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Women Writing in the Seventeenth Century -Sy What Authority?·: Women Writing in the Seventeenth Century BY WHAT AUTHORITY?: WOMEN WRITING IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY -SY WHAT AUTHORITY?·: WOMEN WRITING IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY by Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank, B. A., B. Ed., M.A. A Thesis Submltted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University 1985 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (198;) McMASTBR UNIVERSITY (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: "By What Authority?": Women Writing in the Seventeenth Century AUTHOR: Sylvia Lorraine Bowerbank, B. A. (McMaster University) B. Ed. (University of Toronto) M. A. (Simon Fraser University) SUPERVISOR: Professor W. G. Roebuck NUMBER Of PAGES: vii, 297 ii TO GIORGI LANDON GRINNELL 1962-1914 AND ANDIUi\Y Pl.BBLB GRINNBLL 1968-1984 ABSTRACT: This thesis attempts to reconcile a feminist with a conte1tuallst approach. It enquires jnto the historical origins of the emergence of women as writers in the seventeenth century. At. the same time, it places this women's movement in the conte1t of a profoundly complex revolution in thought, thereby discovering that women's intellectual contributions to the destruction of the hierarchical world view and to the search for new, just alternatives were as diverse and as problematic as men's were. The women who wrote in the seventeenth century were all preoccupied, implicitly or explicitly, with the question: By 1~hat authority do I cast off the traditional silence of women and dare to speak out? They gave different answers. Part One uses the lives of Gertrude More and Mary 17ard to illustrate the subtle ways in which the Catholic Church's concept of grace required the submission of women despite their conflicting inner voices. In contrast, Part Two explores the challenge of the seventeenth-century chariasmatic movement to the traditional iv notion of grace. The radical female Protestants made a significant step towards modern feminism both because they appealed to their own experience as a source for truth and becausEt they .initiated an autobiographical form which dramatizes the convinced woman in revolt against patriarchal structures. Part Three demonstrates that, despite the decline in the authority of the prophet's experience which came with the trliumph of the perspective and methods of science, Jane Lead ·s w1ritings continued a mystical counter-tradition which would nouri~!h the Ro~antic alter.native to scientific reductionism. Part IV analyzes the views of Margaret cavendi!1h and Aphra Behn who argued the natural right of a woman to write. Both challenged neoclassical aesthetic ideals--Cavendish by "JVriting to d~light herself, Behn by writing to delight her audience. Part V concludes by contrasting the approaches ~r>f two women who appealed to the authority of rational argument to justify their views. Mary Astell emerges as an early theorist for enlightenment femjnism, Anne Conway as a theorist for bolis~ic feminism. v TABLB OF CONTBNTS: INTRODUCTION: . ...1 ACKNOWLJIDGBMBNTS: . ..7 PART ONB: BACKGROUND: AUTHORITY AND OBEDIENCE IN THE LIV~ OF TWO CATHOLIC WOMEN chapter 1: The Galloping Nun: Grace and Place in the Jesuit-Thomistic World View.....................8 chapter 2: The Divine Perspective: Two Obediences Reconciled in Gertrude More·s Apology ......................29 PART TWO: GRACIOUS FEMINISM: THE REJECTION .OF HIERARCHY IN THE AUTOBIOORAPHIES OF THE FEMALE PROPHETS Chapter 3: '"Gracious Freedom'": A Review of the Relationship between the Seventeenth-Century Prophets and Feminism ....................................45 chapter 4: Grace vs. Place: Conflict ill the Autobiographies of the Female Prophets ..............................80 PART TBIUiE: THE REVOLUTION INTERNALISED: THE SPIRIT IN RETREAT chapter 5: Prophecy Methodized in the Age of Reason . 109 chapter 6: The Imagination Restored: Jane Lead's Alternative to Reason ..................................... 136 PART FOUR: IN THEIR OWN IMAGE: WOMEN IN SEARCH OF NATURAL STYLE chapter 7: The Spider's Delight: Margaret Cavendish and the "Female Imagination'" ........................170 chapter 8: The Sugar-Candied Reader: The Authority of the Auruence in Ap.bra Behn"s Writings ............ 206 PART FIVE: THE SEARCH FOR REASONABLE AUTHORITY chapter 9: Unreasonable Authority and the Origins of the Female Enlightenment .............................. 259 chapter 10: Anne Conway's Holistic Reason ...............268 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 274 IHTKODUCTION: Vain man is apt to think we were merely intended for t.bte world's propagation, and to keep its human .inhabitanl~s sweet and clean, but, by their leaves, had we the sam.e literature, he would find our brains as fruitful as our bodiesi. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman's Comoanioo (1675) In 1982, when Germaine Greer launched the journ~ll Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. she observed that, despite major advances in women's studies and feminist criticism, "the va:H mass of female literary activity remains scrambled and disfigured." Greer invited scholars to ..reconstitute the literary landscape 2ts composed of women as well as men." 1 There exist three generill studies which contribute significantly to the unscramblillg of the experience of seventeenth-century women writers. In 1920, when Myra Reynolds published The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760, she saw her work as pioneering survey of the little known information on the subject. Ignoring modern critical value~s. she included any woman whose intellectual interests and pursuits seem to demand ... new freedom or se1f-e1pression, new tt~lg and new opportunities for women'". Moreover, she did not apotogiJ~e for the boot·s 0 single comparatively barren point of vie11t1r.., presenting each learned woman '"as an exponent of new ideals for women or as marking by her own achievements new feminilite possibilities in the arts, in learning , or in letters... She left it 1~0 other scholars to reform and enrich the history of the lal~e seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with detailed studies of the lives and writings of women. 2 Hilda Smith's Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists {1982), a reworking of her 1975 PhD thesis, Feminism in the Seventeenth Century. is an impressive historic;al synthesis linking twelve "feminist" defenders of their se1 in a movement "to write critically about their exclusion fro:m educational institutions and positions of importance wit.bin Engli~1h society:·3 Smith sees emerging feminism as part of the growth an.d triumph of rationalist and scientific thinking. Of these women, sbe 3 insists, "their love of reason must never be viewed as separate from an understanding of their feminism:·4 This approach wori~s well with writers such as Mary Astell and Mary Chudleigh, but becomes problematic when applied to Margaret Fell, who appealE!d to the authority or the Inner Spirit, or to Margaret Cavendish, wbo defied scientific method and appealed to the authority of her fancy. As Smith admits, writers such as Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn do not fit into her analysis but their "literary success influena!!d the development of fem.inism.".5 In The Weaker Vessel: Woman·s Lot in Seventeen.tit:. century England ( 1984), Antonia Fraser avoids imposing a reminin bias except that she writes with '"a sense of justice and sympathy" for her subject.6 Because The Weaker Vessel is an informativ•~, entertaining and rich tapestry recapturing the diverse, comple1, often contradictory e1periences of the women of the period, it promises to rescue the lives of these women from oblivion moi·e effectively than any other approach taken so far. As well, becau~1e it is narrative, rather than analyticaJ, history, it lets the anecdotf!S speak for themselves to show that in the seventeenth century 4 there was no real change in "the relative standing or the sexes Jln respect to each other... 7 This thesis partakes in the femhlist attempt to rediscover and to rehabilitate women's literary history. It is pw~t of gynocentric criticism which is characterized by Elaine ShowaJtE~r as ... deliberate strategic foregrounding of the continuities anld interrelations or a women's literary history."8 At the same time, I try to avoid the e:rcesses of "whig history·· by placing the writlni~S or these women in the context of the literary and intellectual concerns of their contemporaries. Our recovery or the literary legacy or our foremothers may not merely reinforce our presertt understanding but may lead us to recreate our vision of the pa~st and of the future. Despite an obvious range of style, social status and outlook, the women who are the subject of this thesis share a common, if I may call it "feminist," ground. Denied the authority of G office, they began to appeal to the authority of their ow:n experience. They dared to speak out against tbe silence imposed by tradition and Christian ideology. They dared to write--thereby 5, subverting and challenging the hierarchical authority of king, priest, father or learned critic. From their different perspectives, they began--and twentieth-century feminists continue--to articulate a just answer to the question the high priests asked when Jesus usurped their prerogatives: "By what authority doe:st thou these Tbings?"9 NOTFS: 1Germaine Greer, .The Tulsa Center for the Study of Womerfs Literature: What We Are Doing and Why We Are Doing It," Iul~!a Studies in Women·s Literature. 1 #l (Spring, 1982), 13, 7. 2Myra Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760. 1st pub. 1920 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 425-426. 3Hilda Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century Bngli!th Feminists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. I. 4Hilda Smith, Feminism in Seventeenth-Century England. (PllD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975), p. 119. 5smith, Reason's Disciples. p. I. 6Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot ill ttle Seventeenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p. xii 7Fraser, p. 465. 8Btaine Showalter, "Women's Time, Women's Space: Writing ttle History of Feminist Criticism." Tulsa Studies in Women·s Literature. 3 #l/2 (Spring/Pall, 1984), 39.
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