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https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ Theses Digitisation: https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/research/enlighten/theses/digitisation/ This is a digitised version of the original print thesis. Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] PhD Thesis “Distinguishing ’twixt knaves and Kings”: Political Agency and Linguistic Authority in Anne Finch’s Poetry Jennifer Lynn Donald Department of English Literature University of Glasgow November 2005 ProQuest Number: 10396173 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10396173 Published by ProQuest LLO (2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLO. ProQuest LLO. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.Q. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 GLASGOW UNIVERSÏTV LIBRARY: Acknowledgments Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the financial support of Patricia Jackson and Fiona Johnstone, founders of The Alexander and Margaret Johnstone Research Fellowship, without which I would have been unable to begin this project. Their generosity and commitment to academic research at the University of Glasgow is the foundation of this thesis. Professor Janet Todd, who encouraged me to consider the potential of Anne Finch as a PhD subject, has continually inspired and motivated through her scholarship and supervision. Her unfailing enthusiasm and interest in the women writers of the Restoration period has sustained my own efforts to uncover the political contexts of Finch’s poetry. I would also like to thank Professor Richard Cronin for his practical advice and assistance and also for his friendship and support over the last four years. Many thanks must go to the English Department, notably Dr. Alison Chapman and Dr. Alice Jenkins, and the University Libraiy, particularly Richard Bapty, who have provided valuable assistance and information, all of which has been veiy much appreciated. Dr. Mardi Stewart, Dr. Antje Blank, Anne Hermanson and Sameeka Gammanpila have furthered my knowledge of women writers in general and Aphra Behn in particular, generously shared their own research and insights and added a great deal of humour and enjoyment to the often lonely and discouraging PhD experience. I would especially like to thank Mardi Stewart for reading and commenting on early chapter drafts and for being such a good friend. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I am immensely grateful to my parents, George and Nora Donald, for their constant support, both financial and emotional, and their unwavering belief that I would eventually finish this project and also my sister, Aisling Donald, who has always been there for me when I needed her. Contents 1. Preface...............................................................................................................................................1 2. “A Sweet, But Absolute Retreat”: Retirement, Reflection And Resistance 10 I. “A RETIREMENT FROM THE NOISE OF TOWNS”............................................................ 12 II. W indings and Sh a d e ............................................... 21 III. A lterations a n d Improvements................................................................................32 IV. “W hat art th o u, SPLEEN, which e v ’ry thing dost a pe?” ........................... 45 3. “Royal James Who Never Shall Retum/To Cheer Those Hearts Which Did Thy Sorrows Mourn”: From Stuart Court To Jacobite E xile ................................................ 60 I Politicizing the Pa n e g y r ic ..........................................................................................60 II. “A n d Royal Oak s be of his race” ............................................................................. 77 III. ‘B onnie D u n d e e ’ a n d the Jacobite Pa n e g y r ic ...................................................90 4. “A Monark He, And Ruler of The Day/A Fav’Rite She, That In His Beams Does Play”: The Male Monarch And The Female Poet.......................................................... 104 I. The Happy W ife: Conjugality a n d Linguistic A u t h o r it y ..........................105 II. “Y o ur Glorious Fate a nd Fortune I foretold”: The P olitical Prophetess..........................................................................................................................113 III. “W eep then ye realm s” : ‘A n Elegy o n the D eath of K. Ja m e s’ a n d ‘On THE D eath of the Qu e e n ’ ............................................................................................ 130 5. “Traders With The Muses”: Poetry And The Politics Of Exchange....................... 147 I. Cleveland Row a n d Literary Co n n ec tio n s.................................................... 151 II. V irtue a n d Co r r u pt io n ............................................................................................... 162 III. ‘Si r Plausible’ ..................................................................................................................169 IV. Fashion an d Fe m in in it y ...............................................................................................176 V. The Tea Ta b l e ...................................................................................................................186 6. “To Fable I Descend With Soft Delight”: Finch As Political Fabulist...................192 I. The W riter of Fa b l e s ...................................................................................................196 II. “I SNARL, ’TIS TRUE, AND SOMETIMES SCRATCH”.....................................................202 III. “Learn from a Fa b l e , I have somewhere fo und” ...... 212 7. Conclusion..................................................................................................................................225 Selected Bibliography.....................................................................................................................228 1. P r e f a c e Ruth Salvaggio has contended that: We cannot place Finch in a historical context when her womanly identity has already situated her among the material whose absence made that history possible. We cannot restore any woman to history when the system of history itself is constructed by and through the exclusion of women - both the actual women of history, and the feminine configuration of otherness that she embodies.^ Similarly, although Dorothy Memiin acknowledged that “many women had written and even published poetry” before the nineteenth century, of whom “by far the most important” were Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn and Anne Finch, she perceived all three as writing “of, from and to” a position “remote from politics and power”,^ Much feminist criticism, particularly of early modem women writers, still relies on the premise that women were “clearly displaced within and from [their] culture” (Salvaggio, p.244), excluded from contemporary discourse, be it poetic or political, social or religious, by their gender. Women’s writing in this period is often still reductively perceived in relation to the supposedly contrasting models provided by the ‘virtuous’ Katherine Philips and the ‘scandalous’ Aphra Behn.^ As Barbara Lewalski has noted, the work of these women is often “too narrowly contextualized - studied chiefly in relation to other women’s texts, or to modem feminist theory, or to some aspects of the period’s patriarchal ideology”."^ Yet there are also a number of studies that seek to overtum the established paradigms governing the criticism of early modern women’s writing. Paula Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Kathryn King, Paula McDowell and Carol Barash are recent examples of critics who have attempted to revision women’s literary history by moving beyond the dichotomous model of female authorship, questioning ‘ Ruth Salvaggio, ‘Anne Finch Placed and Displaced’, in Early Women Writers: 1600-1720, ed. by Anita Pacheco (London and New York; Longman, 1998), pp.242-65 (p.245). ^ Dorothy Mermin, ‘Women Becoming Poets; Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch’, ELH, 57 (1990), 335-57 (pp.335-36). ^ Marilyn L. Williamson, Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750 (Detroit; Wayne State University Press, 1990). Barbara Kiefer Lewalsld, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass. and London; Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 1. 2 the constiTiction of authorial identity/identities and recovering female political agency. Of these often-groundbreaking studies, it is Carol Barash’s reassessment of women’s writing and female community in a historical and political framework that has proved the inspiration