himselfe over to lust, and find that... if men once habit themselves in ill, it is no marvel if they fall into any sinne" (1642, p. 6). Even the innocent may be polluted via secondary infection through proximity to the sinner. It is the fear of contagion that
128 makes the Dowager Countess of Derby hesitate to allow the young Lady Elizabeth to live in the same house as her cousins: "I am fearefull lest there be some sparkes of my Grandchilde Audlies misbehaviour remaining, which might give ill Example to the young ones which are with me.
Milton maintains that it is everyone’s responsibility to live temperately and curb the fires of concupiscence. Keeping a tight rein on passion benefits oneself and others with whom one comes into contact and brings one closer to the image of God.
Apparently, lust is all the more foul because it is easily avoided. He explains in The
Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, that desire for companionship is the intense desire, while "that other burning, which is but as it were the venom of a lusty and over-abounding concoction, strict life and labour with the abatement of a full diet may keep that low and obedient anough. . . . The flesh hath other naturall and easie curbes which are in the power of any temperate man" (TP II.251-3). Men and women alike must dedicate themselves to chastity, and, if female chastity requires a combination of physical wholeness and spiritual purity, so does Milton’s conception of male chastity.
In Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), Milton muses on the double standard, thus:
if unchastity in a woman whom Saint Paul termes the glory of man, be such a scandall and dishonour, then certainly in a man who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring and dishonourable. In that he sins against his owne body which is die perfeter sex, and his own glory which is in the woman, and that which is worst, against the image and glory of God which is in himselfe. (TP I, p. 892)
Here the author ponders a different idea of responsibility for illicit desire from that which we have seen in the Castlehaven testimonies and The Faerie Queene-.
129 man’s sin against woman is a sin against his own body, which is an image of God.
In this way, he modifies the Augustinian tradition that reads the body as an indicator
of the state of the soul by linking body and soul in a more interdependent
relationship; body and soul are inseparable aspects of God’s creation. He also blurs
the distinction between the two sexes by subsuming woman entirely into man, ultimately turning rape into a form of self-injury. When all is viewed as the creation
of God, body and soul, man and woman, all begin to lose the firm boundaries that
allow responsibility and victimization to rest solely on one side. Sadly, while the
subsumption of woman into man does not remove a raped woman’s accountability, it does deny much of her injury. In A Mask, and other of Milton’s works, we find a terribly complex conflation of body and soul, guilt and innocence, responsibility and victimization, all contained within a deceptively simple celebration of chastity. Ideals of chastity break down in situations of sexual assault, and even Milton, who offers a more intricate treatment of the problem than the writers of the Castlehaven testimonies, would not allow that a raped woman’s purity remains unsullied by the crime. Whether lust results in rape, incest, or simple adultery, Milton’s firm belief in sin’s contagion allows him no choice but to disregard the question of consent and condemn the moral state of all parties involved in and affected by the act.
Thus the inconsistent ideologies that create tensions between chastity and beauty and victimization and responisbility found in the conduct literature are compounded and further disguised by elaborate poetic figures and omamenation—here the allegorical projects of Milton and Spenser. Romance, which strucmres the
130 allegorical narrative in both works, is a particularly appropriate vehicle for perpetuating the contradictions, as the traditional plot of Romance is full of, even dependent upon, sexual violence threatened against chaste beauties.’® Milton and
Spenser, through allegory, attempt to recuperate the morally-suspect genre but ultimately remain implicated in the morass of ideological inconsistencies which keep women caught in the position of always already responsible for their own victimization.
131 ■ T H E Ç. ARRAIGNMENT AND . CONVICTION theSarleot Ti’c tn:c poc- o ; ' ::crc cl Caftlîhavcn horà e j y p L s r , Earle of Caflleha ven, (w h o was hi» iff. Peen of cl;c Rejlm found guilty ftjc «mmitiicg Rjpioe’ and Scdotnyjat WcfttninfterjOn Mco- dy,Aprilid;:. Byverrue of a Commifsion of Oyer and Wretmmer,direScd to SklktmuCptatty, Lord Keeret of the GriitSaleofEngliid, D«d .uzhrtewitdfcrttsitdsyîtccctnëtiâei ■ wlthu'léIodge». '■■.ÆrJ■;:•:^ As alfo theischading ofthe Kd EarWifiwtlf afet 00" ■ • Tower■
T ie Loris that were his Fepres fate on each ilicof agrcttTaHc covered with grceoc, whofe names are 4»foUoweth.
3'' ioy^c.v, (7 PrirtwfctX^f.vT/f-n*^. 1^43'
Figure 3.1; Portrait of Castlehaven, frontispiece and title page to the 1642 pamphlet.
132 NOTES
1. Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, sigs. E3''-E4.
2. Codrington, Decency in Conversation Amongst Women, p. 168.
3. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 88. Boccaccio had made this same point to explain the necessity of allegory. See Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 27.
4. Suzanne Hull acknowledges that women were a significant audience for fiction: "The emergence of women as a reading public, recognized by authors and booksellers, coincides with the fiction explosion in the last quarter of the sixteenth century and raises interesting questions on the possible influence of women on the development of literature in the late Elizabethan period" {Chaste, p. 75).
5. Gordon Teskey paraphrases Simone Fomari and adds that Spenser would probably not have agreed that Orlando Furioso is a "continued Allegory," but "it is likely that he found the notion attractive and intended in precisely this way to ’overgo’ Ariosto." See the entry on "Allegory" in the Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A C. Hamilton (Toronto and London: University of Toronto and Routledge Presses, 1990), pp. 20-21.
6. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (Amsterdam: Theatmm Orbis Terrarum, 1971), p. 155.
7. Gordon Teskey, "Allegory, Materialism, Violence," in David Lee Miller, et al., eds.. The Production of English Renaissance Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 293-318, p. 296. Angus Fletcher defines allegory as a "mode" in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964); and Maureen Quilligan counters with her theory of allegory as genre in The Language of Allegory. See also Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Towards a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
8. Teskey, "Allegory, Materialism, and Violence," p. 294.
9. Sheila Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 5-6. Maureen Quilligan also calls attention to a female subject position when reading the epic in Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), chapter four.
10. See, for example, Thomas P. Roche’s seminal study of the middle books, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Princeton:
133 Princeton University Press, 1964). Roche argues for a complex narrative patterning that unifies these books against critics who claim that Spenser lost control of his structure.
11. My quotations from The Faerie Queene are from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (London: Penguin, 1987). All citations appear in the text as Book, canto, and stanza numbers.
12. William A. Oram, "Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction," Spenser Studies 4 (1983), pp. 33-47, p. 38.
13. Margaret Olofson Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca ad London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 41.
14. Susanne Lindgren Wofford, "Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Energence of Character in The Faerie Queene III," Criticism 30 (1988), pp. 1-21, p. 15.
15. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, "’Carelesse Modestee’: Chastity as Politics in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene," ELH 55 (1988), pp. 555-73, p. 564-6.
16. "Universalist" studies include C. S. Lewis’ classic. The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Thomas P. Roche, The Kindly Flame; Lesley W. Brill, "Chastity as Ideal Sexuality in the Third Book of The Faerie Queene" SEL 11 (1971), pp. 15-26; and Pamela J. Benson, "Florimell at Sea: The Action of Grace in Faerie Queene, Book III," Spenser Studies 6 (1985), pp. 83-94.
17. Many recent studies of Book Three acknowledge the importance of gender to Spenser’s characterizations. The following is a selection of particularly interesting approaches: Richard A. Lanham, "The Literal Britomart," MLQ 28 (1967), pp. 426-45; Margaret Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine; Steve Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea o f Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (University Press of Kentucky, 1986); Susanne Wofford, "Gendering Allegory"; Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dennis D. McDaniel, "Fashioning Gentlewomen: Book III of The Faerie Queene and Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman, Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 15 (1992), pp. 42-50; Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires; and Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and TV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
18. Queen Elizabeth, looming as the overwhelming subject, object, and reader of The Faerie Queene, has been the focus of much recent discussion. Studies include Bruce Boehrer, "’Carelesse Modestie’"; Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter three; John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), chapter four; Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the
134 Unmarried Queen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), chapter six; Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), chapter four; Louis Adrian Montrose, "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text" Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 303-40; John King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) pp. 151-5; Mary Villeponteaux, "Semper Eadem: Belphoebe’s Denial of Desire," Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 29-45; Pamela Benson, The Invention of Renaissance Woman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), chapter 11; and to some extent, William A. Oram’s "Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction."
19. Boehrer, "’Careless Modestee,’" p. 564.
20. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes, p. 9. Cavanagh’s discussion of conflicted chastity is often very perceptive, however her argument is confined to The Faerie Queene and does not foreground sexual assault.
21. Much has been written about Amoret and Belphoebe, the twins who represent the two polar ideals of chastity, fruitfulness and virginity, respectively. Busyrane’s assault on Amoret has received a lot of recent critical attention, particularly regarding the violence of Petrarachan imagery on poetry. For example, see Roche, Kindly Flame-, Susan Frye, "Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane," Signs 20 (1994): 49-78; and Dorothy Stevens, "Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion," ELH 58 (1991): 523-44. The debate surrounding Belphoebe involves Spenser’s depiction of a virginal ideal, despite the overwhelming evidence that he favoured married chastity as the ideal state. John N. King argues convincingly that "Protestants accepted the humanistic view that both marital love and celibacy are valid states of life" (Spenser’s Poetry, p. 148). See also discussions of Belphoebe as a figure representing Queen Elizabeth’s elevation of virginity in Frye, Elizabeth /; Villeponteaux, "Semper Eadem"-, Berry, "Of Chastity and Power"-, and Boehrer, "’Careless Modestee.’"
22. Vives, Instruction, sig. N3.
23. Artegall somewhat provides a male counterpart to Britomart’s female chastity, but the fact that the male knight depends upon her aid suggests that her chastity to be stronger and more fundamental.
24. Although much of her argument about the function of vision in The Faerie Queene is very illuminating, I believe that Theresa Krier gives Ovid and Virgil too much credit (and Christianity too little) as sources for attitudes toward sexuality in the epic. Her discussion of virginity, particularly, lacks the cmcial resonance of the Christian ideal: "Virginity in The Faerie Queene is more often conceived on an Ovidian model than on any other, as integrity of selfhood, intimacy with the natural world, and the fragile pleasure of bodily and psychic sensation allowed by invisibility to the social world. " (See Gazing on
135 Secret Sights, p. 125). See also Silberman’s discussion of "erotic discourse," wherein she suggests, "Book III develops an ideal of love, of understanding, and of the relationship between individual and world figured by the Hermaphrodite image with which the original version concludes." Transforming Desire, p. 4); Roche’s discussion of Britomart as the "representation of love directed by the virtue of chastity" in The Kindly Flame (p. 52); and Brill’s Freudian "Chastity as Ideal Sexuality."
25. Brill, "Chastity as Ideal Sexuality," pp. 15, 16.
26. Thickstun argues this point: "Spenser caimot allow Britomart to experience . . . sexual temptation because she is a representative female character, an unmarried woman" {Fictions, p. 40).
27. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes, p. 142.
28. Roche, Kindly Flame, p. 70. Brill’s explanation is that "Britomart’s vulnerability results from a temporary displacement of her sexual energy towards lust, a slight wavering of her chastity" ("Chastity as Ideal Sexuality," p. 20).
29. Roche, Kindly Flame, p. 93, 56, 70-1.
30. Krier notes that "Spenser devotes five stanzas (3.9.20-24) to the description of the prolonged pleasure of fully sanctioned sexual vision. They are entirely and remarkably without any of the warning voices that elsewhere call into question the dynamics of such sight" {Gazing, p. 177). Cavanagh maintains that Britomart’s "revealed beauty . . . confounds her companions, since it provokes the desire that virtue must resist. Britomart hides her sex, therefore, since ’femaleness’ thwarts virtue in men and because undisguised women often attract charges of seduction" {Wanton Eyes, p. 139).
31. As Cavanagh recognizes in The Faerie Queene, "Beauty constitutes both the lure and the reward of female companionship—while concurrently prompting male responses which endanger chastity" {Wanton Eyes, p. 92).
32. Spenser, A Hymne in Honour of Beautie, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 706-20. All quotations are from this edition and are cited in the text with the abbrevation "Hymne" and line numbers.
33. King, Spenser’s Poetry, p. 173.
34. Spenser, Epithalamion, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 658- 79. All quotations are from this edition and are cited in the text with the abbreviation "Epith" and line numbers. See Lisa Klein, "’Let us Love,’" regarding the coimection between the bride’s beauty and the Medusa-like fear she engenders in the speaker.
136 35. Krier perceptively discusses the function of the gaze and the blush in Spenser’s Epithalamion-. "The bride’s blush is not simply charming but also arousing to observers, regardless of the bride’s own will. . . . The blusher, so far from being able to protect herself, only attracts more appreciative gazing, and also desire, by blushing" (Gazing, p. 189).
36. Roche, Kindly Flame, pp. 89-95; Krier, Gazing, pp. 172-8.
37. Davies, The Feminine Reclaimed, p. 70.
38. Florimell’s "exchange" from one man to another is parodied by the False Florimell’s promiscuity. Cavanagh notes that many women in The Faerie Queene are "trafficked" between men. See Wanton Eyes, chapter three.
39. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes, p. 16. Harry Berger, Jr. sees Arthur’s pursuit of Florimell as nonsexual (See "’Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene,” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989], pp. 208-56); Stevie Davies sees Arthur’s chase as instigated by a good instinct (see The Feminine Reclaimed, p. 72); Pamela Benson see no problem with Arthur’s response and maintains that Florimell has allowed her fear to disable her rational defense of her chastity, "as she shows when she runs not only from every trmebling leaf, but also from Arthur" (See "Florimell at Sea," p. 85). Quilligan writes, the three male knights . : . immediately take off after Florimell and her pursuer, in a way that the narrator describes as ’full of great envie and fell gealousie.’ This statement has given readers pause, especially because it seems to invite commendatory moral judgments of the heroes Arthur, Guyon, and Timias. (See Milton’s Spenser, p. 186).
40. Roche, Kindly Flame, p. 14.
41. Brill, "Chastity as Sexual Ideal," pp. 23, 26, 25. See also Benson’s argument that "a girl so terrified of lust that she runs even from Arthur becomes one who defies Proteus’ most seductive strategies with steadfast courage. Because of the action of grace in God’s plan, F achieves the virtue of chastity as she could not on her own. Grace turns her from victim to heroine" ("Florimell at Sea," p. 84).
42. McDaniel, "Fashioning Gentlewomen," p. 49.
43. However, to Vives one cannot have a chaste mind in a seductively adorned body: "But and thou array thy body sumptuously and go gaily forth abroad . . . thou canst not be excused as chaste in mind; thy evil and unchaste raiment shall reprove thee" (sig. K2''). (See Chapter Two.)
137 44. Benson, "Florimell at Sea, " p. 90.
45. Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, p. 187.
46. Quilligan suggests that we "take seriously the pun on chase here, which is . . . a profound structuring principle at work throughout the book. Thus Florimell remains "chaste" even thought she is "chased" by every character she meets—save for Britomart" {Milton’s Spenser, p. 187). For discussions of the prominence and importance of punning and wordplay in allegory, see also Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, pp. 21-2, 33-51.
47. Cavanagh buries this perception in an endnote. See Wanton Eyes, p. 3 (n. 10).
48. Teskey, "From Allegory to Dialectic: Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton," PMLA 101 (1986): 9-23.
49. Krier notes the resemblance between Florimell and Milton’s Lady, however, she sees a difference between Spenser’s and Milton’s concepts of virginity based on their notions of the relationship between "outer shape and inner space" or body and soul. I do not at all agree with her reading of virginity in The Faerie Queene as primarily Ovidian. See Gazing, pp. 125-28.
50. Milton, Areopagitica, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Douglas Bush, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). All quotations of Milton’s prose are from this edition and are cited with designation YP, volume, and page numbers. Richard J. DuRocher argues that Milton’s notion of chastity is very much influenced by his reading of Spenser. See "Spenser, Milton, and ’Venus looking glass,’" JEGP 92 (1993): 325-41, pp. 327-29.
51. Barbara Breasted, "Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal," Milton Studies 3 (1971): 201-224.
52. See John Creaser, "Milton’s Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal," Milton Quarterly 22 (1987): 24-34; Leah Marcus, "Justice for Margery Evans: A ’Local’ Reading of Comus," in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker, (Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 66-85; and Michael Wilding, "Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: Theater and Politics on the Border," Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 35-51.
53. Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers, (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), p. 89.
54. The Arraignment and Conviction of Mervin Lord Audley, Earle of Castlehaven (London, 1642); The Trial of the Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven (London, 1679); The Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin, Lord Audley Earl of Castle-haven (London, 1699). All
138 quotations from these pamphlets will be cited in the text with the designations 1642, 1679, or 1699.
55. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Part One, chapter two, contains a discussion of the spectacle of the scaffold as a crime deterrent.
56. J.A. Sharpe, "’Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England," Past and Present 107 (1985): 144-67, p. 148.
57. The 1642 version reads as follows: "You have abused your daughter, and having honour and fortune to leave behinde, you would have had the spurious seed of a varlet to inherit both" (p. 11). Cynthia Herrup, who has kindly allowed me to consult a manuscript from her in-progress book about Castlehaven, explains that Castlehaven’s own daughter, Lucy, was married to a servant.
58. For more general information about contemporary attitudes toward rape, please refer to chapter 1.
59. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), p. 101.
60. Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 106.
61. Creaser, "Milton’s Comus," p. 32.
62. State Papers Domestic, Charles I, vol. 189, no. 70, as cited in Breasted, "Comus," n. 21.
63. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 457. My quotations from A Mask and Paradise Lost are from this edition, and all line numbers are cited in the text.
64. Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 1988), p. 46.
65. Vives, Instruction, sig. 04.
66. For example, see Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); and Julia M. Walker, ed., Milton and the Idea of Woman. For a recent debate about the relevance of gender and Freudian psychology to the masque, see William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); and "The Politically Correct Comus: A Reply to John Leonard," Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 149-55; and John Leonard, "Saying ’No’ to Freud: Milton’s A Mask and Sexual Assault," Milton Quarterly 25 (1991): 129-40. To Mary Ann McGuire and Georgia Christopher, the Lady is a universal figure for (non-gendered) chastity and for faith, respectively. Both agree that "the primary concern is not with sexual morality . . . lust is the figure for a larger evil." See McGuire’s Milton’s Puritan Masque,
139 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983): pp. 138-9; and Christopher’s "The Virginity of Faith: Comus as a Reformation Conceit," ELH43 (1976): 479-99, p. 483.
67. See A.S.P Woodhouse, "The Argument of Milton’s Comus," and "Comus Once More," in A Mask at Ludlow, ed. John S. Diekhoff (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968). See also the debate between John Leonard, William Kerrigan, and Leah Marcus cited above.
68. Breasted, "Comus," p. 205.
69. According to the writer of The Law’s Resolutions, all women "are understood either married or to be married. " Thus chastity is not an exclusively virginal virtue. Milton’s attitude toward chastity in the masque is not really at so great a distance from the ideals of wedded love in The Faerie Queene, Book III and Paradise Lost as claimed by Woodhouse (see "Argument," pp. 59-60). For a discussion of A Mask in terms of genre, see Angus Fletcher, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1971).
70. McGuire argues that Milton’s Mask makes "no distinction among these virtues as to relative worth." See Milton’s Puritan Masque, p. 149.
71. It can also be argued that virginity and chastity were interchangeable terms during the period. In his diatribe against immorality, Phillip Stubbes insists that "congression and mutuall copulation of those that be thus joyned together in the Godlye state of blessed matrimony, is pure virginitie, and allowable before God and man. " See The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. G8''. In a recent essay, John Rogers argues that there was a seventeenth-century resurgence of the virginal ideal. See "The Enclosure of Virginity: The Poetics of Sexual Abstinence in the English Revolution," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca and London, 1994): pp. 229-250.
72. Milton, Paradise Lost, in Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: MacMillan, 1957), pp. 207-469, Bk. IV, 11. 495-500. Further citations are from this edition and occur in the text.
73. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 269. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, tracing the influence of love poetry on Milton, read Eve’s modesty as erotically manipulative: "Eve has learned something from those moments in the Libertine tradition that unexpectedly reaffirm the erotic value of modesty and yielding." See "Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry," ELH 53 (1986): 27-51, p. 41. Diane McColley to some extent blames Adam’s response to Eve’s beauty on her: "Eve has played the Serpent’s part. Her beauty has moved him, and she has enticed him to disobey God." See Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 28.
140 74. Benson, "Flcrimell at Sea," p. 91.
75. Marcus suggests that the Lady’s body may have been forced, though her mind was not. See "The Milieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault" Criticism 25 (1983): 293-327, p. 318.
76. Vives, Instruction, sig. N3''.
77. For a recent discussion of rape in Book II of Paradise Lost, see Alexander A. Myers, "‘Embraces Forcible and Foul’: Viewing Milton’s Sin as a Rape Victim," Milton Quarterly 28 (1994): 11-16.
78. Dowager Countess of Derby, as quoted in Breasted, "Comus," p. 216.
79. Kathryn Gravdal says of medieval French Romance, "The mimesis of rape is made tolerable when the poet tropes it as moral, comic, heroic, spiritual, or erotic," and she offers an "invisible" definition of the romantic as "that which blurs the distinctions between seduction and aggression." See Ravishing Maidens, pp. 13, 14.
141 CHAPTER 4
BLAZON AND THE EROTICIZATION OF CHASTITY: LUCRETIA AND SUSANNA ON DISPLAY
It is natural, that Desires should be kindled in the hearts of those that Love, because delight by the meanes of Beauty touching the sense, mooveth the sensible appetite, at which motion the figure or Image of some excellent thing being framed to the inward sense, the reasonable Desire maketh knowne his force by a willingnesse to possesse the thing that is framed. And from hence it ariseth that Lovers being provoked by this inflamed Desire, become bolde, and venturous to any attempts . . . to attaine their desired ende.'
To men is granted priviledge to tempt: But in that Charter, women be exempt: Their fault it selfe serves for the faults excuse. And makes it ours, though yours be the abuse: And howsoever, although by force they win. Yet on our weaknesse, still retumes the sinne.^
. . . Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman’s lightness? Having waste ground enough. Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary And pitch our evil thoughts there? O, fie, fie, fie! What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo? Dost thou desire her foully for those things That make her good?^
The direct conflict between the beauty of the chaste woman that entices a beholder’s desire and the protective powers of her virtue are never more evident than in poetry that displays chaste beauty through the rhetorical figure of the blazon. The
142 extended physical description of the woman, even the most chaste woman, transforms the exemplar of virtue into an erotic object for the (male) reader or gazer to enjoy/
Although depictions of the chaste beauty in such works as The Faerie Queene show evidence of the conflict between the Neoplatonic appreciation of beauty and the fundamentally misogynistic ideology that blames women for all sexuality, Spenser, for one, works to maintain distinctions between sacred and profane desire in an attempt to reconcile sexuality with the need for procreation through traditional moral categories.
The works I discuss in this chapter, however, go much further to undermine the defensive power of chastity by erasing that crucial line between the sacred and the profane.
The works treated earlier have also primarily focused upon the exemplary virgin who will one day marry, whereas those treated here depict female subjects who are already married and thriving in this sanctioned sexual relationship. As these women are no longer virgins, their sexuality is unavoidably present and undermines clearcut distinctions between sacred love and profane desire, which categories begin to merge together. The result is the eroticization of the chaste matron. In her book on the female nude in art, Lynda Nead defines the erotic as "the borderline of respectability and non-respectability, between pure and impure desire."^ As the erotic straddles categories, so does the early modem matron: once she is fully sexual, even though her sexuality is honorable within the proper parameters of engendering children and avoiding fornication, it is in danger of escaping containment.® Whether the woman is actually tempted to commit adultery or whether she is merely perceived
143 as sexually desirable to other men—whether she is constructed as subject or object—a married woman is by definition sexual and easily implicated in attracting men’s desire, even in the case of rape.
By even hinting at the sexuality of the chaste married woman, an artist or writer is in danger of losing his reader’s belief in her chastity, whatever the initial intent for doing so. In Foucauldian terms, even the discursive prohibition of sexual desires reinscribes those desires whether largely within the limits of the literary work or by directly addressing the desires of the reader or viewer. Jeremy Taylor acknowledges this problem of how to speak against lust without raising the specter of lust in his reader’s minds when he worries that evil minds may find fuel for their lust even in his pious admonitions against sin. In the preface to the chapter on chastity,
Taylor cautions:
Reader stay, and read not the advices of the following Section, unless thou hast a chast spirit, or desirest to be chast, or at least art apt to consider whether you ought or no. For there are some spirits so Atheistical, and some so wholly possessed with a spirit of uncleanness, that they turn the most prudent and chast discourses into dirt and filthy apprehensions; like cholerick stomachs, changing their very Cordials and medicines into bitterness; and in a literal sense turning the grace of God into wantonness. They study cases of conscience in the matter of carnal sins, not to avoid, but to learn ways how to offend God and pollute their own spirits; and search their houses with a Sunbeam, that they may be instructed in all the comers nastiness.^
Taylor makes much of the idea that the reader’s intention and attitude toward the material is cmcial to the eventual good effects of his text, but he does not absolve himself, as author, from responsibility for attempting to make a wrong reading impossible:
144 I have used all the care I could, in the following periods, that I might neither be wanting to assist those that need it, nor yet minister any occasion of fancy or vainer thoughts to those that need them not. If any man will snatch the pure taper from my hand, and hold it to the Devil, he will only bum his own fingers, but shall not rob me of the reward of my care and good intention, since I have taken heed how to express the following duties, and given him caution how to read them.*
But what of authors without such pure intentions, and what of the women who are instructed to emulate the exemplars whose chastity is so frequently represented with such conflict?
I have here chosen works to analyze that offer varying degrees and types of authorial awareness in the erotic blazons used to describe the sexually-assaulted chaste matron and which choose as their subjects two of the most popular exemplars of married chastity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lucretia and Susaima.
Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece offers a highly conscious eroticization of chastity through its blazons of the tragic Roman heroine and encourages philosophical doubts about the viability of the separation of desire into moral and immoral categories. The anonymous W.V.’s The Ladie’s Blush: Or, the History of Susanna is an equally conscious eroticization of the Apocryphal Jewish heroine, but this poem capitalizes upon the titillation that results from sexualizing the sacred and uses the confusion of moral categories to recuperate and authorize what borders on the pornographic. Both
Lucrece and Susanna are described with erotic imagery, while Lucrece’s chastity, in
Shakespeare’s poem, also provides the narrative impetus for Tarquin’s assault upon her. In neither case does Vives’s insistence upon the chaste woman’s anti-erotic power manifest itself; both women, despite their purity, entice male lust. Thus these
145 texts, along with contemporary visual depictions of Lucretia and Susanna, illustrate how tenuous was chastity’s power to deflect unwanted sexual attention, and while women were being urged to retain their chastity at all costs, the concept itself was under assault by the ineviatble urge to eroticize that which is desired and to desire that which is forbidden/
Lucretia
Lucretia’s eminence as a model for chastity was well established by the
Renaissance; her history appears to be included in every catalogue of virtuous women, in which she figures as an example of the loyal wife who values her chastity and her husband’s honor even above her life/" Vives mentions her as an example:
"What can be safe to a woman, sayeth Lucretia, when her honesty is gone? And yet had she a chaste mind in a corrupt body."" Abraham Darcie tells her story:
Lucretia, a Roman Lady, fairest in beautie, a true mirrour of Chastity; seeing this fair Rose, this precious flower (which decks and embellisheth the reputation of her sexe) had beene ravished and taken from her, ashamed to have been so tyraimously defloured by the younger Prince Tarquin, would not live after shee had seen her fame and renown withered by so vile and approbrious a shame, nor survive her honor.
And, James Yates Servingraan includes a lengthy encomium to Lucretia in his poetic treatise on chastity, which concludes, "Lo thus ±e Matron slewe her selfe, / because she would not have: / A body for her spouse unchaste, / but brought it to the grave.""
146 Shakespeare, however, more than any other writer in my study, philosophically faces the problems surrounding chastity’s seductive attraction and uses the story of Lucretia to question the possibility of assigning desire to discrete moral categories (e.g. sacred love and profane lust). Rather than denying this attraction and claiming that beauty attracts whereas chastity repels, Shakespeare acknowledges that female chastity, which has long been dangled like a tantalizing and forbidden prize in front of the eyes of male beholders, itself attracts desire, as Angelo realizes in
Measure for Measure (see epigraph). Thus chastity’s economic aspect does not merely complicate its defensive posture—it overwhelms it to the point that the quest to attain the unreachable prize may lead men to violence. Likewise Lucrece’s chastity- far from being her protection from mens’ lust—inflames Tarquin’s desire and creates the impetus for her rape. Although Tarquin’s unbridled passions are ultimately to blame for the rape, Lucrece is not completely absolved from responsibility for having drawn those passions to her via her chaste beauty.
Ovid and Livy provide the major early sources for the legend of Lucretia, and the seductive nature of the virtue is obvious even in these Latin accounts.^'*
Although Shakespeare begins the narrative after Tarquin’s decision to "post to"
Lucrece, Livy, in his history of Rome, begins with the tale of the "chastity contest”: while the other Roman officers’ wives frequently spent their evenings luxuriously feasting, Lucretia stayed home "busily engaged upon her wool, while her maids toiled about her in the lamplight. " As the officers spied on her at her work, "Sextus
Tarquinius was seized with a wicked desire to debauch Lucretia by force; not only
147 her beauty, but her proved chastity as well, provoked him. Ovid extends the portrait of Lucretia at work with her maid, allowing the spying officers to bear and see her bemoan her absent husband: "Meantime, the royal youth caught fire and fury, and transported by blind love, he raved. Her figure pleased him, and that snowy hue, that yellow hair, and artless grace; pleasing, too, her words and voice and virtue incorruptible; and the less hope he had, the hotter his desire.In both cases the visual sight of the beautiful Lucretia acting as an exemplary wife spurs Tarquin’s
"unrighteous love."*’ Lust builds in Lucretia’s assailant through clandestine gazing:
Tarquin nurtures his passion in private observation before making himself known to the vulnerable victim.
In Lucrece, however, Tarquin formulates his plan based on Collatine’s bragging—before he has actually seen Lucrece. His fault certainly appears to be his inability to control his passions and the consequent tyrannical infliction of his will upon the object of those passions: he periodically insists, "My will is strong past reason’s weak removing," and "Desire my pilot is."** But what precisely triggers those passions? Shakespeare is explicit about the fact that his knowledge of Lucrece’s chastity is directly connected to Tarquin’s lust: "Haply the name of ’chaste’ unhapp’ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite" (11. 3-9). The narrator chides Collatine for proudly boasting about Lucrece’s virtues: "Or why is Collatine the publisher / Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown / From thievish ears, because it is his own?"
(11. 33-5). The narrator poses jealousy as a possible explanation: "Perchance that envy of so rich a thing, / Braving compare, disdainfully did sting / His high-pitched
148 thoughts, that meaner men should vaunt / That golden hap which their superiors want" (11. 39-42). Yet The reader is ultimately left with no overt motive: "But some untimely thought did instigate / His all too timeless speed, if none of those" (11. 43-4).
Nancy J. Vickers and Coppelia Kahn have argued that Tarquin’s rape is fundamentally motivated by a need to possess and destroy that which belongs to
Collatine in a patriarchal battle over the possession of Lucrece. Vickers notes that
Collatine’s rhetoric—his description of Lucrece—gives evidence of rhetoric’s power and its danger.'® However, if the report of her chastity was the initial reason for his
"posting" to Collatium, the sight of Lucrece’s chaste beauty was the determining factor that made the rape inevitable.
The key issue here is whether Lucrece is implicated in her own rape, a problem that Shakespeare explores through the rhetorical trope of the blazon.
Lucrece is curiously-wrought, employing a plethora of rhetorical figures and providing a set-piece for careful argumentation, but the multiplicity of figures are not without confusion and seeming inconsistencies. Heather Dubrow has argued that much Lucrece scholarship has focused on Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric and either subsumed or entirely excluded other issues such as character motivations and power relations.-® However, many recent studies have effectively examined the intricate relationship between rhetoric and power relations, particularly gender relations.-'
Indeed, the use of such rhetorical tropes as the blazon offer crucial clues to power relations, as gendered figurations are ideologically charged. Vickers has been highly influential in shaping the feminist critical attimde toward the blazon and its
149 consequeces for depicting chaste women as a series of body parts. She suggests that,
"within the English tradition, poetic blazon typically consisted of a catalogue listing each of these particular beauties, their sum constituting an exquisite, if none the less troubling, totality. However, Vickers’ work has largely viewed the blazoned woman as an utterly passive slate upon which men write their own subjectivity and their rivalry with other men. She says about Lucrece,
occasion, rhetoric and result are all informed by, and thus inscribe, a battle between men that is figuratively fought on the fields of woman’s "celebrated" body. Here, metaphors commonly read as signs of a battle between the sexes emerge rather firom a homosocial struggle, in this case a male rivalry, which positions a third (female) term in a median space from which it is initially used and finally eliminated.-^
While I agree that the reified, blazoned woman involves an objectification of women,
I would argue that this objectification is generally a defensive posmre against an only problematically passive object. Though a male rivalry does surround Lucrece, she is far from absent in the text:^'* under the Petrarchan surface of the blazoned woman lurks the threatening sexual subject that seeks to ensnare the relatively innocent male reader. The writer who mrns the tables by ensnaring this dangerous subject and laying her open to view without her consent imposes control over her but cannot subdue her entirely.
Shakespeare, however, takes this relationship between the writer, the beholders, and the blazoned woman and complicates it to a high degree by using the eroticism created by displaying the chaste woman to question chastity’s powers. He employs numerous metaphors in breathless succession: as Katherine Mans remarks,
"Analogies are no sooner invoked than they begin to collapse and must be replaced by
150 others, often with different implications. The effect of this turmoil is to refuse the reader the right to fix upon a meaning or perspective that will hold for the duration of the poem—a problem that ultimately makes it impossible to assign an originary cause for Tarquin’s assault.
By allowing Tarquin to shift some of the blame for the rape onto Lucrece’s beauty, Shakespeare allows the reader to consider Lucrece’s complicity—her enticement—and whether or not we are supposed to be persuaded by this tactic, the argument opens up a space for erotic depictions of the chaste woman. If she can be described as beautiful, she can also be shown to have seduced the attention of the male beholder. The narrator himself is implicated in this eroticization, and he then invites/persuades the reader to participate. Tarquin’s motivation may be rhetorical or visual, but the reader’s experience of Lucrece and his or her experience of Tarquin experiencing Lucrece are necessarily rhetorical. However one receives her, the physical descriptions of the chaste woman’s body allow the reader, along with
Tarquin, access to a sexualized woman who should be inaccessible to all but her husband.
The most extended blazon of Lucrece directly complicates the categories of beauty and virtue, collapsing Tarquin’s, the narrator’s, and the reader’s ability to distinguish one from the other and thus distinguish defensive chastity from seductive beauty. The moment Lucrece greets him at her door, Tarquin is struck by the sight of his hostess, who is described in heraldic terms of a war between the "colors" of beauty and virtue:
151 When at Collatium this false lord arrived. Well was he welcomed by the Roman dame. Within whose face beauty and virtue strived Which of them both should underprop her fame: When virtue bragged, beauty would blush for shame; When beauty boasted blushes, in despite Virtue would stain that or with silver white.
Her beauty, in that white entituled From Venus’ doves, doth challenge that fair field; Then virtue claims from beauty beauty’s red. Which virtue gave the golden age to gild Their silver cheeks, and called it then their shield; Teaching them thus to use it in the fight. When shame assailed, the red should fence the white.
This heraldry in Lucrece’ face was seen. Argued by beauty’s red and virtue’s white; Of cither’s colour was the other queen. Proving from the world’s minority their right; Yet their ambition makes them still to fight. The sovereignty of either being so great That oft they interchange each other’s seat. (11. 51-70)
Vickers reads the use of the military metaphor within the conventional blazon of
Lucrece’s face as a signal of male rivalry at the expense of the female subject in the text. Kahn also comments upon this elaborate metaphor as indicative of the tension between Lucrece’s status as sexual object and sexual taboo as a married woman.
However, what Shakespeare does in this passage is to use conventional figurations of beauty and virtue to expose the conflict that allows the chaste woman to bear responsibility for attracting male desire. The colors become inextricably mixed as each "queen" strives to overtop the other, and, as Virme attempts to draw a kind of veil of shamefasmess over Beauty’s attractions, the veil becomes indistinguishable from those attractions; it becomes the kind of seductive beauty that attracts male
152 desire. While there is indeed a sense of tension between the sexual and the asexual, it may be more accurate to describe the problem as the breakdown of boundaries between the categories of beauty and virtue which, while they initially appear to be pitted against each other in direct opposition, are indistinguishable upon closer examination.
Lucrece’s virtue is her beauty and her beauty is her virtue, and so the text asserts, in Kahn’s words, "the power of chastity to arouse desire"; but this arousal does not, as Kahn suggests, arise solely from "Lucrece’s status as the wife of
Tarquin’s friend. Collatine’s ownership of his wife is only partly responsible for
Tarquin’s arousal. The mystical properties of chastity exert an active power that, in turn, imbue the chaste woman with a degree of agency. While this power is usually a manifestation of chastity’s defense of lust, in Shakespeare’s text chastity has the subtle power to create lust in the beholder of the chaste woman. The result is that we begin to question even the definition of chastity.^® That Lucrece is wholly virtuous- innocent to the ways of lust—Shakespeare repeatedly tells us:
But she that never coped with stranger eyes Could pick no meaning from their parling looks. Nor read the subtle shining secrecies Writ in the glassy margents of such books: She touched no unknown baits; nor feared no hooks; Nor could she moralize his wanton sight More than his eyes were opened to the light. (11. 99-105)
She cannot be blamed for entertaining Tarquin, her husband’s friend, superior officer, and prince of Rome: Lucrece merely extends the requisite hospitality due to the noble visitor.
153 Lucrece’s chastity, however, has precisely the wrong effect upon Tarquin, who interprets the signs of virtue as erotic beauty. The narrator, describing Tarquin’s point of view, conveys this misinterpretation, and in so doing, reinscribes the possibility that chaste beauty can inspire unchaste passion. Kahn sees the second blazon, just before the rape, as "remarkably nonerotic. This moment, however, shows much the same tension between virtue and beauty that we have seen in the earlier blazon, as each stanza begins with a description of eroticized beauty only to counter that description with a testament to virtue and morality:
Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under. Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss; Who therefore angry seems to part in sunder. Swelling on either side to want his bliss; Between whose hills her head entombed is; Where like a virtuous monument she lies To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes. (11. 386-92)
Lucrece’s beauty—particularly her "rosy cheek"—creates desire even in inanimate objects: her hand is an agent of protection, actively guarding her face from the "kiss" of the pillow, which, deprived of satisfaction, "swells." To fend off any taint of lighmess in Lucrece, the reader is assured that the pillow has the "lawful" right to touch her. Indeed, Lucrece is so virtuous that she is like a "monument" to posterity,
"entombed," made inert, passive, by sleep and by the pillow’s support. This passivity, in turn, makes her vulnerable to any "lewd unhallowed eyes": Tarquin’s, the narrator’s, and the reader’s alike.
While Lucrece’s physical attributes are continually eroticized, the language of eroticization is made to figure higher, moral concerns, particularly Lucrece’s
154 mortality. The mixing of erotic imagery with that of death overwhelms Lucrece’s chastity with dark powers, implying that chastity is powerless against a vicious, desperate intent to defile:
Her hair like golden threads played with her breath: O modest wantons, wanton modesty! Showing life’s triumph in the map of death, And death’s dim look in life’s mortality: Each in her sleep themselves so beautify As if between them twain there were no strife. But that life lived in death and death in life. (11. 400-406)
Lucrece’s sleep prefigures Tarquin’s "little death" of the rape and her own suicide, and her hair, which wantonly sports in her life’s breath, enticing Tarquin’s desire, is quickly wrenched around to represent the ponderous issue of life’s transience. Yet this stanza is, once again, immediately followed by a conventional description of
Lucrece’s body:
Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquered. Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew. And him by oath they truly honoured. These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred. Who like a foul usurper went about From this fair throne to heave the owner out. (11. 407-13)
Suddenly, the effigy that was Lucrece transforms into a land conceit, what Peter
Stallybrass calls "the geography of the body," enabling her to be imperialistically examined by the tyrannous Tarquin.Such imperialism taps into the gazer’s acquisitive impulse and Lucrece’s chastity is aligned with the economic metaphor which overwhelms the defensive. Tarquin sets out to possess what he sees:
What could he see but mightily he noted? What did he note but strongly he desired?
155 What he beheld, on that he firmly doted. And in his will his wilful eye he tired. With more than admiration he admired Her azure veins, her alabaster skin. Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin. (11. 414-20)
Lucrece, the paragon of chastity, has been laid bare for the reader’s consumption as well. The erotic blazon of the chaste woman is complicated by images of passivity and impending death, both of which leech the power from Lucrece’s chastity and leave her body defenseless to Tarquin’s attack. Yet, the passivity that is usually associated with innocence is, in Lucrece, an active spur to the latent evil within
Tarquin, who preys on vulnerability. The delicate balance of chastity’s power is here upended and completely inverted, and the narrator’s vivid descriptions of Tarquin’s experience invite the reader to peep at, eavesdrop on, and vicariously enjoy the clandestine gazing that leads to Tarquin’s rape. Heather Dubrow suggests that, in
Lucrece,
The simpler and purer world of Petrarchism is contrasted with a vision that permits and even encourages a more dismrbing form of desire: a lust uncontrolled by literary convention and unhampered by the power of the chaste maiden. Another contrast stems from the fact that Lucrece’s very innocence is seen as dangerous: whereas the purity of the Petrarchan mistress merely frustrates her respectful worshipper, that of Lucrece actually fosters the schemes of her violent adorer.
While I agree that this disturbing inversion of chastity operates here, I would argue that it also present in the "purer" world of Petrarchan poetry, which employs these similar metaphors. Shakespeare deliberately uses rhetorical copia to call attention to the confusion that reigns when poetic conventions give the same attributes to contradictory qualities. This problem suggests Shakespeare’s awareness of the limits
156 of the Petrarchan poetic imagination; it also suggests a rejection of Vives’s distinctions between the sacred and the profane as a way to distinguish physical beauty from virtue.
Shakespeare’s consistent association of conventional oppositions in The Rape of Lucrece undermines both literary and moral expectations. The importance of chiasmus in the poem has been noted by Joel Fineman, who builds a theory of authorial subjectivity upon the workings of this figure in Lucrece?^ In terms of the ideology of the virtue, the term "chastity" works in much the same way as the multivalent key terms upon which Fineman focuses his attention. Aside from the problematic conjunction of beauty and virtue detailed above that allows for a "wanton modesty," Shakespeare employs the conventional martial and economic chastity metaphors to highlight the disjunction between the virtue’s protective power and its seductive attraction. Although Lucrece is not a virgin, her chastity is called the
"never conquered fort" that Tarquin comes to "scale" (11. 481-2), but once he accomplishes the rape, "she has lost a dearer thing than life" (1. 687), her "Pure
Chastity is rifled of her store" (1. 692). As Linda Woodbridge notes, the rape "calls forth comparisons with all kinds of territorial invasion. But the metaphors don’t provide neat analogs. Shakespeare alters the conventional metaphors slightly, imagining chastity as the fort robbed of what it was meant to protect, but this configuration is complicated by the idea that the fort itself is what Tarquin wants.
Chastity is figured simultaneously as that which protects and that which must be
157 protected, an opposition that produces the highly unstable image of the virtue that
Vives, Spenser, and Milton worked to stabilize.
Shakespeare does not attempt to force a logical explanation from the contradictions that are created by slipping quickly from metaphor to metaphor. He revels in this contradiction and even complicates it further by adding an entrapment metaphor to Tarquin’s argument. The tension between Lucrece’s beauty and virtue and Tarquin’s uncontrolled will as responsible agents in the rape allows Shakespeare, like other writers who place sophistic rhetoric into the mouths of their attackers, to blame the victim. Yet, Tarquin not only implies that Lucrece has ensnared him with her beauty, but that she has ensnared herself:
. . . ’The colour in thy face. That even for anger makes the lily pale And the red rose blush at her won disgrace. Shall plead for me and tell my loving tale. Under that colour am I come to scale Thy never-conquered fort; the fault is thine. For those thine eyes betray thee unto mine.
’Thus I forestall thee if thou mean to chide: Thy beauty hath ensnared thee to this night. Where thou with patience must my will abide. My will that marks thee for my earth’s delight. Which I to conquer sought with all my might But as reproof and reason beat it dead. By thy bright beauty was it newly bred. (11. 477-90)
Tarquin is aware and ready to admit that his will guides him to commit the rape, but he blames Lucrece’s beauty for betraying her, making her susceptible to his will. In terms of agency, Lucrece is limited to a self-reflexive capacity to act: in Tarquin’s argument, she is only responsible for making herself into that which his will chooses
158 to act upon. This demoralizing sophistry constructs Lucrece as a powerless victim even as it blames her for her own victimization.
This same logic leads to Lucrece’s unquestioned acceptance of her guilt, which
Kahn and Dubrow attribute to Shakespeare’s historicization of Lucrece as a pre-
Christian Roman matron who "pays for her exquisite awareness of her Roman duty."^‘‘ This guilt does not, however, have to be questioned in terms of a
Roman/Christian dichotomy when we understand that the chaste woman can be perceived as sharing responsibility for her victimization by allowing her beauty to incite men into "conquering" her "prize." Dubrow rightly cautions against holding too fast to the distinctions between shame culmres and guilt cultures that would lead to a too particularized reading of the Lucrece story.^^ Although Shakespeare does not emphasize this aspect of the story, Lucrece does consent to the rape under duress, if only to avoid the dishonor of being found in supposed adultery with Tarquin’s
"slave. " Lucrece’s guilt comes directly from this moment of forced complicity, allowing her to see herself as an adulteress with only the option of suicide to vindicate her. Certainly the suicide is condemned by Shakespeare and most
Renaissance thinkers who agree with Augustine, but her guilt is not necessarily exclusive to a Roman sensibility.^^ In the Renaissance, a wife’s chastity was, in
Vives’s words, "kept by" and "entrusted to" her, but this intangible quality was possessed and owned by her husband, whose honor largely depends upon her reputation for virtue. The violation is not against Lucrece in vacuo but against her husband, Collatine, and the sacred vow of marriage which subsumes the individual
159 Lucrece into the marriage relationship: "The light will show charactered in my brow /
The story of sweet chastity’s decay, / The impious breach of holy wedlock vow" (11.
807-9). Because she is the receptacle for much of Collatine’s honor, Lucrece attempts to make Tarquin see the manifold consequences of the rape, claiming that minstrels would sing the story of "How Tarquin wronged me, I Collatine" (1. 819) and she asserts, "’Yet am I guilty of thy [Collatine’s] honour’s wrack; / Yet for thy honour did I entertain him [Tarquin]" (11. 841-2). She takes upon herself accountability for allowing "a wandering wasp" into Collatine’s "weak hive," which
"sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept" (11. 839-40).
It is the extent of Lucrece’s suffering-not whether she holds any responsibility for the crime—that leads to questions about whether suicide was the proper course for
Lucrece, as a raped wife, to take. Shakespeare offers the reader a bit of conventional physiological lore to explain Lucrece’s excessive suffering and to counter the argument Tarquin advances that blames the victim for his action:
For men have marble, women waxen, minds. And therefore are they formed as marble will; The weak oppressed, the impression of strange kinds Is formed in them by force, by fraud, or skill. Then call them not die authors of their ill. No more than wax shall be accounted evil Wherein is stamped the semblance of a devil. (11. 1240-46)
No man inveigh against the withered flower. But chide rough winter that the flower hath killed; Not that devoured, but that which doth devour. Is worthy blame. O, let it not be hild Poor women’s faults that they are so fulfilled With men’s abuses: those proud lords to blame Make weak-made women tenants to their shame. (11. 1254-60)
160 According to this formulation, women should not be held accountable for the evil which men "stamp" upon their "weak-made" and "waxen" minds. Each analogy
Shakespeare uses in the latter stanza highlights the destruction of an utterly powerless victim, and he asks that women be absolved from blame. This sentiment accords well with Christopher Newstead’s musings:
Men who . . . should be naturally most chaste, are assailants, whereas they should be defendants. . . . Certainly, if [women] should use the like meanes, to obtaine men, a Nay would bee as seldome as treason in the mouthes of most men. Yet so injurious are the censures of these our times, that if a Jove vanquish a silly lo . . . a black infamy shall overcloud, and brand her reputation, not once touching his.^’
Both Newstead and Shakespeare excuse women’s weakness, but by doing so, they condemn women for not having the power to act in their own defense.
Although Lucrece is never accused of actually desiring her attacker, the argument in defense of her weakness and her final acquiescence to Tarquin’s threat allows for the possibility of complicity to exist in her story even without considering the underlying "betrayal" of her beauty that appears in the blazons. She is not given credit for an active, positive stance against Tarquin, but blamed for her passive inability to act (which "feminine" qualities are generally praiseworthy). Both
Tarquin’s argument accusing Lucrece of her own undoing and the narrator’s argument against women’s responsibility for their own and men’s actions work within the active/evil and passive/good binaries. A woman who takes action against even an evil force is still dangerous in that she crosses gender boundaries, and Lucrece’s non- resistance to the rape is easily construed as a type of consent. In fact, Italian
Renaissance revisions of the story, such as those by Coluccio Salutati and Matteo
161 Bandello, frequently suggest that Lucretia feels compelled to die because she did
indeed find pleasure in the rape and was consequently a willing participant.^*
Certainly Shakespeare’s Lucrece is less to blame than Tarquin—this is never in doubt. However, Shakespeare, like Milton, treats at length the familiar motif of the rape victim’s pollution, which places rape firmly into the category of illicit sexuality in the form of adultery.*® The relationship between body and soul upon which
Lucrece muses recalls the Elder Brother’s discussion of the effects of bodily lust upon the soul, even after death:
’My body or my soul, which was the dearer. When the one pure the other made divine? Whose love of either to myself was nearer. When both were kept for heaven and Collatine? (11. 1163-6)
’Her [soul’s] house is sacked, her quiet interrupted. Her mansion battered by the enemy. Her sacred temple spotted, spoiled, corrupted. Grossly engirt with daring infamy. Then let it not be called impiety If in this blemished fort I make some hole Through which I may convey this troubled soul. (11. 1170-6)
Though my gross blood be stained with this abuse. Immaculate and spotless is my mind; That was not forced, that never was inclined To accessary yieldings, but still pure Doth in her poisoned closet yet endure.’ (1655-9)
To Milton, illicit sex is a sinful act that connects the corruption of the body to corruption of the soul, regardless of whether both parties consented to the act
(adultery) or one enforced the other (rape). Shakespeare, however, upholds the purity of Lucrece’s soul despite her infection by Tarquin’s lust and despite any passive part her beauty and chastity may have played in attracting Tarquin. Yet her blood, that
162 mysterious element neither body nor soul but embodying properties of both, is tainted/" Lucrece’s declaration, "My stained blood to Tarquin I’ll bequeath, /
Which by him tainted shall for him be spent" (11. 1181-2), is proved by the narrator’s description: "Some of her blood still pure and red remained, / And some looked black, and that false Tarquin stained" (11. 1742-3). We’re even offered an anatomy lesson in the effects of moral corruption upon the blood:
About the mourning and congealed face Of that black blood a watery rigol goes. Which seems to weep upon the tainted place; And ever since, as pitying Lucrece’ woes, Cormpted blood some watery token shows; And blood untainted still doth red abide. Blushing at that which is so putrified. (11. 1742-1750)
Lucrece’s good blood claims the red of shamefasmess for its color because of the blackness of the tainted blood, which weeps for itself, in an inversion of the battle between beauty and virtue. The final image of Lucrece’s spilled blood leaves the reader to decide whether Lucrece was an entirely innocent victim or in some way complit, whether her soul was entirely innocent or in some way tainted by the act.
These questions and the contradictions apparent in such colorful and graphic depictions of such abstract concepts as beauty, virtue, and violence exist not only in the poetry of Shakespeare and other authors who explored the story of Lucretia but in the visual arts of early modem Europe as well. Lucretia was an extremely popular subject for painting, appearing in works by Titian, Cranach, Reni, and Rembrandt, among others. Two moments from the story were most frequently chosen by artists for their subjects: the rape and the suicide. Donaldson points out the puzzling
163 convention of depicting the rape with a totally-nude Lucretia and an elaborately- clothed (often armored) Tarquin, and he attributes the choice of these artists to either simple delight in the female body or an attempt to build symbolic meaning into the paintings, such as the idea that nudity represents naked virtue, while Tarquin’s armor suggests the warlike status of the rape (see Figure 4.1).'^* In either case, the viewer is invited to find aesthetic pleasure in the eroticized body of the chaste woman during the moment of sexual assault.
However troubling, artists obviously have some justification for depicting
Lucretia unclothed during the rape; Lucretia is, however, also typically shown nude during the suicide (see Figure 4.2). Garrard suggests a disturbing appeal for the nude
Lucretia stabbing herself through the heart: "The image of a naked woman assaulting her own body, frequently the breasts, with a conspicuously phallic object as her instrument, undoubtedly had additional appeal to some viewers, on a grosser sadopomographic level. In visual art, Lucretia’s suicide provides a secondary locus for eroticization, only hinted at by Shakespeare in conjunction with the analogy of sex and death.
Susanna
Whereas Lucretia was popular as a subject for literamre and art in the sixteenth cenmry, Susanna gained ascendency in the seventeenth cenmry. Susanna appears in conduct literamre and catalogues and histories of virmous women as a shining example of married chastity, and her image was painted and engraved by
164 countless artists of the period. "Susanna" even becomes a popular name for girls: as
Linda Woodbridge notes, "perhaps reflecting his age’s interest in this kind of female culture hero, Shakespeare had a daughter Susanna. It is likely that both its Judeo-
Christian (rather than pagan) origins and the divine vindication of her steadfast refusal to commit adultery made the Susanna story less troubling for writers who wanted to exemplify female virtue for a general audience without having to contend with suicide.
However, in much visual art and in at least one literary treatment of the figure, Susanna appears less a model for female virtue (although this is the overt message) than a wholesome excuse for indulging in erotic imagery. A poet or artist might choose the chaste Susanna as his subject in order to mask his foray into erotica, but his eroticization of a pillar of chastity acmally increases the "taboo" aspect of his work: to sexualize that which is ostensibly most protected from being sexualized is a far more adventurous and potentially titillating venture than to present an already sexualized subject in its usual state. Thus a sexualized Susanna is far more risque than a sexualized Venus. As with Lucrece, Susarma’s beauty invites a sexual response in all beholders (readers, viewers, and the gazers within the work alike), who are expected to enjoy the voyeurism from a male subject position. Although
Susanna continues to be perceived as exemplary for her unwavering chastity throughout the period, the focus for nearly all literary and artistic treatments of her is the moment at which she is discovered by the elders nude in her garden bath. By lingering on this moment instead of other events in the narrative that eventually lead
165 to her vindication, Susanna is frozen as an object of desire at the brink of possibly fulfilling those desires. Susanna’s chastity allows her to remain virtuous and worthy of admiration even while her eroticism makes the chaste matron sexually accessible to the male gazer. This accessibility, however, is in direct conflict with the primary qualities of chastity, remoteness and asexuality, and Susanna’s power as chaste exemplar is ultimately compromised and undermined.
The tension created by describing the chaste woman as a seductive woman, which Shakespeare uses to question philosophical distinctions and literary conventions, is used in a different manner by an anonymous writer, "W.V." In The Ladie’s Blush:
The History o f Susanna, the Great Example of Conjugal Chastity, the author uses
Susanna as a vehicle—an unexceptionably moral subject—for frankly erotic imagery, possibly with the aim to authorize a venture into pornographic literature, but certainly to heighten the erotic charge of his imagery. Whereas Shakespeare’s poem overtly exposes the inconsistencies that drive conventional descriptions of chastity and attractive beauty, W.V.’s project relies upon the inconsistencies remaining hidden in order both to justify the erotic and to increase its effect. His store of Petrarchan images fully equips the author for such a treatment, and his extensions and subtle variations of those conventions turn Susanna into a voluptuous, fully sexualized object of desire.
The 1670 poem is subtitled a "heroick poem," implying that high moral virtues will be found within, yet this genre affiliation clashes with the Ovidian, erotic content of the piece, complete with its extended blazon of the nude Susanna’s body from the
166 neck to "nether regions," which almost, but not quite, turns the narrative poem into a
"mock-heroic. In the case of The Ladie’s Blush, the words of the title page alone give the reader no indication of the erotic content within, acting instead as a false moral front. However, the engraved frontispiece opposite the title page (presenting a shockingly graphic depiction of the elders’ assault upon the nude Susanna) belies that moral front and signals the tensions that appear throughout the text (see Figure 4.3).
The sexually-charged illustration and blazons of Susanna set against the solid foundation of the exemplar’s impeccable chastity and her worthiness of receiving divine intervention mire this work in the contradictions between the sacred and the prophane, the chaste and the unchaste, and innocence and culpability at a level beyond the works I have previously examined. The conflict between beauty and chastity in figures such as Florimell and Milton’s Lady remains largely contained within the allegorical structure of those works, which create an intellecmal distance between the reader and the text. In contrast. The Ladie’s Blush and the corpus of visual art with
Susanna as its subject seek to bridge that distance between the reader and the text, or the viewer and the canvas, by enticing the beholder’s desires. If the concept of chastity is already complicated by an underlying contradiction between the sexual nature of women and their transcendent beauty, how much more distorted does this ideal virtue become when used to promote precisely the vice it is designed to
"quench."
As with the Lucretia story, W.V.’s source for his poem contains the seeds of some of these contradictions. The Susanna story derives from a pre-Christian Judaic
167 source that has been included with the other stories that constitute the Apocrypha.
The basic narrative is as follows: Two judges or elders of Babylon repeatedly watch
Susanna, the wife of an eminent Jew, when she goes to walk in her garden. One hot day, they spy her bathing alone in the private garden; they grow lustful, make themselves known to her, and threaten that if she will not lie with them, they will accuse her of adultery. Susanna steadfastly refuses to lie with them, trusting God to keep her from the elders’ wrath. In retribution for this rebuff, the elders claim that they have witnessed Susanna in an adulterous situation with a young man who has since fled. Susanna is publicly tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death by these elders. Divine intervention arrives in the form of young Daniel, who retries Susanna by questioning the elders separately on certain details of their stories. The elders cannot agree on the type of tree beneath which the supposed adultery occurred, for which they are then found guilty of bearing false witness, executed, and Susanna is vindicated.
The accounts translated in the Geneva Bible and the King James Bible weight the events of the story quite evenly: no single event is given significantly more attention than the others. Thus the main thrust of the narrative is the vindication of the wrongly accused through reappraisal of a juridical system that favors the accusation of high-status witnesses, without demanding further proof, over the good reputation of a respected woman. According to Nicholas de Lange the point of the
Susanna story is the need for close examination of witnesses and the punishment of false wimesses: "the separate questioning of witnesses, apparently introduced for the
168 first time here, became a standard feature of judicial procedure. Daniel’s ability to ferret out the truth behind the slander does not, however, depend entirely upon his skill at cross-examination. As an agent of God, he knows the elders’ hardened sin before the examination begins. The Geneva Bible translates the verse thus: "O thou that art olde in a wicked life, now thy sinnes which thou hast committed aforetime, are come to light" (Gen., Susanna 5 2 ) . Daniel can use this particular case to effect change in the system.
In general, however, medieval and early modem literary treatments of the
Susanna story share the Christian didactic themes and images Olga Homer finds in the sixteenth-century morality play by Thomas Garter, The Comedy of the Most Virtuous and Godly Susannaf^ Chastity and lust, mediated by justice, appear as moral focal points in the literary texts, a change in emphasis which leads to more extended treatments of the bathing scene as the site of the elders’ encounter with their own sin and their shift from the sin of private thought to the sin of action against another person. Likewise Susanna’s sincere chastity ultimately vindicates her morally, legally, and socially, but the moment of her assault—the trial of her virtue—receives the greatest attention, and her triumph over vice is exemplary. As an early modern ballad attests, "Why should we not of her leame thus to live godly?Abraham
Darcie insists that, "Susanna’s rare chastity may serve for a patteme to all vertuous
Women to imitate, and to all the rest of the world to admire; who rather then to yeeld to the lascivious lust of the two Elders, resolved to undergoe the ingnominy of a shamefull death.
169 The nature of the elders’ sin, however, and how far Susanna, as the object of desire, is implicated in the origination of that sin is a question that merits closer analysis, even in the Biblical accounts. To give credit where it is due, W.V. adopts for his subject a story that is already rife with inconsistencies regarding Susanna’s part in creating the elders’ lust. According to the translations of the story in the King
James and Geneva Bibles, the first enticement is the sight of Susanna on her walks about the garden:
8. And the two Elders saw her going in every day and walking: so that their lust was inflamed toward her. 9. And they perverted their owne mind, and turned away their eyes, that they might not looke unto heaven, nor remember just judgements. 10. And albeit they both were wounded with her love: yet they durst not one shew another his griefe. (KJ, Sus. 8-10)
At this point in the narrative, no mention has yet been made of Susanna’s beauty, an omission that places the majority of the culpability for their lust directly upon the elders. They are guilty, though Susanna’s beauty initially stirs them, because they
"perverted their owne mind, " and chose to nurture this passion with eyes cast away from heaven, rather than look to heaven for help in ridding them of their desires.
There is, however, a trace of responsibility that lingers with Susanna, for it is
"her love" that "wounds" the elders and causes them "grief. " This ambiguous wording creates a problem for interpretation: what has before and after this moment been described as "their lust" suddenly transforms into "her love. " Added to that grammatical transformation is the change of verb from the passive "inflamed" to the active "wounded. " This small rhetorical moment figuring the causes and effects of
170 love in these sixteenth-century versions of the Biblical Apocrypha serves to confound
an ostensibly clear-cut treatment that embodies lust in the elders and chastity in
Susanna/" The Petrarchan figuration problematizes distinctions between love and
lust and blurs the boundaries of responsibility for passion. Susanna’s physical
appearance is only mentioned in the Biblical accounts during her trial for adultery,
and the translations differ slightly. The King James version reads, "Now Susanna was a very delicate woman, and beauteous to behold. / And these wicked men commanded to uncover her face (for she was covered) that they might be filled with her beauty" (KJ, Sus. 31-32). The Geneva Bible describes Susanna as, "very tender,
and faire of face," and, in this version, the elders command that she be uncovered so that they may be "satisfied" with her beauty (Gen., Sus. 31-32). In both cases, the
sight of Susaima’s face clearly sparks the elders’ passion, and Susanna, uncovered, is both shamed and bared. Regardless of the elders’ culpability for nurmring and acting upon their desires, Susanna retains a degree of responsibility at an ideological level.
Like Vives’s adorned virgin, she is able to wound those who gaze upon her, and the baring of her physical body leads to her intense shame.
A thread of didactic purpose that complements the Biblical story runs through
The Ladie’s Blush, instructing the assuredly male reader in the wages of sin,
admonishing him to beware the negative example of the elders, and praising Susanna
for her virtue. Yet, beneath this didacticism lurks a highly subversive subtext, which
invites the reader to experience the particular vice that the poem appears to warn
against. The author muses on the viciousness of lust:
171 What art thou; Lust? or where is thy black seat? What Dev’lish pow’r did such a fiend beget? Tis thou that mov’st in hell through every part. And (whilst Love bindes the world that nothing start) Confusion bring’st, and shatterest asunder Its pleasant frame, to tremble Nature’s wonder/'
However, the text asks the reader to view the bared Susanna in the same manner as the elders by supplying protracted erotic blazons of her physical body. Although,
W.V. makes some attempt at a Vivesian dualistic treatment of vision in the poem
(eyes are both the physical organs for admitting lust and the spiritual receptacles of divine virtue), this dualism collapses under a lack of distinction between the sacred and the profane. All female beauty can be sexually arousing to the male gazer, regardless of the chastity of the object of that gaze. W.V.’s extended treatment of the effects the sight of Susanna has upon the elders allows all beholders to wallow in her sensuousness despite the pat moralizing that surrounds such indulgence. Susanna’s beauty affects all in like manner: as she undresses and steps into its depths, even the water of the fountain anthropomorphically desires her in the same manner as
Lucrece’s pillow:
Susanna then unveils her orient skin.
Into the Fountain goes, whose amorous brims Dropt tears for joy, t’imbrace such snowie limbs. And curled in a wanton brayd, t’orecome Love’s fire concealed in its watry womb. (15-16)
As the verse continues, it draws the reader into like desires, inviting him to envy the elders who see her and the author who holds the power to tease the reader through description: "Had you but seen, when yet she was half-bare, / Part of her Mantle
172 sporting with the air, / The rest in folds about her middle bom" (16). The elders,
ever-watching, are present to witness this unveiling, and the situation is likened to a
merchant ship at long last spying the land of plenty:
Her Rosie Brests like two Indies stand, A Globed Hemisphere on either hand;
And hither Merchants, laden with desire. Hurry to quench the flames of fire with fire. The other Regions which beneath those lay. Are not unfitly term’d Incognita, Hid by the swelling water, which denies Further pursuit to our discoveries. (17)
Her undiscoverable lower "regions, " jealously guarded by the amorous water, are
described, however, if only through a deferred comparison: The elders
. . . conclude, from what they saw. An image they of th’unseen features draw. And argue from the lesser; Vales close by Must needs abound with more variety: For when hills vaunt their fruitful pride, sure we In lower parts shall richer pasture see. (17)
The elders make their way to this "richer pasture", steered on by "Lust’s most hungry
rage": "Behold your peace, rejoyce, for yonder is / Th’expected port of all true
happiness, / Where bliss more then eternal rests in store: / Go, and possess; what can be wisht-for more?" (18).
Susanna is here transformed like Lucrece into a purely physical production, a
destination for finding treasure, ver>' much like the mistress in Donne’s elegy, who
becomes, "O my America! my new-found-land, I . . . I My mine of precious stones,
my empery. Like Lucrece, and in contrast to the metaphorical treasure of a
woman’s chastity in other works, the treasure here is the female body itself, or, more
173 to the point, that body’s ability to bring about male sexual climax. W.V. does gesture towards a dualistic use of the treasure metaphor in The Ladie’s chastity is the true treasure and the alluring female body is false treasure—but the distinctions are not convincing. When Susanna’s spiritual chastity is likened to treasure, the metaphor seems merely conventional; it is not given the extended treatment that her body receives: she is described by Daniel as a woman, "Whose spotless dealings so resplendent are, / Adorn’d with Vertue, that renowned Gem" (35), and her refusal to give in to the elders earns her the right to immortal fame: "O glorious woman! may this ever be / A Jewel to adorn thy memory!" (37). Her virtue is simply overwhelmed by her physical presence: "Besides her Beauty, which was highly fair, /
Her youth and comeliness beyond compare / Greater perfections she yet own’d, chaste, good" (3-4). Susanna’s "greater perfections" are an afterthought to her more notable fair beauty, youth, and comeliness. Despite brief praises of virtue that frame the poem and the frequent descriptions of lust’s evil, the attention to Susanna’s erogenous zones cannot be easily reconciled with her status as an exemplar of chastity; her sexual body is far too prominent for the reader to believe that it is described only to give reason for the elders’ wickedness. Indeed, Daniel’s comment at the end of the poem is easy to dismiss: "Could Beauty thus bewitch you? why then
see / Its full perfection, blest Eternity" (36). No distinction between true and false beauty can obtain, if the model of chastity herself can be described in such erotic detail.
174 Susaima’s status as a moral exemplar infused with divine virtue is in conflict with her physical description in the poem, and this conflict is also apparent in the writer’s use of other figures of comparison: the Virgin Mary, Eve, and Aphrodite.
She is as "milde as Euphrates’s Silver-flood, / Which softly gliding where old Eden lies, / Seems here to court a better Paradise" (4), by which Susanna, like Mary, is to redeem Eve by passing the trial of her virtue. During her bath, Susanna’s body is likened to the prelapsarian Eve’s: "Like Eve’s in Eden, ere imperious sin / First found an Apple, then a Leaf to hide / The spotted Beauty of her new-born pride"
(15). Once she is spied by the elders, she appears like the goddess of love: "Ye fabulous Ancients! was not this same She / Your Aphrodite, descended of the Sea?"
(16). Susanna’s moral and physical likeness depends upon the events of the narrative: before the elders see her, she is a "better Paradise," thoroughly good; once unclothed, her body holds the focus, but she is still good, yet-unsullied by the shame of the Fall; once the elders see her, however, Susanna appears as the sensual goddess: beautiful, desirable, and immoral. Regardless of whether this reference to Aphrodite reflects the Elders’ perception of her or a more "objective" comparison by the narrator,
Susanna has the ability to appear as a sexual, potentially unchaste woman. Even the likeness to prelapsarian Eve has built into it the postlapsarian Eve whose virtue is found wanting, and both Eves resonate in the description of the bathing Susanna.
Susanna’s moral resemblance changes with the elders’ actions: their lust has the power to transform her from Mary to Eve to Aphrodite, despite her ignorance of their intentions (at that point in the narrative). Utterly passive, Susanna is molded by the
175 reactions of others to her. As an analog to all three figures, Susanna’s moral nature is in conflict with her physical nature: she bears no resemblance to Vives’s chaste woman whose face quenches the fires of lust. Her chastity adds no hint of divine untouchability to her physical presence.
Although Susanna apparently has no power over her appearance, her sexual assault is figured in terms of a temptation that grants her too much power over the actions of the elders. If Susanna’s beauty is a wholly passive lure to the elder’s passions, her supposed ability to choose whether or not she will commit adultery with them is a sign of exaggerated agency; indeed, Susanna’s inherent sexual nature is brought into question. If she is not tempted, she cannot be overcome, and the violence of rape is suppressed, though not entirely eradicated, in The Ladie’s Blush.
The author’s preface highlights the conflation of temptation with assault, wherein he interprets the events of the narrative. This Preface, suspiciously addressed to "the
Amorous Readers," offers this explanation of Susanna’s plight:
What can be imagin’d more needy approaching Martyrdome it self, then for a young Lady, of transcendent Beauty, to be brought to a publick and shameful Execution, surrounded with her disgrac’d and lamenting Relations, to avoid a pleasure she had often tasted (as being a Wife) and might then have accepted from persons who manag’d the Government of her Nation? . . . Could there be a greater discovery of Resolution, then for a delicate person of that tender Sexe, to prefer Stoning in the open field before the pressing sollicitations of two Elderly, yet not too far superannuated Gallants, in the shady solitude of a Garden? But never was so violent a temptation so bravely oppos’d, (sig. A4)
In this passage, the "solicitations" of the Elders are described as a temptation to the sexually experienced Susanna, particularly because this accords with the misogynistic
176 tradition that women are subject to barely controlled lust. When faced with any sexual invitation, only the most virtuous and resolute women will refuse. Now, as this passage continues, the "pressing solicitations" begin to resemble rape;
Let any but imagine the horrour it must have been to her, to be so strangely surpriz’d in that posture of Paradise; and what confusion of thoughts it must have rais’d in her, to observe . . . two persons so little expected, and . . . to finde herself within their unwelcome embraces. . . . What a recollection of vermous and Matrimoniall obligations was requisite, to withstand the shock of so sudden an assault, (sig. A4)
The language of assault coexists with the language of temptation. It is Susanna’s memory of "Matrimonial obligations" that powers her resistance, not the possibility that she lacks the desire to lie with these men. Rape (or coercion) is never an issue.
Like Vives’s virgin, Susaima is over-empowered with total choice—she consents or she refuses, but she cannot really be forced.
The description of the assault within the poem largely bears out the author’s comments in the preface, but the assault is prolonged through a series of sophistic arguments, alternated with descriptions of physical force. Their first assay is forceful:
So they by Lust’s most hungry rage compell’d, Susanna in their eager gripings held. She strives and cries: alas! what should she do? One naked woman in the arms of two. Not men, but monsters, such as Poets feign. The Cyclops were, that did in Aetna reign. (18)
Clearly, Susanna has no physical power to deny the elders anything; if they wish to rape her, they have the strength to do so. Yet, they try to gain her consent: "Fair creature, now behold the doors / Are all made fast, y’are now within our pow’rs; /
177 Yet we intreat: consent, come, do n’t deny; / We’re smitten, Lady, and with you must lie" (19). Threats and persuasion form the basis for the elders’ argument, but, unlike Milton’s Lady, Susanna has no rhetoric to argue against their sophistry: her powers of reason and rebuttal have little to do with her refusal to submit. When faced with their threat to expose her as an adulteress, she is left with "A strange
Dilemma put forth to perplex / The wav’ring judgement of that tender Sex" (19). She must rely on fear of God and her rote knowledge of the Law:
If I consent, by Moses Law ’tis said. No wife shall climb up to anothers bed Unpunisht; which divine decree implies Death the reward of all Adultries. But if refuse, y’already have design’d What base return true Vertue’s like to finde! Howere I must not, dare not sin: your skill Extends no further then this life to kill. (19-20)
Finding no success through threats, the elders try a persuasive tactic that resembles
Comus’s specious philosophy of beauty:
Y’are young, and handsom, of a comely feature; Can it be thought ere God made such a creature For one man’s sole embraces? . . .
Observe the Air, nothing more spotless is. Yet in a thousand thousand bosomes lies. Y’are bom not for your self; the Lord doth hate Those that are backward to communicate And rashness ’tis t’engross Heav’ns liberal store. Lest he who gave too much, should give no more. (20-21)
This figuration of woman’s beauty as (in Comus’s words) "Nature’s coin" certainly fits with the elders’ overall response to Susanna as a commodity to be consumed, and this argument is clearly meant to be specious. Yet the author’s similar
178 commodification of Susanna for the reader’s consumption is left without comment or comparison, subtly undermining all such overt attempts to moralize.
I come now to the moment in the poem that most concisely signals the complex conflation of responsibility and victimization that lies below the metaphors, blazons, overt sophistry, and didacticism. The elders’ final persuasive ploy is, like
Tarquin’s, to blame Susanna for their lust: "’Tis you that gave it life, the fault is yours; / Do but consent, and then it shall be ours" (21). It is worth reading these two lines very closely. The elders claim that Susanna is wholly responsible for the yearning inspired by the sight of her physical beauty. This claim relies upon two assumptions: first, beauty can be recognized by an objective standard, and second, all men will react the same way to the same degree of beauty in a woman. The only way Susanna can remove herself from this responsibility, the argument continues, is to allow the elders to satisfy their yearning by acting upon her. Her non-resistance, in the form of active consent, will allow them to take the action that they claim will shift blame onto them. Her passive beauty leads to lust in them, which (the argument insists) becomes their responsibility as soon as they act upon it. The elders expect
Susanna, with her "wavering judgment, " to accept their reasoning, which is, by contemporary moral standards, faulty. Susanna, by consenting to their demands, would be committing the grave sin of adultery, regardless of anything that came before, during, or after. The only way to vindicate herself is to do what she does— fight against them: she "Cry’d out aloud, O Heav’n avenge this crime! / And shriek’d so" (21). Indeed, even W.V.’s genealogy of vice, reminiscent of Milton’s in
179 Paradise Lost, aligns Susanna with evil by placing her in the position of mother of
Death, despite her lack of consent, the elders’ lack of success, and Susanna’s vindication; "Sin, when conceiv’d. Lust for a parent hath, / Lust the Grandsire unto that monster Death; / A wretched off-spring by these Elders got / Upon Susanna, though they knew her not. (24-5) Susanna is not actively involved, but the generative nature of the passage forces Susanna into the position of nurturing the growing monster within her.
The elders, however, are not completely wrong by the internal logic of the rest of the poem and that which is built into the problematic concept of contemporary chastity. Although the elders’ second statement ("Do but consent, and then it shall be ours") is clearly specious, the first statement ("’Tis you that gave it life, the fault is yours") is not so easily dismissed if we remember Vives and the necessity for veiling beauty. Susanna may not have knowingly invited the gaze of the elders, but it was invited nonetheless. Susanna cannot be fully free from culpability as long as she is visible, and the author has made sure to keep her very visible, with frequent reminders of her nakedness.
As in the Biblical accounts, Susanna’s face is unveiled in front of the friends and family gathered to see her tried for adultery, and the narrator comments upon the various degrees of Susanna’s beauty under such stress. Susanna’s face, beneath her veil, is described to the reader as somewhat marred by grief over her impending death: "Where think what blubber’d eyes, what dreadful grace / By this usurpt the splendour of her face. / And blame her not, when harmless soul she’s come / From
180 wicked hands to take her final doom" (25). The narrator, however, insists that despite her crying, Susanna’s face still merits praise: "Yet ne’rtheless her glorious beauty shone, / Like to the Studs of Ariadne’s Crown; / Or as the Sun, after a latter rain, / Out of the clouds begins to peep again" (26). Once the reader has this description, the elders command that she be unveiled: "Wherefore these wicked
Belials gave command / T’uncover her, that she might bare-fac’d stand, / And with her Beauty feast their hungry eye, / Before the sentence pass’d that she should die"
(26). Once again allied with the elders, the reader is given a chance to "feast" his
"hungry eye" upon Susanna. The veil is useless, in this case, for protecting the chaste woman from the eyes of men: not only do the men in the narrative have the power to uncover her, the narrator allows the reader to gaze upon her before she is unveiled.
What are we to make of these conflicted representations of the exemplary chaste Susanna? Is the author using the chaste subject as simply an excuse for erotica? Or is he entrapping his reader by eliciting desire only to admonish him for having that response? The Ladie’s Blush is an unusual literary treatment of the chaste woman, but such erotic depictions were quite common in the visual arts. By 1670, when The Ladle’s Blush was published, the reader would have been well-conditioned to accept and enjoy depictions of an eroticized Susanna (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5). As
Peter Webb points out, "The sixteenth-century artist had to observe a convention which made nude paintings per se unthinkable. . . . Figures from Greek mythology rivalled saints and biblical characters in Renaissance painting, providing endless
181 opportunities for erotic portrayal. Noble patrons, mostly male, increasingly
sought erotic paintings to adorn private rooms, and even the exclusively-male Church became a large source of patronage for artists who painted religious subjects in like manner. Webb explains, "Yet even here, erotic themes or undertones are frequently present. Certain Old Testament stories were ideal for erotic treatment, such as
Susanna at her bath spied upon by the Elders (painted by Tintoretto, Domenichino,
Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Palma Vecchio, etc.)."^'^ Artists in the Netherlands would also use Susanna and other religious subjects for erotic portrayal. Susanna was not exclusively an upper-class phenomenon, however. Prints from engravings copied from such paintings allowed the image of the erotic Susanna to circulate into the middling and lower classes, making such a treatment of the chaste figure fairly commonplace for men and women of all classes. Mary D. Garrard notes the frequent resemblance between Susanna and Venus and wryly attributes the use of the chaste exemplum as a celebration of sexual opportunity to the indomitable male ego.^^ The engraved frontispiece in the first edition of The Ladie’s Blush highlights the erotic, but disturbingly violent, nature of the poem (refer back to Figure 4.3). Susanna resembles a marble statue, smooth, nearly featureless, and utterly passive as she suffers the elders’ violation. The elders’ bold stare at the viewer while reaching for
Susanna’s "nether regions," appears accusatory, suggesting that the viewer is capable of the same passions, and the text that follows does indeed test those passions.
The depictions of the exemplary Susanna and Lucretia seen above offer testimony to the eroticization of chastity in early modem England; the virtue that is
182 adamantly asexual, that stands for the complete mastery of fleshly desires, can promote those desires, whether intentionally or otherwise. Jeremy Taylor’s worrisome balance between the author’s responsibility for inciting desire in the reader and that reader’s responsibility for approaching the text with a "chast spirit" provides an analog for that of the chaste beauty who becomes the object of unwanted passion.
We are left with the questions, where does responisbility lie? and does such erotic representation effectively obliterate the lessons that the reader is to learn about the heroism of chaste figures? The contradictions built into such representations would continue to fuel inconsistent attitudes toward women as women themselves carefully negotiated the path to proper conduct.
183 1
Figure 4.1; Titian, Tarquin and Lucretia (Warburg Institute files).
184 190. Jü«» van Qc\*c,Luaxtia, early 19». Guido Rcni (acrribuccd lo) ^LucrxtM^ sbcccenth ccntucy\ Vienna, 5c\*cutccnth ccnniiy. Formerly Kunsthi’tcorischcs Museum Lanviuwnc Coltcaion
;:i-. S doma, Lucr::U m a î^misiape, t«S. Lucas Cranach, Lucretia, c. I-:ai:no%cf, Vienna. Cenuldegalcric dcr .'■.'icvlcr .act’.^ibcSie» Landcsmtocum .\kadcr.*.ic dcr bildcr.dcn Kunsrc
Figure 4.2; Sixteenth-century treatments of Lucretia’s suicide (Garrard, An'anesia
Genuleschi, pp. 224-5)
185 B
A
Conjugal Chaftity
Figure 4.3: Frontispiece to The Ladies Blush.
186 I
Figure 4.4: Willem van Mieris, Susanna and the Elders, 1691 (Warburg Instimte files).
187 Figure 4.5: Annibale Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, c. 1590 (Warburg Institute files)
188 NOTES
1. Thomas Buoni, The Problèmes ofBeautie and ail humane affections, p. 159.
2. Christiopher Newstead, An Apology for Women, p. 16. Newstead attributes the verse to a song by Drayton (with a female speaker).
3. Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Il.ii. 175-82.
4. This is not to imply that women readers or gazers cannot enjoy female erotic subjects—the subject position constructed by these works is male.
5. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude, p. 104.
6. The Book of Common Prayer's "Form for the Solemnization of Matrimony" and the "Homily on Matrimony" list the purposes for marriage as procreation, the avoidance of fornication, and companionship.
7. Jeremey Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (London, 1674), p. 65. This tenth edition of the work appears twenty-three years after its first publication in 1651.
8. Taylor, Rule, p. 65.
9. The idea that all drives or desires are at root sexual is essentially Freudian, but this idea has been taken from the level of individual psychology and applied to power relations by Foucault. See History of Sexuality I, Part Four, Chapter One.
10. Although medieval and Renaissance commentators generally commend the value she placed on her virtue, they disagree about whether to judge her suicide by Roman or Christian standards. See Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), ch. 1 passim.
11. Vives, Instruction, sig. G4.
12. Abraham Darcie, The Honour of Ladies, p. 98.
13. James Yates Servingman, The Chariot of Chastitie (London: 1582), p. 35''.
14. On the Shakespeare’s sources for Lucrece, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources for Shakespeare (New York and London: Columbia University Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), vol. 1; and Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950).
15. Livy, History of Rome, in Livy in Fourteen Volumes, tr. B. O. Foster, Book I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) pp. 199, 201.
189 16. Ovid, Ovid’s Fasti, tr. Sir James George Frazer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 113.
17. Ovid, Fasti, p. 113.
18. Shakespeare, The Rape ofLucrece, The Narrative Poems, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Penguin, 1989), 11. 243, 279. All quotations are from this edition, and line numbers are cited in the text.
19. Coppelia Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece," Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-72, pp. 54-5; and Nancy J. Vickers, "’This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face,’" in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 209-22, pp. 210, 213, and passim.
20. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 102. Rhetorical studies of Lucrece include Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Sr. Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia Univerity Press, 1947); Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1984); and Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
21. Studies that foreground the way rhetorical practice intersects with gender, rape, and sexuality include Nancy Vickers, "‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95-115; and "‘This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face,’"; Katherine Eisaman Mans, "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape ofLucrece" Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82; Linda Woodbridge, "Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic, " Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327-54; Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape," Representations 20 (1987): 25-76; David Wilbem, "Hyberbolic Desire: Shakespeare’s Lucrece," in Contending Kingdoms, eds. Mari-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 202-24; and Phillipa Berry, "Woman, Language, and History in The Rape ofLucrece," Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 33-39. Other recent studies of Lucrece that focus on gender, rape, and sexuality include Georgianna Ziegler, "My lady’s chamber: female space, female chastity in Shakespeare," Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73-90; Laura Bromley, "Lucrece’s Re-Creation" Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 200-11; Catherine R. Stimpson, "Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape" in The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 57-64; and Coppelia Kahn’s ground breaking feminist studies, "The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece"-, and "Lucrece: The Sexual
190 Politics of Subjectivity," in Rape and Representation, eds. Lynn A Higgins and Brenda R. Silver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 141-59.
22. See Vickers, "Diana Described"; "’The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’"; and "’This Heraldry.’"
23. Vickers, "’The Blazon,’" p. 96.
24. By drawing an analogy between Lucrece and Medusa as her closing comment in "’This Heraldry,’" Vickers does allude to a "deep ambivalence" in the text (p. 220). Phillipa Berry argues for Lucrece’s subjectivity by examining the character’s rhetoric in "Woman, Language and History. "
25. Mans, "Taking Tropes Seriously," p. 78.
26. Kahn, "The Rape," p. 51.
27. Kahn, "The Rape," p. 52.
28. Dubrow notes the confusion about the definition of chastity definition: Captive Victors, p. 147.
29. Kahn, "The Rape," p. 51.
30. Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories, " p. 138. See also Annette Kolodny, The Lay o f the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
31. Dubrow, Captive Victors, p. 102.
32. Fineman, "Shakespeare’s Will." Fineman argues that chiasmus "is understood to motivate desire in general and rape in particular" (39).
33. Woodbridge, "Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic," p. 331.
34. Kahn, "The Rape," p. 49.
35. Dubrow, Captive Victors, p. 90. See also Donaldson, The Rapes, pp. 33-4.
36. For more in-depth discussions of Augustinian and Renaissance reactions to Lucrece’s suicide, see Donaldson, ch. 1; Dubrow, Captive Victors, ch. 3; and Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989), ch. 1.
37. Newstead, An Apology for Women, pp. 14-15.
191 38. Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 217.
39. Woodbridge discusses the pollution of Lucrece's blood by invoking the theory of Mary Douglas. See "Palisading," p. 336.
40. Gail Kern Paster stresses the cultural importance of blood as a transmitter of heredity during the period: "the relationship between blood and the individual body containing it was no less ideological than physiological. In one’s blood were carried the decisive attributes of one’s cultural identity." See The Body Embarassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modem England (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 66.
41. Donaldson, The Rapes, pp. 13-15.
42. Garrard, Artemesia, p. 210.
43. Woodbridge, "Palisading," p. 338. See also Chapter Five for a discussion of Dorothy Leigh on Susanna and naming in The Mother’s Blessing.
44. David O. Frantz notes that erotic literature does not only exist as a separate genre of "pornography" but crosses all genres. See Festum Voluptatis (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990), p. 209.
45. Nicholas de Lange, Apocrypha: Jewish Literature of the Hellenic Age (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 128. See also commentaries on the Geneva Bible.
46. For clarity, when quoting from the King James and Geneva Bibles, I use the designation "KJ" or "Gen.," followed by "Susanna" and verse numbers. All citations appear within the text.
47. Olga Homer, "Susaima’s Double Life, " Medieval English Theatre 8 (1986): 76- 102, p. 81.
48. "An excellent Ballad entituled The Constancy of Susanna" (London, n.d.).
49. Darcie, Honour of Ladies, pp. 97-8.
50. In the sixteenth cenmry, Philippa Berry argues, the female beloved was perceived as mediating between and melding opposing modes of love—that is, sacred love and lust. See Of Chastity and Power, p. 37.
51. W.V. The Ladie’s Blush: Or, the History of Susanna, the Great Example of Conjugal Chastity (London, 1670), p. 24. All subsequent quotations are cited in die text.
52. John Donne, "Elegy XIX," 11. 27-29.
192 53. Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975), p. 111.
54. Webb, Erotic Arts, p. 124.
55. Garrard, Artemesia, p. 191.
193 CHAPTER 5
ETHOS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CHASTITY: WOMEN WRITERS
Truth is, their tongues are held their defensive armour; but in no particular detract they more from their honour, than by giving too free scope to that gibbery member. . . . Bashful silence is an ornament to their Sexe. Volubility of tongue in these, argues either rudenesse of breeding, or boldnesse of expression.*
Man said once: The woman which thou gavest me beguiled me and I did eat. But we women now may say that men lie in wait every where to deceive us, as the Elders did deceive Susanna.^
Two Ladies arguing whether Lucretia Kill’d her selfe for her Husband’s Honour or for her Own, at last grew so Earnest in their Discourse, as they fell to Quarrel with each other. . . . Give me leave Ladies, said I, to ask you what Lucretia was to either of you? . . . why should you two Ladies fall out, and become Enemies for Lucretia’s sake, whom you never knew or heard of, but as in an Old Wife’s Tale?3
I open this, my final chapter, with three epigraphs heralding a turn of attention toward a selection of works by seventeenth-century women writers which respond in a variety of ways to the wealth of male-authored representations of women’s chastity.
My first epigraph, a return to Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman, exemplifies the pervasive implicit assumption about the intimate connection between women’s silence and their chastity—their "honour"—a coimection that posed an enormous obstacle for the woman writer, whatever the content of her writings. Aim Rosalind Jones suggests
194 that women were bound by the "chastity-silence equation": "ideological pressures worked against [women’s] entry into the public world of print: female silence was equated with chastity, female eloquence with promiscuity. Yet, early modem women did learn to manoeuver around this stricture and publish a surprising number and variety of writings by invoking the power of chastity to protect their authorial ethos from charges of boldness, immodesty, and wantonness.^
Women writers also, because they engage in a socially- and morally- questionable activity, either set out to obliterate the silence-chastity equation entirely or attempt to justify their own writings through appeals to usefulness, virtue, or necessity. Writing about chastity provided an opportunity to express themselves verbally in the service of usefulness and virtue. The activity of women writers sharply escalates in the middle of the seventeenth-century. The years of political and economic unrest in England surrounding the Civil Wars provided a unique opportunity
(however negative the inducements) for women to enter the public "sphere" on a regular basis through such actions as petitioning to regain property and testifying in court.® Thus, while earlier women writers struggled to create opportunities for their writing, many writers later in the century took advantage of the chaos of the Civil
War and justified their writings as exceptional acts, like those performed by heroic female exempla in the catalogues and histories of virtuous women.
Like their male counterparts, women writers frequently investigated and championed the cause of female chastity, yet, as my second and third epigraphs show, they did not always obediently reproduce the chastity topos that male writers
195 employed, nor, on the other hand, did they simply resist the wholesale exaltation of the virtue. Their writings, however, are not without the tensions and contradictions that come from using the language and often the tropes of the male writers to build a new construction of the virtue. Women writers of the period negotiated with the representations and ideological encodings that they had received from male writers in order to reclaim chastity as an empowering quality that is neither cancelled out by female speech nor always already decayed by the seductive lure of women’s chaste beauty. In general, women writers present an altered picture of chastity, one that gives men back responsibility for their own desirous response to female beauty. They also question the ways exemplars have been and can be used to illustrate women’s virtue and abilities.
In this chapter, I explore the creation of ethos and other rhetorical strategies employed in a variety of these works, advice books, persuasive essays, prose romance, and lyric poetry. I end with a discussion of two autobiographies written during the Civil War; this genre provides an example of the blurring of boundaries between author and subject and leaves the modem reader with a sense of how women of the period lived their lives (or wished others to think they lived) under the ever- looming presence of the ideal of chastity, even in times of crisis.
Ethos, Virtue, and Female Authorship
Most works by seventeenth-century women exhibit a self-conscious awareness that writing is a risky activity in terms of the author’s reputation for both moral and
196 intellectual virtue. As women had long been the subject of literature, not the authorities that produced it, Wendy Wall asks, "If women were tropes necessary to the process of writing, if they were constructed within genres as figures for male desire, with what authority could they publish?"’ But it was not only because women were inscribed by male authors for rhetorical purposes that they had a more difficult time authorizing themselves. Additionally, ethos—the entire character and nature of the rhetor—had been based upon a masculine ideal since Socrates. The woman writer was forced to to create an authoritative and virtuous ethos against a firmly-entrenched and long-standing tradition of the "good man speaking well. Such a credible ethos would help to deflect attention away from the perceived impropriety of the writing-act and towards the content of her writings, and a number of strategies were employed to such an end. Beneath them all, however, lies the moral virtue of chastity, without which (as Vives tells us), all other virtues are "as nought."
The general problem at the heart of ethos-creation for women writers of the seventeenth century evolved in part from the constant repetition by Renaissance male writers of two scriptural writings: Paul’s decree against women’s speech and authority
("Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak," and "Let the woman leam in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over a man, but to be in silence");^ and from interpretations of Eve’s initial lack of obedience as grounded in both moral and intellectual weakness.'® As women were widely perceived as naturally deficient in both moral and intellectual virtue, the two fundamental qualities of the rhetor in
197 classical rhetorical theory, those who wished to write were at a tremendous disadvantage before they had even put pen to page." Certainly morals and intellect could be improved, and though the early Humanists Erasmus and More, and a handful of other educational reformers, believed that education led to higher virtue for both men and women, Vives’s ideal predominately held for women throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—attention to retaining chastity was study enough." The great triumvirate of desirable female attributes—chastity, silence, and obedience—were so often conflated that a morally virtuous woman was a silent woman, and a woman who aspired to intellectual knowledge was suspected of the kind of moral weakness that led to Eve’s disobedience, which weakness impinged on her reputation for chastity." Moreover, a woman who presumed to instruct others through her words usurped God-given male authority. Male ethos relied upon a fusion of both virtues, but the virtues themselves were in opposition for the woman writer. Given this dilemma, the seventeenth-cenhuy woman writer’s concern for ethos at times overwhelms her project with overt references to and defenses of her authority to write and her personal moral virtue. The fundamental question of whether a woman has the ability to reason and form logical arguments is at the root of her credibility as a persuasive writer, and she cannot possibly gain the reader’s goodwill if she is not considered a source of moral and intellecmal virtue. Women who wished to publish their writings were forced to circumvent this paradox in whatever way they could.
198 One strategy for combatting the cultural exclusion of women from public discourse involved a frontal attack, although this position intrinsically requires anonymity for the woman writer. Bathsua Makin’s An Essay to Revive the Antient
Education of Gentlewomen (1673), written imder the anonymous persona of an
English gentleman, makes just such an attack, which allows for a forceful and overt stance without implicating the writer’s own moral v irtu e.M ak in ’s own education was remarkable by contemporary standards; the daughter of a schoolmaster and sister- in-law to a celebrated scholar, John Pell, she was early in her life adept in many languages and arts and held the position of governess to Charles I’s daughter, the
Princess Elizabeth.'® Late in life, she opened the school for middling and upper class girls that is advertised at the end of her Essay. Makin appropriates the humanist stance that education leads to virtue and piety, and she argues that young women need to receive training and instruction in the rhetorical arts in order to realize their potential for virtue. By linking virtue and (properly-trained) speech, Makin attempts to overturn the silence-chastity equation and subtly undergird her own persuasive project.
Makin refutes the usual objections that women’s education is against custom by showing, through a catalogue of exempla drawn from biblical, classical, and
English history, that not only is it not unnamral for women to leam, but that there are many precedents for this practice throughout history. She openly argues that the pursuit of virtue and piety are the ultimate ends for education (against the pragmatic attitude that education fits one for employment), a pursuit from which both sexes will
199 benefit.^’ She even makes use of the conventional belief in women’s originary moral weakness in order to encourage their education: "I think the greater Care ought to be taken of Them: Because Evil seems to be begun here, as in Eve, and to be propogated by her Daughters" (7). However, Makin’s exempla provide multiple illustrations of women who did, in fact, participate in public life, albeit in times of crisis.^* Although they generally praise instances of female wisdom and judgment, most catalogues focus upon women remarkable for their piety, faithfulness, and chastity.*® Makin diverges from conventional catalogues of good women by creating categories according to women’s contributions to or participation in the learned arts, in effect inscribing a history of learned women. The bulk of the essay is organized around headings such as, "Women Educated in Arts and Tongues, have been eminent in them" (9), and "Women have been profound Philosophers" (13), followed by discussions of the those who have achieved fame in these areas. Makin claims,
"Women have not been meet Talkers: (as some frivolous Men would make them) but they have known how to use Languages, when they have had them. Many Women have been excellent Orateurs. " She describes numerous heroic women who were willing and able to defend themselves rhetorically in legal and political arenas (when no on else would rise to the task), were plentiful and, despite their public appearances, remained "modest" and "discreet" in accordance with cultural values.
Heroism, Makin implies in her essay, is more than the passive virtues commonly attributed to good women, although those are necessary and in evidence as well. Modesty and chastity are foundational, but such virtues as courage and
200 eloquence are what make good women great (and are in no way signs of disorderly crossing of gender-boundaries). Thus Makin illustrates that solid study of the principles and practice of rhetoric directly counter a woman’s vulnerability to a host of wrongs and her ignorant inability to perform right actions: "She could not open her
Mouth with Wisdom, and have in her Tongue the Law of kindness, unless she understood Grammar, Rhetorick, and Logick" (35).
Although Makin makes a case for women’s abilities, she does not want to be identified by the reader as female: the prefatory note to the reader asserts, "I am a
Man my self, that would not suggest a thing prejudicial to our Sex" (5). This identification with the masculine is aimed at achieving what Kenneth Burke calls
"consubstantiality"—a oneness with the dominant group, which, in this case, consists of gentlemen with potentially educable daughters.^® By linking herself to the reader’s own group identification, she can hope to achieve both credibility in the eyes of the reader, as a like-minded man, and a positive hearing for unorthodox views. By cutting off her identification with women, Makin removes any implication that she is unauthorized to speak because of her own suspect morality and intellect. She suppresses her authorial self in the interest of her cause of education, which, ideally, would make such suppression unnecessary in the future. Her subtextual message is that women will only be seen as respected and convincing writers after they are allowed the benefit of an education that teaches the necessary language arts, an endeavor that can only bolster virtue. Makin establishes a small but significant defiance against popular opinion with her positive assertions about women’s enduring
201 natural abilities, and she subtly subverts the places in the essay where she openly acquiesces to male authority. Her entire project, a published persuasive essay advertising the competence of a woman teacher and written by a woman (though not overtly so), stands as a prime example of that unsanctioned act—public oration and claimed authority. Makin herself becomes a member of her catalogue of exemplary women; she joins the ranks of her newly-acknowledged tradition of learned women as one who speaks out against the wrongs of her society when no one else would.:
I hope Women will make another use of what I have said; instead of claiming honour from what Women have formerly been, they will labour to imitate them in learning those Arts their Sex hath invented, in studying those Tongues they have understood, and in practising those Virtues shadowed under their Shapes; the knowledge of Arts and Tongues, the exercise of Virtue and Piety, will certainly (let men say what they will) make them honourable. (21-2)
While Makin’s persuasive tactics, which depend upon eliding her gender, are relatively rare in the sevententh-century, it is even more unusual to find women who use their true identities to make such frontal attacks against speech prohibitions.
Margaret Fell Fox, later wife to Quaker leader George Fox, was incarcerated for public preaching and wrote an essay in her defense while in prison. Women’s
Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures (1667) meticulously reinterprets Scripture in an attempt to counter current arguments against women preaching.^^ In a complicated interdependency, this apparently objective, general task of defending all women’s right to speak subtly justifies her own writing. Two complementary methods can be detected in Fell’s overt message and in her own ethos-
202 formation: she advocates one brand of authorization, prophecy from God, and performs another, logical argumentation.
Fell’s argument hinges upon making distinctions between the authority the wife owes to her husband and her relationship to other men, and between women who speak for God and those not divinely inspired. She claims that Paul’s injunctions about usurping authority refer to the marriage relationship: "Here the Apostle speaks particularly to a woman in relation to her husband, to be in subjection to him, and not to teach, nor usurp authority over him" (370). She also extends her argument to include unmarried women: "If you tie this to all outward women, then there were many women that were widows which had no husbands to leam of, and many were virgins which had no husbands" (372). Presumably, any woman who was unmarried or had her husband’s permission to speak would be exempt from this command, as she would not be usurping authority from the only male to whom she owed absolute obedience. Yet Fell makes another exception for any woman who prophesies. Paul’s words may be God’s Law, but God can grant dispensation to His Law to anyone at any time:
Where women are led by the spirit of God, they are not under the Law, for Christ in the male and in the female is one; and where he is made manifest in male and female, he may speak, for "he is the end of the Law for righteousness to all them that believe. " So here you ought to make a distinction what sort of women are forbidden to speak, such as were under the Law, who were not come to Christ, nor to the spirit of prophecy. (372)
Fell is effectively historicizing Scripture by tying Paul’s words to the women under the Old Law. Once women are accepted in Christ, they are exempt from the Law
203 that disallows their speech. She adds numerous female exempla from the Bible whose speech was justified by God, and clarifies the distinction between prophecy and worthless speech: "So in this true church, sons and daughters do prophesy, women labor in the gospel, but the apostle permits not tattlers, busybodies; and such as usurp authority over the man would not have Christ reign, nor speak neither in the male nor female" (376). This speech resonates with the analogy of the woman as the church and the bride of Christ. In fact, given this analogy, a woman has a greater responsibility to obey Christ as her eternal husband than the temporal husband to whom she owes earthly obedience. As with Anne Askew and a handful of Puritan women, if duty to these two "husbands" conflicts, duty to Christ must be a woman’s inevitable choice. Fell justified her own speech through the argument that women can act as conduits for God’s word: although this argument effectively effaces women’s speech as self-created in thinking subjects. Fell’s own construction of the essay belies this effacement. Her essay is simultaneously a forum for proving her ability to perform Biblical exegesis and construct logical arguments and, she infers, for proving that she too is endowed with the spirit of God that makes her speak.^
Whether the author’s name was acknowledged or not, this kind of direct attack against social custom was far less common than the strategies by women writers who wrote under their own names and manoeuvered within (and more gently pushed) the narrowly-confined boundaries of acceptability. Dorothy Leigh, early in the century, published her advice book. The Mothers Blessing, under the generic authority of what
204 Wendy Wall terms the "mother’s legacy," through which a "provisional self
authorization is made possible from within culmral restrictions":
By evoking the horizon of death, the Renaissance woman writer had a chance to undertake what was considered an exceptional feat: to take control of the frighteningly precarious circumstances of her life, to articulate beliefs and desires, to display her mastery of moral precepts and knowledge, and to claim the power to show publicly, in Grymeston’s words, ’the true portraiture of [her] mother’s minde?^
Those who wrote within the sanctioned space of the "legacy" created crises somewhat analogous to those which provided Makin’s exempla the opportunity to exercise their rhetorical skills while retaining their virtue. In the case of the "mother’s legacy," women writers tap into the cultural ideal that, as mothers, they will do absolutely everything in their power to look after the well-being of their family—even after death, and even if it means publishing their private motherly wisdom for public eyes.
This family-focus for the work helps to mediate its public nature and deflect the charge that mere brash immodesty could be the impetus for the author’s endeavor.
The traditional modesty topos of the author found in dedicatory epistles to current or hoped-for patrons and in general notes to readers becomes particularly meaningful in the case of women writers, who frequently use these textual moments to trumpet their awareness of the impropriety of their endeavor.^'* Despite the entitlement her rank seems to give her, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
is especially prolix in the prefatory matter to her works: of her thirteen books, none has fewer than five (and a few more than a dozen) separate notes and epistles, written by Cavendish in defense of her right to write despite her obvious limitations (due to
lack of education, she insists, not lack of intellect)Some of Cavendish’s most
205 fulsome self-criticism appears, not surprisingly, in her philosophical writings; a friend and patron of Hobbes, she was deeply aware of her sex’s lack of education and the impriopriety of a woman daring to publicize her opinions on philosophy: "I being a
Woman Cannot, or if I could, it were not Fit for me Publickly to Preach, Teach,
Declare or Explane them by Words of Mouth, as most of the Famous Philosophers have done, who thereby have made their Philosophical Opinions more Famous, than I fear Mine will ever be. As Hilda L. Smith acknowledges, "With each new work
[Cavendish] tried to defend herself against the attacks lodged against previous ones.
Seldom has an ambitious author devoted so much effort to excusing faults or fending off expected criticism. These self-professed flaws in style and content are possibly designed to preempt outside criticism by indulging in copious self-criticism.
At least one contemporary woman, however, found Cavendish’s intellect to be admirable: Bathsua Makin mentions Cavendish as an example of contemporary learned women: "The present Duchess of New-castle, by her own Genius, rather than any timely Instruction, over-tops many grave Grown-Men. "-®
One of her earliest books. Poems and Fancies (1656), contains a variety of apologies in the form of a dedication to her brother-in-law. Sir Charles Cavendish; epistles to "noble and worthy ladies," her lady’s-maid, "Mistris Toppe" (along with that woman’s reply), "Naturall Philosophers," and the general reader; and three verses, two apologizing for her book and one defending her apologies.These verses are interesting self-authorizations that exist on the border between the prefatory material and the book’s major contents. In "An excuse for so much writ upon my
206 Verses," Cavendish apologizes for her prolixity in a way that recalls the cultural connection between women’s speech and sexuality and taps into the accepted genre of the "mother’s legacy." She resurrects the metaphor of the book as the writer’s child, a figurative association between mental and physical creative acts (the latter necessarily with sexual origins). By using the motherhood topos, Cavendish justifies her writings (particularly her apologies for her writings) with the same image that sanctifies the married woman’s sexuality: "Condemne me not for making such a coy le
/ About my Book, alas it is my Childe." Cavendish’s self-consciousness about the reception of her writings is equated with a mother’s proper care for the safety of her child: "So I, for feare my Strengthlesse Childe should fall / Against a doore, or stoole, aloud I call, / Bid have a care of such a dangerous place: / Thus write I much, to hinder all disgrace. The censuring critic is perceived as a potentially dangerous obstacle, which might be avoided if the author speaks up loudly and often enough in defense of the work. Cavendish’s strategy is first to please herself by giving birth to a child from her own imagination and then, with sheer prolixity, to out-manoeuver the critics in their own censure.^* But by conjuring criticism in the same breath as conception, Cavendish infuses the creative act with its own destruction—it wouldn’t exist if it weren’t to be criticized.
Cavendish, however, was more overt in her anxiety about her writings impinging upon her reputation for chastity. Many of the prefaces to her more
"fancifull" writings—her prose fiction, closet drama, and poetry—clearly convey this anxiety. Understandably, Cavendish’s appeals to male readers (her brother-in-law and
207 "Natural Philsophers") focus upon her lack of formal education; her appeals to women, however, are mostly concerned with defending her writings against
"dishonesty," as if chastity will naturally be the first and foremost concern for all women (and, consequently, women will be the first to notice its lack in other women). In fact, she encourages other women to follow her lead, claiming that writing is a wholesome way to spend time that deflects desire away firom unchaste activities. She pleads to "All Noble, and Worthy Ladies,"
Condemne me not as a dishonour of your Sex, for setting forth this Work; for it is harmlesse and free from all dishonesty. . . . Wives, Sisters, & Daughters, may imploy their time no worse than in honest. Innocent, and harmless Fancies; which, if they do. Men shall have no cause to feare, that when they go abroad in their absence, they shall receive Injury by their loose Carriages. Neither will women be desirous to Gossip abroad, when their Thoughts are well imployed at home.^^
Cavendish’s attempts to gain the approval of women readers for her books by suggesting they themselves try writing is an attempt at consubstantiality; the author’s concerns for her own reputation for moral virtue are intimately tied to her apparent care for her readers’ moral well-being. In the preface to Natures Picture Drawn by
Fancies Pencil (see Figure 5.1), a book of stories in verse and prose, Cavendish worries that her book will smack of Romance, always a suspect genre where morals are concemed:^^
Though some of these Stories be Romancical, I would not be thought to delight in Romances, having never read a whole one in my life. . . . I hope, that this Work will rather quench Passion, than enflame it; will beget chast Thoughts, nourish the love of Virtue . . . and instruct Life: will damn Vices, kill Follies, prevent Errors, forwam Youth, and arm the Mind against Misfortunes; and in a word, will admonish, direct, and perswade to that which is best in all kinds.^'*
208 Implicit is the understanding that reading Romance can enflame one’s passions; if some of her stories resemble Romances, the author, too chaste and modest ever to read one through, never intended such a thing. Cavendish appears especially aware of a male literary tradition and its concerns for producing a chaste response in the reader: Vives’s description of the Virgin Mary’s ability to quench passion resonates in her claim for her book’s similar aim;^^ like Spenser, Cavendish intends to use a colorful and exciting method to promote virtue, a task that will benefit her reader and, hopefully, keep her own reputation for chastity intact; and if Jeremy Taylor can fear that his cautions against lust in The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living will inspire the vice simply by being named, it is no wonder that Cavendish fears the same from something that (accidentally) resembles Romance. While Taylor’s readers would certainly censure him if that pious work could ever be thought prurient, a woman writer like Cavendish would find herself thoroughly pilloried by her critics, labelled a
"whore" of both tongue and body.
Rhetorical Virtue and the Power of Chastity
Thus women writers of all genres and subjects were self-consciously aware that they over-stepped a culturally imposed boundary. Writing explictly about chastity was one of the few dependable ways to direct the reader’s attention away from the act of writing and toward an entirely "innocent" and commendable subject matter: how better to appear virtuous even while engaged in a questionable activity? how better to employ eloquence than to speak in defense and praise of the first and
209 foremost feminine virtue? But more to the point, women writers who invoked
chastity by name offered proof that their own desires were under the control of reason
and kept securely in line with societal expectations. Since female authors needed to
devise ingenious and subtle methods for justifying their speech, it is no wonder that
few (if any) would wish to undertake a complete revision of the chastity monolith in public print. Even if some women recognized the personal restrictiveness of the chastity that was most often thrust upon the reading public, the virtue was one of the few qualities attributed to women that at least held out a promise of power. The proliferation of images since the Middle Ages of chaste women armed with steel and/or godly radiance offered early modem women who strove for goodness a vision
of spiritual control over a world that was largely outside of their social and political control.
Seventeenth-century women writers faithfully reproduced much of the received opinion about chastity except when their own knowledge, experience, or personal agenda directly contradicted that opinion. One area of disagreement, as we have seen, was in the sepration of chastity from strictures against women speaking.
Another key site of divergence from (or at least a degree of conflict with) male writers’ discussions of the virtue is chastity’s relationship to beauty and thus the
resonsibility women have for creating desire in men. In The Mother’s Blessing,
Dorothy Leigh’s discussion of chastity differs only subtly from that of most male-
authored conduct books. Leigh’s discussion is included in a chapter devoted to giving children "good names," such as those belonging to figures of holiness and temporal
210 greatness. Although Leigh acknowledges "I doe not thinke any holinesse to be in the name," she attaches great significance to exerting control through the process of naming children, which "may bee a meanes to put them in mind of some vertues which those Saints used; especially, when they shal read of them in the Bible" (28).
The power of naming and its ability to shape the person who bears that name resonates in this relatively long chapter, giving Leigh an opportunity to sing the praises of female exempla. She writes that chastity is
a vertue which alwaies hath been, and is of great account, not onely amongst the Christians and people of God, but even among the Heathen and Infidels: insomuch that some of them have written, that a woman that is truly chaste is a great partaker of all other vertues; and contrariwise, that the woman that is not truely chaste, hath no vertue in her. (29-30)
Leigh’s general statements, defining the breadth and importance of chastity, are highly orthodox for those who treat the virtue and perfectly consonant even with
Vives, whose words (and their Scriptural origin) resonate in Leigh’s advice to women: "God hath given a cold and temperate disposition, and bound them with these words; Thy desire shall be subject to thy husband. As if God in mercy to women should say; You of your selves shall have no desires" (38). This statement is followed by conventional decriptions of "Heathen" women who have committed suicide rather than lose their chastity.
But The Mother's Blessing is not wholly conventional in its advice about chastity. Through an encomium to Mary, Leigh embraces a mystification of the virtue, but, instead of the Vivesian implication that women are only to be initiated into the practice of chastity and excluded from its core mystery, Leigh shapes that
211 mystery to serve women only and exclude men utterly: "Here is this great and wofull shame taken from women by God, working in a woman: man can claime no part in it" (35). Other women writers of the period make similar gestures towards recuperating women’s history and elevating the Eve/Mary typology to the status of
Adam/Christ. Leigh’s contemporary, Aemilia Lanyer, depicts Eve as an innocent victim of a powerful deceiver. She defends Eve from an inordinate share of the blame for the Fall and reminds readers of Mary’s part in the redemption. After numerous dedications to noblewomen, Lanyer tells her "Vertuous Reader," "This I have done, to make known to the world, that all women deserved not to be blamed.
Lanyer’s defense argues point-by-point against some of the most common misogynistic assertions against Eve:
But she (poore soule) by cunning was deceav’d. No hurt therein her harmelesse Heart intended (11. 773-4)
If he would eate it, who had powre to stay him? Not Eve, whose fault was onely too much love. (11. 800-1)
If any Evill did in her remaine, Being made of him, he was the ground of all. (11. 809-10)
Leigh, however, does not dispute Eve’s "shame," nor does she engage in dispute at all. She attributes Mary’s power to redeem women’s shame directly to her chastity:
"Mary was filled with the Holy Ghost, and with all goodnesse, and yet is called the blessed Virgin: as if our God should (as he doth indeed) in briefe comprehend all other vertues under this one vertue of chastity" (36-7).
Leigh’s most radical desparture from male writers on chastity occurs with her discussion of Susarma. Though the author lists many names as good choices for the
212 reader’s children, she singles out Susanna for detailed discussion, telling the reader,
"[I] only meane to write of the last name, Susan, famoused through the world for
chastity" (29). The treatment of Susanna displays a different attitude toward the
responsibility women bear for the desires that men feel toward them than that
portrayed in male-authored treatments of the figure. Here, Leigh departs from the
simplistic and tautological notion that because chaste women are protected from
sexual assault, a woman who is assaulted has thus proven herself to be unchaste:
Men lye in waite every where to deceive us, as the Elders did to deceive Susanna. Wherefore let us bee, as she was, chaest, watchfiill, and wary, keeping company with maides. Once Judas betrayed his Master with kisse, and repented it: but now men, like Judas, betray their Mistresses with a kisse and, repent it not: but laugh and rejoy ce, that they have brought siime and shame to her that trusted them. (33)
Leigh’s defense of Susanna resembles Lanyer’s defense of Eve. Despite the frequent conventionality of the chapter and its condemnation of female unchastity, there is an unmistakeable distinction between the unchaste, who are responsible for any wrong they incur, and the chaste, who can be deceived and violated by others. Curiously,
Leigh does not remind her readers that, according to the Apocrypha, Susanna was not only left unviolated, but even had her reputation vindicated: her neglect of this point makes it all the more apparent that, to Leigh, the signifiance of the story lies in the
knowledge that chaste women are not immune to deception and violation. Whether or
not Susanna actually commits adultery with the Elders is of lesser import than the knowledge that chaste women can be assaulted in the first place. Leigh’s parallel between Christ and women is a fairly radical conjunction, implying with great conviction that even the truly good can be wronged if the deceiver is treacherous
213 enough. The blurring of categories that we find in eroticized depictions of chastity
like The Ladie’s Blush is entirely absent here, and, in contrast to Vives and Brathwait
who also insist that the lure of women’s beauty is rooted in women’s natural tendency
towards vice, Leigh squarely puts the blame on wily and passionate men, more
treacherous than Judas, who deceive, sin, and delight in their crime.
In a complicated gesture, Leigh disempowers women of their evil control over
men (which power Vives pointedly attributes to women) and, freeing women from the
onus of guilt for their beauty, she reinvests them with a chastity that is subtler, more personal, and mysteriously more potent than the chastity constructed by most male writers. Women are best off in the company of other women not because the temptation of man’s presence is too great to bear, but because men can be a serious threat to women. For Leigh, chastity is not conceived as merely a defense employed against women’s own sexual natures, or even a reliable defense against assault, but a fragile holiness that permeates the entire being of the chaste woman, bringing her closer to the mysteries of God.
The piety with which Leigh regards her subject is not surprising, and even her departures from convention, significant though they be, are largely quibbles within a fairly narrow constructive framework of chastity. It is more startling for a woman writer, even late in the century, to divest chastity of it’s religious mystery altogether
and concentrate solely on the virtue’s ability to lead to social and even political
power. Cavendish’s "Assaulted and Pursued Chastity" is a long, rambling romance
(in spite of the author’s disclaimer), in which the heroine flees from her handsome.
214 rich, and noble (but married) pursuer through a series of adventures that finally lead to their marriage (after his wife’s convenient death)The retention of the heroine’s chastity is the impetus for the narrative, like Richardson’s Pamela, which would appear about a hundred years later, but unlike Pamela the heroine’s chastity indirectly allows her to reach a position of great social and political power. Yet, chastity as represented in this tale is strangely conflicted in its relationship to male desire, as is, indeed, the entire stams of chastity as the prime female virtue. The chaste heroine is absolved from blame for sparking the desire in the lusty prince, who tries seduction, force, and when she escapes, ruthlessly pursues her across the seas. Yet, the prince’s change from a seducer/rapist to a desirable suitor through the course of the narrative undercuts the purpose for female chastity: the virtue becomes largely a ploy to catch a husband and amass worldy power along the way.
The contradictions to be found in Cavendish’s representation of chastity under assault are most apparent in a discrepancy between the purpose the author claims for her tale and the narrative itself. This discrepancy indicates a conflict between the woman writer’s method of self-authorization—the way she justifies what she writes— and the story she really wants to tell. Moreover, the explanation Cavendish gives for writing her tale is rich with resonances of earlier discussions of rape and the relationship between chastity and beauty, and she blithely reproduces the conflicts that those discussions contain. The author’s evident aim is to "shew young Women the danger of Travelling without Parents, Husbands, or particular Friends, to guard them"
(394). It is important to quote this passage at length:
215 Though Virtue is a good Guard, yet it doth not always protect their Persons, without other Assistance: for though Virtue guards, yet Youth and Beauty betrays; and the Treachery of the one, is more than the Safety of the other; for Young, Beautiful, and Virtuous Women, if they wander alone, find but very often rude entertainment from the Masculine Sex, wimess Jacob’s Daughter Dinah, which Schechem forced: and others, whose Forcement is mentioned in holy Scripmre, and in Histories of less Authority (sans nombre): which shews that Heaven doth not always protect the Persons of Virmous Souls from rude Violences; neither doth it always leave Virtue destimte, but sometimes sends a Human Help; yet so, as never but where Necessity was the Cause of their Dangers, and not Ignorance, Indiscretion, or Curiosity: for. Heaven never helps, but those that could not avoid the Danger. . . . But to conclude, I say. Those are in particular favoured by Heaven, that are protected from Violence and Scandal, in a wandring-life, or a Travelling-condition. (394-5)
Clearly Cavendish’s philosophy of rape differs from Milton’s in A Mask Presented at
Ludlow Castle: heaven only sometimes favors the chaste with protection from ravishment, and then usually through human aid and not heaven-sent agents like
Thyrsis and Sabrina. The mercurial and unpredictable divinity that Cavendish describes is much more allied to the pagan and natural powers that she most often calls upon in her works, particularly Fortune and the Fates. Moreover, there is nothing especially elect or divine in Cavendish’s conception of chastity that would allow it to reliably bring divine rewards. Like Leigh, Cavendish suggests that chastity alone does not have the power to fend off those who are determined to transgress, but unlike Leigh, Cavendish does not invest the virtue with an alternative mysterious religious significance. To Cavendish, chastity functions much more as a social virtue, such as courtesy, which keeps the world running in a smooth and orderly fashion but can be upset at any time by anyone who does not recognize its worth.
216 Thus women who are left by necessity (not by ignorance, indiscretion, or curiosity—all vices) at the mercy of the "rude entertainment" of the "Masculine Sex" are in great danger indeed, like Dinah, whose travels led to her rape. Here
Cavendish alters the idea that Brathwait explicates in The English Gentlewoman, when he writes, "Had Dinah never roaved, shee had prov’d a Diana, and had never been ravished"; and, "Dinah may be a proper Embleme for the eye; shee seldome strayes abroad, but shee is in danger of ravishing. Brathwait implies that Dinah’s violation was first and foremost caused by her own actions—it was her travelling abroad (necessary or otherwise) that is to be condemned for creating the opportunity for her to be seen and desired by her ravisher. Cavendish, however, while acknowledging that Dinah’s travels provided the opportunity for her to be raped, shifts the responsibility for the crime onto the shoulders of the "Masculine Sex" and its "rude entertainment" of women as long as those travels were not undertaken for vicious or trivial reasons. Cavendish is not willing to exempt women utterly from responsibilty for being victimized, but she is willing to take into consideration which actions may have contributed to the assault. Men, on the other hand, are never to be trusted on first acquaintance—it is a woman’s duty to expect treachery from them before she should blithely trust them.
Cavendish’s personifications of Virtue, Youth, and Beauty, on the other hand, resonate with the male-authored tradition of emblematic literature, which undercuts her attempt to assign blame for rape to the "Masculine sex. " In a rhetorical move similar to Shakespeare’s (in Lucrece), Cavendish pits Virtue against Youth and Beauty
217 as a figure for the struggle between the virtuous woman and the ravisher. Yet, this metaphorical relationship does not perfectly correspond: the conflict moves from two separate human adversaries to battling qualities all contained within only one of the human figures. If the assaulted woman’s own Youth and Beauty betray her Virtue, regardless of the reason she’s put in such a position, then the ravisher is merely a neutral force that needs the willingness of at least some part of the woman in order to perform his rape. Thus Cavendish’s own deployment of the male rhetoric of chastity serves to betray her theory that rape is a crime of assault against a wholly innocent victim.
The story itself, like its preface, slips elusively in and out of agreement with these two conflicting positions—woman as innocent victim/woman as culpable victim.
It also dramatizes the personified struggle between Youth/Beauty and Virtue (with the ravisher looming in the backgroimd) as a different menage-a-trois that maintains the displaced female-female struggle: heroine and bawd (with ravisher in the background ).Assaulted and Pursued Chastity contains an argument reminscent of the "Beauty is nature’s coin" speech delivered by Comus in Milton’s Mask, but, significantly in Cavendish’s reworking of the struggle, the sophistic side is presented by a woman, the female bawd employed by the married Prince to persuade the heroine to willingly accept his seductions:
Her Mistress began to read her Lectures of Nature, telling her. She should use her Beauty while she had it, and not to waste her Youth idly, but to make the best profit of both, to purchase Pleasure and Delight: besides, said she, Namre hath made nothing in vain, but to some useful End. . . . Wherefore it is a sin against Nature to be reserved and coy. (397-8)
218 This economic argument summarizes much of Comus’s more protracted points of logic. Put into the mouth of a woman agent for an absent "buyer," however, the clear-cut one-on-one, male/female stmggle between good and evil becomes a more insidiously mediated and bartered exchange between the market forces that are used metaphorically in the speech. The bawd’s dispassionate persuasions only indirectly serve her own ends, which are literally monetary, and she is free from the ravisher’s charged emotions and sexual passion toward the object of persuasion. Though the heroine is apparently as savvy to the fallaciousness of this argument as the Lady in the masque, her only recourse is deception: "The young Lady, being of a quick apprehension, began to suspect some Design and Treachery against her . . . and dissembling her discovery as well as she could for the present, gave her thanks for her Counsel" (399).
The dispassionate nature of the mediated situation is one reason for the heroine’s rejection of overt argumentation as a strategy for retaining her virtue, but she has another reason as well for turning to active deception to gain her release:
Her confidence of the Gods protection of Virtue gave her Courage. . . . But when [her Mistress] was gone, considering in what a dangerous condition she stood, and that the Gods would not hear her if she lazily called for help, and watch’d for Miracles, neglecting Natural Means: whereupon she thought the best way was, secretly to convey her self out of diat place, and trust her self again to Chance. (399)
In direct opposition to the Lady’s stalwart and passive faith in divine protection, the pragmatic heroine of Assaulted and Pursued Chastity decides that the gods will only watch over her safety if she acts quickly and wisely in her own defense. Like Makin, chastity is not enough on its own: it must be complemented by heroic action. In fact,
219 the action the heroine takes is surpisingly outward-directed: she manages to get hold of a psitol and hide it in her chamber, and, in a nod to Lucrece, she announces, "I am in no ways to be found by wicked Persons, but in Death: for whilst I live, I will live in Honour" (403). Cavendish revises this moment of sacrificial suicide, however, by having the heroine suddenly turn the pistol on her seducer, shoot him, and injure him: "Stay, stay, said she: I will first build me a Temple of Fame upon your Grave, where all young Virgins shall come and offer at my Shrine; and in the midst of these words, shot him" (404). In addition to the heroine’s proactive stance, the language with which she discusses chastity diverges from that of most women writers. In the body of the text, the "heaven" of the preface becomes "the gods" of classical literature, which departure also serves to further reduce the mysterious quality of the virtue’s Christian resonance.
So, why is chastity so crucial for a woman that she must encounter a multitude of dangers in her effort to protect it? Cavendish appears to thoroughly undercut the threat to the heroine’s chastity with the comic ending, effectively trivializing the heroine’s self-defense into a plot device for catching a husband. But in Cavendish’s conception, this social importance of the virtue is not to be taken lightly. Certainly most conduct books since the early sixteenth-century agreed that attracting a good husband is one of the major goals for a woman, but the possibility that this worldly goal could openly displace attention to a woman’s spirimal salvation emerged in the seventeenth century.'” Advice books began to acknowledge that a chaste appearance can be "put on" to please a prospective mate—that, in fact, chastity can be bartered
220 like social capital: Brathwait insists, "Let modesty suit you, that a discreeter mate may chuse you.'"*^ That chastity (or its appearance) is a essential quality for a prospective bride gives the unmarried woman with a reputation for chastity a certain amount of power over her social condition, and even though the property of chastity was most often bartered between men (the father and the husband-to-be), it allows
Cavendish the space to imagine the power that a chaste orphan could wield over her future. In fact, Cavendish takes this exchange of capital to its extreme in her narrative: the heroine of the tale exchanges the ownership of her chastity for an empire, which could only have come into the possession of both the heroine and her pursuer via the adventures they encounter, the armies they lead, and the lands they conquer while the Prince chases her all over the world: chastity doesn’t merely buy the heroine her prince, it buys the prince and wins them both an empire.
Cavendish’s pragmatic view of chastity as a powerful social tool is radical for her time; women writers generally adopt a more spiritual approach to the virtue, whether through sincere piety or to construct a pious ethos. Despite her prefaces, she fits the description Sylvia Brown uses to describe a character in a Cavendish play with the author’s own words, "Here is no teacher who ’will admonish, direct and perswade to that which is best in all kinds,’ but rather a manipulator of kinds of moral categories. Yet, Cavendish’s manipulations are not only a self-serving evasion of condemnation; her moral twists and turns are also her attempts to negotiate between a number of conflicting ideologies: the misogynistic, the Petrarchan and Neoplatonist, and what Kenneth Burke would call a developing "scientistic" ideology emerging with
221 the works of Decartes, Locke, Boyle, and her friend Hobbes. Her forays into natural philosophy along with her elevation of the social power of chastity over a mystical, religious model suggest her affiliation with a more secularized society. Yet, the fact remains that chastity, however defined, is still the fundamental and crucial facet of female virtue designed to protect the ethos of the female author.
While Cavendish’s suspect foray into romance is buffered by her celebration of chastity, women writers who wrote lyric love poetry were treading especially dangerous ground, as the genre was founded upon the textual display of sexual desire.
Ann Rosalind Jones, whose book Currency of Eros treats sixteenth-century love poetry by women, writes.
The ideological matrix that associated open speech with open sexuality in women made love poetry an especially transgressive genre for them, the genre of a semiprivate sphere that broke down secure categories. The woman love poet, exposing desire for a man who was not her husband to the gaze of a mass readership, was a public woman—a term that in the sixteenth century meant a whore."*^
Though she was the niece of Philip and Mary Sidney and a member of their literary circle, Mary Wroth, one of the earliest English women to write, circulate, and publish love poetry, was not immune to attacks on her morality occasioned by both her writings and her extra-marital relationship with her cousin, William Herbert (who is very likely the original for Amphilanthus, the beloved in Wroth’s sonnet sequence
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus). Lord Denny, who claimed he was slandered by topical allusions in Wroth’s prose Romance, Urania, wrote bitter attacks against the author:
Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster As by thy words and works all men may conster Thy wrathfull spite conceived an Idell book
222 Brought forth a foole which like the damme doth look
Work o th’ Workes leave idle bookes alone For wise and worthyer women have writte none/^
Although Denny’s attack was certainly motivated by self-interested anger, he aims his barbs at what he sees as Wroth’s gender transgression, and, like Cavendish in her defense of her work, makes use of the motherhood conceit. In contrast to Cavendish,
Denny portrays Wroth’s creation of her book as a perversion of motherhood, his language is reminiscent of Spenser’s Errour, with its monstrous brood, and looks ahead toward Milton’s Sin, whose rape by Death brings forth "yelling Monsters."
Yet Wroth’s love poetry is very different from the conventional, male-authored poetry with its Petrarchan sexual frustration and display of the female beloved.
Wroth does make use of Petrarchan conventions in her sonnets, but the desire that smolders in the speaker becomes abstract and diffuse, collapsing inward. Wendy
Wall suggests that Wroth’s poetry characteristically "refuses to pit speaker against the beloved’s rhetorically controlled and displayed body; instead, it discloses the rent and vacant subjectivity that defines the speaker’s identity.'"** The speaker vents frustration and sorrow more often for her own unrelenting desire than for the beloved’s disdain and never blazons or reifies the beloved’s body:
Truly poore Night thou Wellcome art to mee: I love thee better in this sad attire Then that which raiseth some mens phant’sies higher Like painted outsides which foule inward bee. I love dry grave and saddest looks to see. Which seems my soule, and dying hart intire. Like to the ashes of some happy fire That flam’d in joy, butt quench’d in miserie I love thy count’nance, and thy sober pace
223 Which evenly goes, and as of loving grace To uss, and mee among the rest oprest Gives quiet, peace to my poore self alone. And freely grants day leave when thou art gone To give cleere light to see all ill redrest/’
Wroth’s refusal to display the beloved serves to locate all struggles between speaker and beloved within the speaker, like Cavendish, whose heroine’s struggle with a seducer/ravisher metaphorically shifts to an internal battle between Youth/Beauty and
Virtue. This re-location, while hiding the sexual nature of the speaker’s desire, exempts the love-object from much of the blame for tormenting the speaker (where most male sonneteers attribute the most blame).
This internalization which Wall sees as "rent" subjectivity has greater implications for early modem women writers in general: it suggests that these writers were hyperconscious of the ideological forces that consistently tell women that they should feel no desires (nor inspire any) that are not a reflexive answer to their husband’s, and if they do, they must identify them, worry them, and tear them out by the roots—a purely individual, internal process that excludes/ignores the object of that desire. Brathwaite’s advice in The English Gentlewoman describes this process of expunging desire as a textual process; desires are "written" deep within women and bear little relationship to the male object (in contrast to men’s desire, which is also
"written" by women): "Should you, by a due examination of your selves, fmde any bosome-sinne secretly lurking, any subtill familiar privately incroaching, any distempred affection dangerously mutining: Be your owne Censors. Thus Sidney,
224 through Astrophil, can openly express desire for Stella and plead with her to return his affection, a situation that leaves Stella open to blame if she refuses him:
Stella, in whose body is Writ each character of blisse. Whose face all, all beauty passeth. Save thy mind which yet surpasseth.
Graunt, o deere, on knees I pray, (Knees on ground he then did stay) That not I, but since I love you. Time and place for me may move you.**’
Wroth, through Pamphilia, however, must distance herself from Amphilanthus and transform her desire into a private, internal struggle with her own emotion:
Joyes are beereav’d, harmes doe only tarry; Dispaire takes place, disdaine hath gott die hand; Yett firme love holds my sences in such band As since despis’ed, I with sorrow marry; Then if with griefe I now must coupled bee Sorrow Tie wed: Despaire thus govern mee/°
Wroth’s poems illustrate the desiring female subject’s struggle to gain mastery over her "dangerously mutining" "distempred affection"—in effect self-censoring and revising her desires to accord with reader expectations of women’s writing. The poet attempts to balance the requirements of the genre with an appearance of moral decency. As Wendy Wall suggests, Wroth’s placing of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus at the end of Urania is strategic: "The poetic speaker is thus protected from sexual libel through the romance’s explicit characterization of Pamphilia’s chastity and through the mediating layer of fiction that places Wroth at a distance from her work.
Thus a concern for chastity is always central to women’s writings, permeating the
225 text, overwhelming all other interests, even when the virtue is not the overt subject of that text.
The Chaste Life Devised and Displayed
From this variety of imaginative, advisory, and fictional writings on chastity, I now turn towards the genre of autobiography to gain an understanding of women’s self-reflexive relationship to the virtue, to move from asking how women used chastity to create a virtuous ethos toward how women used chastity to respresent their own lives in print. Until recently, women’s autobiography had been largely ignored or relegated to a category of minor interest because the concerns delineated in much of women’s self-representational writings do not coincide with those of male autobiographers, whose construction of the masculine self as an actively political individual with views on war and commerce are of interest to the "objective" historian.^- Not surprisingly, women’s autobiography, both religious and secular, takes as its subject more domestic, pious, and personal concerns than men’s autobiography.^^ Mary Beth Rose, following Georges Gusdorf, sees seventeenth- century autobiography as the "individual’s struggle to define his or her experience by the narrative creation of a unified personality, through which the author attempts to reconcile the public and private aspects of being, often represented as conflicting.
Leigh Gilmore, theorizing gender and genre in autobiography adds a political dimension to the work of analyzing these writings: "Insofar as any notion of autobiography is necessarily enmeshed with the politically charged and historically
226 varying notions of what a person is, we can focus on autobiography as a way to understand how (self-) representation and authority get linked up with projects that encode gender and genre. Thus the project of analyzing women’s self representations is more about understanding women’s perceived relationship to the social forces in their world and their attempts to impose authorial order to their lives and less about questioning the absolute truth-value of the narrated events.
In my examination of the autobiographies of Margaret Cavendish and Aim,
Lady Halkett, my concern for the production of "truth" is thus over-ridden by my interest in the clues the text holds about what women in the seventeenth century wanted their readers to believe was true, and particularly, how chastity played a crucial role in that vision of the self. The construction of the self in these mid- cenmry autobiographies can say much about these women’s beliefs or wishes regarding the relationship of the material self to the conceptual ideal. Thus to read these texts with an eye towards how women represent themselves in relation to cultural narratives of chastity can offer us a sense of how these narratives affected the authors’ attempts to unify, evade, emphasize, and give particular meanings to their lives. As with other women’s writings of the period, chastity here is of central importance, but in autobiography the two dimensions of authorial ethos and rhetorical subject are collapsed into one: the rhetorical subject is the author, whose presented self either accords with culmral ideals or else stands in danger of condemnation and a ruined reputation. At stake in self-representation is more than an exhibition of virtuous rhetoric—the author must construct a virtuous life.
227 Among her numerous other works, Margaret Cavendish left for posterity her memoirs, a relatively short and carefully-chosen assortment of narrated events and descriptions of herself and her family. As with most autobiographies from the period,
Cavendish begins with a brief genealogy of her parents, but quickly shifts away from this patriarchal mapping to an encomium of her mother’s skills at rearing eight children as a single parent. Despite her father’s early death, Cavendish insists that her upbringing was idyllic and repeatedly draws the reader’s attention toward the care
Lady Lucas took over her daughters’ virtue: "As for my breeding, it was according to my birth and the nature of my sex . . . for as my sisters was or had been bred, so was I in plenty, or rather in superfluity; likewise we were bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles."^® According to Cavendish, Lady
Lucas was especially careful of her daughters’ activities in the nursery, keeping them well guarded from bad influences: "She never suffered the vulgar serving-men to be in the nursery among the nursemaids, lest their rude love-making might do unseemly actions, or speak unhandsome words in the presence of her children, knowing that youth is apt to take infection by ill examples" (189). This passage concurs with
Vives’s adamant advice to parents to find virtuous nursemaids and to keep young girls well out of the way of male servants: "Avoid all man’s kin away from her: nor let her not leam to delight among men. . . . Let the maid leam none uncleanly words or wanton or uncomely gestures. The passage also brings to mind the Dowager
Countess of Derby’s fear that her abused granddaughter. Lady Elizabeth, would infect the other grandchildren with her sin.®* And indeed, Cavendish’s few references to
2 2 8 "amorous love" all partake of the language of pollution. Cavendish, free from the
"infection" of "ill examples," grows up in harmony with feminine ideals and learns to act in a proper manner by following her virtuous sisters: "As for the pastimes of my sisters when they were in the country, it was to reade, work, walk, and discourse with each other" (191). Her family’s society is described as a perfectly harmonious unit, unsullied by infection from the outside world: "they did seldome make visits, nor never went abroad with strangers in their company, but onely themselves in a flock together agreeing so well, that there seemed but one minde amongst them"
(192).
While Cavendish subtly implies that the crises occasioned by the Civil Wars are responsible for fracturing her edenic family group, she also acknowledges that they provide the opportunity for her to meet her future husband. As a young woman during the early years of the war, she joins Henrietta Maria’s court as a maid of honor and consequently accompanies the court to France when the queen flees
Oxford. Cavendish eventually waits out the Interregnum with her husband in Holland in a house owned by Rubens, making one unsuccessful trip back to England to petition Parliament for a return of her husband’s propertyCavendish makes much of her innocence and naivete while in the sophisticated court environment, underscoring her proper chaste modesty and unfamiliarity with worldly behavior.
Separated from the support of her family, Cavendish describes herself as,
afraid lest I should wander with ignorance out of the waies of honour, so that I knew not how to behave myself. Besides, I had heard that the world was apt to lay aspersions even on the innocent, for which I durst neither look up with my eyes, nor speak, nor be any way sociable,
229 insomuch as I was thought a natural fool; indeed I had not much wit. (193-4)
The author freely admits to a strong motive behind the self-deprecation with which she labels herself a fool: "I was so afraid to dishonour my friends and family by my indiscreet actions, that I rather chose to be accounted a fool, then to be thought rude or wanton" (194). Yet, she explains that it is precisely this appearance of naive chastity that leads to her highly advantageous marriage to the Marquis (later Duke) of
Newcastle: "My Lord the Marquis of Newcastle did approve those bashful fears which many condemned" (194).
Thus Cavendish describes her growing relationship with her future husband first in the highly conventional terms of Petrarchan courtship and then in the highly conventional terms of married chastity. The Marquis capmres her heart, she explains, despite her reluctance to marry and her well-learned schooling to avoid the society of men: "Though I did dread marriage, and shunned men’s companies as much as I could, yet I could not, nor had not the power to refuse him, by reason my affections were fixed on him" (195). Once she writes that she accepted his suit, Cavendish quickly mrns to a defense of the quality of love she feels for her fiance: "He was the onely person I ever was in love with: neither was I ashamed to owne it, but gloried therein. For it was not amorous love, I never was infected therewith, it is a disease, or a passion, or both, I only know by relation, not by experience. . . . My love was honest and honourable" (195). Cavendish’s careful distinction between "amorous" and "honourable" love is a telling one; despite the fact the, as a married woman her sexuality is sanctioned by marriage, she feels the need to protect herself from any
230 aspersions that she is indeed "amorous, " with all of the vicious associations that term
carries when employed in relation to women. Instead, Cavendish’s writings consistently portray her love in terms of a single-minded constancy to her husband, who, despite being thirty years her senior, outlives her by nearly thirty years and has himself buried with her. Their joint tomb in Westminster Abbey, with effigies lying side by side (Margaret’s holding a book), bears an inscription written by William in
Latin and English that gives attention to Margaret’s feminine virtues, particularly her wifely constancy and her written accomplishments:
Here lyes the Loyall Duke of Newcastle and his Dutches his second wife by whome he had noe issue, her name was Margarett Lucas, yongest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester a noble familie for all the Brothers were Valiant and all the Sisters virtuous. This Dutches was a wise wittie & learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie. She was a most Virtuous & a loveing & carefull wife & was with her Lord all the time of his banishment & miseries & when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirements.
As with her other writings, Cavendish’s memoirs simultaneously self-justify and self-criticize, a conflict in representation that has been previously noted by Mary
Beth Rose: "The narrative effect of her conflict between self-assertion and self- effacement can best be disentangled by observing her repeated attempts to define herself not merely in terms of her personal attachments, but rather according to a
Renaissance ideal of femininity. In a curious digression wherein she rails against women’s tendency to speak too much in jostling for "preheminence of place,"
Cavendish describes her version of the proper path for advancement: "An honest heart, a noble soul, a chaste life, and a true speaking tongue, is the throne, sceptre, crown, and footstoole, that advances [women] to an honourable renown" (201). She
231 distinguishes quantity from quality of words spoken and can keep from condemning her own prolixity in the same breath by separating writing and speech into two qualitatively different acts: speech is bold self-assertion, ever in danger of threatening the chaste reputation, while writing, though equally composed of words, is silent and modest: "I pass my time rather with scribling than writing, with words than wit, not that I speak much, because I am addicted to contemplation, unless I am with My
Lord, yet then I rather attentively listen to what he say es, then impertinently speak"
(205). Moreover, Cavendish’s emphasis upon her chastity supports her self authorization, and her self-condemnation for her bashfulness is merely another way to separate herself from the taint of boldness that threatens a chaste reputation: "My bashfulness is in my nature, not for any crime, and though I have strived and reasoned with myself, yet that which is inbred, I find it difficult to root out. . . .
Since it is rather a fear of others than a bashfull distrust of my self, I despair of a perfect cure" (202-3). Finally, to make sure the reader hasn’t missed it, Cavendish outright testifies to her chastity: "My life hath been ruled with honesty, attended by modesty, and directed by truth" (208); and, "I am chaste, both by nature and education, insomuch as I do abhorre an unchast thought" (210).
While Cavendish chooses a discursive, explanatory method for assuring her reader of her chastity, Ann Lady Halkett, whose life in England was much more directly affected by the horrors of war, uses the defensive ideal of chastity to illustrate her innocence and repair her reputation which suffered from a long engagement to
Colonel Bampfield, a married man. Like Cavendish’s heroine in Assaulted and
232 Pursued Chastity, Halkett's romantic struggle with an off-limits suitor and her daring adventures eventually do lead to marriage, but not to Bampfield. Halkett’s reputation for chastity suffers for many years, but her method for justifying herself only occasionally runs to overt declarations of her innocence; more often, the author allows narrated events to show how God, her friends, and family all saw fit to support her in her "trialls." Ultimately, her virtue is shown to be vindicated by the inherent protective power of chastity, which could only have saved her from the threat of rape if she had been chaste in the first place. Moreover, her marriage to Sir
James Halkett is the culmination of the narrative, as if the whole purpose of her memoirs-to repair her reputation-had been accomplished by this single act.
Like Cavendish, Halkett sets up her narrative with a brief testimony to her early upbringing to assure her readers that her personality was formed by an honest childhood: "Till the year 1644 I may truly say all my converse was so innocentt that my owne hart cannott challenge mee with any imodesty, either in thought or behavier. However, in 1644, at the age of twenty-one, Halkett allows (against her mother’s orders) the attentions of a young gentleman who subsequently elopes with another woman. This first romantic adventure that Halkett describes foreshadows her six-year engagement to "C.B.," Colonel Joseph Bampfield, a questionably loyal supporter of Charles I.“
Halkett’s memoirs are dominated by this engagement to a man who repeatedly claims that his wife is dead despite frequent rumors to the contrary. This engagement was likely adulterous; two missing pages (one leafe) at a crucial point in the narrative
233 and one reference remaining in the text strongly suggest that her relationship with
Bampfield was indeed sexual.This single reference occurs when she finally gets irreconcilable proof that Bampfield’s wife is living, and she seeks advice to discover whether she is entitled to marry Sir James Halkett. She is assured.
Since what I did was suposing C.B. a free person, hee nott proving so, though I had beene puplickely maried to him and avowedly lived with him as his wife, yett the ground of itt failing, I was as free as if I had never seene him and . . . withoutt offence either to the laws of God or man marry any other person when ever I found itt convenientt. (76)
At this time, three types of spousal were in practice in England: an avowed, present- tense marriage committment (in the presence of witnesses); a spousal de futuro, a promise of future intent to marry; and the most acceptable to church law, the ecclesiastically-solemnized marriage in a church and after the banns had been called or a license procured. Consummation sealed all three options into a legally-binding marriage, but the unconsummated spousal de futuro left open the possibility for either party to marry someone else. Whether or not the spousal de futuro was legally binding was the subject of legal cases well into the eighteenth century.^ Based on
Halkett’s words, it is likely that sometime during the six years of their engagment, their spousal de futuro was both consummated and vowed as a present commitment but not in the ecclesiastically-solemnized rimal. Whatever the case, since Bampfield was a bigamist, no commitment to Halkett could be legally binding, though the danger for her was great: Sarah Findley and Elaine Hobby report that, "by 1650 . . . adultery by a woman became for the first and only time in this century a capital
234 offense. Although Halkett appears not to have been charged with any legal offense, her reputation wasn’t equally free from trouble.
Thus, in the presentation of her life, the autobiographer systematically works to vindicate herself both with claims of her innocence about Bampfield’s wife and with descriptions of her otherwise virtuous life. The memoirs testify to the public nature of her life; her friends and family are always intimately aware of all of her activities, which apparent torment leads to occasional outbursts of conscience:
Itt is nott to bee imagined by any pious, vertuous person (whose charity leads them to judge others by themselves) butt that I looked upon itt as unparaleld misfortime (how inocentt so'ever I was) to have such an odium cast upon mee as that I designed to marry a man that had a wife, and I am sure none could detest mee so much as I abhored the thought of such a crime. (35)
But Halkett’s horror and contrition for having participated in this "crime" are balanced by her belief in her own basic innocence, and she constructs herself, like
Dorothy Leigh’s Susanna and Aemilia Lanyer’s Eve, as a true victim of a brilliant and unscrupulous deceiver:
I know I may bee comdemned as one that was too easily prevailed with, butt this I must desire to bee considered: hee was one who I had beene conversantt with for severall yeares before; one who proffesed a great friendship to my beloved brother Will: hee was unquestionably loyall, handsome, a good skollar, which gave him the advantages of writting and speaking well, and the chiefest omamentt hee had was a devoutt life and conversation. Att least hee made itt apeare such to mee, and what ever misfortune hee brought upon mee I will doe him that right as to acknowledge I learnt from him many excellentt lessons of piety and vertue and to abhorre and detest all kind of vice. Thiss beeing his constantt dialect made mee thinke my selfe as secure from ill in his company as in a sanctuary. (28)
235 Bampfield’s ability to woo the virtuous Halkett with apparent goodwill, and above all, skillfully pious discourse allies him with the most talented of Milton’s sophists and
Spenser’s hypocrites. In contrast to the claims by these earlier writers that the truly learned and virtuous will recognize sophistry and hypocrisy, Halkett implies that even the most virtuous will be unable to withstand the assault or even recognize the inherent evil of such a man as Bampfield (or Judas, or Satan himself), and though she is not to be absolved from all blame for having been part of this sinful simation, attenuating factors should merit her some mercy. Like Cavendish’s discussion of
Dinah, Halkett’s memoirs attest to the merciful idea that there are degrees of guilt and mitigations of responsibility that cannot be ignored in judging others and establishing reputations.
But it is in narrating many of the important events of her life that Halkett most ingeniously repairs her reputation for chastity. The evidence that Halkett offers of her friends’ and family’s unwavering support and belief in her innocence is a persuasive tactic for bolstering her reputation. That the highly respectable widower
James Halkett would continue to want to marry her even when apprised of her relationship with Bampfield offers undeniable testimony to her worth, even as the marriage itself awards her the status of an "honest" woman. Family members also prove their support in active ways; soon after the rumors begin to circulate that
Bampfield’s wife may indeed be alive, Halkett’s brother-in-law "N. " (Sir Henry
Newton) challanges Bampfield to a duel over her honor. Although Halkett condemns the practice of duelling and regrets the injury her brother-in-law sustains, she exults
236 in his support: "I cannott butt acknowledge I had a sattisfaction to know so worthy a person as my brother N. owned a concerne for mee, which hee would never have done (I was assured) if hee had beleeved mee vicious" (48). Additionally, Halkett’s frequent parenthetical phrases help to buffer her opinions and populate her narrative with unreferenced authorities: she is often "assured" and "told" by nameless others of the truth of that which she then imparts to her reader.
The most authoritative backing Hackett testifies to receiving, though, comes straight from the "heaven" that (according to Cavendish) may or may not be relied upon to aid the virtuous woman under assault. Halkett interprets her recovery from times in which her personal safety is at risk as evidence of divine support and approval. These moments, in which Halkett overtly describes the divine will at work, usually involve her recovery from serious illness, which she characterizes in hindsight as a series of personal spiritual trials imposed by God: "But it seemes the mercy of
God would nott then condemne mee into hell, nor his justice suffer mee to goe to heaven, and therefore continued mee longer upone earth that I might know the infinitenese of his power that could suport mee under the load of calamitys" (33).
Other events, however, are allowed to stand largely upon their own merit, laden with cultural significance for the chaste woman. The most telling of these occurs around
1650 when Halkett, fleeing from the dangers of war in England and following
Charless II into Scotland, becomes the guest of the Countess of Dunfermline. An unruly regiment of soldiers, advancing northward with the English army, takes up residence at Fyvie, the Dunfermline seat. Halkett carefully sets up her encounter
237 with the soldiers as a potentially dangerous one, both to her life and to her already dubious chastity:
When they came into the howse they were very rude, beating all the men in there way and frighting the weemen and threatening to pistoll who ever did nott give what they called for. My Lady Dunfermline, beeing then great with child, was much disordered with feare of there insolence, and with teares in her eyes desired mee to goe and speake to them to see if I could prevaile with them as beeing there countrywoman. ’Butt,’ says shee, ’I know nott well how to desire itt, because I heare they say they are informed there is an English woman in the howse, and if they get her, they will bee worse to her then any.’ (58-59)
This veiled threat of rape ("worst to her then any") as well as the general havoc incurred by the presence of the hostile soldiers gives Halkett the opportunity to test her powers, those channelled directly from God and those radiating from her virtue:
As soone as I came amongst them, the first question they aksed mee, was if I were the English whore that came to meet the King, and all sett there pistolls against mee. (I had armed my selfe before by seaking assistance from Him who only could protect mee from there fury, and I did so much rely upon itt that I had nott the least feare, tho naturally I am the greatest coward living.) I told them I owned my selfe to bee an English woman and to honour the King, butt for the name they give mee, I abhorred itt" (59).
Halkett forthrightly acknowledges her loyalist sympathies but denies the aspersion to her virtue, and, in accordance with Bathsua Makin’s claim that well-crafted, virtuous, and learned discourse, practiced in time of dire need, can help turn a good woman into a great woman, she successfully employs a heroic rhetoric to calm the soldiers and save both herself and the entire household from rape and/or murder:
They heard mee with much patience, and att last, flinging down there pistolls upon the table, the Major gave mee his promise that neither hee nor any with him should give the least disturbance to the meanest in the familly, only desired meatt and drinke and what was nesesary that they
238 called for. And they did so keepe there word that my Lord Dunfermeline was by there staying in the howse secured from many insolencys that were practised in other places. (59)
Halkett’s ability to defuse a potentially deadly situation—to divert a plundering warrior’s rapine lust—is offered both as evidence of the hand of God working through her to bolster her courage and, decisively, proof that her chastity—intact—has the power to turn the rapist’s thought away from his lust. As Vives insists, true chastity can be recognized by just such a sign: "We have read of women that have been taken and let go again of the most unruly soldiers, only for the reverence of the name of virginity bicause they said that they were virgins. Halkett’s disavowal of the name of whore, coupled with her persuasive abilities, succeeds in saving her virtue and offers conventional proof that her virtue was there in the first place to be saved.
The description of this event, while testifying to Halkett’s personal virtue and the power she can gamer therefrom, comes out of the traditional ideal of chastity as a virtue that will protect the chaste woman from assault. Thus Halkett supports her own chastity with the formula that other women writers worked to dismantle.
The legacy of chastity that women writers of the seventeenty-century inherited from generations of male writers was an intricate complex of ideological forces— epistemological, social, sexual-that combined to create an elusive quality of being assigned as women’s most essentially feminine trait. Male writers used myriad literary methods and employed countless rhetorical strategies in an effort to define, understand, and characterize this trait for the benefit of their readers. Collectively considered, however, these writings on chastity present a complex and highly
239 contradictory picture of the virtue that is ostensibly so universally important to the soul and reputation of every woman. Chastity is as once a spiritual defense against evil, a moral defense against vice, a physical defense against rape, the antithesis of physical beauty, the origin of physical beauty, a seducer of desire, and, above all, the symbol of all that is good and feminine. Women writers, receiving this complicated foundation upon which their identity stood, modified specific characteristics of the virtue to suit their own particular needs: they made use of the implicit power that comes with evoking the name of chastity in order to provide occasion for and to authorize their self-expression against charges of social transgression.
240 ' * * f -
N A T L Î R É S l P I C T U R E I Drawn by j f a n c i e s ! PENCIL T o the Life.
Being (everal Feigned Stories, Comical, Tragical,' Tragi-cotr.ical, Poetical, Roinancicai, Philofophi-i . cal, Hiftoricai, and Mora! : Some in Verlë, forael in Prole; Ibrne Mixt,and Ibme by Dialogues.
; tf'fitteJi h/ tî< Thrice Noble, Illultrious, andmofl Excellent Princels, THE BVCHESS of HEiVCASTLE.
Tèi SacorA Eiitkn.
L 0 N D 0 N, Printed by A. hhxsAl, in the Year i.
Uj . .-i-s A&j'L- — Ve \ !
Fiaure 5.1; Frontispiece and title page to Natures Picture.
241 NOTES
1. Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, pp. 88, 89.
2. Dorothy Leigh, The Mother’s Blessing: or. The Godly Counsel of a Gentlewoman not long since deceased, left behind for her children (London, 1616), pp. 32-3.
3. Margaret Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664), pp. 110-11.
4. Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 1, 2. This connection between silence and chastity has been widely remarked: see for example Wendy Wall, The Imprint o f Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), chapter 5; and Peter Stallybrass, who notes that, in the early modem period, "Silence, the closed mouth, is made the sign of chastity" ("Patriarchal Territories," p. 127).
5. Some important general studies of early modem English women’s writings include: Patricia Crawford, "Women’s published writings 1600-1700," in Women in English Society, ed. Mary Prior (London and New York: Methuen, 1985): 211-82; Gary P. Waller, "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing, in Silent but for the Word, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985): 238-91; and Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-88 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).
6. See Hobby, Virtue of Necessity, and Crawford, "Women’s published writings."
7. Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 282.
8. Quintilian is attributed with developing the ideal of the moral speaker against the perceived amorality of the sophists.
9. 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Timothy 2:13-14.
10. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both attributed Eve’s fall to moral and intellectual weakness. Milton designs Eve’s fault as her deficiency of reason in Paradise Lost.
11. The two-part ethos is an Aristotelian invention (see Ethics) which was adopted by the Latin theorists most influential to Renaissance rhetoric, Cicero and Quintilian.
12. Vives attributed More’s intention in educating his daughters solely to a concem for their chastity: "Their father, not content only to have them good and very chaste, would also they should be well-leamed, supposing that by that mean they should be more truly and surely chaste" (sigs. ET"'').
242 13. According to Ralph Houlbrooke, if a man slandered a woman by calling her "whore," he could defend himself in court by claiming that he meant "whore of her tonge," not "whore of her body" {Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520-1570 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], p. 80, as quoted in Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories," p. 126).
14. Ann Rosalind Jones borrows a system for categorizing women’s writings from the popular culture theorist Stuart Hall, who defines three "viewer" positions to media messages: the "dominant/hegemonic," in which a public text is reproduced obediently; the "negotiated" position, in which the ideological encodings are accepted but transformed to serve a different group (complete with contradictions); and the "oppositional position," in which the code is lifted completely from its context and its benefits are assigned to a nonhegemonic group {Currency, pp. 3-6). In general, women’s writings on chastity are generally "negotiated" positions, whereas late seventeenth-century women’s defenses of education are occasionally "oppositional. "
15. All quotations are taken from Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (London, 1673). Page numbers are be cited in the text.
16. A controversy has arisen over the correct identification of Makin and the writings she produced. According to a recent study, Makin has been frequently mis- identified as Bathsua Pell Makin (rather than Bathsua Reginald Makin) and mistakenly named as the author of an anonymous treatise on debt. For the most current biographical information about Makin, see Jean R. Brink, "Bathsua Reginald Makin: ‘Most Learned Matron,’" Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 313-326. See also Frances Teague, "Bathsua Makin: Woman of Learning," in Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Wamke (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 285-304; and "New Light on Bathsua Makin," Seventeenth-Century News 44 (1986): 16. See also Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Vintage, 1985), pp. 130-1.
17. Wrightson, in English Society, writes that "the educational imperative of the day was . . . a powerful mixture of idealism and practicality" (185). He does note, however, that access to education was very limited: Educational opportunity for boys was . . . grossly biased by wealth. For girls it was doubly discriminatory. Access to the grammer schools and universities was closed to them whatever their rank, and though gentlewomen might be well taught by domestic tutors, few other girls were able to proceed beyond the attainment of literacy in a petty school, if that. (189-90) Margaret L. King, in Women of the Renaissance, notes that learned women were identified in literature with female soldiers and rulers and were often portrayed in masculine garb: "The refiguration of such a woman as masculine accounts for the appearance of extraordinary qualities in a creature otherwise known to be inferior" (190).
243 18. Makin’s essay appeared between the restoration of Charles II and the Glorious Revolution, and her examples of women acting in times of crisis could very well have touched her readers’ personal memories.
19. The same exemplars are often used for different virtues: Zenobia is praised by Thomas Elyot in his Defense o f Good Women for wisdom, while Vives uses her as an example of ideal chastity in Instruction.
20. For more on Kenneth Burke’s theory of identification and consubstantiality, see his A Rhetoric of Motives in A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962), pp. 521-857.
21. Fell Foxe, Margaret. Women’s Speaking Justified in The Rhetorical Tradition, eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 677-85. Page numbers for quotations are cited in the text.
22. For more on women and prophetic speaking, see The Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. Esther S. Cope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Phyllis Mack, Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
23. Wall, Imprint, pp. 287, 293. Wall quotes from another example of the genre, Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscelanae, Meditations, Memoratives (1604).
24. Margaret Hannay discusses the modesty topos in relation to women writers in her introduction to Silent But for the Word.
25. Early Cavendish criticism, coinciding with the rise of feminist criticism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tends to be highly judgmental about (and exasperated by) the author’s consistent undermining of what initially appears as startlingly modem and forthright feminism. See for example, Mary Ann McGuire, "Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, on the Nature and Status of Women," International Journal of Women’s Studies (1978): 193-206, who makes surprising value-judgments: Cavendish’s assumptions that she was, as a woman, incapable of rational control and that literature did not demand rationality damaged her writings. She allowed her books to go to press flawed by chaotic thought and careless manuscript preparations and consequently failed to produce work of enduring value. (193)
26. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions (London, 1663), quoted in Hilda L. Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 93.
27. Smith, Reason’s Disciples, p. 77.
244 28. Makin, Essay, p. 10. Also quoted in James Fitzmaurice, "Fancy and the Family: Self-characterizations of Margaret Cavendish," Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990): 198- 209, p. 199.
29. I am using a Brown University Women Writers Project typescript copy of the first edition (1656) of Poems and Fancies. Page numbers, which were added by WWP and may not correspond to the original edition, are cited in the text.
30. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, p. xv.
31. This poem-as-child conceit is not, of course, wholly original to Cavendish, although it takes on a different resonance for a woman writer. See for example Sidney’s Sonnet 50 in Astrophil and Stella.
32. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, p. v.
33. See my Chapter Three for a discussion of beliefs in Romance’s effects upon the reader.
34. Cavendish, Natures Picture (London, 1671), sig Cl. Page number for subsequent quotations will be cited in the text.
35. Vives writes, "They say that the holy virgin our lady was so demure and sad that if any man cast a wanton eye upon her, that foul heat was all quenched as though a man had cast a fire brand into the water" (Instruction, sig. N3''). (See Chapter Two.)
36. Curiously, the restrictions upon women in various cultures that appear to be the most oppressive to outsiders are often the ones that are most vehemently defended as empowering by the women within those cultures. Some modem examples are Muslim women’s adherence to purdah in Arabic cultures and women’s defense of female genital mutilation in many African societies.
37. Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, in The Poems ofAemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p.48.
38. There is as yet no published critical work on this narrative. Marina Leslie has, however, kindly allowed me to consult her manuscript which will appear in Menacing Virgins: Reprentations of Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, eds. Kathleen Kelly and Marina Leslie.
39. Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, pp. 50, 86.
40. The topos of the evil woman who, for monetary or other reasons, imprisons young women and works as an agent for their seduction (while the seducer only makes occasional
245 appearances) is a commonplace in eighteenth-century novels. See, for example, Richardson’s Clarissa and even Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Women: Or, Maria.
41. See my discussion in Chapter Two.
42. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 24.
43. Sylvia Brown, "Margaret Cavendish: Strategies Rhetorical and Philosophical Against the Charge of Wantonness, Or Her Excuses for Writing so Much," Critical Matrix 6 (1991): 20- 45, p. 29.
44. Jones, Currency, p. 7.
45. Josephine Roberts, ed., introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), pp. 3-75, pp. 32-3. Cavendish alludes to this verse when she self-mockingly writes, "Work Lady, Work let writing Books alone, for surely Wiser Women n’er writ one," in CCXI Sociable Letters (London, 1664), sig. B; and quoted in Roberts, p. 34 n. 85, and Sylvia Brown, "Margaret Cavendish, " p. 26.
46. Wall, Imprint, p. 334.
47. Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, sonnet 15. Quotations are from the Roberts edition.
48. Brathwaite, The English Gentlewoman, p. 205.
49. Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, Eighth Song, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 11. 41-44, 49-52.
50. Wroth, Sonnet 9, 11. 9-14.
51. Wall, Imprint, p. 336.
52. See for example Paul Delaney’s seminal British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1969), which rounds up "Female Autobiographers" into one small chapter and characterizes their writings with such terms as "effusions" and "neurotic over-sensitivity" (pp. 161, 163).
53. Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Anitquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p. 24. See also Sarah Heller Mendelson, "Stuart women’s diaries and occasional memoirs," in Women in English Society 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London and New York: Methuen, 1985): 181-210, who writes. Although spiritual memoirs account for a large proportion of the feminine manuscripts that have been preserved, it is impossible to estimate how much secular material failed to survive or was deleted by editors of manuscipts that were subsequently printed. There are reasons for suspecting that a substantial
246 amount of non-devotional writing may have disappeared in this manner, because editors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries exhibit a marked preference for female piety. (188)
54. Mary Beth Rose, ed., "Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography," in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 245-78, p. 249.
55. Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 17.
56. Margaret Cavendish, Memoirs of Margaret Duchess of Newcastle, in The Life of the (1st) Duke of Newcastle and Other Writings by Margaret Duchess (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), p. 188. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited in the text.
57. Vives, Instruction, sig. C2'\
58. See my discussion in Chapter 3.
59. There are four biographies on the life of Margaret Cavendish: Thomas Longueville, The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (London, NY: Longmans, Green, 1910); Richard Ten Eyck Perry, The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History (Boston and London: Ginn and Co., 1918); Douglas Grant, Margaret the First: a Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (London: Hart-Davis, 1957); and Kathleen Jones, A Glorious Fame: the Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623- 1673 (London: Bloomsbury, 1988).
60. Rose, "Gender, Genre, and History," p. 252.
61. Arme, Lady Halkett. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, in The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 3-87, p. 11. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and are cited in the text.
62. Bampfield wavered in his loyalties: he performed well-documented services for Charles I and the Duke of York in the 1640s but also worked for Cromwell in the 1650s and supported the Dutch in the 1660s during England’s Second Dutch War. See Memoirs, n. 23:9.
63. According to John Loftis, the modem editor of the diary, "the context in which the missing leaf appeared suggests that it was removed, by Lady Halkett herself or some other person concerned to protect her reputation, because she had written forthrightly about her relationship with Colonel Bampfield" (n. 72:32).
64. Wrightson, English Society, p. 67; and Gellert Spencer Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy, as cited in Findlay and Hobby, "Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography," p. 15.
247 65. Sarah Findley and Elaine Hobby, "Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography," in 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century. Ed. Francis Barker, et al. (University of Essex, 1981), pp. 11-36, p. 12.
66. Vives, Instruction, sig. G2.
248 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary
“An Homily of the State of Matrimony (1563).” Daughters, Wives, and Widows. Ed. Joan Larsen Klein. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992: 11-25.
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius. A Treatise of the Nobilitie and Excellencye of Woman Kynde. London, 1542.
Allestree, Richard. The Ladies Calling. London, 1673.
Ames, William. The Marrow of Sacred Divinity. London, 1642.
Anonymous. The Arraingment and Conviction of Mervin Lord Audley, Earle of Castlehaven. London, 1642.
Anonymous. The Tryal of the Lord Audley, Earl of Castlehaven. London, 1679.
Anonymous. The Tryal and Condemnation of Mervin, Lord Audley Earl o f Castle-haven. London, 1699.
Anonymous. An excellent ballad entituled the Constancy of Susanna. London, n.d.
Astley, Robert. Of Honour. London, 1601.
Augustine. On Christian Doctrine. The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1990: 386-416.
Aylet, Robert. Peace with Her Foure Carders, viz. Five Morall Meditations. London, 1622.
Bacon, Francis. “The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Moral, 1625.” Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works. Ed. Sidney Warhaft. New York: MacMillan, 1985: 45-196.
Batchiler, John. The Virgins Pattern: in the Exemplary Life, and Lamented Death of Mrs. Susanna Perwich. London, 1661.
249 Blamires, Alcuin, ed. Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Concerning Famous Women. Trans. Guido A. Guarino. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1963.
Brathwaite, Richard. The English Gentlewoman. London, 1631.
—. A Ladies Love-Lecture. London, 1641.
Bruto, Giovanni Michele. The Necessarie, Fit, and Convenient Education of a Young Gentlewoman: Translated into English by W.P. London, 1598.
Bullinger, Heinrich. The Christen State of Matrimonye. Trans. Miles Coverdale. London, 1541?
Buoni, Thomas. The Problèmes ofBeautie and all humane affections. Trans. S.L. London, 1606.
Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Sir Thomas Hoby. London: J.M. Dent, 1974.
Cavendish, Margaret. “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancy’s Pencil to the Life. London, 1656.
—. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London, 1663.
—. CCXI Sociable Letters. London, 1664.
—. “Memoirs of Margaret Duchess of Newcastle.” The Life of the (1st) Duke of Newcastle and Other Writings by Margaret Duchess. London and Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1916.
—. Poems and Fancies (1656). Providence: Brown University Women Writers Project, 1994.
Codrington, Robert. The Second Part of Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation Amongst Gentlewomen. London, 1664.
Darcie, Abraham. The Honour of Ladies: Or, a True Description of Noble Perfection. London, 1622.
Davies, Eleanor. The Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies. Ed. Esther S. Cope. Oxford: Oxford University press, 1995.
250 Donne, John. John Donne’s Poetry. Ed. Arthur L. Clements. 2nd ed. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992.
Drayton, Michael. Matilda. The Faire amd Chaste Daughter of the Lord Robert Fitzwater. London, 1594.
DuBoscq, Jacques. The Compleat Woman. London, 1639.
Elyot, Sir Thomas. The Defense of Good Women. The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance. Ed. Diane Bomstein. Delmar, NY : Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1980.
Erasmus, Desiderius. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium. London, 1532.
Featley, John. The Honour of Chastity: A Sermon Made and Preached by John Featley. London, 1632.
Fell Foxe, Margaret. Women’s Speaking Justified. The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1990: 677-85.
Freud, Sigmund. “Contributions to the Psychology of Love: the Taboo of Virginity.” Trans. Joan Riviere. Collected Papers. Ed. Ernest Jones, M.D. Vol. 4. New York: Basic Books, 1959: 217-35.
— . “Femininity.” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965: 112-35.
Geree, Stephen. The Ornament of Women, Or, a Description of the True Excellency of Women Delivered in a Sermon at the Funerall of M. Elizabeth Machell. London, 1639.
Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises. London, 1622.
Greene, Robert. Penelopes Web. London, 1601.
Grymeston, Elizabeth. Miscelanae, Meditations, Memoratives. London, 1604.
Guazzo, Stefano. The Civile Conversation. Trans. George Pettie. London, 1581.
Halkett, Lady Anne. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett. The Memoirs ofAZnne, Lady Halkett and Anne, Lady Fanshawe. Ed. John Loftis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979: 3-87.
251 Harvey, William. Divine Meditations upon Some o f the Virtuous and Vitious Women in the Scriptures. London, 1661.
Hawkins, Francis. Youths Behaviour, Or Decency in Conversation Amongst Men. London, 1661.
Hergest, William. The Right Rule of Christian Chastitie. London, 1580.
Haywood, Thomas. The Generali Historié of Women. London, 1657.
Lanyer, Aemilia. “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Ed. Susanne Woods. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Leigh, Dorothy. The Mother’s Blessing: or. Godly Counsel of a Gentlewoman not long deceased, left behind for her children. London, 1616.
Livy. Livy in Fourteen Volumes. Vol. 1. Trans. B.O. Foster. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Makin, Bathsua. An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen. London, 1673.
Markham, Francis. The Booke of Honour. London, 1625.
Markham, Gervase. The Engish Huswife. London, 1615.
Milton, John. A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: MacMillan, 1957.
—. Paradise Lost. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: MacMillan, 1957.
—. An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 1. Ed. Don M. Wolfe, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
—. Areopagitica. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 2. Ed. Douglas Bush, et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959.
—. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The Prose of John Milton. Ed. J. Max Patrick and Arthur M. Axelrad. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1967: 143-201.
—. Christian Doctrine. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 6. Ed. John Carey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.
252 Newstead, Christopher. An Apology for Women: Or, Womens Defence. London, 1620.
Ovid. Fasti. Trans. Sir James George Frazer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Peacham, Henry. Minerva Britanna. London, 1612.
Pierse, Charles. Venues Anatomie, or, a Compendious Description of that Late Right Honourable, Memorable, and Renowned Bedfordshire Lady, the Lady Cheany of Tuddington. London, 1618.
Puttenham, George. The Ane of English Poesie. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1971.
Ripa, Cesare. Iconologia. New York: Garland, 1979.
Salter, Thomas. The Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie. London, 1579.
—. The Mirrhor of Modestie. Ed. Janis Butler Holm. New York: Garland, 1987.
Servingman, James Yates. The Chariot of Chastitie. London, 1582.
Shakespeare, William. Measure for Measure. Ed. J.W. Lever. London: Methuen, 1966.
—. The Rape ofLucrece. The Narrative Poems. Ed. Maurice Evans. London: Penguin, 1989: 105-62.
Sidney, Sir Philip. Astrophil and Stella. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. William A. Ringler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
—. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Ed. Thomas P. Roche. London: Penguin, 1987.
—. Amoretti and Epithalamion. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems o f Edmund Spenser. Ed. William A. Oram, et al. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989: 583-79.
253 —. A Hymne in Honour ofBeautie. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Ed. William A. Oram, et al. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989: 706-20.
Stubbes, Phillip. The Anatomie of Abuses. London, 1583.
Swetnam, Joseph. The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women. London, 1617.
T.E. The Lctwes Resolutions o f Women’s Rights. London, 1632.
Tasso, Torquato. The Householders Philosophy. . . whereunto is annexed a diarie book for all good huswives. Trans. Thomas Kyd. London, 1588.
Taylor, Jeremy. The Rule and Exercise of Holy Living and Holy Dying. 10 th ed. London, 1674.
V., W. The Ladie’s Blush: Or, the History of Susanna, the Great Example of Conjugal Chastity. London, 1670.
Vives, Juan Luis. A Very Fruitful and Pleasant Book Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman. Trans. Richard Hyrde. London, 1529?
—. The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita. Ed. Carlos G. Norena. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.
Woolley, Hannah. The Gentlewoman’s Companion. London, 1673.
Wroth, Mary. The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.
Secondary
Aers, David and Bob Hodge. ‘“Rational Burning’: Milton on Sex and Marriage.” Milton Studies 13 (1979): 3-33.
Allen, Don Cameron. “Some Observations on the The Rape ofLucrece.” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 89-98.
Amussen, S.D. “Gender, Family and the Social Order, 1560-1725.” Order and Disorder in Early Modem England. Eds. A.J. Fletcher and J. Stevenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: 196-217.
254 Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.
—, eds. The Violence of Representation, or ’How the West Was Won. ’ London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
Ashley, Kathleen M. “Medieval courtesy literature and dramatic mirrors of female conduct.” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York and London: Methuen, 1987: 25-38.
Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield. On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
Bashar, Nazife. “Rape in England Between 1500 and 1700.” Sexual Dynamics of History. London: Pluto Press, 1983.
Bayne, Diane Valerie. “’The Instruction of a Christian Woman: Richard Hyrde and the Thomas More Circle.” Moreana 45 (1975): 5-15.
Belsey, Catherine. The Subject of Tragedy. London and New York: Methuen, 1985.
—. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Ben-Amos, liana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modem England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
Benson, Pamela. “Florimell at Sea: The Action of Grace in Faerie Queene, Book III.” Spenser Studies 6 (1985): 83-94.
—. The Invention of the Renaissance Woman. University Park: Peimsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Berger, Jr. Harry. “’Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene.” Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance. Eds. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989: 208-56.
Berry, Phillipa. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen. London and New York: Routledge, 1989.
—. “Woman, Language, and History in The Rape ofLucrece.” Shakespeare Survey 44 (1991): 33-39.
255 Bevington, David. Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Black, Matthew Wilson. Richard Brathwaite: An Account of his Life and Works. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928.
Bloch, R. Howard. Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. “’Carelesse Modestee’: Chastity as Politics in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene.” ELH 55 (1988): 555-73.
Breasted, Barbara. “Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal.” Milton Studies 3 (1971): 201-24.
Brill, Leslie W. “Chastity as Ideal Sexuality in the Third Book of The Faerie Queene.” SEL 11 (1971): 15-26.
Brink, Jean R. “Bathsua Reginald Makin: ’Most Learned Matron.’” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 313-26.
Bromley, Laura G. “Lucrece’s Re-Creation.” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 200- 211.
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Brown, Sylvia. “Margaret Cavendish: Strategies Rhetorical and Philosophical Against the Charge of Wantonness, Or Her Excuses for Writing So Much.” Critical Matrix 6 (1991): 20-45.
Brownmiller, Susan. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1975.
Bugge, John. Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal. International Archives of the History of Ideas 17. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975.
Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources for Shakespeare. 8 vols. New York and London: Columbia University Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75.
Bullough, Vem, et. al. The Subordinated Sex: A History of Attitudes Towards Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
256 Buncombe, Marie K. “Faire Florimell as Faire Game: The Virtuous, Unmarried Woman in The Fairie Queene and The Courtier.” CLA Journal 28 (1984): 164-75.
Burford, E.J., and Sandra Shulman. Of Bridles and Burnings: The Punishment of Women. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives and a Rhetoric of Motives. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1962.
Carre, Jacques, ed. The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain, 1600-1900. Leiden, New York, Koln: E.J. Brill, 1994.
Cavanagh, Sheila T. “Nightmares of Desire: Evil Women in The Faerie Queene.” Studies in Philology 91 (1994): 313-38.
—. Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Christopher, Georgia B. “The Virginity of Faith: Comus as a Reformation Conceit.” ELH A3 (1976): 479-99.
Clark, Sandra. The Elizabethan Pamphleteers. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.
Colie, Rosalie. Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Crawford, Patricia. “Women’s published writings 1600-1700. ” Women in English Society. Ed. Mary Prior. London and New York: Methuen, 1985: 211-282.
Creaser, John. “Milton’s Comus: The Irrelevance of the Castlehaven Scandal.” Milton Quarterly 22 (1987): 24-34.
Culp, Dorothy Woodward. “Courtesy and Moral Virtue.” SEL 11 (1971): 37-51.
Davies, Kathleen M. “Continuity and Change in Literary Advice on Marriage.” Marriage and Society: Studies in the Social History of Marriage. Ed. R.B. Outhwaite. London: Europa Publications, 1981: 58-80.
Davies, Stevie. The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea o f Woman in Sepnser, Shakespeare and Milton. The University Press of Kenmcky, 1986.
257 de Lange, Nicholas. Apocrypha: Jewish Literature of the Hellenic Age. New York: Viking, 1978.
Delaney, Paul. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1969.
Donaldson, Ian. The Rapes ofLucretia: A Myth and its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.
Donawerth, Jane. Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1978.
Dubrow, Heather. “A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Generic Tradition. ” Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986: 399-417.
—. Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987.
DuRocher, Richard J. “Spenser, Milton, and ’Venus’ looking glass.’” JEGP 92 (1993): 325-41.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen Books, 1978.
Emmison, E.G. Elizabethan Life: Morals & the Church Courts. Chelmsford: Essex County Council, 1973.
Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Findley, Sarah, and Elaine Hobby. “Seventeenth-Century Women’s Autobiography.” 1642: Literature and Power in the Seventeenth Century. Ed. Francis Barker. Essex: University of Essex, 1981: 11-36.
Fineman, Joel. “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape.” Representations 20 (1987): 25-76.
258 Fitzmaurice, James. “Fancy and the Family: Self-characterizations of Margaret Cavendish.” Huntington Library Quarterly 53 (1990): 198-209.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964.
—. The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton’s Comus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane, 1977.
—. “The Battle for Chastity.” Trans. Anthony Forster. Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times. Ed. Philippe Aries and Andre Bejin. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985: 15-25.
—. The History of Sexuality, Part 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
Frantz, David O. Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989.
Fraser, Antonia. The Weaker Vessel. New York: Vintage, 1985.
Frye, Susan. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
—. “Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane.” Signs 20 (1994): 49-78.
Garrard, Mary D. Artemesia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographies: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Gossett, Suzanne. ‘“Best Men are Molded out of Faults’: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama.” ELR 14 (1984): 305-27.
Grant, Douglas. Margaret the First: a Biography of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. London: Hart-Davis, 1957.
Gravdal, Kathryn. Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
259 Grudin, Robert. Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Guillory, John. “From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost. ” Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Eds. Elizabeth Harvey and Katharine Mans. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1990: 68-88.
Halpem, Richard. “Puritanism and Maenadism m. A Mask.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe. Eds. Maureen Quilligan, Margaret W. Ferguson, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986: 88-105.
Hampton, Timothy. Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Henderon, Katherine Usher, and Barbara F. McManus, eds. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women, 1540-640. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
Hobby, Elaine. Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-88. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
Hogrefe, Pearl. The Thomas More Circle: A Program of Ideas and Their Impact on Secular Drama. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959.
Holm, Janis Butler. “Struggling with the Letter: Vives's Preface to The Instruction of a Christen Woman.” Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of Sixteenth-Century England and France. Eds. Marie-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991: 265-97.
Homer, Olga. “Susanna’s Double Life.” Medieval English Theatre 8 (1986): 76-102.
Houlbrooke, Ralph. Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation, 1520-1570. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Hull, Suzanne C. Chaste, Silent & Obedient: English Books for Women 1475-1640. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1982.
Ingram, Martin. “The Reform of Popular Culture? Sex and Marriage in Early Modem England. ” Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England. Ed. Barry Reay. London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985: 129-65.
260 Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Jardine, Lisa. Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Jed, Stephanie. Chaste Thinking: The Rape ofLucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
—. “The Scene of Tyranny: Violence and humanistic tradition.” The Violence of Representation. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. London and NY: Routledge, 1989: 29-44.
Jelinek, Estelle C. The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Nets and bridles: early modem conduct books and sixteenth-century women’s lyrics.” The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York and London: Methuen, 1987: 39-72.
—. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Jones, Kathleen. A Glorious Fame: the Life o f Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623-1673. London: Bloomsbury, 1988.
Jordan, Constance. Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Joseph, Sr. Miriam. Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 1947.
Kahn, Coppelia. “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-72.
—. “"Lucrece: The Sexual Politics of Subjectivity.” Rape and Representation. Eds. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991: 141-59.
Kaufman, Gloria. “Juan Luis Vives on tnhe Education of Women.” Signs 3.4 (1978): 891-96.
261 Keeble, N.H. The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kegl, Rosemary. The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Kelly-Gadol, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Becoming Visible: Women in Western History. Eds. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977: 137-64.
Kelso, Ruth. Doctrine for a Lady of the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Kerrigan, William. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
—, and Gordon Braden. “Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and Renaissance Love Poetry.” E L iî53 (1986): 27-51.
—. “A Politically Correct Comus: A Reply to John Leonard.” Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 149-55.
King, John N. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
—. Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Klein, Joan Larsen, ed. Daughters, Wives, & Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
Klein, Lisa M. “’Let us Love, Dear Love, Lyke as We Ought’: Protestant Marriage and the Revision of Petrarchan Loving in Spenser’s Amoretti.” Spenser Studies 10 (1992): 109-37.
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.
262 Krier, Theresa M. Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. “The Metaphorical Logic of Rape.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 2 (1987): 73-79.
Lanham, Richard. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.
—. “The Literal Britomart.” M -g 28 (1967): 426-45.
Laqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Leonard, John. “Saying ’No’ to Freud: Milton’s A Mask and Sexual Assault.” Milton Quarterly 25 (1991): 129-40.
Lemer, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
—. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Lewis, C.S. The Allegory o f Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.
Longueville, Thomas. The First Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1910.
Mack, Phyllis. Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
MacLean, Ian. The Renaissance Notion of Woman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Marcus, Leah S. “The Lilieu of Milton’s Comus: Judicial Reform at Ludlow and the Problem of Sexual Assault.” Criticism 25 (1983): 293-327.
Marcus, Leah S. “Justice for Margery Evans: A ’Local’ Reading of Comus.” Milton and the Idea of Woman. Ed. Julia M. Walker. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988: 66-85.
Mans, Katharine Eisaman. “Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare’s Rape ofLucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82.
263 McColley, Diane. Milton’s Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
McDaniel, Dennise. “Fashioning Gentlewomen: Book III ofT/ze Faerie Queene and Vives’s Instruction of a Christian Woman.” Selected Papers from the West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association 15 (1992): 44-50.
McGuire, Mary Ann. “Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, on the Nature and Status of Women.” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1 (1978): 193-206.
—. Milton’s Puritan Masque. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983.
McLeod, Glenda. Virtue and Venom: Catalogs of Women from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
Mendelson, Sarah Heller. “Stuart women’s diaries and occasional memoirs.” Women in English Society, 1500-1800. Ed. Mary Prior. London and New York: Methuen, 1985: 181-210.
Montrose, Louis A. “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text. ” Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986: 303-40.
—. “Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History.” ELR 16 (1986): 5-12.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16 (1978): 6-18.
Murrin, Michael. The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Towards a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.
Myers, Alexander A. “’Embraces Forcible and Foul’: Viewing Milton’s Sin as a Rape Victim.” Milton Quarterly 28 (1994): 11-16.
Nead, Lynda. The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Newman, Karen. Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Norena, Carlos G. Juan Luis Vives and the Emotions. Carbondale and Edwards ville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.
264 Oram, William A. “Elizabethan Fact and Spenserian Fiction.” Spenser Studies 4 (1983): 33-47.
Ortner, Sherry B. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, Society. Eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974: 67-87.
Ortner, Sherry B. “The Virgin and the State.” Feminist Studies 4 (1978): 19-35.
Parker, Patricia. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London and New York: Methuen, 1987.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Patton, Elizabeth. “Second Thoughts of a Renaissance Humanist on the Education of Women: Juan Luis Vives Revises his De institutione feminae Christianae.” ANQ n.s. 5 (1992): 111-4.
Post, J.B. “Ravishment of Women and the Statutes of Westminser.” Legal Records and the Historian. Ed. J.H. Baker. London: Royal Historical Society, 1978: 150-164.
Quilligan, Maureen. Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983.
—. The Language of Allegory. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979.
Roche, Jr., Thomas P. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964.
Rogers, John. “The Enclosure of Virginity: The Poetics of Sexual Abstinence in the English Revolution.” Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, anbd Culture in Early Modem England. Eds. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994: 229-50.
Rose, Mary Beth, ed. “Gender, Genre, and History: Seventeenth-Century English Women and the Art of Autobiography.” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986: 245-78.
Sharpe, J.A. “’Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107 (1985): 144-67.
265 Shepherd, Simon. Amazons and Warrior Women. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981.
—, ed. The Women's Sharp Revenge. London: Fourth Estate, 1985.
Silberman, Lauren. “Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene.'” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modem Europe. Eds. Maureen Quilligan, Margaret W. Ferguson, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986: 259-71.
—. Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Smith, Hilda L. Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Eds. Maureen Quilligan, Margaret W. Ferguson, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986: 123-42.
Steppat, Michael. “Social Change and Gender Decorum: Renaissance Courtesy.” The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain, 1600-1900. Ed. Jacques Carre. Leiden, New York, Koln: E.J. Brill, 1994: 27-40.
Sthnpson, Catherine R. “Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape.” The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Eds. Gayle Greene, Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980: 56-64
Summers, Claude J. and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds. Renaissance Discourses of Desire. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993.
Teague, Frances. “New Light on Bathsua Makin.” Seventeenth-Century News 44 (1986): 16.
—. “Bathsua Makin: Woman of Learning.” Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century. Eds. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Wamke. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989: 285-304.
Ten Eyck Perry, Richard. The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her Husband as Figures in Literary History. Boston and London: Ginn and Co., 1918.
266 Teskey, Gordon. “From Allegory to Dialetic; Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton.” PMLA 101 (1986): 9-23.
—. “Allegory.” The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. A.C. Hamilton. Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press and Routledge, 1990. 20-21.
—. “Allegory, Materialism, Violence.” The Production of English Renaissance Culture. Eds. Sharon O’Dair, David Lee Miller, and Harold Weber. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994: 293-318.
Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Thomas, John A. “A Moral Voice for the Restoration Lady: A Comparative View of Allestree and Vives.” JRMMRA 7 (1986): 123-42.
Tomaselii, Sylvana, and Roy Porter, eds. Rape. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Turner, John Grantham. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
Vicari, Patricia. “Renaissance Emblematica. ” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 8 (1993): 153-68.
Vickers, Nancy J. “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Eds. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985: 95-115.
—. “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme.” Criticial Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79.
—. “The Body Re-Membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description.” Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes. Ed. John D. Lyons, et al. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982: 100-109.
—. “‘This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face.’” The Female Body in Western Culture: Co ntemporary Perspectives. Ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986: 209-222.
267 Villeponteaux, Mary. “Semper Eadem: Belpheobe’s Denial of Desire. ” Renaissance Discourses o f Desire. Eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1993: 29-45.
Walker, Julia M, ed. Milton and the Idea of Woman. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Waller, Gary F. "Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing.” Silent but for the Word. Ed. Margaret P. Haimay. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985: 238-91.
Wamicke, Retha M. Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983.
Watson, Foster. Vives and the Renascence Education of Women. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1912.
Wayne, Valerie. “’Some Sad Sentence’: Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman.” Silent But for the Word. Ed. Margaret P. Haimay. Kent: Kent State University, 1985: 15-29.
Webb, Peter. The Erotic Arts. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975.
Weisner, Mary E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Whigham, Frank. Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
White, Robert A. “Shamefastnesse as Verecundia and as Pudicitia in The Faerie Queene.” Studies in Philology 78 (1981): 391-408.
Wildeblood, Joan. The Polite World: A Guide to the Deportment of the English in Former Times. London: Davis-Poynter, 1973.
Wilding, Michael. “Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. 1634: Theater and Politics on the Border.” Milton Quarterly 21 (1987): 35-51.
Willbem, David. “Hyperbolic Desire: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Contending Kingdoms. Eds. Maria-Rose Logan and Peter L. Rudnytsky. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991: 202-224.
268 Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
Wofford, Susanne Lindgren. “Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III.” Criticism 30 (1988):
1- 21 .
—. “The Social Aesthetics of Rape: Closural Violence in Boccaccio and Botticelli.” Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene. Ed. David Quint, et al. New York: MRTS, 1992: 189-238.
Woodbridge, Linda. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
—. “Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 327-54.
Woodhouse, A.S.P. “The Argument of Milton’s Comus.” University of Toronto Quarterly 11 (1941): 46-71.
—. Once More.” A Maske at Ludlow. Ed. John S. Diekhoff. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968.
Wrightson, Keith. English Society 1580-1680. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Ziegler, Georgianna. “My Lady’s Chamber: Female Space, Female Chastity in Shakespeare.” Textual Practice 4 (1990): 73-90.
269