Intersecting Discourses of Race and Gender in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam Evelyn Gajowski University of Nevada, Las Vegas [email protected] And they had inherited, among other things, a long history of the ‘meaning’ of color. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark1 Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry, is the first dramatic text authored by a female playwright in the English literary tradition.2 The play dramatizes the conflicts that characterize two marriages: Mariam and Herod, and Salome and Constabarus. Indeed, ‘marriage is the battlefield of the play’, as Elaine Beilin puts it.3 Not surprisingly, initial critical attention to Cary’s tragedy comparatively analyses the marital conflicts characterizing Cary’s marriage, drawing on The Lady Falkland: Her Life, a biography written by one of her daughters, on the one hand, and the marital conflicts characterizing Mariam’s marriage to Herod within the imaginative world of the dramatic text, on the other. Early critical attention also comparatively analyses In revising this essay for publication, I am grateful to Edel Semple and Ema Vyroubalová, the editors of this special issue of EMLS, as well as the anonymous EMLS readers for their suggestions and to Dorothy Vanderford and Ariel Santos for their editorial and research assistance. 1 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 49. 2 If we were to consider Mary Sidney’s closet drama, The Tragedy of Antony, as a dramatic text in its own right rather than merely a translation of Robert Garnier’s sixteenth-century text from the French, then Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam would be the second dramatic text authored by a female playwright in the English literary tradition. 3 Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 167. 1 Cary’s dramatic text and her source, Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, translated into English by Thomas Lodge and published in 1602. Cary drew upon Josephus freely, but she makes two major alterations in the story that she inherits: the first is the addition of her Christian perspective, as Beilin points out, while the second is her focus on the character of Mariam as her tragic protagonist.4 What I aim to interrogate here is Cary’s juxtaposition of two antithetical representations of femininity – Mariam, her tragic protagonist, and Salome, her villain – to structure her dramatic text. While Salome dominates the first half, Mariam dominates the second half. I aim, further, to examine Cary’s skilful exploitation of early modern European discourses of race and gender in establishing the identity formation of these two female characters. European Discourses of Race ‘Europe is both a region and an idea’, as Robert Bartlett points out in The Making of Europe.5 And ideas of ‘Europeanness’ have long been entangled in discourses of racial, ethnic, national, religious, and geographic difference – in literature, as in history. Indeed, these various discourses have contributed to ‘Europe’ as a construct, or the 4 Ibid, pp. 165-6. Other scholarly and critical studies of Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam include, in chronological order, the following: Elaine Beilin, ‘Elizabeth Cary and The Tragedie of Mariam’, Papers on Language and Literature, 16 (1980), 45-64; Sandra Fischer, ‘Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny, Domestic and Religious’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. by Margaret P. Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), pp. 225-37; Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘A Room Not Their Own: Renaissance Women as Readers and Writers’, in The Comparative Perspective on Literature: Approaches to Theory and Practice, ed. by Clayton Koelb and Susan Noakes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 93-116; Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, Introduction, in The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. by Weller and Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 1-59; Dympna Callaghan, ‘Re-reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry’, in Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 163-77; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Carolyn E. Brown, ‘The Tragedy of Mariam’s Politics’, Paper presented at the Shakespeare Assn. of America Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 1999; Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, Introduction, The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. by Hodgson-Wright (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000), pp. 1-37; Lisa Hopkins, The Female Hero in English Renaissance Tragedy (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Joyce Green MacDonald, Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). My analysis of Cary’s Mariam is indebted to, and hopes to build upon, the work of these scholars and critics. 5 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 1. 2 ‘Europeanization of Europe’ in the premodern era, as Lisa Lampert puts it.6 Historians and literary scholars have disagreed, however, about the origins of racial discourse in Europe. On the one hand, historians such as Bartlett make an argument for a medieval period that was ‘pre-racial’, asserting that ‘race’ was akin to twenty-first century conceptions of ‘ethnicity’. Literary scholars such as Jeffrey Cohen, on the other hand, disagree, asserting that racial difference played a significant role in the construction of premodern European identity.7 Geraldine Heng and Lisa Lampert also challenge the view that medieval Europe was ‘pre- racial’. According to Heng, the discourse that established ‘the normativity of whiteness’ (and, by implication, the deviance of ‘blackness’) is evident as early as the Middle English romance, The King of Tars (c. 1330), which, coincidentally, celebrates the power of Christianity.8 Lampert traces cultural constructions of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ to the early thirteenth-century German romance, Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach, in addition to The King of Tars. Both romances illuminate ‘the tangled relationships’ between ‘theological’ and ‘biological’ notions of race, she argues, in the premodern era, as well as the modern era.9 The racial stereotypes with which we are familiar at the outset of the twenty-first century – the association of ‘whiteness’ with goodness, purity, and innocence, on the one hand, and the association of ‘blackness’ with evil, sin, and guilt, on the other – were present in premodern Europe. These medieval romances construct ‘whiteness’ as normative and European, and, further, initiate the construction of the binary of a European ‘self’ and a non-European ‘other’. More recently, Lynn Ramey agrees that the word ‘race’ had different denotations and connotations in the premodern era than it does in the twenty-first century, but she also argues that this disparity is worthy of analysis.10 While Greek and Roman writers describe racial and character difference, according to Cohen, they do not equate ‘blackness’ with inferiority. He argues that it was the early Christian writers – Albertus Magnus, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Gregory the Great, Paulinus of Nola – who initiated the association of ‘whiteness’ with goodness, on the one 6 Lisa Lampert, ‘Race, Periodicity, and the (Neo-) Middle Ages’, Modern Language Quarterly, 65 (2004), 391-421 (p. 392). 7 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘On Saracen Enjoyment: Some Fantasies of Race in Late Medieval France and England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (2001), 113-46. 8 Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 9 Lampert, p. 393. 10 Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). 3 hand, and the association of ‘blackness’ with evil, on the other. The early Christian writers thereby effectively initiate racial difference, with its various connotations and denotations, as we know it, stereotypically, today. This development occurs, in particular, with Christian constructions of the ‘blackness’ of the Saracen, whose ‘dark skin and diabolical racial physiognomy’ were, as Cohen puts it, ‘the most familiar, the most exorbitant embodiment of racial alterity’. Strictly speaking, ‘the Christian body did not have a race’, he notes, because ‘the body of the other always carried that burden on its behalf.11 Ramey, too, traces evidence of colour prejudice and anti-black sentiments to the founders of the Christian church, specifically Paul and Origen. According to the Christian, and, specifically, Roman Catholic formulation, ‘blackness’ became equated with sinfulness, demons, and devils.12 Within the context of early modern literary scholarship, Ania Loomba challenges the arguments of scholars who assert that race issues cannot be analysed in early modern Europe because the concept of race did not exist. The association of ‘whiteness’ with goodness and ‘blackness’ with evil derived, in part, from a Bible-centred conception of the world according to which ‘humanity was graded according to its geographical distance from the Holy Land’, as Loomba points out; ‘hence black people were devilish because they existed outside both the physical and the conceptual realm of Christianity’.13 In early modern England, ‘whiteness’ was seen as primary – the default or the norm – as Arthur Little argues, while ‘blackness’ signified ‘some later horror, a kind of accident or aberration, a kind of jungle infestation’.14 Throughout the development of these fluctuating ideas about ‘Europeanness’, ‘whiteness’ came to be construed as ‘European’, while ‘blackness’ came to be construed as ‘non-European’. European Discourses of Gender Romantic love as a structure of thought in the Western tradition was invented by troubadours such as Giraut de Borneilh in the south of France in the twelfth century.