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Women Characters in Hilary Mantel‟S Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

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Women Characters in Hilary Mantel‟S Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies Vol-3 Issue-5 2017 IJARIIE-ISSN(O)-2395-4396 HERSTORY IN HISTORY – WOMEN CHARACTERS IN HILARY MANTEL‟S WOLF HALL AND BRING UP THE BODIES MATHANGI.V, Dr.JAYANTHASRI BALAKRISHNAN, Ph.D Research Scholar, Associate Professor (Retd.),Dept. of English PSG College of Arts and Science, PSG College of Arts and Science, Coimbatore. Coimbatore. Ph- 9894248566 Email- [email protected] Abstract Recovering the lost voices of women in history has been one of the significant endeavors of feminists. Women writers of the present century also venture to recreate the lives of women long gone and historical fiction is one of the most convenient genres for such representation. Hilary Mantel in her Tudor historical fiction Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies charts the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the Chief Minister of Henry VIII. Apart from featuring an unlikely hero, Cromwell, another striking aspect of the novels is Mantel‟s portrayal of the women characters. Focusing on the lives of the royal women, especially the first three wives of Henry VIII, Mantel highlights the predicament of these women, whose only role was to fulfill their biological duty of producing a male heir, failing which they were not even guaranteed the safety of their lives and much worse, were made victims of history by the discourse of their own bodies. Keywords: sphere, body, fertility Hilary Mantel was born in 1962 in Derbyshire, England. She has penned numerous novels including A Place of Greater Safety, Fludd, Vacant Possession, Every Day is Mother’s Day, Giving up the Ghost etc. Recently she has won two Booker Prizes for the first two installments of her Tudor trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, historical novels tracing the life of Thomas Cromwell, the Chief Minister of Henry VIII. Being the first woman writer to secure this glory, the third installment of the triptych, The Mirror and the Light, that is yet to be published, has raised much speculation. The novels trace the life of Thomas Cromwell, the son of a Putney blacksmith, in the service of Henry VIII and his eventual fall caused by his whimsical master. Mantel‟s novels very frequently deal with the treatment of women and in the words of John Mullan, a reviewer writing for The Guardian, her women characters inhabit a “. stifling world where women are deprived of all power to act, even to move. .” He continues to say that many of them “have no escape from the power exerted over them”. Even in her Tudor novels she portrays a similar predicament of the royal women of the Tudor court who were wedged in the quagmire of power. The Tudor period proffers fascinating perception on the question of sphere, a corollary of power. James Daybell in Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England refutes the idea that the concept of sphere- public and the private, was developed during the Victorian period and traces it back to the Tudor times with the help of manuscript newsletters. The letters that women wrote during this period stand testimony to the fact that they established alliance between both the spheres thus blurring the distinction between them. However the women of this period seem to have been restricted in myriad ways. Alison Plowden in Tudor Women: Queens & Commoners maps out the life of the Tudor women. In the Introductory chapter she states, “. sixteenth century England was still very much a man‟s world. With no voice in parliament women could play no part in making or changing the law and, indeed, common law barely recognized their existence, except as an appendage of husband or father”(5). This was applicable to the Tudor royal women too who were highly capable and in the words of Plowden, “The royal House of Tudor was to owe a great deal to its womenfolk. Indeed, it owed its very existence to a woman . .” (7) .The reference is to Lady Margaret Beaufort whose maneuverings led to the accession of her Tudor son Henry VII to the English throne. Also the match that she finalized for him with Elizabeth of York bore its fruits by ensuring the continuance of a peaceful Tudor reign ending the disputes between the Yorks and the Lancastrians for good. Though Margaret initially played 6789 www.ijariie.com 1198 Vol-3 Issue-5 2017 IJARIIE-ISSN(O)-2395-4396 a political role to secure the throne for her son, she immediately relegated herself to the domestic affairs of the royal household. Plowden says: She never took any active part in politics and probably never wanted to, but in her own sphere her influence seems to have been entirely benign. To her contemporaries she embodied all the most admired female virtues, being a chaste, fruitful and submissive wife, a loving mother, a dutiful daughter, an affectionate sister and a pious, charitable Christian (14). Her contemporaries seem to have valued her role in the domestic sphere rather than her political role. Her sense of duty as the woman of the royal household was effectively passed over to her daughter-in-law Elizabeth, who immediately became busy producing children. A study of the Tudor period would reveal that marital bond is the only means through which women could secure security and status in the society. But it brought along with it the dangers of brutality and unjust treatment in the hands of the husband and most importantly, “. martyrdom, which few wives escaped. From her mid-teens to her early forties (if she lived that long), the average woman could expect to face the ordeal of childbirth if not annually, at least upwards of a dozen times. Most women bore between eight and fifteen children and saw perhaps half of them die . .” (6). The lack of proper reproductive healthcare and medical facilities and poor sanitary conditions spared none including royalty. Elizabeth of York delivered eight children out of which only four survived and she herself died in the childbirth at the age of thirty eight. Though royal births received much attention, such casualties were borne with mettle as it was “a story repeated in countless other families whose domestic tragedies are recorded in brass and stone in parish churches up and down the land” (6). But the lives of royal women were confined in ways as the commoners were not. The primary role that a Queen was expected to perform was to produce children, particularly sons. This biological duty, as it was called, was massively important to ensure the sustenance of the dynasty. Though no regal laws prohibited a woman from ascending the throne, unstable and difficult times of the past led to the belief that a male-heir would be the ideal option to secure the throne. The Tudor period acutely felt this necessity because “it was a dynasty founded primarily on conquest rather than heritage” (bbc.uk). The competing powers of France and Spain were also posing continuous threats to the English. This was the state of affairs when Henry VIII, the second son to Elizabeth of York ascended the throne in 1509. A galaxy of literature is available on the Reformation and the Dissolution of Monasteries that Henry masterminded during his period. Receiving commensurate attention is his longing for a male-heir and in his endeavor to have one, his eventual marriage to six women. Though his desire was fulfilled by his third wife, he assayed to marry three more times. The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, The Six Wives and Many Mistresses of Henry VIII: The Women's Stories, The six wives of Henry VIII: the king seen through the eyes of each of his ill-fated wives, Henry VIII: The King, His Six Wives, and His Court are the books that talk about his marriage to and treatment of these women. Janet Hardy-Gould, the author of Henry VIII and his Six Wives in his introduction to the book states: There were six of them – three Katherines, two Annes, and a Jane. One of them was the King‟s wife for twenty-four years, another for only a year and a half. One died, two were divorced, and two were beheaded. It was a dangerous, uncertain life. After the King‟s death in 1547, his sixth wife finds a box of old letters – one from each of the first five wives. They are sad, angry, frightened letters. They tell the story of what it was like to be the wife of Henry VIII of England. It was his first wife, Catherine of Aragon who was cast aside after twenty four years of marriage for not producing a male-heir. The King by then had lusted after Anne Boleyn and married her with the hopes of having a son. Henry was disappointed this time too for their first child was a daughter. Also Anne “miscarried of the boy who might have saved her”(Plowden 5) and the child was also found to have a deformity of some kind and in those days this was attributed to the woman being unfaithful to the husband. The King who had been waiting for a chance to do away with this ranting loose-tongued spouse, sent her to the scaffold on the charges of adultery and conspiracy against him along with five other men with whom she was supposed to have had a liaison, one of them being her own brother George Boleyn. He married Jane Seymour within days after Anne‟s execution and this woman became his favourite wife because just after seventeen months of marriage she presented him with the long-awaited male- heir, Edward.
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