UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in
Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman and
Mary Novik's Conceit
by
Theresa Rae Baker
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, FACULTY OF HUMANTIES, GRADUATE
PROGRAM IN ENGLISH
CALGARY, ALBERTA
JULY, 2009
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•+• Canada UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled
"Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an
Unknown Woman and Mary Novik's Conceit' submitted by Theresa Rae
Baker in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.
Supervisor, (Dr. Pamela McCallum, Department of English)
(Dr. Michael Ullyot, Department of English)
(Dr. Elizabeth Jameson, Department of History)
Date Abstract
"Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman and Mary Novik's Conceit' explores the marginalized histories of real women in two historical novels written since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Vanora Bennett's richly-layered novel and the well-crafted poetic language in Mary Novik's
Conceit re-imagine the lives of women by employing what Toril Moi calls a "woman's vision of the world" (268), rather than Virginia Woolfs advice to forget gender when women write. With the help of theorists Georg
Lukacs, Hayden White, Linda Hutcheon, and Diana Wallace, this thesis examines how these two twenty-first-century novels are both inheritors of traditional forms and innovators of twenty-first century approaches. I employ Diana Wallace's excellent survey of British women's historical fiction in the twentieth century, to examine how Bennett and Novik adapt the historical novel tradition to reflect the unease in twenty-first- century society.
iii Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support and guidance of my advisor, Dr. Pamela McCallum, who has shared my passion for the exploration of how twenty-first century women authors are retrieving or re-imagining women's lost histories. Thank you for your wealth of knowledge, your humour, and your wise suggestions. The upcoming opportunity to present a condensed version of my exploration of Vanora
Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman at the "Echoes of the Past
Conference" (Newcastle University) in Newcastle, U.K., on 27 June 2009, will be a rewarding culmination of two years' hard work. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Dr. Mary Polito, who helped me toward a better understanding of Renaissance women; Dr. Susan
Bennett, who referred me to Dr. McCallum; and Dr. Michael Ullyot, who allowed me to explore the contexts surrounding King Richard III and
Shakespeare's Richard III. I must also acknowledge the benevolence of the Owen Family Scholarship and the Alberta Government's Queen
Elizabeth II Scholarship; and at the University of Calgary, the Faculty of
Humanities' Career Development Award and the URGC Graduate Travel
Award to attend the conference in Newcastle. Equally influential has been the support of my fellow graduate students: Connie Luther, Pilar
Aguilar Malavia, Drew McDowell, Paul Faber, and Sheba Rahim.
iv Dedication
I dedicate this thesis to my husband, Lee Baker, for his unwavering support and confidence in my undertaking of this project, and to my daughter Lindsay and son David who have equally supported my efforts. Thank you for all the assistance and patience, love and laughter that you have all shared with me throughout this process. I am also very grateful to Penny Andrews, Judith Arato, Kendy Bentley, Karen
Booth, Paula Kennedy, Rayna Rabin, and Marley Rynd for their support and wisdom. TABLE OF CONTENTS
Approval page ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Dedication v Table of Contents vi
Chapter One: Introduction: Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman and Mary Novik's Conceit 1
Chapter Two: Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman 16 Sir Thomas More, Saint and Statesman 27 Meg Giggs Clement, an Unknown Woman 45
Chapter Three: Mary Novik's Conceit 64 John Donne, Poet and Priest 72 Ann More Donne, Lover and Mother 87 Pegge Donne Bowles, an Unknown Poet 100
Conclusion: "Metafictional games" and Knowable Facts 118
Bibliography 127
vi 1
Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in
Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman
and Mary Novik's Conceit
Chapter One:
Introduction:
Renaissance Parables of Duplicity in Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman and Mary Novik's Conceit
Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1936 short story "The Democrat's
Daughter" narrates the elopement of one of the three daughters of the radical and eccentric Charles Stanhope, third Earl Stanhope (1753-
1816). Stanhope was as famous for his inventions as he was infamous for supporting the principles of the French Revolution and arguing against Britain's interference in France's politics. Warner's narrative makes allusions to Stanhope's support of France and his connection to his brother-in-law Prime Minister William Pitt, the Younger. Yet it is
Stanhope's youngest daughter, Lucy, who catalogues the principles to which Stanhope subscribes and for which his society mocked him: they were "compelled to sleep without a nightcap and with the window open...Hester [was] sent out to ward turkeys on the common...the coronet [was] taken down from the park gates... [and she was] addressed by an embarrassed tenantry as plain Miss Luqf (66). Despite his advanced liberal ideas, Stanhope does not choose to extend the same 2 kind of liberalism to his daughters, evidenced by his expectations that
Lucy marry the man her father has chosen for her: "Mr. Turner...an admirable apothecary'' (63).
Lucy Stanhope is both physically and metaphorically short sighted, a foolish girl who always obeys her father's commands, but petulantly decides to kill herself to extricate herself from this alliance:
"With this end in view she ate neither dinner nor supper, walked her feet wet in the park, sat in a draught all the evening, and stayed awake to cry to the limit of her endurance" (67). Her ridiculous attempt to do herself harm results in nothing more than "a raging appetite, a stiff neck" (68) and a cold that brings a visit from her intended. Surprisingly, despite her disdain for the match her father has made for her, Lady
Lucy—who is so demure as to not even look up from the apothecary's boots during their interview—develops an interest in Mr. Turner.
Perhaps Mr. Turner was "an orphan. Better still, he might be a foundling, a foundling who would presently be recognized as a foundling of a good family" (70), Lucy imagines. These romantic fantasies are countered by Mr. Turner's condescending concern for Lucy's "delicate
[constitution]" (77) that "would require particular care" (75); she convinces herself his concern is chivalric and that she is "deep in love"
(79). So when her sisters, Hester and Griselda, decide to "write to Uncle
Pitt.... [who] would hardly wish to see his niece married to an apothecary" (80), Lucy appeals to Edmund Turner for "an immediate 3 elopement" (82). In a footnote to this story, Warner confirms Stanhope's youngest daughter, "in 1796, being then sixteen...married an apothecary in Sevenoaks"1 (83).
Although these liberal politics of Stanhope gave birth to noble ideals, including Stanhope's involvement with William Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade, and were considered radical for their time, the
Earl's politics failed to encompass agency or suffrage for women. As presented in Warner's story and corroborated by the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, many of Stanhope's actions backed up his liberal political rhetoric, but his role as a father followed the examples of the rest of his generation and, indeed, the previous ones. Warner demonstrates this contradiction in her story, presenting Stanhope as old-fashioned enough to marry his daughter off without her consent, yet democratic enough to choose the local apothecary. Employing tropes from chivalric romance, Warner characterizes Lucy as a submissive damsel in distress, in opposition to the outspokenness of her older sisters. This struggle between women's radicalism and conservatism was of great interest to Warner, as demonstrated in this short story by how
Lucy herself appropriates some agency by precipitating her elopement with a note to the apothecary. The choice of an historical setting for "The
Democrat's Daughter" was typical of Warner's other works of fiction that
1 The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that Lucy married, at sixteen, "the surgeon Thomas Taylor did not receive her father's approval and caused some public amusement. Stanhope disinherited all his children" (Ditchfield). 4 focused on feminist struggles. However, she stopped writing novels after
1954 because
[n]othing big enough was left to say. We had fought, we had
retreated, we were betrayed, and are now misrepresented. So I
melted into the background as best I could to continue sniping,
(qtd. in Wallace, Historical Novel 69)
Warner is speaking of her anti-fascist activism and her support of
Republican Spain in the 1930s and 1940s. Warner's metaphor, however, could just as easily describe the status of feminism at the end of the twentieth century when scholars like Susan Faludi were observing the silencing of American female political voices while, in the United
Kingdom, Natasha Walter observed a "creeping silence on feminism"
(Walter, "My part") in the political arena.
The second wave of feminism that surged in the 1960s and crested in the 1980s experienced a backlash, as documented by Faludi in 1990s. Indeed, Faludi echoes Warner's metaphor of advance, retreat, betrayal, and misrepresentation in her 2006 preface to a reissue of
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women:
The metaphor of combat is not without its merits in this
context....But by imagining the conflict as two battalions neatly
arrayed on either side of the line, we miss the entangled nature,
the locked embrace, of a Svar' between women and the male
culture they inhabit. (12) 5
Faludi argues that the "backlash" she explored in her 1990 research is still a force to be reckoned with fifteen years later, yet the "force and furor of the backlash churn beneath the surface, largely invisible to the public eye" (12). Thus feminists have retreated in the face of betrayal from women such as Mona Charen,
a young law student [who] writes in the National Review, in an
article titled 'the Feminist Mistake'....[that feminism] has
effectively robbed us of one thing upon which the happiness of
most women rests—men" (qtd. in Faludi 2).
The participation of the media can be seen in
publications from the New York Times to Vanity Fair to the Nation
[that] have issued a steady stream of indictments against the
women's movement, with such headlines as WHEN FEMINISM
FAILED or THE AWFUL TRUTH ABOUT WOMEN'S LIB. (Faludi 2)
Media attacks on feminism include a range of so-called side effects:
"from mental depression to meager savings accounts, from teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexion" (Faludi 3). This approach to feminism as some kind of cult from which we must shelter our daughters is not new. Rebecca West wrote in 1913, "I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat" (qtd. in Faludi 14). 6
Active feminist or sniper? Which strategy should a twenty-first- century female author choose? As Stephen Greenblatt argues, "works of art, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange" (Self-fashioning vii). This "collective negotiation and exchange", Greenblatt argues, creates a milieu that surrounds and influences an artist or author's attitude toward their work, an influence that Greenblatt calls the "circulation of social energy" (Greenblatt, Self- fashioning 1). Accordingly, I would argue that the "circulation of social energy" surrounding Vanora Bennett and Mary Novik plays an important part in the creation of their early twenty-first-century novels.
By choosing these two historical novels, I must necessarily examine the approaches of two very different female authors: one from Canada and one from Great Britain, both with experience from other cultures, but each at a different life stage (generationally and professionally). Despite these differences, each has chosen to explore the marginalized stories of real women from the Renaissance who lived in the shadow of a famous father: Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman explores the life of Meg Giggs, step-daughter of Sir Thomas More, and Mary Novik finds a character much like Virginia Woolf s "Shakespeare's sister" (57) in her examination of John Donne's daughter, Pegge, in Conceit. But how do these women use history to examine the "creeping silence on feminism"
(Walter, "My part") in early-twenty-first century society? 7
By examining the tradition of historical novel literary theory, I will show how the new millennium has seen a transition in its production, that we seem to be "drifting backwards" (Walter, "seductions") more frequently in authorial choices of setting and that feminist authors are developing new strategies for critiquing their patriarchal cultures. From the mid-twentieth-century work of Hungarian scholar Georg Lukacs's whose Marxist examination of the historical genre praises Sir Walter
Scott as its father, to Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon's later work, to
British scholar Diana Wallace, this study will examine how these two authors negotiate around what Lukacs criticizes as the "mere costumery" (19) found in some novels, to cast as their heroine "a more or less mediocre, average... [gentlewoman]."2 In her detailed examination of British women's historical novels, The Woman's Historical Novel:
British Women Writers, 1900-2000, Wallace has found that the historical novel's genealogy reaches back further than Lukacs gives it credit and that
the historical novel has been one of the sites where women writers
have had most freedom to examine masculinity as a social and
cultural construction. The act of reading and writing across
gender has been central to the woman's historical novel right
through the twentieth century. (Historical Novel 8)
2 Lukacs's gender bias, of course, proposed a "hero" and an "English gentleman." However, I will argue that these writers nevertheless satisfy Lukacs's requirement of a hero on the margins who "see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them" (24). 8
Sylvia Townsend-Warner is one of the authors Wallace explores in her survey of the women's historical novel because she is
one of the most versatile, accomplished and sophisticated
historical novelists of the twentieth century, male or female.
Indeed, I would argue that she is a major writer, not despite the
fact that she wrote historical novels but because her achievement
is to new-mint the genre through a fusion of realist and Modernist
forms and Marxist and feminist politics. (Historical Novel 70)
Warner, like Virginia Woolf, had strong opinions on the role of woman writers. In her groundbreaking treatise on women and writing, A
Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf discusses how "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction" (4); how the library at the British Museum held many books "written about women.... by men" (30), but none written about men by women; she re- imagines the life of Judith, Shakespeare's "extraordinarily gifted sister"
(55); catalogued those women who had found some success as authors; observed that women live "infinitely obscure lives" (104) that remain unrecorded; and that "it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly" (120). For their ability to demonstrate this kind of androgynous writing, Woolf celebrates the works of
Shakespeare, "Keats and Stern and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge"
(120) for making possible the kind of books that seem "to perform a 9 curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life" (127). Warner, on the other hand, believed that, because women
enter the liouse' of literature by scrambling through the pantry
window rather than as of right through the front door... [they] are
not hampered by learning, self-consciousness, or an innate sense
of moral superiority. (Wallace 70)
Instead, Warner argues, women "[vanish] out of their writing so that the quality of immediacy replaces them" (qtd. in Wallace 70).
Woolf s challenge, in particular, for authors to embrace an androgynous style has been found problematic. In her analysis of
Woolf s argument, Toril Moi recently argues that Woolf was trying to avoid the paradigm identified by Simone de Beauvoir, "[man] is the One,
[woman] is the Other" (Moi 264), thereby avoiding "the danger of identifying with the despised category, namely femininity" (268). Indeed,
Moi argues that Woolf found such identification as "more terrifying to her than the danger of having to pretend to be entirely genderless" (268).
Responding to Woolf, Moi argues:
if a woman's vision of the world is strongly marked by her gender,
that is as potentially interesting as the absence of a gendered
view. The whole point after all, is to avoid laying down
requirements for what a woman's writing must be like, (original
italics 268) 10
Moi concludes by defending all literature as
an archive of culture. We turn to literature to discover what
makes other human beings suffer and laugh, hate and love, how
people in other countries live, and how men and women
experienced life in other historical periods. To turn women into
second-class citizens in the realm of literature is to say that
women's experiences of existence and of the world are less
important than men's. (268)
She also lays down her own challenge, to question "how to understand the importance—or lack of it—of the gender or sex of the author" (262).
Wallace observes this idea of exposing versus hiding an author's sex from a different angle, arguing that an important component found in historical novels by women is how the genre gives female authors "the freedom to adopt male narrators and protagonists, and to write about the 'male' world of public and political affairs" (Historical Novel 7).
By examining the recent works of British author and journalist
Vanora Bennett and Canadian author Mary Novik, I will show that these two authors employ some of the strategies that Lukacs praised in Scott, but adapt those strategies in a feminist form to enlighten "how... women experienced life in other historical periods" (Moi 268) by positioning their heroines close to the "great historical personality" (Lukacs 38). Both authors add to the literature on their chosen periods by reclaiming the lost histories of these real historical women, or, as Toril Moi puts it, they 11 add to the "archive of a culture" (268). White's awareness of this "archive of culture" underlies his argument that "narration and narrativity [are] the instruments with which the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse" (Content 4).
Although, White has admitted "that historical events differ from fictional events" [Tropics, original italics 121), his comparison of historians to novelists reveals that "the discourse of the historian and that of the imaginative writer overlap, resemble or correspond with each other"
(Tropics 121), blurring their delineation. Part of the "discourse of the historian," that White challenges includes the value judgments that allow historians to privilege certain events over others, such as how the record of Margaret Clement More bravely assisting the Carthusians when they were persecuted by Henry VIII in the late 1530s is, at best, obscure. Given this blurring between history and fiction that White puts forward, how does one then read novels about women for whom "the evidence simply does not exist to tell the full story of their lives"
(Kaufmann)? Are these authors reclaiming history, writing fiction, or imaginatively interpreting historical facts?
These late twentieth-century historiographic discourses are especially fundamental as the substructure of the twenty-first-century fictional explorations of history undertaken by women. No less fundamental is, as Wallace argues, the female authorial tradition of reclaiming women's history to form a "maternal genealogy" (Wallace 15), 12 a tradition which is as old as Sophia Lee's 1783 historical novel, The
Recess. I will extend Wallace's findings to explore how the historical novel continues to be important for women writers and readers, especially as a political commentary of the "force and furor of the backlash [churning] beneath the surface" (Faludi 12) of twenty-first- century Western society. I will also explore how these authors employ traditional literary composition to critique and inspire, but also employ new literary modes to negotiate the tension between history and imagination that has often been ignored in traditional historical fiction.
Why has the Renaissance recently claimed centre stage in novels, film, and television? Each of these books chooses a setting that situates its plot in the Renaissance, beginning with Portrait of an Unknown
Woman, set in England's Reformation under the absolutist reign of
Henry VIII. Conceit has a cyclical linear timeline that begins and ends with the Great Fire; in between Pegge experiences the rules of three absolutist monarchs, a brief republic, and a monarchical revival albeit stripped of absolutism. To understand the popularity of the Renaissance as a setting for twenty-first-century novels, it is important to understand that the Renaissance emerged from the various kinds of social units that were characteristic of the Middle Ages, "including guilds, associations, civic councils, and monastic chapters, each eager to obtain some measure of autonomy" ("Middle Ages"). These guilds were critical sites for women because they offered medieval women a locus where they could excel. With the Renaissance, as these guilds lost their power a patriarchal hegemony began to dominate; a main component of their sovereignty was to define and enforce the place of women within the family. Consequently, sites of female excellence began to disappear or became isolated within the family structure.
Parallel to this disintegration of social units was the Renaissance
"strengthening of city-states in Italy, and the emergence of national monarchies in Spain, France, and England" ("Middle Ages"). With this nation building, "bureaucracies expanded, diplomatic business increased and courts played an ever-growing role in national life" (Hale
195), collectively contributing to the situation of power within a patriarchal paradigm. Cultural developments such as secular education were critical to the birth to a movement later called humanism, one that gained enough power to influence secular education into privileging the study of classical scholars. Consequently humanism and national monarchies drove European civilization away from medievalism,
"culminating] in the birth of a self-consciously new age with a new spirit" ("Middle Ages"). These developments, this "new spirit," were instrumental in the emergence of the problems and issues that still remain in contemporary society: political corruption, wars, terrorism, and national identity to name a few.
Renaissance political evolution also saw the notions of national identities and national boundaries take hold—an "us versus them" 14 attitude—causing isolation to become entrenched, an attitude that lingers into the twenty-first century. Indeed, nationalism continues to be a crucial issue in global politics despite the moderating efforts of institutions like the United Nations, Northern Atlantic Treaty
Organization, and World Monetary Fund. Further isolating countries around the world, as demonstrated by the "war on terror" following the attacks of 9-11, is the question of religion. As the West struggles with declining religious practitioners and reduced numbers of Catholic priests and nuns being recruited, sects like the Fundamental Church of
Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints make headlines alongside other sites of global religious conflict. Parallels can be found between these contemporary religious tensions and the Renaissance Reformation clashes between Catholicism, German Lutheranism, and Henry VIII's
Church of England.
Global tensions that result from the instability of religion and religious thought must necessarily be negotiated by world leaders, each with their own political and moral agendas. For Lukacs, the destructive nature of these kinds of agendas was exposed in Adolf Hitler's Germany, inspiring him to challenge novelists to reveal "those social-historical and human-moral forces whose interplay made possible the 1933 catastrophe in Germany" (342). Warner was one novelist who took up the challenge, albeit taking a feminist approach, demonstrating her understanding that "politics and morality...are intimately connected" (Wallace 69). Building on the literary tradition of novelists like Sylvia
Townsend Warner, who was "driven by her political convictions"
(Wallace, Historical Novel 69), Bennett and Novik, I would argue, engage with early twenty-first-century politics by examining the tension between politics and morality in history while alluding to how it applies to our society today. These two authors also use the historical novel as a means of analyzing their political place in the shifting power structures of the early twenty-first century. Indeed, as Wallace argues:
It is not surprising that in women's hands the historical novel has
often become a political tool. A historical setting has frequently
been used by women writers (as by male writers) as a way of
writing about subjects which would otherwise be taboo, or of
offering a critique of the present through their treatment of the
past....to shape narratives which are more appropriate to their
experiences than those of conventional history. (2)
Given this twentieth-century tradition, it is not surprising that underneath the surface of her protagonists' story arc, Bennett seems to critique the political, religious, and moral strategies of Prime Minister
Tony Blair's post-9-11 Britain. Similarly, I will argue that Novik employs magical realism to examine how the literary establishment canonized
John Donne while dismissing women's writing, rendering it lost, destroyed, or simply ignored. 16
Chapter Two:
Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman
At the end of the twentieth century, feminist Natasha Walter— whose 1997 book, The New Feminism, is an in-depth exploration of the status of British feminism—expressed concern that the proliferation of historical fiction was written by "interestingly bland writers"
("seductions"). As a judge, in 1999, for the Booker Prize, Walter could authoritatively report that "[a]bout a third of the novels submitted for the prize have a historical setting" ("seductions"). Walter celebrates historical novelists like Tolstoy for creating novels that "feel as fierce and contemporary as a novel set in the writer's present" (my italics
"seductions") instead of retreating into the safety of the past. She asks,
"Are [writers of historical fiction] substituting research, however well done and engagingly presented, for the deeper springs of fictional inspiration" ("seductions")?
"Fierce" is an appropriate adjective to describe both Vanora
Bennett's journalism and her first novel, Portrait of an Unknown Woman.
Like Walter, Vanora Bennett's work has appeared in the London newspaper The Guardian and demonstrates a similar approach to feminism, one that conforms to what American feminist Naomi Wolf describes as "'power feminism' [that] sees women as human beings— sexual, individual, no better or worse than their male counterparts—and lays claim to equality simply because women are entitled to it" {Fire with 17
Fire xviiij. Both journalists also demonstrate their compliance with one of the strategies found in Wolfs 1990 text on female empowerment, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st
Century: "The more we 'tell'—within the limits of honesty and fairness— the safer we are. And the power of 'telling' turns liabilities—secrets we were forced to keep—into assets—secrets we can expose" (314). This strategy for telling can be seen in Bennett's journalism articles, beginning with her work for Reuters in Cambodia, a year after the
Khmer Rouge fell from power; amidst conflict reporting in Africa where she was "commuting between Angola and Mozambique and writing about death, destruction, diamonds and disease" (Bennett, "Biography"), before she changed continents again to report on the Chechen war. Her assignment in Chechnya led to Bennett's first non-fiction book, Crying
Wolf: The Return to War in Chechnya (2001), which she followed with another exploring the illegal caviar trade in Russia, The Taste of Dreams:
An Obsession with Russia and Caviar (2003). If her correspondent work is on the edge of conflict, her work at home in London is equally so. For example, her article, "A Plague on all our houses," examines the struggle of one small woman against an army of rats in a poor area of London;
Bennett's tribute to murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, reveals her admiration for a woman also assigned to the Chechen war.
These are the factors that make up the "circulation of social energy"
(Greenblatt, Self-fashioning 1) that surrounds Bennett; these are the 18 factors that give Portrait of an Unknown Woman a "fierce and contemporary" feeling; and these are the factors that inspired Bennett to choose the historical fiction genre to write a novel that, on the surface, tells the story of a woman in early Renaissance England. On a deeper level, I would argue, this novel discusses the agency of women confronted with the corruption of a ruler who appears to be good and with a patriarchal hegemony that fabricates a web of lies and deceit to support that ruler's corruption.
By employing historical fiction, Bennett chooses a form that, especially in Britain, had its popular roots in Sir Walter Scott, the main subject of Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg
Lukacs's important contribution to the study of the historical novel.
Lukacs considered Sir Walter Scott the premiere innovator of the historical novel because Scott rejects the tradition of the portrayal of an epic historical hero as an immortalized historical figure—such as
Achilles or King Arthur—in favour of a character that
is always a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman. He
generally possesses a...degree of practical intelligence, a certain
moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for
self-sacrifice. (33)
Scott's hero also functions differently from the epic hero in that he
"bring[s] the extremes whose struggle fills the novel, whose clash expresses artistically a great crisis in society, into contact with one another" (36). Lukacs praises Scott for presenting "great crises of historical life in his novels" (36), crises in which "hostile social forces, bent on one another's destruction are everywhere colliding" (36).
Bennett employs these same parameters, adapting Lukacs's guidelines, only to substitute an English gentlewoman—Meg Giggs Clement—for
Lukacs/Scott's gentleman; Meg Giggs Clement also brings together opposing forces in Reformation England—her step-father, Sir Thomas
More, and the victims of his torture that Meg meets. Meg's "practical intelligence" is a product of More's experimental school, a fulfillment of another one of Wolfs suggestions for feminism's future:
"Institute 'Power 101' courses in high schools so girls of all
backgrounds know how to debate, fund-raise, call a press
conference, run a campaign, read contracts, negotiate leases and
salaries, and manage a portfolio" (317).
A humanist education grounded Meg Giggs in her Early Modern society in the same way Wolfs "Power 101" courses would ground girls today.
Bennett portrays the humanist education More promotes in his special school as an experiment, especially in connection with the young women in that school. As Greenblatt describes it, a humanist education would consist of "the Quadrivium, that portion of the Seven Liberal Arts comprising Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy... [and] the
Trivium—Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric" {Self-fashioning 17). This education formed the base of the knowledge and rhetorical skill Meg needs to confront her father. Yet, Bennett's novel also demonstrates a verisimilitude that is "like the historians... impressively competent at drawing detailed, well-re searched pictures of their past times" (Walter,
"seductions"). The result is a "gracefully and persuasively" ("Boston
Globe") written narrative that "skilfully [uses] historical details to capture the uncertain mood of a turbulent era" ("Boston Globe?').
By choosing the historical mode for her novel, Bennett engages in an area where narrative and record intersect. Hayden White argues that, in the process of making history a narrative, historians have to use narrative strategy, employing the mechanics of literature and imagination. This process can blur the delineation between the two.
Lukacs demonstrates some awareness of this problem when he credits
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones) and Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders) for introducing a "broad, realistic portrayal of the present [taking] in here and there important events of contemporary history which it links with the fortunes of the characters" (Lukacs 20), bringing the kind of verisimilitude to a work that, Lukacs says, turns these authors into
"historian[s] of bourgeois society" (20). At the time when Fielding and
Defoe were writing, the great Enlightenment economists, Adam Smith and James Steuart, were making their own observations about the evolution of capitalism and mercantilism that, Lukacs argues, influenced the authors of the "great social novel of England" (21) because Smith and Steuart's writings 21
drew the attention of writers to the concrete (i.e. historical)
significance of time and place, to social conditions and so on, it
created the realistic literary means of expression for portraying
this spatio-temporal (i.e. historical) character of people and
circumstances, (original italics 21)
For Lukacs, the historical truths lend verisimilitude to historical novels and represented a key component in what Lukacs celebrates in the evolution of the novel: realism.
Where then does history end and fiction begin? How can the reader discern fact from fiction? A famous example of a creative work long assumed to represent historical truth is William Shakespeare's
Richard III—a. play based largely on More's History of Richard the Third and forming a small part of the intertextual history contributing to
Bennett's novel. Although Horace Walpole was one of the first to question Shakespeare via More's depiction of Richard III,3 it has only been since the twentieth century that consistent critiques have managed to shed doubt on Shakespeare's portrayal of the last York monarch.4
Such resistance—both in historiographic scholars as well as lay readers of history—forms a major theme of Bennett's novel and addresses
Hayden White's argument that, "[although historians and writers of
3 See "Horace Walpole: Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third," Richard III Society American Branch,
(Tropics 121). White recognizes the Victorian era as a time when "it became conventional...to identify truth with fact and to regard fiction as the opposite of truth" (Tropics 123) and the study of history thus became
"a distinct scholarly discipline in the West" (Tropics 124). As a result, historians employed a "much less linguistic (and therefore less poetic) self-consciousness than writers of fiction" (Tropics, original italics 127) that manifests itself in plain speaking and writing devoid of "florid figures of speech" (Tropics 127). White is not convinced that this strategy assures the clinical truth of history, that "history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical representation" (Tropics 122) due to the "natural...impulse to narrate" (Content 1), that it is "a meta- code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted" (Content 1).
Elaborating on Lukacs and White, Diana Wallace regards this poststructuralist focus on "the 'fictionality' of history" (Historical Novel
180) as critical to understanding the subjectivity of history, that "'every representation of the past has specifiable ideological implications"'
(White qtd. in Wallace, Historical Novel 180). The influence of this shifting interpretation of history as fictional and fiction as historiographical can be seen, Wallace argues, in the last half of the
1980s, when 23
women writers began to write increasingly playful and
sophisticated 'postmodern' historical novels or, to borrow the term
used by Linda Hutcheon (1988) liistoriographic metafictions',
which drew on these understandings. (Historical Novel 180)
Linda Hutcheon's definition of historiographical metafiction, "differs considerably from the realist historical novel idealised by Lukacs... through the use of multiple narrators... in ways which destabilise the
'authority' of historical narratives and expose their subjectivity"
(Wallace, Historical Novel 196). Hutcheon sees these kinds of postmodern historical novels as primarily "intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages" (qtd. in
Wallace, Historical Novel 180). An example of the intersection of White's claim about the blurring of history and fiction in narrative and
Hutcheon's idea of the intertextualiry between historical works can been seen in Bennett's "Author's Note:" "This story is based on more historical fact than might be expected" (507). Yet her brief bibliography includes biographies of More that depict him as the saint5 that Pope John Paul declared him to be rather than as the fanatic 6 that Bennett's novel suggests him to be. By including a reference to a hagiography published
5 Bennett cites Peter Ackroyd's The Life of Thomas More, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998. This book was received as ultimately praising More, rather than finding him a "bloodythirsty heretic-hunter" (Colish). Bennett also cites Alvaro de Silva's Thomas More, a 2003 text published by the Catholic Truth Society as part of its works on the lives of saints. 6 See Jasper Ridley, The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More, London: Constable, 1982; and Richard Marius, Thomas More, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. by the Catholic Truth Society as recently as 2003, Bennett issues a warning that there are powerful, global forces working towards maintaining the status quo in our understanding of and attitudes toward history.
Bennett, as has already been noted, adopts many of Lukacs's fundamental principles for the historical novel, but employs a feminist adaptation of his promotion of minor characters to focus on what Toril
Moi describes as "how...women experienced life in other historical periods" (268), thereby adding to the "archive of culture" (268), through
"a woman's vision of the world...strongly marked by her gender" (268). A
"power feminist" reading of history would be remiss if it did not address the strategies of the dominant Early Modern culture—i.e. white male
Catholics, emerging Protestants, and influential humanists—to marginalize and contain women. By examining women's marginalization alongside that of rebellious Protestants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, Bennett subverts Lukacs's principle of nation-building in the historical genre to tear down More as an "important [personality] of
English...history" (Lukacs 38) and adds a new twist to twentieth-century critiques of the reign of Henry VIII: Bennett's novel hypothesizes that the
Tudor dynasty was established when his father, Henry VII, orchestrated a coup; and Henry VIII's liberation of England from the domination of the Catholic church was achieved through sites of prolific torture and burning. Bennett's novel is divided into four sections, each with subtitles that allude to one of the paintings created by Hans Holbein;7 each painting an allusion to that section's narrative. Part one, "Portrait of Sir
Thomas More's Family" (1), refers to the More family portrait by Holbein that survives only in sketch form—"given as a present to... Erasmus almost 500 years ago" (Brown). The sketch introduces the More family and foreshadows the revised painting, at the end of the novel, that
Holbein may have painted.8 Part two, "Lady with a Squirrel and a
Starling" (191), refers to "a courtly lady...painted during Holbein's first visit to London" (Jones). Although "her identity is unknown... her hat is similar" (Jones) to the one Meg wears in the disputed Lockey/Holbein portrait of the More family. Since Meg has not been officially recorded as its subject, Bennett's title suggests Meg as subject, but her title also acts as a protest against the dearth of information on women like Meg.
Part three, "Noli-Me-Tangere" (233), in which Holbein depicts Mary
Magdalene mistaking the resurrected Christ for a gardener (John 20:16), emphasizes John Clement's revelation of his true identity to Meg which in turn conforms to Hutcheon's theory that a protagonist of an
7 There was an exhibit of Holbein drawings at the National Portrait Gallery in the late 1990s (to which Bennett refers on her homepage), but also a Holbein exhibit of his major paintings at the Tate Gallery in 2006. 8 There is much controversy surrounding the painting found at Nostell Priory in 1983. Though many, including Richard III supporter Jack Leslau, argue the painting is Holbein's, the authorities that argue Rowland Lockey is the artist have prevailed. See Leslau's website,
Quadrivium of humanist education. By mastering these subjects,
Greenblatt explains, Holbein symbolizes how the two Frenchmen in the painting were in "possession of the instruments—both literal and symbolic—by which men bring the world into focus, represent it in proper perspective" (Self-fashioning 17). Holbein then slices across the bottom of this depiction of mastery of the world with an "extraordinary anamorphic representation of the death's-head" (Greenblatt 18): a skull, when "viewed frontally...an unreadable blur" (Greenblatt 18), but viewed peripherally comes into focus. Consequently, Bennett's use of this painting warns us that things are not always as ordered and catalogued as they appear, that different perspectives can alter our understanding of world history and contemporary world politics.
My analysis of this novel focuses on these different perspectives, how Bennett both presents Sir Thomas More as a "great historical personality" (Lukacs 38) in the mode so praised by Lukacs, but also brings into focus his "virtues and weaknesses, good and bad qualities"
(Lukacs 45). Allegorically, More's darker characteristics represent the darker side of another complex British figure: Prime Minister Tony Blair.
By drawing an analogy between these two political-religious figures, Bennett promotes an analysis of heads of state who establish a war against an evil enemy within their midst, depicted by those in power as determined to internally tear the state apart. By depicting Meg as the female version of Lukacs's "more or less mediocre, average English gentleman" (33), Bennett demonstrates how rhetoric is used to manipulate women, but, just as importantly, she also brings to centre stage a woman whose documented historical courage in the face of religious torment has not received historical attention.
Sir Thomas More, Saint and Statesman
Vanora Bennett's website has a special entry under the section devoted to Portrait of an Unknown Woman in which she describes what inspired her to write this novel: "The first glimmering of the idea for this book came from an exhibition of [Hans] Holbein drawings at the
National Portrait Gallery about [ten] years ago" (Bennett). Certainly,
Holbein represents an important character in this book; he recorded for history the iconic image of King Henry VIII, but he also painted images of the powerful—and not so powerful—people in King Henry VIII's court.
By virtue of these portraits—texts to be read with an art historian's key to unlock the secrets—Holbein adds to the intertextuality of this novel, one that "blurs the line between fiction and history" (Wallace 144) because Bennett's allusions to Utopia, The History of Richard the Third, and Holbein's art are actual (as opposed to fictional) historical artefacts. By embedding them in her fiction, Bennett "de-reahse[s] these texts in return by making them part of a fiction" (Wallace 144). If the theory behind Holbein's last painting of the family of Sir Thomas More is given credence, Holbein is also someone who reveals historical truth. Bennett, as an investigative journalist and author of non-fiction works that research the truth behind the Chechen war and the illegal Russian caviar trade, has a passion for the search for truth. Retired jeweller and researcher Jack Leslau also seeks the truth by interpreting certain symbols in the Nostell Priory painting that he accredits to Holbein, thereby changing our understanding of Holbein's painting, turning it into a testimony of the usurpation of the Crown of England by King
Henry VII in 1485 and More's deceit in the suppression of this political coup. More is often remembered for protesting against Henry VIII's marriage to Anne Boleyn and subsequent claim as the head of the
Church of England. Bennett is aware of the veneration of More, but her novel takes the opportunity to reveal another kind of truth: More's support of torture in his war against evil heretics. If this has a modern day ring to it, it is because Bennett, I would argue, has written a political allegory critiquing the use of torture in the early twenty-first- century crusade against terrorism.
More began his campaign of heresy hunting and torture with the backing of Henry VIII. It was probably More's aid in the king's composition of a tract against Luther and More's prolific polemical writings supporting the Catholic faith that influenced Henry's choice of
More as the successor of Cardinal Wolsey. Meg, John Clement, and
Holbein represent, as Lukacs describes it, the personal destinies that
"coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis" (Lukacs 41). That historical crisis is at the crossroads of the infiltration of Martin Luther's ideologies into England along with the rising popularity of William Tyndale's English Bibles, printed on the continent in 1525 and smuggled into England; and the growing dissatisfaction of Henry VIII with the autocratic Catholic Church.
Whereas today "many scholars of the English Renaissance consider
[More] to have been sixteenth-century England's greatest humanist, and his Utopia, the era's personification of literary brilliance" (Bowman 82),
Bennett's representation of More is more critical. Her postmodern scepticism of his hagiographic reputation is not new; American scholar
Richard Marius's 1984 biography, Thomas More, argues:
He was a complex, haunted, and not altogether admirable
man....although we may exonerate him from old charges that he
tied heretics to a tree in his yard at Chelsea and beat them, he
was if anything inclined to an even greater savagery against them,
for he cried for them to be burned alive, and he rejoiced when
some of them went to the fire. (Marius xxiv)
Marius argues "that More was not really a humanist at all" (Bowman
82), that Utopia "was a pattern of thought that was utterly Christian and medieval" (Marius 169), not revealing More s brilliance, but rather his
Tieavy-handed' and 'puritanical' ways" (Bowman 82). Bennett uses this analysis of More, putting it in the mouth of Erasmus himself when he tells Holbein how More turned from humanist to prosecutor: "I'd say the most charitable way to look at his behaviour now is to understand that he's never been modern. His mindset is medieval through and through"
(352).
Other influences of Marius's analysis of the dark side of More can be found in Bennett's representations of More's confrontations with his step-daughter, Meg Giggs. The first time she challenges him, after she has witnessed the death of one of his torture victims, More responds with a condescending observation that "[t]hese are ugly times we're living in, if a daughter can think it's right to question her father's actions" (286). He then attacks her ability to interpret the evilness he imagines in all heretics: "do you...have any idea at all what it is you're sympathizing with" (286). As he defends his position, Meg must resist his "convincing...mellifluous voice, however sincere he sounded" (287).
Proof of More's involvement in torture was first promoted in John Foxe's
Acts and Monuments, the source Marius says established "More's reputation as a merciless torturer of heretics committed to his care [one that] lingered for centuries in the English consciousness" (Thomas More
405). Compounding this charge is Foxe's assertion that More had Sir
James Bainham "tied to a tree in the courtyard at Chelsea and whipped, 31 then sent to the Tower to be stretched on the rack while More stood by"
(Marius, Thomas More 405). Bennett adapts this history, collapsing the history of More and torture into two main plot points, the first at the beginning of the novel when Meg shows John Clement a tortured man incarcerated in More's gatehouse. Meg's attempt to persuade Clement to recognize More's corruption fails. In another assimilation of historical fact, Meg confronts More about the burning of Sir James Bainham, whose public accusation of Sir Thomas is reported by Foxe. By making
Meg another accuser of More, Bennett re-imagines how a family member like Meg might have the audience of More by virtue of those familial connections, yet the advantage of perspective because of her adopted status. Yet Bennett further complicates this relationship by having Meg despair of ever having a true sense of belonging.
As noted above, More's legacy as "a merciless torturer of heretics... lingered for centuries in the English consciousness" (Marius, Thomas
More 405). Such was not the case in Europe where "[t]ributes to More as a martyr were quickly forthcoming on the continent" (House). Indeed,
Foxe himself "predicted More's canonization" (House), an event that was finally realized in 1935. Despite his appointment by Pope John Paul II in
2000 as the "patron saint of statesmen and politicians" (Bowman 78),
More's "reputation is now as controversial as at any time since his death" (House). Bennett takes full advantage of this controversy to subvert Lukacs's ideal for showing "the human greatness which is 32 liberated in its important representatives by a disturbance of this all- embracing kind" (my italics 51). Instead, Bennett's More represents how the combustible mixture of power and religion can be as threatening to a country as the evil forces of its enemies.
By beginning the novel in the first-person point of view of More's adopted daughter, Meg, Bennett offers us a portrait of an "immaculate hero" (Marius "Utopia as Mirror"), detailing his generosity, his support of his family's accomplishments, and his pride in his family. But just as
Bennett finishes redrawing this towering figure of humanist genius, she begins to tear down his humanism with Meg's suspicions. When she leads Clement to More's gatehouse and bids him to "peer into the darkness inside" (44), Meg suggests that Clement is also peering into the darkness that resides in More. What Clement sees there is:
the wooden stocks, and the pitiful little stranger's figure with his
legs and arms trapped in its holes, a living arc of thinly covered
bones and torn clothes topped by two bloody eyes, half-closed,
over swollen lips moving in perpetual prayer. (45)
When Clement defends More's restraint and fairness, rejecting the evidence he sees, Meg shows him More's other building:
We were walking towards the New Building—Father's sanctuary
from court life: his private chapel, his gallery, his library, his place
of contemplation and prayer, the place where he wrote his
pamphlets. It had monkish bare walls, a single bench and a plain desk....I opened the door, brought John inside...and closed it,
silently pointed out the brown-stained scourge swinging from a
hook on its inner side." (50)
Meg is not successful in convincing Clement that her proof signifies
More's corruption—he privileges his faith in More above Meg's interpretations of physical evidence. However, the gruesome image depicted by Bennett's narrative brands the image of this victim into our imaginations and offers strong physical evidence of the violence that
More was prepared to use in his war against heretics—a war that began when "Brother Martin declared war on Church corruption ten years ago"9 (46).
When More finally appears in the narrative, Meg synecdochically describes him as "that great dark lion's head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul"
(61). She conveys the kind of charisma he possesses as a "glorious glow that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went" (61). These are the images of a great statesman and humanist. Meg then sets this
"great historical personality" (Lukacs 38) into a domestic space, their home in Chelsea, that doubles as a public space:
He and Dame Alice were sitting on two high-backed chairs,
surrounded by a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars
in their eyes, and the pair of them were struggling to make their
9 Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenburg in 1517. See "Luther, Martin," Encyclopaedia Britannica. 34
disobedient lutes obey them (he's always been tone deaf, but he
loves the idea of playing duets with his wife). But there was a
smile playing on his wide mouth as he tried to force his fingers to
be nimble on their strings. He knew his limitations. He was ready
to see the lute duets, like so much else, as the beginning of a joke
about human frailty, (my italics 61)
While this passage shows a domesticated More, his positioning before "a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars in their eyes" suggests that More was, at all times, the consummate performer, one who thrived in the admiration of others. Stephen Greenblatt claims that More, as "a consummately successful performer" (Self-fashioning 12), is an important figure in understanding how various Early Modern writers or statesmen engaged in self-fashioning. This term of Greenblatt's involves a complex interchange between social-cultural expectations and how ambitious men and women would employ language (in the form of poetry, drama, or the essay) or image (in the form of portraits or fashion) to project a specific persona. For example, Elizabeth I promoted an image of herself as a virgin, the object of Platonic love as found in tales of Chivalric Romance. This passage also shows that More strove to master difficult tasks, like playing a lute while "tone deaf." Displaying his own deficiency serves to emphasize the "limitations" of humans, an important theme for More—as exemplified in his insistence that the laity did not "need to understand the truths written" (Bowman 79) in 35
Scriptures because "the Church [had] already done that for them"
(Bowman 80). Mortal limitations are linked with "human frailty," which foreshadows the frailty of More's life and reputation in his political role in Henry's court.
More's hunt for heretics, his subsequent torture of them, and the rhetoric he uses to either deny or rationalize his involvement, form the central theme in what I would argue is Bennett's political allegory of the legacy of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. After the terrorist attacks on
New York's World Trade towers on September 11, 2001, U. S. President
George W. Bush initiated a war on Iraq, accusing the leaders of that country of possessing weapons of mass destruction. Blair backed Bush in this allegation. As Blair's support of Bush deepened, reports of torture committed by both U.S. and British troops were vehemently denied by both. Soon, British regard for Blair slipped; he had become "a naive and vainglorious fool, the poodle who loyally followed the President and has, consequently, tainted his own premiership with alleged falsehoods and failure" (Baldwin). Like More, Blair's "falsehoods" centred on his war rhetoric against the evil threatening Britain. Most reports of torture have focused on the facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu
Ghraib, near Baghdad; other sites include "al-Baghdadi air base,
Hubbania camp, Tikrit holding area, the ministry of defence and the presidential palace in Baghdad" ("Red Cross"). Amnesty International's
2005 report on the globalization of torture argues that "[t]he USA, as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power, sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide" ("Amnesty International"), its actions in this grant "licence to others to commit abuse with impunity and audacity" ("Amnesty International"). As ally to the American
President, Blair cannot escape culpability for granting this license.
Allegations of torture from within Britain itself began with public figures like British Lord Justice Steyn who asked in 2002, "Ought our government to make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay" (Brittain).
Guardian journalists have reported as early as 2003 on the "ill- treatment... suffered in Afghanistan and Guantanamo" (Brittain), while
Guardian journalist Hugo Young argued that "the Brits were in on
[torture] from the beginning." Another form of torture, rendition —the practice of kidnapping or capturing an individual with the specific purpose to send him to a country where torture is practiced—has also been practiced by British intelligence. In a August 2004 article in The
Guardian, Victoria Brittain demands, "[h]ow can Britain knowingly be parry to another outrageous kidnapping by the Americans, of Algerians from Bosnia, after a Bosnian court had ordered their release for lack of evidence." In late 2005 Guardian journalist Simon Risdall observed that the British government "is facing accusations from MPs that by allowing
US flights connected to the CIA operation, it may have knowingly or unknowingly contravened the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN convention against torture." Like Meg Giggs, these voices of protest confront the corruption of powerful figures in British government.
By using political allegory as a tool to critique her contemporary government, Bennett follows a long tradition that includes Jonathan
Swift's Tale of a Tub (1704) and John Bunyon's The Pilgrim's Progress
(1678). "Allegory" stems from the Greek words alios, meaning "other," and agoreuein, meaning "to speak." The New Princeton Encyclopedia of
Poetry and Poetics characterizes allegory as encompassing both a strategy of literary construction as well as a strategy of literary interpretation. As the Greek stem words indicate, by analyzing a work allegorically, one must "explain a work as if there were an 'other' sense to which it referred" ("allegory"). There is a symbiotic relationship between the two interpretive processes; they "increasingly stimulate one another as they develop into full-scale literary and interpretive movements in their own right" ("allegory"). In his analysis of religion and allegory in Early Modern England, John S. Pendergast argues that
allegory was appropriated as an important reading strategy at key
moments when a crisis occurred to the dominant paradigm,
resulting in a need to make renewed sense of the culture's
understanding of the world and worldly texts....to make sense of
the cultural and historical stories and myths for a changing
culture and society. (22) 38
One of the most famous Early Modern allegorical texts is Edmund
Spencer's Faerie Queene (1590/1596), a verse narrative that "relies upon allegory to create a moral, normalizing poetic representation of
Queen Elizabeth [I]" (Pendergast 134). The popularity of allegory in the period in which Bennett's novel is set emphasizes the symbiotic process involved in allegory on critiquing the morals of Early Modern men deepens the critique of twenty-first-century British men in power— contemporary men who should have learned from the history of their predecessors. By demonstrating how More silences Meg by convincing her to return to her traditional woman's role as wife of Clement, Bennett comments on how women today are silenced by male rhetoric to privilege family and domestic space over career in public space.
Performativity, seen especially in the masks worn by More and
Blair, is another characteristic these two powerful leaders share. From the beginning of the novel, Meg observes that More has a smile that is
"powerful and golden and enchanting" (422); indeed, there always seems to be "a smile playing on his wide mouth" (my italics 61). Stephen
Greenblatt observes the development10 of this kind of persona-shaping performance in his study on self-fashioning, arguing that there is "a change in the intellectual, social, psychological, and aesthetic structures that govern the generation of identities" (Self-fashioning 1) in the Early
10 "Development" conveys Greenblatt's avowal that these "extraordinarily subtle and wry manipulations of persona... [do] not suddenly spring up from nowhere when 1499 becomes 1500" (original italics 1). Modern period; he considers More as being the vanguard of this development. When Meg first accuses More of torture, he defends himself in a voice that "stayed reasonable" (286), but keeps his smile:
"Father was smiling, though it was a smile that didn't reach his eyes, still visibly refusing to engage with my anger" (288). When Meg accuses
More of having Bainham burned at the stake, More again smiles at her and asks, "What do you know about politics" (363). When More arranges for actors to interrupt a family dinner and order him to "present
[himself] to the royal commissioners" (433), More simply "bowed his head....a little smile playing on his face" (433). By these narrative strategies, Bennett suggests More uses his "golden" smile to cover moments of tension, to deflect attack, and to charm his adversaries.
Blair has also been depicted as using his "ubiquitous smile"
(Kahr), to disarm and deflect. He received media attention over this mannerism as early as 1999, when the press wondered what lay beneath it, "Bambi or Machiavelli" (Kahr). In that same year Leo Apse,
"the former Labour MP...once credited as the man who brought Freud into the House of Parliament" (Kahr), wrote The Man Behind the Smile:
Tony Blair and the Polictics of Perversion (1998). Apse argues that Blair's smiles cover a "terrorised childhood" (Kahr)—a similarity Bennett seems to emphasize by having More reflect on his own childhood against a backdrop of war and political instability. However, in these early days of
Blair's reign, the psychological underpinnings of his smile are used to 40 elicit sympathy for Blair's need to "seek recognition and affection in the public arena" (Kahr). Indeed, in his review of the book, London's
Independent journalist Brett Kahr likens Blair to "a modern-day Hamlet who frets and broods over the decisions that his position demands"
(Kahr) because of his instinct to please. Eleven years later, Blair's former close ally, Chris Mullin, published his diaries, describing Blair as a leader who was always "conciliator and persuader" (Brock), thereby suggesting "just how much acting Blair did to keep the velvet glove in place over his fist. The smile never cracked; he was hard to hate because he dodged enmity with such ease" (Brock). Accordingly, just as Meg learns to distrust her father's smiles, to wonder at what lay beneath them, Blair's critics became disillusioned with their Hamlet, finding a
Machiavelle beneath the smiles.
As noted above, these two political regimes used torture to fight evil, a word with strong Biblical implications, indicative of the religious devotion of both More and Blair. More's perception of evil is an all- pervasive, paranoic threat from the very population he has promised to protect. It is this nature of evil that More invokes when Meg first challenges his methods of using "the Scavenger's Daughter"11 (273) on a young man. More protests that he will not
11 The OED describes this as "An instrument of torture (invented in the reign of Hen. VIII by Leonard Skevington or Skeffington, Lieutenant of the Tower), which (bringing the head to the knees) so compressed the body as to force the blood from the nose and ears." 41
stand meekly by and let the kind of evil take hold that will sweep
away all the rules and laws we live by.... They're not the pitiful
boys you seem to be taking them for. They are the darkness. They
want to snuff out the light we've always lived by. If we don't
destroy them first, theyll destroy the Church we've lived in for
fifteen hundred years. We have no choice. (287)
These heretics who represent "the darkness" are then targeted by More for destruction, either by torture or by burning.
A similar kind of darkness was described by Blair in his unified front with Bush against terrorism after the 9-11 attacks: "in another part of the globe, there is shadow and darkness where not all the world is free" (Jeffrey). The Biblical underpinnings of Blair's collusion against an "axis of evil" (Bush) have not gone unnoticed. Caspar Melville argues in the British online journal The Humanist that Blair's rhetorical devices
"smacked of exactly the kind of divine certainty which underpins a crusade" (Melville). Blair's defence for supporting Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric included remarks that were coated in "Holy Book-inspired moral certainties" (Melville), such as his argument that his choice to back Bush in the Iraq war "would be judged by his 'maker"' (Melville) and that he had only done "what I believed to be the right thing"
(Melville). Evil, as More argues, must be destroyed before it destroys the chosen people. Hence torture becomes a tool for those corrupted by 42 power to destroy their perceptions of evil and protect those whom they deem righteous.
Since the nature of evil is a religious concept and the perpetration of torture in the name of the pursuit of that evil is a political one, we see how the politics and religion of both regimes—i.e. that of More's sixteenth century England and Blair's early twenty-first century— become as "intertwined as neatly as colored bands of sugar on a candy cane" (Bowman 87). Indeed, Marius argues that More's "passionate religious spirit" ("Utopia as Mirror") subverted More's humanism because
"[p]art of his religious passion was his ruthless and implacable hatred of
Protestants, his call that they be burned at the stake and his unrestrained glee when some of them were" (" Utopia as Mirror"). Bennett shows this subversion of More's humanism by his religious passion when More persuades Meg that her suspicions about him are not true:
I have encouraged free thinking and experiment in my time—
perhaps too much. Change for its own sake seemed so exciting in
the golden year, when we were young and everything looked fresh
and innocent....I often wonder how far I'm to blame in the eyes of
God for having enjoyed all that tinkering and altering. How far my
own idle curiosity has been responsible for opening Pandora's box
and letting so much evil fly out into the world, (original italics
171-172) Nostalgia for the past, innocence lost, humility before God and the irrefutable presence of evil on earth are the themes Bennett has More use to convince Meg that he had only done "what I believed to be the right thing" (Melville).
In a similar way, Blair's marriage to a Catholic, Cherie Booth, and
Blair's public acknowledgement of his own devout faith have become influences on his regime that cannot be divorced from his role as politician. Suspicions about the depth of his religious commitment were confirmed when, after his resignation, Blair converted to the Catholic faith. Amidst controversy as to whether Blair's beliefs have influenced his stint as prime minister, New Humanist editor, Caspar Melville, argues
No one, with the possible exception of Osama Bin Laden, has done
more to bring the toxic certainties of religious belief back into
politics and public culture, and this has had nothing but a
destructive influence on our hard-won secular settlement.
(Melville)
But Melville says the British prime minister's religious agenda went beyond his solid backing of Bush's policies surrounding the war on terror. In his 2007 article, Melville cites "Blair's City Academy policy [as providing] a back door into education for religious special interests"
(Melville). Melville refers here to Blair's agenda to replace failing inner city schools with a national wide school system that would be funded by both independent and public money. However, there have been many allegations that religious indoctrination12 is solidly on these school's agendas.
The years leading up to the Reformation in England represented an era of great upheaval, when dominant political, religious, and cultural institutions felt threatened by the struggles for power between the royal houses of Lancaster and York. The first occasion that More recalls this era of uncertainty is when he deflects Meg from questioning him about the torture victim in his gate house and tells her his perspective on the crisis he feels is imminent, if not already upon them:
When I was a boy, there were wars in the land and we should
have felt more uncertain in every way, every day, than we do in
this time of peace and plenty....But we didn't. When I walked to
school at St. Anthony's in the morning, with a candle in my hand,
London looked like a map of the face of God. Monasteries,
nunneries, guilds, churches; it used to be a city where everyone—
ever man, woman and child—knew his place and his role....We
knew the weight of a loaf of bread and the bride-price of a silk-
woman in the Mercery....and the length of service of an apprentice
in the rope-makers' guild....Even if there was war, we lived at
peace with God. (168)
12 See Francis Beckett, "Schools for Scoundrels: Religious groups are rushing to take advantage of the Blair Government's new education policy. And guess who's paying for it?" The Humanist. 122.2. Mar/Apr 2007. Online ed. 13 May 2009.
More complains that the world is now "so full of loud discordant voices... that it sometimes feels like anarchy.... Some of them are genuinely evil.... Luther, Tyndale: the men of darkness" (168-169). Not only is he creating nostalgia for the past where everyone "knew his place and role," but More makes reference to how the aforementioned guilds played not only an important role in shaping society, but how women were defined by their employment as "silk-woman," something that disappears in the
Renaissance. So convinced was More's anxiety that the new religious upheavals threatened their lives, he instructs Meg that "politics is life. If you lose peace you lose everything else; love, marriage, children, the lot"
(original italics 58), thereby inculcating Meg into his paranoia of threats from these "men of darkness."
Meg Giggs Clement, an Unknown Woman
Bennett's female hero is not, like Lukacs's ideal hero, "a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman" (33). Meg Giggs is a woman with an education superior to that of some of her male contemporaries, she is also related to a powerful famous man, and demonstrates a talent for healing the sick and injured. However, Bennett satisfies another
Lukacs tenet: the author demonstrates a "capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types" (35). Early Modern women were a
"historical-social" type that, by re-imagining what they were like forces
Bennett to see Early Modern England through a "woman's vision of the world" (Moi 268), one that is, necessarily, strongly marked by her gender" (268). By appropriating Meg's view of her world, Bennett demonstrates to her audience how the roles of women in Early Modern society were much narrower than today. In doing so, Bennett emphasizes that "gender roles... are clearly socially and culturally constructed and open to the possibility of further change" (Wallace 8).
By having her understanding of her family history, and the history of the man she loves, continually contradicted, Meg learns to distrust the historical narrative of the dominant, patriarchal culture of sixteenth- century England. This, then, is Meg's story, the exploration of how a dominant, patriarchal culture contains and marginalizes women—much in the same way the poor Londoners escaping the sweating sickness13 are contained in "the encampment in the back of the barn" (141)—by virtue of an education that firmly establishes a woman's role in society and by virtue of rhetoric that appeals to women's emotions and portrays the dominant, patriarchal culture as protecting women from the evil in the world. Like the allegorical critique of deceptive and powerful leaders that I argue Bennett employs, this examination also alludes to twenty- first-century society and "the persistent and outrageous inequality of women throughout [that] society" (Walter "My part"). It alludes to how
13 This disease emerged as an epidemic, limited to England in five out of its six outbreaks, all within the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Except for one outbreak in 1506, "all the epidemics were severe, with a very high mortality rate" ("sweating sickness"). There is an epidemic recorded for the year 1528 that would coincide with Bennett's narrative. 47
"young women are being sold personal rather than political empowerment, and young women particularly are under the constant blandishments of a culture that tells them that the only way to feel empowered is through shopping and plastic surgery" (Walter "My part").
Faithfully portraying a "historical-social type," requires extensive research. Bennett's meticulous research of More was made easier by the numerous biographies that have been produced throughout history, beginning with one written by son-in-law William Roper. For Meg Giggs, however, "the evidence simply does not exist to tell the full story"
(Kaufmann) of her life. What does exist are records found primarily in the margins of More's biographies, usually in the form of her words recorded because they reflected well on More himself. For example,
Margaret Bowker's biography of Meg in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography reveals that the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives "praised her Greek" (Bowker) and she was "one of the few eyewitnesses to [More's] execution and the only member of his household present" (Bowker).
Although this profile of Meg does not credit her passion for what we now call naturopathic medicine, it does attest to a house "full of books in
Greek and Latin as well as glasses and 'earthern painted pots' with medicines inside" (Bowker). The ODNB does allude to an act by Meg of courageous kindness that supports Bennett's re-imagining of Meg nursing the poor Londoners who are afflicted with the sweating sickness and, later, the torture victim: Amid the rigours of childbirth Margaret found time, in May 1537,
to minister to the Carthusians who were imprisoned in Newgate
without trial and chained to a post without access to food or
sanitation. Margaret bribed the gaoler and for a time kept them
fed and clean until their very survival alerted the king to the
succour they were receiving. (Bowker)
This record of Meg's bravery is told in The Life of Mother Margaret
Clement,14 written by a Jesuit priest about one of Meg's daughters: the
Prioress of St. Monica's Convent, Louvain. The powerful image of Meg defying King Henry after her father's execution combined with the knowledge that Meg's daughter attained one of the most powerful positions available to an unmarried woman, may have inspired Bennett to create a "living human embodiment" (Lukacs 35) of an intelligent,
Early Modern woman who is unafraid to question the corruption she sees in her society.
In order for Meg to engage in rhetorical arguments with More, she had to receive an education. For early humanists like More, education both served "to ease the contact with the past which would enrich life in the present" (Hale 194) and to promote proper conduct among gentlemen. Meg recalls her education with pride, and her tutor, John
Clement, with affection. Although they would have studied the
14 The Life of Mother Margaret Clement is part of the three-volume work of Jesuit Priest John Morris, entitled The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, a nineteenth century, out-of-print text. 49
Quadrivium and Trivium, a basis for all Early Modern humanist education, Meg and her sisters would have other forms of education that included society's definition of women roles and religious studies.
Education under More's direction was exemplary, as evidenced by
Meg suggesting it
set such a fashion that the Eliots15 and the Parrs16 also started
copying Father's teaching methods. Little Katharine17 and William
Parr were at risk of becoming as clever as us if they didn't watch
themselves. (21)
Yet neither was education restricted to the schoolroom or domestic space. As famously argued by Thomas Nashe18 later in the century, plays were an effective means of educating the public. In the early sixteenth century, England had a "rich and vital theatrical tradition"
(Greenblatt, "introduction" 30) before the "first permanent, freestanding public theatres" (Greenblatt, "introduction" 30) in 1567. Dramas and their texts have roots in various forms of entertainment that date back to the Middle Ages. Morality plays "flourished in England in the fifteenth century and continued on into the sixteenth" (Greenblatt "introduction"
15 Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) was another humanist and scholar thought to have associated with More but who, after More's execution, distanced himself from that association. 16 The ODNB confirms that the "Parrs' educational programme was organized along the lines devised by Sir Thomas More for his own children" (James). 17 By alluding to the future sixth wife of Henry VIII, Bennett aligns Meg with a woman who "was a witty conversationalist with a deep interest in the arts, and an erudite scholar who read Petrarch and Erasmus for enjoyment" (James). 18 Thomas Nashe {bap 1567-1601) argued in 1592 that drama, especially historical dramas, served the functions of educating people and promoting a national identity. See Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Devil, "The Defense of Plays." Free text available at Luminarium.
Early Modern plays that descended from these often employed the didacticism of the medieval morality play, but extended their analysis to include critiques of politics and religion. Consequently, when young
John More calls for a performance of "The Play called the four PP' (63), as a form of evening entertainment, his choice is rejected by More based on its didactic message. This play, by John Heywood,20 has no definite date of composition, the only extant copy being 1544. It may have been written in the early 1530s, making the reference an anacronysm, contributing to the "[disruption] of linear chronology" (Wallace 204) found in postmodern novels. Its plot critiques the pardoner, whose church-sanctioned role was to sell pardons, or indulgences. Since the didactic message criticized the Church,21 More suggests Walter Smith's
The Widow Edyth: Twelve Merry Gestys of One called Edyth,the Lyeng
Wydow, a play also printed (1525) by John Rastell,22 which uses More's household as one of its scenes. I would argue that Bennett includes this
19 Shakespeare's characterization of Richard III is often compared to Vice in the medieval morality plays. 20 It is interesting to note that the ODNB that there is a suggestion of allegory in the four PP "when the devil, attired for tennis in his shirt, seems to suggest the king himself (Happe). 21 The critique of the Church as it appears in the play regards the corruption of church officials, something of which More and Erasmus made subject in their own critics. This is an initial indicator of the hypocrisy that More consistently demonstrates. 22 Rastell was the brother-in-law of More and father-in-law of John Heywood. 51 scene for two reasons: it marks More's transition from the humanist who joined Erasmus in condemning certain practices of Catholic priests to the fanatic who tortures heretics; it also promotes the Early Modern
Christian attitude toward women, that they needed to be confined to domestic space rather than be allowed to corrupt men outside that space.
In the classroom, John Clement was Meg's tutor, but Meg's memories of how their relationship developed based on their outings to
Bucklersbury Street form a large part of her passion for medicine and healing. Before they moved to the Chelsea house that forms the backdrop to the opening of the novel, More and his family resided at
"The Barge:"
The Clements took up their quarters in a well-known house in
Bucklersbury known as The Barge...an interesting house which
More had leased in 1513...moving to Chelsea in 1525, he
transferred his lease to Clement. Bucklersbury we know from
Shakespeare to have been the apothecaries' quarter... (Reed 330-
331)
Clement, who advises Meg that he's "an orphan like you" (16), invites
Meg on a walk one afternoon during Meg's adolescence. It is a whim of
Meg's that pulls them "into sweet-smelling Bucklersbury Street"23 (17), where the shops of apothecaries and herbalists could be found.
23 Bennett borrows her description of the street directly from Reed's. 52
Bucklersbury represents a public space, a space ordinarily off-limits to a young woman, and later a space in which Meg finds a sense of her own value, independent of her marriage to Clement, as she develops her expertise as a healer among the poor of Bucklersbury. As a result of her acceptance by these people, one of the street's eccentric characters, Mad
Davy, sends a torture victim to Meg for help. Thus, Meg "learns" what
More has been sanctioning in his war against heretics.
Before Meg can "learn" about More's involvement in torture, she learns that her history lessons have been lies created by her father and
Clement to hide the truth, establishing a pre-condition for Meg's disillusionment and distrust of her father and her husband. By appropriating Jack Leslau's theory24 about how the two princes in the
Tower were not killed by Richard III, Bennett forces Meg to confront the lies of which her father is capable to protect the status quo, that is to support the political coup of Henry VII. Clement may be a pawn in this game of power, but More's strategy of installing Clement as his children's tutor and slipping him into his famous treatise, Utopia, show deliberate plotting that strips Meg of her "dearest childhood memories"
(228). By making More's network of humanists, Erasmus included, party to creating the political fiction surrounding Richard III (via More's
History of that king) and the Tudor dynasty's claim to the throne,
Bennett also questions the reliability of these humanists and the
24 See Leslau's site for his theory that Bennett has appropriated for adaptation.
I's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, "pointed out to a friend how flexibly the new knowledge [i.e. humanist education] could be used"
(Hale 192), implying that virtuous goals need not have been the only ones the humanists had in their sites. This is confirmed by historian
John Hale who observes that the humanists, whose conflict with the medieval style of scholasticism was a by-product of their studies, nevertheless had ambitions to acquire positions in the universities of that period. Bennett's use of this royal subplot is not just a strategy to avoid "writing about some of the most slippery and difficult aspects of our present lives" (Walter, "The seductions") or a clever way of inserting an infamous British mystery.26 Although she never authoritatively states that she believes the Leslau theory to be true, by including the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, Bennett alludes to many examples in history where government coups have suppressed one leader to promote another.
As mentioned above, women's roles were narrowly defined in early modern society: they were expected to marry a man chosen for them and procreate, with the emphasis on providing a male heir; the vast majority
25 Bennett's third novel, Blood Royal (2009), examines the life of a woman who was close to Christine de Pizan (1365-1430), an important woman author "wrote some of the very first feminist pieces of literature" ("Pizan"). The extent of her work suggests a female humanist, yet she has not been recognized as such. 26 As Leslau describes it, "[t]he disappearance of two boy princes from the Tower of London in 1483 remains the greatest, most baffling and longest running case of missing persons in the history of royal England. It is unsolved" (Leslau Holbein). 54 of women were not expected to receive an education, indeed many could not read; and women were constantly reminded of their sex's culpability through Eve's fall from grace, as told in the Book of Genesis. Meg demonstrates her inculcation into the dominant culture's expectations of women from her first appearance in this novel as a young woman who despairs of ever marrying, her sisters having recently done so. Meg's longing for the social status of a gentleman's wife in an Early Modern marriage reflects a socially prescribed goal for women that she has either observed or in which she has received instruction. This goal is reinforced by making the unmarried woman feel like a failure or an outcast. Evidence of this can be found in Meg's mood, a "peevish ill- temper that had been with me through a winter of other people's celebrations—a joint bride-ale for Cecily and Elizabeth and their husbands" (6); after listing the pairings of the other More daughters, she despairs that "it was only me [that More] seemed to have forgotten to marry off27 (6). Meg's rebellion against having societal roles enforced on her begins with her expressed desire to have her marriage be to the
"man I've always loved" (9). Her sisters' marriages, as was common in this period, were arranged by More. This desire for a love-match marriage is a romantic element, emerging from the popularity of
Chivalric Romances, a form of literature that represented another point
27 Bennett's novel argues that More arranged these marriages, as seen when More tries to explain to Meg how Clement fathered a child with Elizabeth. More blames himself for what he sees and Elizabeth's indiscretion, i.e. of seducing John, because "she'd never have done it if I'd found her the right husband in the first place" (497). of tension with reason, as promoted by the humanists, because of its promotion of emotion.
Before More will let Meg marry Clement, however, the former prince must narrate to Meg his true history. The section that includes this confession is entitled Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, alluding to the Holbein painting that depicts a woman with a chained squirrel, a symbol of confinement or imprisonment. Clement, formerly Richard
Plantagenet, was contained for most of his life by More and his humanist friends. His rebellion against that confinement, followed by his submission to it, are associated—according to Bennett's narrative— with More. As Clement narrates his past to Meg, Bennett "can be seen as engaged in the act of ventriloquism, adopting a male voice through the use of a male protagonist" (Wallace 23). Wallace argues that "male writers...have used cross-gender ventriloquising as a way of appropriating and silencing the feminine voice" (23). In this case,
Richard's voice has been silenced by the same patriarchal hegemony that silences women; Bennett liberates his voice through his association with a woman.
After her marriage to Clement, Meg "learns" about her father's involvement in torturing heretics because of the strong connections she has made with the inhabitants of Bucklersbury Street and the eccentric
Mad Davy in particular. As a minister of an underground church, Mad
Davy is a trickster character, someone who we cannot entirely trust because his motivations are ambiguous. However, he brings to Meg s doorstep one night two "respectable-looking women in anonymous shrouds of grey wool.... sister hags by pain" (270). "He says you're good with herbs" (270), the younger of the two tells Meg, indicating Davy.
They want Meg to treat a "human-sized pile of rags on a plank in the doorway" (270), a pile that turns out to be a victim of More's torture:
The man underneath [the rags] had injuries I'd never seen or even
imagined possible....The body below the lolling head was crushed;
arms broken straight across just above the wrist and elbow; legs
broken straight across just above ankle and knee; and the surface
in between a mangled stew of imploded ribs and twisted back and
great dark bubbles of blue and red. There was blood coming from
his anus. There was blood coming from his ears. He wasn't quite
dead; there were little whimpering noises coming from the
smashed mouth, under a blancmange of swellings and caked
blood where eyes and nose could only be guessed at. (271).
By explicitly describing this victim's state, Bennett not only revives the spectre of the other victim of More's torture from the novel's beginning, but forces her reader to appreciate the horror of all torture, including the allegations of torture at the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison facilities. When Meg asks her visitors for an explanation of the young man's injuries, the younger one says, "as loudly and brutally as she dared....He met the Scavenger's Daughter, didn't he?" When Meg, completely bewildered, fails to respond, the young woman "shrugged, turned away and muttered: 'Ask your father. He knows"' (272-273). Meg chastises herself for having "got so complacent in [her] domesticity that
[she'd] failed to put together all the stray bits of information I'd accrued going about my humdrum daily business" (279). Like the current state of feminism as represented by Walter, Meg awakens to how she had
"melted into the background" (Warner qtd. in Wallace 69), recognizing that the person she had been before her marriage "would have been down in the parlour we'd given Father... snooping silently through the papers he left on the desk, looking for evidence" (280). She chooses to confront her father by visiting him for dinner at Chelsea.
Stephen Greenblatt argues that More held a "rich significance
[for]... the dinner party, emblem of human society both in its foolish vanity and in its precious moments of communion" (Self-fashioning 12).
Bennett makes great use of this social space of interaction, mapping out how Meg shifts from covert defiance of her father's patriarchal power to overt defiance at the site of the family dinner party. But the dinner also represents patriarchal structure, their attachment of significance to certain arbitrary periods of the day. It is this structure and the one that backs More's heretic-hunting agenda that Meg confronts on the day she visits her father. As noted earlier, More vehemently defends his fight against what he perceives to be an evil force. Meg does not voice her thoughts aloud but, recalling the abused victim who died in her arms, 58 she does not accept his rhetoric of the evil of the followers of Luther, but only silently protests that she can't "apportion evil as neatly and completely in the camp of his enemies as he was doing. I'd seen the blood trickling out of that boy's body" (287).
Since the preceding events have sabotaged Meg's trust in both
Clement and her father, More has to rebuild that important element in order to deliver the rhetorical argument meant to persuade Meg to end the affair she begins with Holbein. After Meg discovers Elizabeth's child was fathered by her husband, she begins an affair with the artist; More's rhetoric persuades her to forget the lies and deceit that have been perpetrated against her, and "[g]o back to [her] life" (501) with Clement.
More's argument, however, is carefully structured around Aristotellian rhetoric, with its strategies of persuasion that fall into the first tripartite division where a rhetorician must "produce persuasion either through the character of the speaker, the emotional state of the listener, or the argument {logos) itself ("Aristotellian Rhetoric); the first part of the second tripartite division, that is the deliberative approach28 where the rhetorician "either advises the audience to do something or warns against doing something. Accordingly, the audience has to judge things that are going to happen in the future, and they have to decide whether these future events are good or bad for the polis, whether they will cause advantage or harm" ("Aristotelian Rhetoric"). More's careful strategizing
28 This approach was outlined by Aristotle to take place in assembly. See "Aristolian Rhetoric.'' 59 can also be seen in the deliberate pauses he takes as he makes his argument and the contradictions inside those arguments, recalling the earlier performativity at the beginning of the novel. Is More sincere or manipulative?
As part of his strategy to regain Meg's trust, More chooses to reveal a past love affair29 with Meg's mother. By employing the second part of the first tripartite division, that is understanding the emotional state of the audience and constructing his argument to take advantage of that state, More knows that he will regain Meg's emotional connection and thus make her receptive to his persuasion: "You're the very image of her, you know," he whispered. "So painfully alike... sometimes I could hardly bear to be near you. I can't begin to tell you how much I loved her" (493). His tone of voice is carefully lowered to make Meg listen closely—physically and mentally—while the words effectively nurture the insecure side of Meg. More's success is shown in Meg's response:
Every other discovery of the past tumultuous day and night was
blotted out of my mind by this one: the sudden blinding, absolute
certainty that filled me now that I too had always been loved. (493)
Rather than retaliate against More for not sharing this news with her earlier, as she does on hearing previous omissions, Meg asks, "What was my mother like" (494). After hearing what she needs to hear—"Like you"
29 Note that I use the article "a" rather than "his" because I think Bennett is ambiguous about this affair, that it becomes another demonstration of More's Machiavellian strategies. 60
(494)—Meg finally asks why More hadn't told her before. This is the point where More moves into his deliberative speech to persuade Meg to choose the right course.
More's strategy regarding his reticence about his affair with Meg's mother—someone who is never named but remains an obscure, ghostly figure—is to answer Meg's question by not really answering it at all:
I used to think the things of this world were more important than
I do now....Appearances. Public behaviour. Surfaces. But Master
Hans has shown us something in the past day or two about the
value of honesty. What I know now is that I want my family to be
happy in the truth, and to do the right thing before God. (494-
495).
Consequently, More makes Meg realize that she has been false—hiding her liaison with Holbein—and she has not done the right thing before
God—betrayed her marriage, committed adultery. This contradicts Meg's narrative at the beginning of the novel, that More is not concerned about
"appearances." As for "public behavior," More's passion has been to have religious conformation within the Catholic Church, something on which he famously does not back down. As Meg thinks guiltily of her liaison with Holbein, More shows his knowledge of her character and her emotions by saying, "It wasn't hard to guess" (495). He appeals to her emotions again by saying how lucky he was to get her back—referring to her warming up to him with this new revelation—and to "have a second 61 chance of happiness" (495). He compares his experience with Meg to hers with Clement. He does not want her to align herself with Holbein— either as an on-going lover or to run away with him—because More doesn't want "sin [to] destroy your life the way it nearly did mine" (495).
Because More is adamant in his defence of the right to torture and burn heretics, I would argue the sin to which he refers is his affair with Meg's unnamed mother—his omission of that name effectively erasing Meg's matrilineal genealogy. More goes on to brush aside Meg's protest that
Clement broke his vows first—displaying a prior knowledge of that affair to which Meg, again, does not respond. He asks Meg to instead consider how poor Elizabeth is faring having first been "married... badly" (496) by her father—in other words, Elizabeth is a victim of More's poor judgment. By portraying Elizabeth as someone who would not have had a sexual flirtation if he'd "found her the right husband in the first place"
(497), More allows Elizabeth no agency in her transgression.
With More's emotional persuasion accomplished, he now appeals to "the argument itself (logos)" ("Aristotle's rhetoric"). He uses the inductive argument, that is an example, of Holbein's new version of their family portrait—the one that hangs in Nostell Priory—as why living close to a genius like Holbein will only "cause you pain" (500). In this strategy
More is not unlike contemporary political machines and media campaigns that, as Susan Faludi and Natasha Walter have argued, blame feminism for everything "from mental depression to meager savings accounts, from teenage suicides to eating disorders to bad complexion" (Faludi 3). I would argue that by narrating this argument in such detail, Bennett is warning women that this kind of rhetoric tries to convince women, just as More convinces Meg, to "[g]o back to your life"
(501)—that is the traditional roles of females as nurturers, occupying domestic spaces—and to "[l]earn to love someone who's learned not to fight like you do" (501). In other words, be complacent, give up the fight for an equal voice and other equalities that are still denied women; but do not ask the patriarch to give up his fight.
By re-imagining the life of Meg Giggs, daughter of Sir Thomas
More, Bennett claims an "important [personality] of English... history"
(Lukacs 38) for women, expanding the matrilineal genealogy that began, according to Wallace, with Sophia Lee's 1783 novel, Recess. By having
Meg chastise herself for having "got so complacent in [her] domesticity that [she'd] failed to put together all the stray bits of information I'd accrued going about my humdrum daily business" (279) indicates an attempt on Bennett's part to persuade a similar realization for modern female audiences, emphasizing what Natasha Walter has called a
"creeping silence on feminism" (Walter "My part") in the political arena, calling attention to how the "domesticity" usually associated with marriage makes some feminists complacent.
Bennett uses the historical novel to register concerns about the early twenty-first century by finding connections between Renaissance 63 claims of "humanism" that are subverted by records of torture and contemporary claims of a righteous war subverted by images of violence and evidence of manipulation. As a journalist who has covered wars, famine, and contemporary women's struggle for a political voice, I would argue that Bennett is issuing a challenge to women, and her readers, to be aware of how the world of power and politics subverts the values they cherish. 64
Chapter Three:
Mary Novik's Conceit
Diana Wallace argues that "one of the major factors fuelling interest in the historical novel from the late 1980s onwards "has been the reclamation of the unrecorded history of women, or history 're- imagined"' (Wallace, "Tulips"). Natasha Walter, as noted in the previous chapter, raises the question of whether women writing historical fiction today are "substituting research... for the deeper springs of fictional inspiration" ("seductions"). As we have seen in Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman, the reclamation of women's history can act as a distant space to critique the author's contemporary political environment through allegory. Bennett's allegory emphasizes the crisis in feminism today that reflects the position of women who find out that their government is condoning torture while their own political voices have been victimized by a "creeping silence" (Walter, "My part"). Walter talks about the promise from her British government that "the beginning of the 21st century would see a more women-friendly politics [but it] has foundered in the macho, centralised culture of New Labour" ("My part").
Yet there are other strategies that offer more than just "a plethora of intimate detail about their subjects' lives.... [piling] up physical and social detail until the past becomes almost as vivid as the view out of our own windows" (Walter, "seductions"). Mary Novik, like Vanora
Bennett, modifies a male literary genre—the bildungsroman—for a 65 female protagonist and similarly breaks the novel into sections to reinforce the fragmentation of women's histories: a prologue, three thematic sections, and an epilogue. The prologue, entitled "The City
1666" (1), opens with London's Great Fire seen through Samuel Pepys's point of view; section one, "Yearnings 1622-1631" (19), begins when
Pegge is only nine but already motherless; section two, "Death's Duel30:
1631" (109) focuses on Donne's slow decay into death; and section three, "Tongues: 1631-1667" (261), is a condensed history of Pegge's marriage up until the Great Fire. By choosing Pegge Donne, Novik also responds to Virginia Woolf s theory about Early Modern women who have been overshadowed by a famous, literary relative. Whereas Woolf wondered about Shakespeare's sister, Judith,31 Novik explores Donne's daughter, Pegge. Reclaiming female history must necessarily involve engagement with female voices and must negotiate female spaces like the home and its domestic space; the garden, a space where women can explore their affinity with nature; and the space where birthing and mothering occur. By bringing these spaces to the centre of a novel,
Novik reclaims a rich matrilineal heritage.
Novik goes beyond this rudimentary template of Shakespeare's sister to employ the modes of magical realism and the grotesque to
30 "Death's Duel" is also the name of John Donne's own funeral sermon that he preached on 25 Feb. 1631. See Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, "Donne, John." 31 Whereas Shakespeare did not have a sister named Judith, he did have a daughter by that name. See "A Shakespeare genealogy," Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet,
Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of
Narrative, Wendy B. Faris defines realism "as a canonical, patrilineal form, because realism has dominated fiction in the West for the past three centuries" (Faris 172). Magical realism, then, "radically modifies and replenishes the dominant mode of realism in the West, challenging its basis of representation from within" (Faris 1). How does it do this?
Faris defines five primary characteristics of magical realism in a novel: first, it must include an "irreducible element" (7), that is of a magical or mystical form, a "narrative voice [that] reports extraordinary—magical— events, which would not be normally verifiable by sensory perception, in the same way in which other, ordinary events are recounted" (Faris 7).
In Conceit, this element is represented by Ann Donne's narrative from beyond the grave. Secondly, there is a strong presence of the phenomenal world in magical realism, it includes "intriguing magical details....[that] represent a clear departure from realism, detail is freed from a traditionally mimetic mode" (Faris 14). Novik demonstrates this through the family dog, Sadie: a "drooling, warmth-seeking, self-pitying stray" (21) who exhibits an uncanny affinity with Pegge and Ann's 67 faithful maidservant, Bess, and great loyalty to the unappreciative
Donne. Pegge also demonstrates an awareness of the phenomenal world of spirits when she acknowledges "that the ghost of Jane Shore was abroad" (41). Thirdly, a magical realist novel should create "unsettling doubts" (17) rising from the conflict between realism and magic in the text—the "closeness or near-merging of two realms" (Faris 21) that constitutes the fourth characteristic in a magical realist novel. Novik achieves this "near-merging" with the fluidity of the dialogue we receive from Ann, in the phenomenal world of the grave, and Donne, in the grotesque world of the living. Magical realism is often located in a space where two worlds intersect, "many times situated between the two worlds of life and death" (22). Ann's first narrative, in which she describes her grave, where "there is passion, so fierce and sharp that it can never be locked up in cabinets of sense" (114), creates initial,
"unsettling doubts" that recede as Ann's narrative unfolds, only to rise again when Donne offers a rebuttal. Finally, magical realism disrupts traditional modes of space, time, and identity. This disruption appears in different forms in Conceit, the most obvious being the novel's structure as outlined above. If Fredric Jameson's argument that realism creates a homogeneity in both time and space that erases "older forms of ritual, sacred or cyclical time" (Jameson qtd. in Faris 23-24), then
Novik's strategy to address each of these old forms can be seen as her disruption of those homogeneous modes. Ann and Pegge's method of 68 telling time by flowers or bees is an example of this strategy. As for identity, Faris argues that "[t]he multifocal nature of the narrative and the cultural hybridity that characterizes magical realism extends to its characters, which tend toward a radical multiplicity" (25). Novik demonstrates this by giving us points of view from Samuel Pepys,
William Bowles, Pegge and Ann Donne, and John Donne himself—in both first- and third-person points of view.
Closely linked with magical realism is the grotesque, a mode that
David K. Danow examines in The Spirit of Carnival: magical realism and the grotesque, arguing that it can be classified with magical realism under Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque. Danow sees the two approaches as opposing:
Broadly stated, the profound difference between the two may be
conceived as situated on a continuum whose poles reflect the
classic opposition between eros and thanatos, between the force of
life and the drive to death that occupies, at one and the same
time, the human soul. (10)
Danow's interpretation resonates when applied to the extreme worlds of
Ann's soul languishing in her grave, waiting for her reunion with her lover in a voice full of "the force of life," Donne's slow putrefaction, imprisoned in his mortal body, and Pegge's passionate search for love.
As an instructor in literature and creative writing at Langara
College on Canada's west coast, Mary Novik brings a literary sensibility to this novel, grounded in her creative writing studies with University of
Alberta professor Thomas Wharton. In the summer of 2000, in
Cambridge, Novik found the inspiration for Conceit in a second-hand book store's text of John Donne's poetry. There, she found poetry that she "certainly didn't remember seeing...in my school anthologies" (Novik,
"What inspired"), an oblique reference to the preponderance of dead white male authors in anthologies of literature. Novik's situation in academia and her memories of those "school anthologies" form the
"circulation of social energy" (Greenblatt 1) for this novel.
Conceit begins on "the second of September, a Sunday, at one o'clock in the morning" (3) in the year 1666. Samuel Pepys is making his way home from a night at "the Three Cranes, where he drank too much mulled sack and sang himself hoarse.... As he passes through Pudding
Lane, he takes little notice of the unusual glow inside the bakery"32 (3).
From this "unusual glow" grows the Great Fire of London, described as
"one of those cataclysmic events that has burned its way into the consciousness of mankind" (Hanson xix). This kind of historical event is described by Wallace as "a moment of fracture which [makes one] sharply aware of ourselves as subjects within history" (228). Since
Wallace argues that "[a]ny historical novel is related to history...in its
32 In The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Pepys describes this episode in his entry dated "September 2nd (Lord's Day). Some of our mayds up late last night to get things ready against our feast to-day, Jane called us up about three in the morning, to tell us of a great fire they saw in the City" (186). See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Ed. Richard Le Gallienne, Toronto: Modern Library Paperback, 2003. 70 engagement with the moment of its writing" (Wallace, "Tulips"), I would argue that Novik's strategy to begin with London's Great Fire and come back to it near the novel's end represents an engagement with a more recent "moment of fracture": the September 11, 2001, attacks on the
World Trade Center in New York City. Wallace argues that, "in retrospect
[the twentieth century] can be seen to have ended...with the fall of the twin towers in New York on 11 September 2001" (228). Even the time of year of the attacks and the Great Fire (September 2-5) coincide with eerie proximity. Novik emphasizes this connection when, at least two weeks after the fire, Pegge goes out to her garden where a "fine red dust from the Sahara had carpeted the garden, mingling with a layer of ash from Cheapside. She had been finding scraps of books all day" (317).
After the World Trade Centre Towers fell to terrorists, paper from the
Towers' offices was said to have travelled miles, landing in backyards.
New York Times reporter Sara Kershaw reported that "in my Brooklyn neighborhood... down wind of the disaster, charred office papers were still flying around in the air" (Kershaw). Contextually, the attacks occurred the year after Mary Novik discovered the second-hand book of John
Donne's poetry.
In his review of Conceit, Globe and Mail journalist Jim Bartley reminds us that, as a literary device, conceit is "something more than personal vanity" and, in contemporary practice, about "as common as the quill pen". He applauds Novik's engagement with this device to make 71 a "mind-expanding creation of a distant world (lT^-century England)" with language that "in a sentence or two [makes]... [a symbol]... (say, a fish eye)... awaken and integrate thematic nuances that have slept in the reader's subconscious for chapters".
John Donne, Poet and Priest
Donne biographer, John Carey, argues that ambition is the
"thread which runs through the whole [of Donne's life] and binds it together [with a] restless desire for work and worldly success" (60). That ambition and search for fame divided Donne's life into two: Jack Donne, writer of love poetry, and Dr. Donne, writer of meditations and sermons.
It is this love poetry that creates the persona of the ardent lover that is associated with Pegge's father in the history leading up to the novel's beginning, a persona with whom Pegge wants to enter a discourse about the mysteries of love. However if you consider Carey's argument—
In some respects, Donne isn't a love poet at all. The physical
characteristics of the girl he's supposed to be talking to don't
concern him. Nor does her personality: it is completely obliterated
by Donne's. He doesn't even seem to feel sexually excited. (9-10)
—perhaps there was no divide between the two Donnes at all. Given the
Elizabethan tradition of love poetry and its trope of presenting the object of that poetry as a cold, unattainable mistress, Donne's subversion of this form in his earlier poetry—and with it his critique of his contemporaries' "hackneyed nature imagery" (Carey 10)—could be viewed as another ambitious strategy of a young, sexually active
Renaissance man. By interpreting the poetry as Carey does, means that
Donne's early poetry is stripped of love, leaving only intellect and ambition behind.
Donne's ambition is first demonstrated in Novik's novel when he returns home from St. Paul's one day; his reception to nine-year-old
Pegge's excitement is to order her to remove the dog Sadie "from my prize auriculas33 at once" (24). This demonstrates the tension between the male world view as seen from Donne's perspective—flowers are catalogued and grown for the merit they can bring to the gardener—and the female world view that privileges nature unrestrained. For example, the dog, Sadie, uses nature for shelter or refuge—"[s]he would hide in the flower bed" (21)—whereas Pegge finds nourishment in nature, as when she "plucked an apple from her father's tree and ate it, core and all" (22). If the flowers are "prized," they have been judged by an outside authority; hence Donne would have competed against other gardeners for the distinction. When Pegge spies Donne returning she sees that their dog, Sadie, is "hiding behind the flowers with her tail wagging in full view. Pegge stepped in front of the tail at the precise moment that her father rode into the courtyard on his mare Parrot" (my italics 23). When
33 According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online these are "species of Primula, also called Bears-ear, named from the shape of its leaves; formerly a great favourite with flower-fanciers, producing under cultivation trusses of many blooms, the corollas often powdered with white or grey." 73
Donne offers his attention to his horse in the form of an apple, Sadie howls, "sounding remarkably like a child who had stubbed her toe" (23).
Pegge is obstructing the view between both Donne and the dog, but still
Sadie conveys her jealousy, an emotion that forms part of the uncanny connection between the dog and Donne. Pegge's father, "without turning his head... said to Sadie, You don't even like apples,"' (24), and then orders Pegge to remove Sadie from his prize flowers.
Ambition is linked with betrayal when Donne recalls his service in
Cadiz34 as part of the expedition led by Robert Devereaux (the Earl of
Essex)—who is later executed for treason—and Sir Walter Raleigh, an adventure Donne undertook for the purposes of advancing himself through military service. The poetry Donne produces as a result of his experiences on this expedition adds further proof to Donne's emotional detachment. Carey argues that, if one compares Raleigh's account of this adventure to Donne's, "we are inevitably struck by the superior humanity of Raleigh's.... [whereas] Donne treats the slaughter [of the
Spanish soldiers] as a joke: the pretext for a smart paradox. There is no pity in his lines" (95). Raleigh recalls the soldiers fleeing the Spanish galleons when surprised by the English:
tumbling into the sea heaps of souldiers... some drowned and
some sticking in the mud.... The spectacle was very lamentable on
34 In 1587, Spain had begun to threaten England with an invasion to support Catholics in that country. The expedition to Cadiz was mounted to prevent this and resulted in the burning of ships and supplies. As the quotes from Carey's biography of Donne infer, Spanish casualties were not insubstantial. their side; for many drowned themselves; many, half burnt, leapt
into the water" (qtd. in Carey 94).
Whereas Raleigh conveys his empathy for his enemy, Donne responds with a witty epigram, "A Burnt Ship," that creates a paradox at the cost of the dead Spaniards:
Out of a fired ship, which, by no way
But drowning, could be rescu'd from the flame,
Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came
Neere the foes ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.
(my italics, qtd. in Carey 95)
Novik conveys Carey's critique of Donne when she has the Dean recall this episode:
The Spaniards planted our dead upright at the tidemark. When
the tide turned, the flotilla of bodies sailed out past our ships,
shining in the moonlight like the Catholic heads I had seen as a
boy on London bridge. In several hours, the flowing tide would
carry the corpses past us in the opposite direction. We could hear
the dogs fighting for position on the beach. (141)
There is a similar absence of any experience or observance of human emotion in Novik's prose as there is in Donne's original narrative. This detachment, Novik suggests, may have led Donne to betray Essex during his incarceration for treason.
The Cadiz expedition recollection serves to introduce Donne's involvement in the execution of his former commander, Essex, while also serving to emphasize how early modern men deceived Queen
Elizabeth I by their unshakeable low esteem for women. When Essex's campaign in Ireland suffered great losses, the earl was "[djesperate to tell the Queen before she heard it from her messenger" (142), so Essex rode hard across country to reach her and deliver the news himself. His arrival at Her Majesty's chamber was unexpected and unannounced. As
Novik's Donne recalls Essex's narrative,
Only then, he told me, did he notice that she had no brows. Her
skin was unpainted and her teeth black. One of her ladies was
combing something on a stand. It was the Queen's wig, impaled
like a traitor on a pike. For the first time since entering the room,
he focused upon Elizabeth's head—pale, blue-veined, and utterly
devoid of hair—and saw his fate reflected in her eyes. (143)
By insinuating the Queen's vanity was responsible for his execution,
Essex betrays his patriarchal bias; by narrating the event in Donne's first person point of view, Novik indicates the potential unreliability of the ambitious Donne as the source. Historically, Essex had betrayed the
Queen by refusing to fight the Irish rebels and by returning to England when she had expressly forbidden him to do so. His last ditch effort to 76 save his own life was an attempt to topple Elizabeth herself based on the popular support Essex had received in the past. His attempt failed miserably and Elizabeth ordered his execution; over a year had passed since his regrettable intrusion on her privacy. Donne's involvement in this episode was due to his position as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, in whose house Essex was imprisoned on his return from Ireland. Biographer Carey suggests that a 1599 note from Donne to a friend indicates the poet's sympathy for Essex; Novik disagrees.
Emphasizing his ambition, Novik casts Donne as a spy, writing out letters to the Queen, "in my best hand" (143), for the earl while he was captive in York House—during Ann's residence there—but making copies of those letters for his employer. Novik suggests that Donne's ambition influences his betrayal of Essex and provides a precondition, by Donne's own confession in the novel, to his later betrayal of Ann, that is tricking her into marriage and arranging for both the ceremony and the consummation to have enough witnesses that Ann's father had to accept it. Ironically, Donne's marriage to Ann destroyed any of his chances for advancement.
Equally consistent with the detachment displayed in Cadiz, argues
Carey, is the detachment found in Donne's love poetry. Novik emphasizes this detachment by demonstrating Donne's apathetic attitude when he recalls his son George, who also joins an expedition to
Cadiz, presumably following in his father's footsteps. George, Donne reveals in his first person narrative directed at Ann, is "a hostage novvr
(140) in Cadiz. Donne says, "Pegge will miss George if he dies, but Jo will miss his brother even more" (141); but there is no indication that
Donne will miss the boy at all. He rationalizes that "George would be safer in his grave than in Catholic hands" (141)—referring to the
Spanish Inquisition now in force in that country35—a sentiment that amounts to another betrayal, this time of his son.
Emotional detachment could also account for Donne's early attitude towards Ann, as revealed in his recollections. Donne shifts between ridiculing a woman he clearly considered his intellectual inferior—despite appreciating her elevated class status—and lusting after her body, as demonstrated in much of his verse. Donne first ridicules Ann's strategy of telling time by her close observation of flowers. During one of their walks in the garden, Ann says, "the pimpernel has closed, but the dandelion is still open, so it is between two and three o'clock Mr. Donne" (121). Instead of absorbing her lesson,
Donne turns it into an opportunity to impress her with his lover's rhetoric, achieving some measure of success when he nearly kisses her.
He pulls back as the awareness of other eyes watching them makes him cautious. Donne's setback in his seduction game forces his male
35 According to the World Encyclopedia, the Spanish Inquisition arose from the early Medieval persecution of any suspected of heresy. It was "instituted in 1483 at the request of the rulers of Spain and was not abolished until 1834." arrogance to the surface when Ann observes that "[t]he four o clocks are opening" (123). He tells her,
You cannot go on telling time by buttercups and water lilies.... The
world of men goes by the clock, not in these infant ways. You have
spoken no Spanish this half-hour, as you well know, unless you
count this Spanish torpor. You must realize that as soon as your
aunt presents you at court these lessons will be over. Perhaps
sooner, if the Spanish do not improve their manners to the
English. (123)
Not only does Donne deride her for her observance of nature's method for telling time, he reminds Ann that their social order consists of a
"world of men," insinuating that she could not know of this world because of her confinement to domestic space but she must, nevertheless, learn to conform to its rules and expectations. In her attempts to teach her Spanish teacher, Ann is not only reduced to the status of a child, she is also reminded of how helpless her role is in
Elizabethan society. By invoking the omnipresent threat of Spanish invasion that lingered in Elizabethan England after the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, Donne reminds Ann that it is the world of the clock and the world of men that keep her society safe from the horrors of
Spanish invasion. This provides an interesting parallel to Sir Thomas
More's role of protector of Meg Gigg's in Vanora Bennett's novel. 79
Next, Donne ridicules Ann's ignorance of the presence of Essex in her uncle's house:
You hardly knew he was there, Ann. You were no more aware of
influence and rank than the air you breathed, but they were as
natural and as necessary to you. Essex meant nothing to you, but
I was his channel to the outer world. (143)
Like the earlier scene when he chastises Ann for not being part of the world of the clock and not understanding the world of men, Donne critiques Ann for her lack of ambition. He exposes his detachment from
Ann further by his easy recollection of "the exact number of steps through the unlit halls from Essex's prison in York House back to my own room as if they were steps to Golgotha36... [yet he] cannot recall... where [Ann's] sweet bedchamber lay" (144). By later having Donne observe that influence and rank were "as natural and as necessary" to
Ann as the air she breathed, Donne demonstrates his awareness of
Ann's superior social position. Given the establishment of Donne's ambition, could Novik be suggesting that his courtship and marriage to
Ann was as strategic as the copies Donne made of Essex's letters? Given
Donne's brilliance, one might question why he would be drawn to Ann, who, at "barely fifteen" (18) possessed "[t]he body of a woman but the reasoning of a girl" (181). He emphasizes the allure of Ann by finding the woman-girl combination so a powerful drug he "studied the perfection of
36 Golgotha is the hill on which Jesus Christ was crucified. 80
[her] limbs, ripening into womanhood" (181) in order to feed his sonnets:
"claiming you with my words" (181). Although his insatiable lust kills
Ann through her physical deterioration caused by multiple childbirth, was the physicality of their marriage a testament to the kind of romantic, all-consuming love that Pegge imagines? Novik indicates that it was not, by having Donne confess that, "Having betrayed Essex, it was not hard to turn my back on you[, Ann]" (232).
If the phenomenal world is a strong presence in this novel, it is only accessible to women, as demonstrated by Donne's frustrated attempts to break through the barrier between the realistic world of the novel and the magical world of the novel. Whereas his power on earth stems from his place in the patriarchal hegemony, there is no separation of gender in the crypt. Consequently, Ann's narrative seeks to reflect on that very separation of gender in the world she left, the "world of men." If a magical realism plane is "born... in the gap between the belief systems of two very different groups of people" (Hart 3), then the space where
Ann's dialogue occurs must be in that gap. The world Ann inhabits, "is magical [but] underpinned by the real" (Hart 4) because as Ann lies in the darkness of her grave, "in a miserable coffin" (112), people come and go "in the church above me, gossiping about John Donne's sickness and pointing out his wife's plain epitaph" (Novik 111). Donne inhabits the world of the real that is "permeated by magic" (4), as demonstrated by 81
Donne's attempts to break through, by Sadie's unusual connection to
Donne and Pegge, and by Pegge's awareness of the spiritual world.
Donne directs his first-person narrative at Ann during the last days of his life when he is comparing his bedridden state, where his soul is imprisoned in his mortal body, to a coffin: "I lie in prison and am coffined until I die" (137). It is in this state that Donne contemplates
Pegge and reveals some of his perceptions of her, as though updating
Ann on her daughter's progress. As his mind wanders, Donne finds that
"[s]ometimes when my lips move, no sense at all comes out" (139), indicating that his ramblings are not being taken down but occur in his attempts to transgress from the real world into the magical one. These transgressions are intimately linked with Donne's promise etched on
Ann's headstone: "John Donne... who hereby pledges his ashes to her ashes in a new marriage wedded" (Novik 25), drawing on Christian theology that teaches eternal life to those who believe in Christ.
Accordingly, the magical realism that brings Ann's spirit to life
"originates predominantly from the beliefs of [Novik's] own cultural context" (Bowers 92), that is a predominantly Christian, Western country. In Magic(al) Realism Maggie Ann Bowers traces this postmodern approach back to Germany in the 1920s, to art critic Franz
Roh who used "magic realism" (2) to describe the direction in which art was moving at that time. The term surfaced in Latin America first in the novels of Cuban Alejo Carpentier and was developed by Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, British-Indian Salman Rushdie, African-
American Toni Morrison, and Chilean-American Isabel Allende. But it is
Carpentier who, Bowers argues,
saw the multiethnic and multicultural mix of Latin America and
the cultural practices such as voodoo that resulted from it, as
providing the perfect raw materials for a sense of the magical real
in every day. (90)
Bowers interprets this strategy of drawing on "material beliefs or practices from the cultural context in which the text is set" (91) as ontological magical realism, "the most common and most recognized form of magical realism" (92). Novik employs these strategies in the narratives that alternate between Ann and Donne, discussing disparate theories about the afterlife and the soul.
Donne's first attempt to transgress across these two worlds occurs when he embarks on a late night trip to his wife's grave. It is St.
Lucy's Eve, the anniversary of their wedding. Pegge wakes to noises coming from her father's room; her father is talking "in some sort of trance, his tongue working uselessly, as if half-formed words were struggling to escape in poems" (42). Pegge follows when Donne rises from his bed to traverse the city at night to the side of his wife's grave at the church of St. Clement's. "I have come to keep my promise, Ann" (48),
Donne announces on his arrival at the grave. He then proceeds to pry open Ann's grave and, "[d]ropping nimbly over the edge, he landed in the 83 bone-hole" (48). Sadie catches up with Donne, sits "on her hindquarters and [howls] to call her Orpheus37 back from the underworld" (49). Pegge watches with relief as her "father broke off his unwholesome tryst and scrambled out of the bone-hole, dragging the crowbar with him" (49). It is unclear whether this has woken Donne from his trance, but he is immune to the dog's "loyalty unswerving...wagging her tail at his feet"
(49). Donne "[flings] the crowbar across the aisle in anger...[and chases] the yelping animal into the night" (49). This is the first association of the grotesque with Donne, but it also represents Donne's failure to reconnect with Ann through the barrier of death. Having Pegge and
Sadie bear witness to Donne's attempt may emphasize a connection with
Ann, but Ann later faults the dog for interfering, "to warn [Donne] of the danger" (114) of crawling into the crypt. She also accuses the dog of
"[appointing] itself a sentinel against me" (114-115) at Donne's deathbed. Perhaps Novik employs the myth that dogs can sense the presence of ghosts, or perhaps the dog prevents Donne from leaving
Pegge fatherless too soon, before he has found her a husband. Novik is ambiguous about this, making Sadie an unusual dog with uncanny abilities.
From the grave, Ann's memories are bitter; she accuses Donne of putting her there: "you begat another child on me, my twelfth, and I died
37 Novik uses Orpheus and Eurydice, and Theseus and Ariadne, but never mentions Eurydice's name. Both heroes betray their partners. Eurydice literally disappears in the myth, perhaps an allusion to Ann's similar disappearance from Donne's life and from history. 84 from it" (113). Still in the "world of men," Donne associates memories of
Ann with imprisonment: "It is not the first time I have been imprisoned for your love" (137). His first imprisonment was brought about by Ann's father; his last is Donne's own inability to "stop the thoughts of you... I wonder if you have conspired to keep me here, pinned to this bed of vain desire" (137). Donne is accusing Ann of still having the ability to sexually excite him, a weakness of his that first had him seducing her in the garden, but became a test of his faith after becoming Dean of St.
Paul's. His hunger for her, he confesses, was "insatiable" (181) until he became a priest, had to restrict his impulses, "and this youthful play at dieting became sour truth" (181). His words indicate that it is sex and only sex that draws him to Ann. Indeed, his hunger for her is present even at the time of his death when he finally connects with her as she is
"pulling me into the hot mouth of death, the labyrinthine end. My fornicating soul is sucked down with my body into a subterranean grave, your toothed and fatal vaginal embrace" (239). Ironically, the presence Donne recognizes here belongs to Pegge, a reinforcement of the denial of Donne's access to the magical world. Like Ann, Donne's observations are preceded by his link with Pegge, who cares for him.
Pegge therefore provides a link between the two worlds inhabited by these two lovers.
Emphasizing Donne's inability to "hear" Ann's narrative is his total denial of responsibility in her death: "Why did God give you a 85 stillborn child you could not bear? Was it a test of your faith, or of mine"
(140). However, Donne's guilty conscience manifests itself in his paranoia of Ann's quest for retribution:
For fourteen years, you have pursued me from your grave.... I
must die in the first person and rise omniscient.38 I will collect
you when the time is right, for time cannot weary you where you
lie now. When you are six thousand years old, you will have not
one wrinkle of age or one sob of weariness in your lungs. (180-
181)
The tone here is very similar to the tone in Donne's apathetic depiction of the Cadiz adventure, putting his own spiritual grace before his wife's anticipation of their reunion. His last sentence indicates that Donne is unaware of how "lust echoes on cold bone" (114) for Ann. Instead, he seems to envy her freedom from life's complaints. Employing his now familiar detachment, Donne recalls that Ann was "crying in our chamber, your hand supporting your back, for your womb was full of
Pegge.... now your hair was grey" (181) after he announced his entry into the Church. Once Pegge was delivered, Donne recalls the sexual restrictions placed on Church of England priests:
I could not come to your bed on fast days and feast days, I could
not come when you were bleeding, or suckling, or with child, or
even when you had given birth but not yet been churched. (182)
38 Novik uses a postmodern self-reflexive strategy here to draw attention to the text as fiction and aligns with Donne's own reputation as an author. Nevertheless, Ann becomes pregnant again, her last. When Donne tells
Bess to chase the children out of Ann's bed during this pregnancy, Bess replies that "they did [Ann] less harm than Dr. Donne, who had made your belly a house of death" (183). Donne uses Ann's death in the same way that Carey accused him of using the plight of the Spaniards by creating a succinct, poetic summary devoid of emotion: "Your reason escaped in a single tear, though your body wept three days longer"
(183).
The grotesque surrounds Donne in the real world, demonstrated by Pegge's witnessing of his visit to Ann's grave and the first time he takes to his bed, then in his last days with both his and Pegge's commentaries on the decay of his body. John Hodge argues that the grotesque has often been used to "critique various representations of the female body" (187-188). Thus, by associating Donne's character with the grotesque, Novik subverts the original approach of the grotesque to critiquing a man's body. Mikhail Bakhtin examined the use of the grotesque in his study of carnival, Rabelais and His World, and dates this use of the grotesque to critique women's bodies back to the Middle
Ages, demonstrated by the "Kerch terracotta figurines of decaying, deformed, senile, pregnant hags" (Hodge 188). Mary Russo interprets
Bakhtin's analysis as a male exploitation of the 87
Female Grotesque for their own critical ends. Specifically, [Russo]
reminds us that men masqueraded as women during carnivals or
riots to fight for political change. (Hodge 188)
Novik creates a feminist inversion of the grotesque by lingering over
Donne's physical decay, for example having Donne beg Ann to leave him
"to the corruption of my body. I can smell it beginning. Let me putrefy and vermiculate, incinerate, dissolve, desiccate, and be dispersed until I am motes of dust" (185). As death draws near, Donne resents the presence of so many women in his room of death—Bess, Pegge, and
Sadie—bitterly describing how Bess ministers his body:
Bess cares for me at night as she cared for my children, regulating
the function of my organs as she regulated [those of his children].
Now she peers into my chamber pot with thin lips, displeased with
my stingy offerings. Her basins hold the ministration of the devil.
Mustard poultices for hoarseness in my chest, and purgatives to
loosen my bowels. If that does not work, a greased finger will
shoot up my anus, digging out a plug of stool to start the process
going. (234)
Thus Novik doubles her female inversion of the grotesque by having Dr.
Donne, the man who ministered the souls of St. Paul's, having to submit to the ministrations of Bess, his social and gender inferior. Novik further creates a metaphor for the decay of Donne's body as representative of the moral decay that soured Ann's marriage to him. Indeed, Novik makes a sweeping statement against patriarchal structures by insinuating Donne is a symbol of the putrefaction of their morality.
Ann More Donne, Lover and Mother
When one of Ann Donne's daughters confesses to her father that she "had clipped your nails as you lay dying to entice your soul back to collect them" (184), Novik encapsulates an important feminine theme of her novel: the minutiae of female existence erased or discarded by the dominant culture that will later be reclaimed and remembered in a magical world where female history is privileged. John Donne is morally outraged when he discovers that his children have hoarded physical traces of their dead mother:
Bridget's tinder-box with nail parings... the hair that Constance
had combed out of your brush, the flannel in which Jo had caught
one of your tears. I threw them on the fire as the children
watched, and condemned such Catholic idolatry. (184)
By this reaction, Donne categorizes his children's simple wish to maintain some kind of connection with their mother as the practice of
Catholic idolatry—referring to the medieval tradition of collecting and selling the relics of saints or even Jesus himself. Donne thus represents patriarchal hegemonies that have burned or erased the traces of female history. This space where histories erased and forgotten are found or reclaimed shares common space with postcolonial reclamation, a site 89 where magical realism became the popular mode for reclaiming histories lost by those colonized.
Bowers argues that a standard for magical realism writing is their portrayal "from the marginal perspectives of people lacking political power.... [It is] associated with fictions that tell the tales of those on the margins of political power and influential society" (33). Faris argues for a
"female spirit" (170) in magical realism, one that is "characterized by structures of diffusion, polyvocality" (170), as shown by Novik's multivocal points of view; "and attention to issues of embodiment, to an earth-centered spirit world" (my italics 170), as shown by Ann and
Pegge's affinity with nature. The displacement of women writers, Faris argues, has made them, as a collective, feel "like a colony" (176) in the face of the three-hundred-year tradition of "realism... as a canonical, patrilineal form" (172), and explains how Isabel Allende "enlists magical realism as a kind of support system for feminine writing, confirming its decolonizing potential for women" (177).
In order to better understand the "magical" element of this mode,
Bowers prefers a definition of "realism" that dates back to Aristotle's idea of mimesis, "the act of imitating life" (Bowers 21); Aristotle believed that "witnessing art is an essential way to learn about the human truths of life" (Bowers 21). Yet when Aristotle first made these arguments, his own context was a Greek society where "Greek women had virtually no political rights of any kind and were controlled by men at nearly every stage of their lives" (Romano). Therefore, Aristotle spoke of men, the
"world of men." Bowers argues that "[m]ost critics of magical realism... and the majority of writers of magical realism understand the world to be ruled and controlled by a predominantly male and white Western elite" (68). This ruling elite promotes attitudes that have been shaped by the discourse of the Enlightenment,
that all truth could be known through logic and science without
the need for the superstitions of religion.... The dominant culture
remained dominant by denying others the power to govern and the
power to challenge the truths that they proposed. (Bowers 68)
By giving Ann's spirit a voice, Novik suggests a magical dimension to life, that a dead person's soul lingers near the society it once enjoyed in
"an earth-centered spirit world" (Faris, my italics 170). By pitting Ann's magical voice against the earth-bound and mimetic voice of Donne,
Novik emphasizes the tension between the phenomenal world and the real world that characterizes magical realism. Whereas the mode of realism "allows the writer to present many details that contribute to a realistic impression" (Bowers 21), it serves as a skeleton to magical realism, a poststructural mode that will then try to "stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits" (Bowers 22) in order to explore the myriad of voices silenced by dominant culture.
In Conceit, Novik searches for the truth in the romance between
Ann More and John Donne, thereby challenging the dominant culture's 91 version of Donne and his progeny with two strong female voices, Ann and Pegge, against one voice from the dominant culture, Donne. These two voices also exemplify, in Faris's words,
a female strategy... [associated] with the 'parented' female text
Elaine Showalter defines with the aid of Virginia Woolf s idea that
a woman writing thinks back through both her mothers and her
fathers... that female discourse is double-voiced because it
encodes both the 'dominant' mode and the 'muted' group within it
aligns it with the polyvocal nature of magical realism. (Faris 173)
Thus, Novik explores female space with female language in a world that, within the novel, is accessible only to females. Her narrative is neither
"woman-manly or man-womanly" (Woolf 120), but distinctly "a woman's vision of the world" (Moi 268). This is emphasized by these two female voices overpowering Donne's in a way that the dominant culture has overpowered women in the past. For example, when Donne lays dying he complains, "Must I share my last cell with female infidels" (234)
By having Ann's narrative of their love affair come from her spirit and beyond the grave, Novik satisfies the first characteristic of magical realism as outlined by Faris, the "irreducible element" (7):
The narrative voice reports extraordinary—magical—events, which
would not normally be verifiable by sensory perception, in the
same way in which other, ordinary events are recounted....
articulated in such detail or so completely integrated into everyday reality in other narrative traditions—mythical, religious, folklonc.
(Faris 7)
Novik gives Ann's long-silenced voice the chance to challenge the truth as told by the dominant culture, for which Izaak Walton is a symbol. As
Donne's biographer, Walton invents much of what the dominant culture considers the truth by resisting Pegge's demand that he refrain from characterizing Ann as a disobedient daughter and objectified wife.
Walton couldn't imagine "what good [it was] to recover the wife's reputation at the expense of the husband's—Ann More, who was nothing compared to John Donne" (313). Instead of Walton's veneration of Donne—achieved by excluding the sensual poetry that betrayed Ann and inspired Pegge—Ann's truth captures Donne's selfishness and ambition, traits Carey argues is "[a] thread which runs through the whole [of his life] and binds it together" (60).
Ann Donne's death occurs on 15 August 1617, before this novel begins and the inspiration for nine-year-old39 Pegge's fantasies about love, as emboldened by the love poems her father wrote before he became Dean of St. Paul's. For Pegge, their romance was a passionate love affair that, as Donne's epitaph on Ann's gravestone attests, goes beyond the grave. There is dramatic irony in how Ann bitterly recalls her courtship and her marriage, dispelling any rosy fantasies surrounding love. Ann chooses violent language to describe her experience: "I was
39 Chapter one begins in the year 1622, making Pegge's birthday 1613. slain by love, at far too young an age (112), an allusion to the violence of her own death and the often violent pains associated with childbirth.
It is Ann, rather than the father Pegge cares for, who educates Pegge in love's realities, teaching her that romance is an illusion. Pegge shifts her devotion to Ann—"I had taken her part for so long, I hardly knew which was my other or myself (393)—and gains for her mother the ultimate revenge against her father.
It is Pegge who precipitates Ann's first words when she throws herself on top of her mother's grave and weeps. Ann responds:
Someone is treading on my grave.... Tears drip through the cracks
between the stones... Pegge is the only one who weeps like this.
Perhaps she has heard me speak aloud, for anyone who presses
an ear to my tomb may hear me talking and, even as an infant,
Pegge had unnaturally keen hearing. (Ill)
Here Novik first establishes the special connection between Pegge and
Ann, one that has Ann say, "she was such a sturdy, practical creature, already capable of telling one flower from another, the only one of my daughters to breed true" (228). Flowers not only provide an important connection between Pegge and Ann, but also Pegge and Sadie. The family dog "would hide in the flower bed" (21), she would watch over
Donne, and she would console Pegge, especially on Donne's death. The dog's full name, Sadducee,40 connects the animal to Ann—whose higher social class has already been noted—because it is the name of an aristocratic Jewish sect from biblical times. Donne recognizes Sadie's mystical characteristics in his first-person narrative:
Once in a while, when Sadie barks for no reason, Pegge looks
about as if a spirit might be present in my chamber then lays a
hand on the dog to quiet her. For months the dog has shadowed
me, even into the chancel of St. Paul's, tracking the rank odour of
human flesh. I do believe the animal has some gift, for she knew
before my own doctor that I was dying. (185)
Donne refers to an incident when Sadie was trapped in the sanctuary of
St. Paul's, tracking "an old scent up the stairs into the choir loft and
[whimpering] like a lost child" (22). Novik places this incident at the beginning of the second section, deflating the decorum one usually associates with a historical figure like Donne, but also revealing his lack of humour with her description of how Sadie brought "the Dean's performance to a jerky embarrassed halt" (22).
Ann's concept of marking time, as noted earlier, is through the physical attitudes of flowers, a temporal measurement first catalogued by Carl Linnaeus. Given the assignment of female gender to nature, this
40 The Sadducees was a political party opposing the Pharisees during Christ's time. Sadduceeism is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary Online as "Materialistic scepticism and denial of immortality considered as characteristic of the Sadducees; spec, denial of the existence of witches, ghosts, and the like." This choice of reading aligns Donne and Walton against the spirit of Ann. becomes a distinctly feminine way of marking time and satisfies another of Faris's characteristics of magical realism: in addition to the two different, merging worlds of the real and the magical, magical realist fictions "disturbs received ideas about time, space, and identity" (23).
Ann and Pegge's ability to mark time by reading the flowers acts as another connection between Ann's feminine magical world and Pegge in the real world. By having Donne privilege his "world of men" and their world of the clock over that of Ann's time-telling, Novik demonstrates the dominant culture's privileging of science over spirituality, a shift that began in the Early Modern period. This affinity with nature is also associated with sex for these women, as demonstrated in how Donne's sensual poetry causes Ann to have dreams of nature's fecundity:
Verdant stalks, emerald blades, the hard new green of unripe
fruit, the greenish-gold of pistils and stamens bursting with
unspent pollen. The deep blue-green drone of insects raiding
plants. My legs hinged open like heavily scented petals, then
closed upon themselves again. (154)
Again she employs similar figures of nature, but imprisoned by male patriarchy, when describing why she was not free to give herself to
Donne in marriage: "this honey was not mine to give. My father owned the hive. John Donne knew as well as I did that I could not wed a tradesman's son" (156). Ann's bitterness and cynicism from her position in the magical world reveal the betrayals she experienced during her relationship with
Donne, beginning with their wedding, one opposed by her uncle, Sir
Thomas Egerton, his third wife, Alice Spencer, and her father, Sir
George More. Donne arranged for a secret marriage to Ann (December
1601); the bride and groom were masked and they had a "mock- chaplain" (168) perform the service. After "we had been declared mock man and wife" (169), Ann had hoped for privacy; instead the five students from the Inns of Court stripped the couple and led them to their marriage bed. Her use of "mock" indicates Novik's suggestion that
Ann was tricked into this marriage. Although made an object of the gazes of these students, Ann tried to "keep the tears and shame inside"
(170) her. For his offence, Ann's father had Donne thrown in jail and
Egerton dismissed him. Yet when Sir George More threatens to annul
Ann's marriage, Ann forgets the circumstances of her marriage to defy him: "We have five witnesses to the consummation... all students of law at Lincoln's Inn who are prepared to testify in court" (95). Sir George accuses Donne of trying to gain himself a "Protestant wife to raise himself at court" (196). Given the suggestions Novik has made regarding
Donne's confession of betrayal, his ambition, his impatience with Ann's country ways, and his strategy of having five lawyers as witnesses at his wedding's consummation, indicates Novik's thesis that Donne's motivation for marrying Ann was ambition. Ann herself succumbs to romantic ideals under Donne's influence, as seen when she defends Donne's Catholicism by asking,
"what other faith made saints of its women" (203); as demonstrated by her dismissal of Donne's reported debts because she knew they "should remedy that state together, for poets and their wives lived frugally, if not entirely upon fresh air" (203). Her romantic idealism is soon crushed under the weight of poverty and children, and serves as a lesson to
Pegge. Meanwhile, Donne's ambition continues to come between him and his wife, as demonstrated by his travel abroad while she is carrying their eighth child. On this occasion, Donne writes his famous poem, "A
Valediction Forbidding Mourning," in which he compares their love to a drawing-compass:
You told me that we would be yoked together like a drawing-
compass even when the legs were spread apart. Was a clever poem
worth a dead child? Labouring to give birth, I sent my spirit to
find you, but you did not spring back to my side like the promised
compass leg. (222-223)
Though it is Walton's biography that famously reports that Ann's spirit appeared before Donne on this trip, Ann gives a new interpretation of how her appearance was of her own design rather than Donne's spirituality.
The worst betrayal, for Ann, is intertwined with Donne's decision to become a priest, after King James's insistence. In order to cash in on 98 the last of his youthful ambition and before he would construct his new persona of Dean Donne, Ann watches Donne retrieve his "scattered verses hastily from friends, thinking to publish them while you still could" (223). Ann, whose language since before her marriage has expanded and her understanding of Donne's subtleties deepened, reads the poetry:
I lit a candle in your library....Rank satires and elegies were
spread across your tables—verses your friends had thought worth
saving that I had never seen. The female body was anatomized
with its ripe menstruous boils and sweaty breasts, its warts,
weals, and hanging skin, its limbs strung up like sun parched
quarters on the City gates. A man's member was likened to the
mouth of a fired gun pouring hot liquid metals into a woman's
body. Who would have thought poetry to have such malice in it.
(224)
Novik again employs the grotesque when she links Donne's language with Ann's narrative, emphasizing how Ann felt betrayed by this objectification of her body for the perverted pleasure of Donne's coterie.
In the same way that Meg Giggs felt her marriage a fraud upon learning
John Clement had fathered Elizabeth's son, Ann finds the distribution of these "[r]ank satires and elegies" (223) amongst Donne's friends for their titillation turned their marriage into a fraud. Ann realizes that the composition of these verses was as fueled by ambition as was the collecting of them, and finds her own metaphor for it: "Once an everywhere, our bedchamber was now too cramped for your ambition"
(original italics 225). Donne's religious position became the all- consuming focus of his ambition, leading him, like More, to turn his back on the life he led before taking a post offered him by a king. Ann wonders, "[w]hat sort of jealous god called conjugal love a sin?" (225), retaliating by finding
my own god with her own commandments, and Aphrodite had no
mercy for men who scorned her. Her favourite punishment was
petrification. You were easy to discipline, for you had already
begun to turn yourself to stone. (225)
Ann shows her awareness here of Donne's lack of emotion, but she wants his soul with a fierceness that betrays the new emotion of rage:
You will find my anger has not eased with time, but has bloated
and heated like manured straw that feeds and mulches roots.... I
will flower brilliantly into the light, my mouth a violent blue, my
petals feathered and flamed with ire, and our embrace will be far
from the quiet reunion you dreamt of... .The most delicate of
flowers, the lady's slipper, stinks of rotting fruit to draw flies to it.
And so I shall set a sugar trap for you. (115)
Ann uses nature's images in the same way that Pegge uses them during her fishing trip with Walton, but her images are of decay and entrapment—"stinks of rotting fruit to draw flies to it"—suggesting that 100 her plans for Donne's soul, once she traps it, are not sweet but full of the bitterness of revenge.
Pegge Donne Bowles, an Unknown Poet
Pegge's search for the truth about love from the father she associates with passionate love sonnets is doomed because John Donne was duplicitous; his poems were the product of his ambition just as the marriage into which he tricked Ann More was an ambitious strategy, according to Novik's novel. This argument has been built by Donne's confessions of his ambition and betrayal of his wife, and compounded by
Ann's savvy observations about how Donne's obsession with ambition left no room for love for her. His physical need for sex, however, kept her pregnant until it killed her: "you begat another child on me, my twelfth, and I died from it" (113). Pegge's obsession with romantic love, her perspicacity, and her love-filled marriage are shaped by her writing
"back through both her [mother and father]" (Faris 173), as shown in how Pegge first rewrites her father's sermons then writes "boldly in the white between the lines. Lips, legs, and arms: small words that fitted into the spaces left by men" (original italics 274). These voices of her father and her mother and Pegge herself represent the "polyvocal nature of magical realism" (Faris 173) that Novik accesses to write with "a 101 woman's vision of the world [because it] is strongly marked by her gender" (Moi 268) while, at the same time, adopting a male narrator, but not, as Wallace suggests, "to write about the 'male' world of public and political affairs" (7). Instead, Novik privileges female domestic spaces, a mother's love for her children, and the female privileging of nature and spirituality over science and ambition. Novik exposes the hypocritical world of genius—just as Bennett did in Portrait—while promoting the opportunity of rewarding relationships built on negotiation, trust, and endurance.
As has been discussed previously, Ann Donne is connected with nature through her knowledge of flowers for marking time. Pegge, she observes, has inherited this trait, making Pegge the likely audience of
Ann's narrative. Throughout the section of the book called "Death's
Duel: 1631" (109-260), Pegge is at the centre of a dialectical argument that pits the emotions and bitter experiences of an objectified and marginalized woman against a man who is an important member of "the world of men." This narrative is precipitated by Pegge's trip to her mother's grave after Donne has refused to ever let Pegge "be [his]
Margaret More" (84). For someone who, according to his wife, "fancied
[himself] a Thomas More who educated his daughters" (226), Donne's response to Pegge's dream of being the kind of daughter to him that
Margaret More was to her father is harsh: "A man is King and men must be the scholars" (84). His attitude is indicative how, according to Ann, "England changed for girls after the Queen's death, for the King did not wish to have educated women about him. King James liked to say that to make women learned was to make them cunning" (226). Donne does not deny Pegge's gift for writing; in the copies of his sermons he finds
"digressions I had never preached. Sometimes they had a kind of brilliance to them" (236). But Donne forbids her that path, opening
Pegge to the channelling of her mother's nature-infused spirit, a path that would lead her to the kind of nature-centered and loving family life that was denied Ann.
Part of that loving family, for Pegge, includes Ann's life-long servant Bess and the dog, Sadie, whose vigilance has switched from
Donne to Pegge then Bess as she ages. When Pegge's family moves outside of London, Bess accompanies them; though she complains of
Sadie's fleas "she let[s] the dog lie across her feet when she thought no one was watching" (263). When Bess dies, "Sadie sank at once into a dreadful gloom. Hiding under Bess's bed, she refused to come out to eat or drink and was dead within three days" (264). Earlier in the novel,
Pegge fought with her father on whether dogs had souls, and when
Constance married had "hoped Sadie would not pine away and die of grief, as melancholy dogs were known to do" (41). Sadie does not "pine" for Constance, nor does she "pine away and die" when Donne dies.
Instead, with Pegge secure in her new family and Bess gone, Sadie gives in to her "melancholy." Subsequently, Pegge buries Sadie shortly after 103
Bess, and finds some release for her grief in the act of returning Sadie to the earth:
Pegge buried Sadie herself, then sat in Bess's old chair beneath
the yew with the soil clinging to her hands. Even with dusk falling,
Pegge could not bring herself to go inside. William brought her a
young dog from his kennel, wrapped in [Bess's] horsehair blanket,
but Pegge told him angrily to take it back, (my italics 264).
Like the night he proposed to Pegge, William Bowles shows again his kindness and care for Pegge, providing a dramatic contrast to the acts of kindness absent from Novik's portrayal of Donne.
The image of Pegge above with "the soil clinging to her hands" emphasizes Pegge's affinity with nature, also demonstrated by the ambiguous love scene she has with Walton by the river on their fishing trip. Nature's fecundity is what Pegge's scrutinizes: "a clump of green- life floated past with a damselfly laying her eggs in the glinting sun" (62); when Pegge spies a big fish, she sees that the "belly was fat and quivering. The best eating. A female, bursting-full of spawn" (65); when several carp begin "splashing on the surface" (66), Pegge realizes that
"[t]hey were in the very act of spawning" (66). Transferring this mating energy to Walton, Pegge is quick to obey his order to crawl out onto a rock, "to a narrow outcropping" (62) to view the fish. He then, "crouched over her ankles at the neck of the rock" (63). Both of them are wet from wading through the river but Pegge imagines, as she lies there close to 104
Walton, that "[t]he rock was talking to her body, and her body to the rock, but what they were saying could never be written down, not in the
King's English as taught to gentlewomen" (64). In her euphoria of
Walton's attention, Pegge associates all of nature's fecundity to his actions, imagining their fishing activity as a tryst in a pastoral setting, one of her romantic illusions.
Hoping to cultivate the same affinity with nature in her children,
Pegge plays with them outside and takes them on picnics. As her children mature, she brings nature inside, as when Constance has been hired by Bowles to give painting lessons to Pegge's daughters:
Pegge brought in some tulips from the garden for her daughters to
paint as well. Although the tulips were now splayed over the green
baize, the girls' brushes danced by preference over the pale lilies,
irises, gladioli, and narcissi. Pegge was sorry now that she had
pulled up the tulip bulbs. She had wanted her daughters to draw
the whole plant, even down to the rich clumps of clinging earth"
(my italics 287).
While the other "girls' brushes danced by preference over the pale lilies, irises, gladioli, and narcissi" (287), Pegge is disappointed when they ignore the tulip and its life-generating bulb nurtured by the "rich clumps of clinging earth." Only Franny, who seems to have Pegge's non conforming spark, 105
was drudging away at the vibrant tulips, one foot bare, the other
dangling in a garden clog. Pegge saw Franny rub her paper so
many times the brilliant paper ran, turning the sky a weepy
carnation, (my italics 287)
A single garden clog especially connects Franny to Pegge, although her preference for the tulip and the hopelessness of her painting style also indicate her alliance with her mother.
Pegge's adolescent fascination with nature and its fecundity appears in her own "fantasticaF (original italics 254) versions of her father's poems, most particularly "The Flea:"
As she rounded the Dean's corner, where the wind always blew, a
cool finger of breath lifted the neck of the purple robe and slid into
her clavicle, breath marrying bone, then traversed her breastbone,
burrowed into her navel like a flea trying to get warm. Then the
flea danced back out, took a bite and kissed her flesh, its hollows
and mounds, assessing how much she had grown... how her
nipples bristled in the cold, and how her womanhood was held
like an unripe peach between her legs... (43)
Whereas Donne's poem, whose speaker demonstrates jealousy of the flea because that insect receives what the speaker cannot: "Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, / And in this flea our two bloods mingled be"
(Donne, "The Flea" 3-4), Pegge's turns the conduit for lovers' shared blood and symbol of marriage back into the flea of nature, one that "took 106 a bite and kissed her flesh" instead of one that "swells with one blood made of two" (Donne 8). As Donne himself had said of Pegge's versions of his sermons, "they had a kind of brilliance to them" (236). But the flea also appears in association with Sadie, the dog; first Donne then Bess
"complained about Sadie's fleas" (263). Fleas on a dog are, like Pegge's biting flea, their original state in nature. Yet their association with Sadie adds to the complexity of Sadie's mystique.
By turning Donne's metaphysical flea back into the flea of nature,
Novik writes against the male-dominated literary culture's manipulation of language in order to demonstrate their intellect. Another strategy
Novik uses to write against the dominant culture can be seen in her subversion of romantic tropes, a genre associated with women since
Chivalric Romances became popular in Middle Ages. Pegge's youth and virginity are a site of romance, as seen by her allusions to the romances of Ariadne and Theseus (22), Jane Shore and Edward IV (40), Orpheus and Euridice, and her father and Ann, "most beloved, most dear, most mourned of mothers and of wives" (25). Situating her parents' doomed romance amongst other equally doomed romances, Pegge illustrates her failure to comprehend the tragedy of their endings; for Novik the strategy suggests the Donnes' romance belongs with tragedies.
Therefore, it is through a romantic paradigm that Pegge sees Izaak
Walton as her own true love and her sister, Con, as the bewitcher of him
"with her snares and diversions that are forever threatening to seduce" 107
(Davis 169) him from his quest. Caught up in this illusionary romance— like a female Don Quixote—Pegge's courting of Walton contrasts Donne's impersonal verses with her use of images of nature and nature's fecundity as her inspiration on their previously-mentioned fishing trip to the River Darent.41 During this trip Pegge scrutinizes Walton's physical body as she becomes aware of her own:
They ate the radishes from her pocket, enjoying the coolness in
their mouths.... She fell a little behind, playing with the
drawstring on her scarlet bodice and feeling her nipples rubbing
underneath.... Unbuttoning his new doublet, [Walton] dropped
it.... Now even his shoes and hose came off... He was rolling his
sleeves up above the elbow. Above his walnut-brown hands, his
arms were startlingly white, and as muscular as a water carrier's.
(60-62)
Searching for something with which to scoop up the carp, Pegge orders
Walton to "loosen the ties that fasten my bodice up the back" (65), removing the bodice to be used to catch the fish and leaving her with
"only a lawn chemise [clinging] damply to her skin. She let him feed his eyes, to see how the sun had kissed and swollen her young nipples"
(65). But Walton is oblivious; he holds the bodice "like soiled laundry"
(85). While leveraging himself to attempt to catch the carp, straddling
Pegge in the progress, he orders her to "[h[old me fast" (67), asking her if
41 Pegge describes this as being "twenty-five miles south of London" (58). she feels the "fish...throbbing" (66). Pegge is confused, because she feels
"[t]he raw heat of the sun and rock, the blows of her heart, the prickling of her skin "(66). Soon after the fishing trip, smallpox consumes Pegge and leaves her scarred. Could this be a form of punishment for seeking intimacy with Walton? Given that the arrival of Pegge's menstrual cycle coincides with her acceptance of William Bowles's offer of marriage, I would argue that these two occurrences are directly related to the men associated with them: Walton is the wrong choice and Bowles is the right one. Pegge later refers to the fishing trip as a time when "they had lain together like man and wife" (81), but after Walton marries another she makes an oath that she "will be a virgin" (86) and confesses by her father's deathbed that she "could not scrape up even a taste [of love] for myself (original italics 394), making the tryst Pegge imagines another part of her romantic fantasy.
Ann's memories instruct Pegge to re-evaluate her romantic ideals, but it is Pegge's re-reading of her father's poems—revealed later in the novel in another subversion of linear time—that forges her alliance with her mother and modifies her previous image of her father:
What became of your vow to die in the act of love and share a
single grave with Ann? I read through your poems once again,
counting your unkept promises to her. I had taken her part for so
long, I hardly knew which was my mother or myself. (393) 109
Pegge had realized as Donne lay dying that he sought sainthood and was using Walton as his means for copying out "the case for your beatification from your own canny lips. You told him story after story, each destined for the Life of Donne" (original italics 393). Her bitterness towards her father's ambition matched her mother's: "although I was a better secretary, [Walton] was a far, far better fool" (394). Pegge finally received her lesson in love by observing how her father "had been given a surfeit of love and squandered it while I could not scrape up even a taste for myself (my italics 394). This revelation inspired Pegge "not to wait for love to seek me out. If I was to taste love, it must be now" (394).
Pegge borrowed "Bess's.... dried honeysuckle steeped in grease to anoint a body benumbed and cold. To bring him round... when nought else will do if (original italics 395) and rubbed Donne's body with the ointment as she recalled how Donne had
railed against Ann's voluptuous spirit in your sermons that the
audience sat rigid with attention, eager for more of the Dean's sins
with his dead wife. Well, I was amorous too, but I was flesh and
blood, heavy with new womanhood and bruised by the deceit of
men. I cursed all faithless lovers and wished them turned to stone,
(my italics 395)
Pegge coaxed out of Donne's decrepit body "a glorious haemorrhaging flood... rampant with remembered love, bartering [his] immortal spirit 110 for one more minute in a woman's arms" (395-396). Pegge confesses that
Ann "drove [her] forward" (396):
Drawn by my perfume, I whispered, you will slide into my labyrinth
like a bee into an orchid. And in that lyric rush, if I sang out my
name as Ann, then thrust my tongue deep in your mouth, who
was to blame, my mother or myself? (original italics 396).
The implication is, of course that Pegge brought Donne to erection and, her spirit and Ann forged as one, begins to have intercourse with him.
Revenge is foremost in Pegge's mind, as she imagines that "when [Donne was] about to die unconfessed and forfeit [his] grand sepulchre in
Paul's" (396) pity seizes her: "I withdrew my tongue and let you hang between the utmost pleasure and the utmost pain" (396). If Pegge's act can be deemed sinful because of its incestuousness, it can be deemed doubly sinful because coitus interruptus, also known as onanism, is the sin Donne refused to commit with Ann.
Considering this revelation occurs before Pegge receives a proposal of marriage from William Bowles, her reaction to him and her acceptance of his proposal become clearer. Bowles finds Pegge and Sadie after her father's death and saves Pegge in a most chivalric fashion from sexual assault. Pegge's initial perception when Bowles arrives is that he is her father's horse, Parrot, but
as the fog parted and the mare drew closer, Pegge saw it was only
a tall man with a brown cloak wrapped round against the damp. Ill
Parrot's sweet nose dissolved into the man's, although the eyes—a
welcome chestnut brown—were indisputably the mare's. (253)
Her chivalric image of a saviour on a horse dissolves into Bowles, whose gaze Pegge associates with her father's beloved horse, symbolizing
Pegge's maturation beyond romantic ideals. Bowles tells Pegge about the codicil in Donne's Will: "Her portion to be £750 if she weds Mr. Bowles of
Clewer and £20 if she of her own fantastical brain rejects him" (original italics 254). When Pegge accepts, Bowles proves himself a kind provider when he lays "his cloak on top of the [small cart] and [bends] with the utmost gentleness to lift" (260) Sadie, who is sick. Pegge's menstruation cycle finally begins, signalling that Bowles is the right choice for her.
Although Pegge is the agent of her mother's revenge against her father, when fire threatens to destroy her father's effigy, "some pity called [her] back" (396). By saving Donne's effigy and restoring it to Sir
Christopher Wren, Pegge claims space for her father memory in a monument—St. Paul's Cathedral—that will ensure his fame. By using the events around the Great Fire as a framing device, Novik not only embodies Pegge's question—"Why men did always begin their stories at the start?" (273)—she also demonstrates that the "surfeit of love" Pegge received from Bowles motivated her last generous act towards her father.
With Pegge's acceptance of Bowles's proposal marking the onset of menstruation and Pegge's own fertility, Novik emphasizes another site of 112 feminine discourse silenced by traditional narratives. Iris Marion Young examines this silence in her essay, "Menstrual Meditations" (97), by beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's critique on society's attitudes toward and young woman's responses to their first menstrual period:
The physical limitations that menstruation brings by nature or
convention symbolize the relatively constricted life that is a
woman's in a male-dominated society. To be sure, there are
positive moments for some, the women who enjoy the power of
their sexuality or who throw themselves happily into motherhood.
The stance of most girls toward feminine maturation, however, is
ambivalence: affirming and denying themselves as women, split
and alienated." (de Beavoir qtd. in Young 100).
Because menstruation is cyclical it is another way of measuring time that, like the flower clock, is attuned with nature. Consequently, as
Pegge emerges from her fantasy of chivalric romance, her menstrual cycle arrives to ground her in the world of the feminine, a world in which her life partner will earn her love and trust from years of kindness and devotion rather than carefully crafted protestations of devotion that fail to be fulfilled.
As the author whose employment of conceit was often "brilliant
[excesses], stretching metaphor into strands of gossamer" (Bartley),
Donne's current literary fame is due not so much to Walton's biography, as to his veneration by T. S. Eliot and others in the early twentieth 113 century. Attention paid to female poets of his generation, on the other hand, has been scant. For example, an average undergraduate anthology for the Renaissance lists fourteen female authors as compared to fifty-five male authors42. And, by having Pegge first call Izaac Walton's biography on her father a fiction then deciding that a "woman could write a fiction as well as a man" (273), Novik claims space for women writers from this period. By having Pegge then write "in the white between the lines" (274), Novik imagines how the writing by women of this period may have been created, in the time and space left to them outside of their domestic and family responsibilities. By the end of the novel, Bowles discovers volume after volume of this kind of writing that
Pegge has produced and hidden. He cannot read it because Pegge has used a code for her writing—a privileged language in the same way that
Ann's narrative is accessible only to Pegge indicating that the female experience cannot be understood by men. Bowles presents Pegge's writing to Samuel Pepys for his opinion; Pepys determines the code is
"tachygraphy, a system devised for taking down sermons" (337), but judges Pegge's writing to be defacement rather than art, advising Bowles that "[w]ith so many books burnt in St-Faith's-under-Paul's, this folio would fetch a ransom, yet it is hardly worth a penny in this condition"
(336). Pegge's writing is not only discarded as the activity of a mad
42 See The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century, the Early Seventeenth Century. 7th ed. 114 woman, it is also considered less than worthless in the currency of the dominant culture.
It is therefore ironic that Novik creates a framing device with
London's Great Fire of 1666, because that "moment of fracture" (Wallace
228) destroyed a vast number of texts of men. In Neil Hanson's examination of the Great Fire, The Dreadful Judgement, a catalogue of property destroyed included libraries of the rich and the inventories of booksellers who sought to safely store their books in St. Faith's, located under St. Paul's. Like St. Paul's, St. Faith's was consumed by fire.
Hanson gives an indication of the catastrophic proportions of the blaze:
The Great Fire.... obliterated at a stroke virtually every trace of a
medieval city that had been six centuries in the making. A few
books and parchments were saved, a handful of buildings escaped
the holocaust unscathed, but much of what we might have
learned of the intimate details of medieval London was lost
forever. Like the burning of the library at Alexandria, the fire of
London stole from us an irreplaceable store of human knowledge.
(Hanson xx)
Considering the historical traces of women that have been erased, burned, or discarded, this man-made maelstrom seems like the intervention of a female divinity—Ann's "Aphrodite [who] had no mercy for men who scorned her" (225). 115
Conceit is steeped in allusions to these great historical events and their similarities to current events, but the title itself draws attention to the way in which language is manipulated. Metaphysical conceit, of course, is the literary device Donne made popular in which "internal qualities are conveyed by vehicles with which they share no physical features" (Preminger). An example is Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning," often alluded to in the novel, in which Donne compared the souls of two lovers (presumably he and Ann) to the legs of a compass, conjoined: one leg always stationery, the other mobile. Pegge appropriates some of Donne's conceits for her own purpose, as she does with the flea. However, in the end, Pegge's own conceits demonstrate the kind of love and passion missing from her father's. First, it is shown in her love for her granddaughter:
Now I am jostled by another night-creature, her feet going step by
step up the ladder of my leg. Not yet weaned, my grandchild
nuzzles at my breast, puckering her lips like a hawkmoth
searching for a bud. I tug her higher, making a buzz in her ear so
she will buzz me back in mine. (390)
Pegge remains true to her affinity with flowers and the fecundity of nature, comparing her granddaughter to an insect that is known for
"pollinating flowers such as orchids and petunias while sucking nectar"
("hawk moth"), then turning Pegge into an insect by virtue of her "buzz in her [granddaughter's] ear." Instead of appropriating the image of the 116 insect, as Donne did the flea, and transforming it into a "vehicle" for poetry, Novik transforms Pegge and her granddaughter in order to allow them to communicate in a language they share between them—a motif in this novel. Similarly, instead of sharing a "marriage bed," as Donne describes it, Pegge shares "a love-bed" (390) with her husband. Her survey of Bowles as he sleeps conveys the emotion missing from her father's verses:
It is not the first time I have come to him in the night. These
fingerings are shorthand for a long affection.... In the dark, there
is only sensation, the dreamer adding scent and colour according
to his whim.... But this time, instead of enjoying my lover I have
been watching him sleep. William is no longer young, and I have
begun to worry about him. (390)
Novik, through Pegge, discards the metaphysical interpretations of the flea or the compass as instruments of lovers' passion, because "nothing should come between two lovers but their skin" (390). As for the heart— the organ that Pegge first sought to understand romantically then physically, by studying William Harvey's 1628 treatise on blood circulation—Pegge compresses these understandings as she lies next to
Bowles:
I press my fingers to his heart and feel this clock pulse, not in a
case of silver, but of skin, the beats quickening whimsically at my 117
touch. Here is a heart within my grasp. I have only to reach out in
the moonlight to claim it. (397)
By first describing her husband's heart as a physical pulse then conceiving it as a "surfeit of love" for her to claim, Pegge recognized both the literal and metamorphical figures of the heart, but, in their "love- bed," privileges the romantic emotions and symbols women assign to it over the reason men use to understand it. When Pegge declares, "my love for you has grown over the years to marvellous proportions. Let us die together in the act of love, so death cannot divorce us" (398), she writes a new version of a love story, her version, with a happy ending. 118
Chapter Four:
Conclusion: "Metafictional games" and Knowable Facts
In his twentieth-century analysis of the historical novel and its birth, Georg Lukacs praises the work of Sir Walter Scott and uses his novels as examples to outline the elements that he considers fundamental to its form: a male-centred examination of the historical
"world of men" (Novik 123). Today, historical novels written by women still employ several of these elements: the first is the author's re- imagining of the story of a marginal historical figure that is not of the epic proportions associated with kings, generals, and statesmen, a person who Lukacs defines as existing in the "middle way" (32). Women authors adapt this requirement, re-imagining the history of women who have been generally ignored or left out of historical records, as previously argued by Diana Wallace in her examination of twentieth- century British women writers. Secondly, Vanora Bennett and Mary
Novik also demonstrate the renunciation of Romanticism that Lukacs finds in Scott's work, parodying that type of historical narrative by including romantic elements but then subverting those elements. For example, Pegge Donne's romance-charged infatuation with Sir Izaak
Walton is frustrated by Walton's adoration of her sister Constance while
Meg Giggs's idol-worshiping of John Clement turns to loathing in the face of Clement's passivity and infidelity. Third, both authors address what Lukacs saw as a weakness in Sir Walter Scott's novels, that is, 119
"that there is no room in these novels for the interesting and complex tragedies and comedies of love and marriage" (34). Whereas Bennett's approach to Meg focuses more on the tragedy of disillusionment and dissatisfaction inside a marriage, Novik balances the tragedy of Ann and
John Donne's marriage with the comedic episodes in William and Pegge
Bowles's marriage.
Diana Wallace reminds us that, although Lukacs saw the demise of the classical historical novel as coinciding with the political upheavals across Europe in 1848, a rebirth of the historical novel occurred in
Germany in the 1930s as a reaction to fascism. Lukacs suggests that these novels "are politically motivated texts which turn the past into a
'parable of the present9' (original italics, Wallace, "Defeated" 78), or as
Lukacs puts it "to wrest directly from history a 'fibula docet' [fable to instruct]" (338). Nowhere in this rebirth or in Scott's era does Lukacs give recognition to women authors. However, Wallace argues that the wave of female-authored historical novels in Britain in the 1930s emerged in a similar reaction to the rise of fascism, but more importantly from the preconditions of the agency appropriated by women during the upheaval of World War I and the subsequent passing of universal suffrage. Of these novels, it is the romance, Wallace argues, that became the most important. It evolved from early family sagas and adventure-swashbuckler novels and underwent further development with anti-Fascist historical novels such as Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) and Sylvia Townsend Warner's
Summer Will Show (1936) and After the Death of Don Juan (1938).
Georgette Heyer, British author of close to sixty novels43 and the vanguard of this female tradition, "aimed predominately at a female audience and us[ed] Tiistory' to explore the restrictions and injustices, past and present, of women's lives" (Wallace, "Defeated" 82).
Consequently, Bennett and Novik are inheritors of this tradition, yet they are firmly established in the postmodern, taking their inspiration from "the metafictional games of John Fowles and...Umberto Eco, A.S.
Byatt, Graham Swift and others...[whose work starts] to make the historical novel a respectable subject for critical attention" (Wallace,
"Defeated" 77) by challenging the focus of historical novels on men. Part of the "metafictional games" that Bennett and Novik demonstrate include a postmodern approach to historical narrative; their novels reflect on the instability of history, as described by Linda Hutcheon, historiographic metafiction. Therefore, these novels form part of a larger variety of narratives that demonstrate alternative approaches to history, challenging the idea of history as knowable facts. For example, the traditional history of Richard III as narrated by Sir Thomas More depicts that monarch as a scheming, murderous tyrant whereas later
43 Georgette Heyer's first novel, The Black Moth, was published in 1921. Her last, My Lord John, was published in 1975, a year after her death from lung cancer. Whereas most critics find her novels "repetitious" (Womack), Wallace argues her historical novels were important explorations of "gendered identity as socially constructed and therefore potentially fluid" (Historical Novel 35). 121 narratives, such as Horace Walpole's, are more moderate. Which narrative represents truth? Can we find truth? Hutcheon writes, "[t]he debates about the nature and status of narrative representation in historical discourse coincide and are inextricably intertwined with the challenges offered by historiographic metafictions" (57). In other words, these diverse approaches taken by different historians/authors towards historical "narrative representation" account for the instability of history, blurring the delineation between historiographical narratives and historical fiction that Hayden White analyzes. It is in the recognized blurring of these two very different narratives—one self-consciously scientific, the other self-consciously artistic—that inspire authors;
Bennett suggests that King Richard's nephews escaped the Tower and spent the rest of their lives in obscurity, while Novik suggests that literary giant John Donne's famous romantic marriage was a farce, a vehicle for his all-consuming ambition. These authorial strategies represent Bennett and Novik's challenges of the idea of history as knowable facts.
Both of these explorations subvert the characteristic Lukacs admired in Scott: a narrative with a "complex and intricate path which led to England's national greatness and to the formation for the national character" (54). Bennett's narrative explores how the corruption of
British heroes subverts "national greatness" and "national character" by stripping the gloss from those heroes. Novik, as a literary scholar, 122 chooses to explore the apotheosizing of certain male literary figures while excluding or severely limiting women's writing from inclusion in
Western culture's literary canon and in English studies.
Recent events in the twenty-first century—specifically the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the persistent reactionary anti- feminist politics discussed in the reissue of Susan Faludi's seminal text
Backlash and in the columns of Natasha Walter—provide a context for the narrative strategies of Bennett and Novik that demonstrates similar challenges that Wallace found in her aforementioned examination of
British women's historical fiction of the 1930s. Wallace argues that the context of this era—one that followed the success of women in obtaining universal suffrage in England—was characterized by an "anti-feminist backlash" ("Defeated" 80) in which
the ideal of educating women for citizenship was progressively
watered down until the woman citizen was defined as homemaker
and mother rather than political activist. Moreover, the rise of
Fascism meant that women were entering a history which seemed
dangerously on the edge of repeating earlier catastrophes.
("Defeated" 80)
Bennett and Novik seem to react to a similar anti-feminist backlash, one accompanied by the rise of terrorism and a questionable ethics of power in the response of western superpowers to that terrorism, a response 123 that threatens the personal freedom and justice that have long been a cornerstone of those western superpowers.
In her survey of British women's historical novels of the twentieth century, Wallace argues that the "notion of a 'dialogue' between past and present comes up repeatedly in the work of both the writers and critics during the 1990s" {Historical Novel 205). I would argue that
Bennett and Novik's novels demonstrate that that dialogue has taken on a different tone. The events of September 11, 2001 and the reactions to those events by the Western superpowers of Britain and the United
States have raised concerns about the ethics of power. As Wallace argues, the 1930s represented a unique time for women facing "an anti- feminism backlash" and a world on the edge of catastrophe, but missing from that era is the perception of a country's own leader as immoral or duplicitous. Subsequently, Bennett and Novik choose the Renaissance for their novels' setting. Not only did the literary mode of allegory reach its greatest popularity during that era with works like Edmund
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, but Renaissance women faced "an anti- feminist backlash" as well. The patriarchal hegemony "progressively watered down" the agency women had gained through their participation in and excellence demonstrated through the Medieval craft guilds, a theme Bennett explores in detail in her second novel, Figures in
Silk. As women's places grew more confined within the family, these sites of excellence disappear or become associated only with the family. 124
But it is in the volatile state of Renaissance politics and religion—the instability of the Tudor reign and the warring factions of the Catholic and Lutheran religions—that these authors have found similarities between political- and religious-based struggles in the passionate Blair-
Bush war against terrorism. Whereas More would have quoted from the
Bible and used the threat of eternal damnation to sway his audience,
Blair and Bush incorporate phrases steeped in religiosity, aimed at anyone or any country suspected of harbouring ill-will against the West in general, and the United States and Britain in particular. Thus, I would argue, Bennett draws parallels between the Renaissance and contemporary worlds, and shows how one woman is forced to make her own choices and find her own agency within a society that remains patriarchal.
Novik's aim to demonstrate a woman making choices within the paradigm of a patriarchal society coincides with Bennett's. However, she chooses to parody the power paradigm of intellectuals through her characterization of Samuel Pepys, the "expert" to whom William Bowles presents his wife's writing for analysis. This strategy offers an oblique critique of the male literary elite's exclusion of women authors from important literature—deemed worthy of inclusion in anthologies—most particularly women authors of the sixteenth century. In an earlier critique of this bias, Elizabeth Hanson tells the story of how, when she had just begun her first academic appointment in the 1980s, the head of 125 the department invited her to participate in the review of the seventeenth-century portion of "a widely-used anthology of English literature" (165), for which the head was one of a group of editors.
Hanson admits to having been emotionally charged with the invitation,
"driven partly by the heady fantasy of direct intervention in the process of canon formation" (165) but also driven by the prospect of having printed texts in the place of the photocopies with which she had formerly taught. Hanson expresses her disappointment in this exercise because
my zealotry led not to radical reform of the anthology in question
but to a heated and exasperated quarrel with the aforementioned
editor and head of department.... the [anthology's]... very
organization seemed to invest with metaphysical certainty
categories such as literature,' 'English,' 'period,' 'authors, (major
and minor)' which to me were at best historically contingent and
at worst oppressive in the discriminations they enforced. (165)
I would argue that Novik's magical realist novel, Conceit, takes up this protest of Hanson's against the low value attached to the writing of early modern women. By employing the magical realist mode, Novik participates in the "the metafictional games" to which Wallace refers.
Novik's self-reflexivity as an historical author becomes apparent given the previous century's acceptance of women's historical novels, as
Wallace has observed: 126
Equally important in terms of literary history and canon formation
is the fact that the general critical disdain for women's popular
historical novels appears to have led to the neglect of a body of
historical novels by writers such as Naomi Mitchison, Sylvia
Townsend Warner, Bryher, H.F.M. Prescott and Mary Renault.
{Historical Novel 5)
Thus Novik narrates the story of a woman who had to claim the writing space left over by men, hid her work in a secret collection, and had that work dismissed when it is examined by a male literary authority.
Since "any historical novel always has as much, or perhaps more, to say about the time in which it is written" (Eco qtd. in Wallace,
Historical Novel 4), I would argue that the choices made by these two women authors are necessarily aligned to their political contexts:
Bennett is politically motivated to critique the abuse of those in power in
Britain in the early twenty-first century by examining another "moment of fracture" (Wallace, Historical Novel 228) and another era when patriarchal leaders abused their power; Novik critiques the current
"archive of a culture" (Moi 268) in the twenty-first century by creating an analogy for the loss of women histories by examining a different
"moment of fracture" during which privileged histories—those written by men—were destroyed. These two novels form part of the work of women writers, over a variety of fields, that critique those in power while seizing agency for women. Bibliography
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