Desire and gender in the sonnet tradition, Part 57

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Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

10.1057/9780230583832 - Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition, Natasha Distiller

Also by Natasha Distiller SOUTH AFRICA, SHAKESPEARE, AND POST-COLONIAL CULTURE

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UNDER CONSTRUCTION: ‘RACE’ AND IDENTITY IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY (edited with Melissa Steyn)

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Natasha Distiller

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Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

© Natasha Distiller 2008

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Acknowledgements

vi

Chapter 1

Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference

1

Chapter 2

Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis

21

Chapter 3

Petrarchism in Early Modern England

43

Chapter 4

The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth

80

Chapter 5

Strategies of Legitimation 1796–1881

98

Chapter 6

Queering the Petrarchan Subject: The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch

135

Chapter 7

Edna St Vincent Millay and the Dissident Petrarchan Subject

153

Conclusion: Petrarchism Today

173

Notes

182

Works Cited

197

Index

211

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Contents

My primary debt of gratitude belongs to John Holmes, without whose intellectual involvement and ongoing support this project would not have been possible. A more generous colleague and friend it would be impossible to find. Thanks also to Jo and Amy, for sustenance of all kinds during a research trip to Oxford in the English winter of 2005/2006. Thanks are due to other colleagues: Brenda Cooper was a willing and helpful reader of the initial chapter, and an important source of encouragement. Goran Stanivukovic kindly read the entire manuscript and made useful comments. Elisa Galgut provided an alternative view on psychoanalysis’s use of gender. I am grateful to Evelyn Gajowski for her support. Thanks also to Paula Kennedy and Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan, and to their readers who helped to improve the book. This book was begun during a research trip to Oxford enabled by the South African National Research Foundation, and substantially completed in time paid for by the Research Office of the University of Cape Town in the form of a teaching replacement grant for the second half of the teaching year 2006. Grateful thanks to the NRF’s Thuthuka Programme and to Haajirah Esau, and to Joe Muller, respectively. Sections of Chapters 1, 2 and 5, and the conclusion of this book have been adapted from the following articles: ‘There was a woman known to be so bold’: gender in Petrarchism. South African Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (2006). ‘Petrarch’s long-deceased woes’?: Petrarchism and hip hop. Scrutiny2 11 (1) (2006): 46–64. ‘Another Story: The (Im)Possibility of Lesbian Desire’. Agenda 63 (2005): 44–57. The permission of the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation for the cover image is gratefully acknowledged.

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Acknowledgements

1

The project of this book is to explore the contention, by way of a specific example, that in Western culture the position of being a desiring subject speaking in public is gendered male. Women who speak in this way – desirously, publicly – have to engage with the implicit gendering of the subject position of speaker. I put this statement in a psychoanalytic framework; the implication of the argument is that full human subjectivity is granted to the male subject in the Symbolic realm. I make this point with specific reference to Petrarchism, a way of writing love poetry, as it developed in England in the sixteenth century. Then I show what women sonneteers have made of the genre and its gendered language and subjectivities across English literary history. In this task, the early modern subject of Petrarchism functions both as an analogue and as a precursor for the modern Lacanian subject. The relationship resides in more than a structural similarity, although that both subjects are formed in the language generated by desire for the unattainable is apposite. The pervasiveness of Petrarchan positions can be seen to have fed into psychoanalytic models of subjectivity, and from there into current notions of how subjects love. I seek not to insist on stock positions of male oppressor and female victim. Instead, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which language, always embedded in the social, enables subjectivity, and to insist on the importance of gendering to this process, and thus to the – in this case – literary subjects who speak both out of and into a specific generic system, and from there into wider cultural systems. At the same time I will be emphasising the power dynamics on which the kind of subject formation I am describing relies. This brings into focus the patriarchal, heteronormative nature of the dominant Symbolic of 1

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference

mainstream Western cultural history. Emphasising the relations of gendered power in language and hence in subjectivity also points to strategies of resistance, reclamation, and refusal that are always simultaneously at work. In the course of this task, I traverse historical periods, literary history, psychoanalytic theory, feminist debates, and, in the end, national boundaries. The work of insisting on the wider cultural manifestations of Petrachism’s use of gender was begun by Nancy Vickers in 1981. Mary Moore (2000: 9, 14) has shown that Petrarchism can be considered what she designates, following Foucault (1977), a master discourse, and, following de Lauretis (1987), a technology of gender. Moore’s work demonstrates that it is possible to investigate multiple historical moments under the same rubric: that of disparate women writers’ variable responses to the conventions of a genre (or mode, as Moore [2000: 7] designates it) which became so pervasive in popular conceptions and discourses of desire that they constitute a subject position within a Western cultural erotic language. Petrarchan conventions for subject positions, in other words, transcend the historically-specific literary. The work of this book is not to offer an historical overview of primary cultural texts other than the poetic, although it is informed by an understanding of historical and cultural conditions in the early modern period, and each subsequent moment of investigation thereafter. Neither does this book claim to cover the extensive and complex inheritances of Petrarch’s oeuvre for Western literature, or the multiple possibilities his work spawned for literature in Italian, French, Spanish, and English. Instead, it proffers a feminist theoretical insight into a specific Western mode of articulating desire that has been canonised from its development as one strand of a poetic tradition which developed in English from the sixteenth century onwards. It does this by focussing specifically on the sonnet sequences that engage with and develop Petrarchism in English poetry. By exploring the work of early modern writers who are exceptional in this way (rather than the bulk of Elizabethan sonneteers whose work was premised on imitation, not innovation), the book explores the development of Petrarchism as a mode of speaking subjectivity in early modern England, in the first instance, and from there in English poetry up till the twentieth century. Using a Lacanian framework risks imposing later constructions of identity and sexuality onto the past. Given that the early modern period is as far away as it is from our post-modern present, it is virtually impossible to see its experiences and expressions of sexuality and self-

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2 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

hoods (in psychoanalytic terms, of course, the two are inextricable) on anything approaching its own terms, as the work of Jeffrey Masten (1997: 5) and Jonathan Goldberg (1992), amongst others, have demonstrated. But the point I make depends on subjectivity’s reliance on linguistic structures, and in Lacanian terms it is legitimate to view the subject of enunciation – the ‘I’ brought into being by the act of speaking – as a construction of its language in any time and place, always acknowledging that a linguistic subjective construction is made possible, and circumscribed, by its specific historical moment. Such a model, where language is the subject, is particularly apposite to the Petrarchan sonnet as a poetic form as it developed in English, because the poet speaks him- or herself into being in the act of speaking his or her desire. Beginning in the sixteenth century, in order to establish its initial characterisation in English, I follow the sonnet from thence, to the 1590s and into the early seventeenth century, to its resurgence in the nineteenth century, and then to early twentieth century America. The work of this initial chapter is to account for the larger theoretical framework which enables this investigation. First, what does it mean for a subject position, within language and/or society, to be ‘masculine’? If such a statement is not to reinscribe outmoded essentialist definitions which equate biology with gendered identity, it needs to be properly accounted for as a statement about the workings of history and society on specific individuals. It also needs to carefully relate a complex subjectivity to language as the framework within with and through which subjectivity is in part formed. At the same time, it is crucial to nuance the notion that desire is gendered, so that both desire and gendered identities can be seen to be materially and historically embodied, contingent, multiple, and shifting. The mercurial nature of identity, its unfixedness, is implicit in Judith Butler’s (1999) notion that while we cannot get beyond the heterosexual matrix which constitutes identity, subjects are capable of seizing upon the available positions and subverting them. This, ultimately, has to be the case if women are to write their desire within Petrarchism (and indeed, following the implications of the argument as I go on to make it, if they are to be subjects in Western culture at all). I draw on the position developed by Luce Irigaray with regards to women’s non-representation as subjects in language, and apply it to Petrarchism as a specific framework with its own linguistic parameters and generic rules. With the help of Butler, and the feminist debate about the relationship between sex and gender, in this chapter I attempt to

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 3

properly reconcile the potential within Irigaray’s work on the impossibility of women speaking within dominant discourses with a feminist theorising that refuses essentialist subject positions. I hope to offer a framework that uses a post-Lacanian feminist appraisal of the relationship between language and subjectivity in order to account for how different women writers use language differently in the Petrarchan sonnet. I seek to introduce material history into this framework, as a way to navigate the problem of essentialism and the fraught relationship between sex and gender. Since this project ranges from early modern England to early twentieth century America in its exploration of the sonnet, ultimately to comment on particular discourses of desire today, it is imperative I avoid constructing a notion of gender, and its relationship to speaking positions within a generic framework, that is trans- or a-historical, and thus too general to be of use. Historical circumstance will enable and disable specific gendered meanings and responses to the status quo, as the various investigations into the writing of different women in different times will illustrate. To use a post-Lacanian framework to point to the reliance on language for the formation of the subject is to insist both that gender structures identity and that the meanings available to subjects in their self- and cultural-formation will always be social. It is a way of accounting for the perpetuation of gender (and other identity constituents) and (in) the structural relation between the self and its situation – or, the self and (in) the Symbolic order. While I recognise that gender always means in relation to, especially, race, class, and sexuality, I concentrate here on gender as the primary category of meaning-making in my linguistic subject of Petrarchan poetry. This is because, as I will elucidate in this chapter and in the following one, the psychoanalytic model on which I build relies on sexual difference as a first point of departure. The reliance of gendered positions on, especially, rank, in the early days of the sonnet will be taken into account as we go along. Similarly, the reliance of gendered positions on colonial relations for identities formed during the nineteenth century must be implicit; the development of the English canon, within which the sonnet came to acquire its possibilities for nineteenth-century women writers, cannot be lifted out of the imperial history on which English nationalism relied. One of the tasks of this book is to show how, within a particular lyric tradition in Western culture, the speaking subject, because it is a subject speaking desire in public (which is also to say, in the Symbolic), assumes this position within language, within genre, and within desire; this position initially wants to exclude the female as subject, in part because it

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4 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

requires her to be its object. Language, desire, and the role of gender thus become nodal points for this work. I also hope to show that desiring subjectivity as popularised in English Petrarchism has influenced the conceptual possibilities on which I draw in discussing Petrarchism, language, gender, and society. Psychoanalysis’s debt to literature, and to the literature of the Renaissance specifically, has been remarked upon, but the implications for the relationship between Petrarchism and psychoanalysis, and the models of subjectivity the latter has helped to constitute and disseminate, has yet to be fully realised. One of my contentions is that it is more difficult for women writers, writing female lovers, to express desire in public within the generic constraints of Petrarchism. Of course, this begs the old question, what does it mean to speak as a woman, or indeed, to write as a woman? I do not mean to suggest that there is an essential quality to the experience of being a woman, or that is it possible to identify the quality of a woman’s written ‘voice’ accordingly. Rather, I mean to make use of the idea that within the language system which comprises Petrarchism, the poetic subject is constituted by rules which we can identify as gendered according to the social and literary systems out of which the genre arises. How it is possible to know the difference between a ‘woman’s’ desiring articulation within Petrarchism, and a ‘man’s’? My project relies on the idea that there will be a difference – the difference of gender. The debate about the relationship between sex and gender has been a crucial one to feminist theories. It is both enabling of some of the founding moments of a movement which insisted that women should not be defined according to the meaning of their bodies imposed by patriarchal systems; and disabling of attempts to speak for and on behalf of women as a group. How do we insist that there is something called ‘woman’ in whose name feminism works, while simultaneously recognising the culturally constructed nature of the female gender? If gendered identity is entirely socially constructed, there is no absolute definition of what it means to be a woman that can be applied outside of history and culture. At the same time, the separation of gender from sex can result in the reinscription of biology as the fixed anchor of reality to gender’s cultural shiftiness. Separating gender from sex can be used to entrench sexual difference as a biological fact from which there is no escaping: whatever the differences in social meaning, there are foundational differences that no feminist theory can refuse to acknowledge. Equally, focussing on the constructed nature of gender can

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 5

disavow sexual difference: all gendered difference becomes socially constructed. Furthermore, emphasising the difference between gender and the body makes sexual difference the central issue in social identity formation, and as such can leave out race, class, and sexuality as equally important elements for identity and as sites of social construction. The history of the sex/gender debate is long and has multiple historical and theoretical strands. In the past 30-odd years significant critical attention has been paid to understanding the constructions of early modern gender, sex, and sexuality, which means trying to figure the relation between bodily sex, gender roles, and sexual acts and identities. Some of this attention has been devoted to first, uncovering, and then, understanding, the lives and works of women. Whether feminist historians and literary historians investigated the conditions of women’s lives (e.g. Kelly-Gadol 1987), specific aspects of what particular women could do (e.g. Jardine 1999, 1987; Hannay 1990), or the lives and works of women who seemed to effect extraordinary accomplishments in the face of what their culture said they were allowed (e.g. Lewalski 1993; Krontiris 1992; Jones 1990; Beilin 1987), they were seeking in part to understand how and why women were gendered. It seems clear that socially, sexually, psychologically, and economically, women and men existed in a hierarchy of relations which drew its authority from the bible and from classical thinkers. Following Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen, Renaissance medicine understood women as incomplete or inferior men, physically, morally, and intellectually. If Aristotle’s misogyny (that the ‘female is nothing else but an error or aberration of nature… yea the first monster in nature’, as early modern anatomist Helkiah Crooke summarised it in his magisterial Mikrokosmographia of 1615 [Aughterson ed. 1998: 464] ) helped to inform early modern theories of gender, Galen’s model of human anatomy was widely accepted in the period, informing its notions of the biology of sex. Galen saw women’s genitals as inverted versions of men’s, retained inside the body due to women’s cooler, moister, and therefore inferior physical make-up: ‘[N]ow just as mankind is the most perfect of all animals, so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for his perfection is his excess of heat, for heat is Nature’s primary instrument’, he wrote in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body (qtd. Beecher 2005: 995). This ‘one sex’ model (as opposed to a more modern conceptualisation of two different, incommensurate, sexes, which Thomas Laqueur [1992] says emerged in the eighteenth century) might have understood

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sex to be more fluid than it would later become. Stories of women turning into men as a result of overheating their systems were in circulation from the time of Pliny (123–30).1 The anti-theatrical tracts of the period also displayed an anxiety about masculinity’s vulnerability to effeminisation (Levine 1994), and both these texts and others that objected to boy-players taking the woman’s part reveal an anxiety about the stability of masculine essence (Orgel 1996a: 26–7). Galen’s theory of homology coexisted alongside confirmations of anatomical differences, sometimes in the same text. Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia refutes the idea that women’s anatomy is an inferior version of men’s and therefore indication of their monstrous or deformed nature, ‘For the perfection of all natural things is to be esteemed and measured by the end: now it was necessary that woman would be so formed or else nature must have missed of her scope.’ Crooke insists on the natural functions of ‘the difference of the sexes’ (Aughterson ed. 1998: 464, 465). At the same time he later asserts Galen’s theory, ‘That women’s testicles are hidden within their bodies is also an argument for the coldness of their temper, because they want heat to thrust them forth’ (465). In 1652, Nicholas Fontanus was still writing in his textbook, The Woman’s Doctor, ‘That women have stones [i.e. testicles] and seed, no true anatomist will deny. The woman’s seed… in regard of the small quantity of heat, is more imperfect than the seed of the man’s’ (476). And in The Complete Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, published four years later, the text confirms the homology between male and female anatomy, and the superior heat of the male: Men… have their testicles within their bodies for two causes; first, because it is required that the testicles of the male should be bigger and hotter than those of the female… The stones of women… are seated in the hollowness of the abdomen; neither do they hang out as in men, but they rest upon the muscles of the loins… The clitoris is… like the yard [i.e. penis] in situation, composition and erection, and hath something correspondent both to the prepuce [i.e. foreskin] and the glans in man (480). At the same time, the text elucidates the differences implied by the anatomical inversions it describes: ‘The stones of women although they do perform the same actions and are for the same use as men’s, yet they differ from them in situation, substance, temperament, figure, magnitude and covering’ (ibid.). Thus two, apparently conflicting, arguments have sometimes been seen to be in circulation about sexual

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 7

difference in the period. Stephen Orgel comments that we should understand both stances as authoritative, since they were deployed not according to the services of a coherent theory on sex and gender, but ‘at the appropriate moment in a discussion of physiology and behaviour’ (1996a: 22). The significance of early modern theories of sex for our purposes are, as Orgel notes, that they define women in terms of men (24–5), where women are the inferior specimens, whether because they are incomplete, monstrous, or malformed, or because nature requires their colder, weaker, passive constitution to enable generation. One effect of this conceptualisation of sex was that it gave scientific basis to many prejudices about women’s lustfulness, duplicity, and moral and intellectual weakness. Their inferiority was understood as manifesting in their gendered behaviour, and, crucially, in their sexuality. Laqueur (1992: 29) argues that for the ancient philosophers on which early modern science based its theories of the body, social categories were the natural components which explained gender, not sex. An existing sexual hierarchy, part of the conceptualisation of an overriding world order, was expressed through biology, which ‘only record[ed] a higher truth… anatomy serve[d] more as illustration of a well-known point than as evidence for its truth’ (26, 27). This is one of the ways that gender can be seen to predetermine the meaning of sex. Nevertheless, even if the ancients were less concerned with verifiable fact and more interested in finding correlatives for a spiritual and natural order they mapped on to what they saw, the difference between men and women – the question of degrees of heat – became a physical fact used to justify casting women as inferior. In both earlier and later models (first, there is only one sex, with the differences between men and women being the result of women’s incomplete achievement of masculinity; then there are two sexes, fundamentally biologically different) men and women exist in a relation of hierarchy, and women’s inferiority is explained by recourse to their biology, even if what constitutes that biology is conceptualised differently. The major difference between the two models is that the one sex model allows for sexes to exist on a continuum. If the cultural or social circumstances facilitated it, at least some early modern writers seemed to have thought (see Beecher 2005), sex could change. Sex had the potential to be fluid and gender was more rigidly determined (Laqueur 1992: 130):2 an inversion of our current understandings of sex and gender (although the existence of intersex infants and other sexually indeterminate individuals challenges this notion in practice, it has not

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8 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

made a significant difference to commonsensical understandings of sex as both rigid and binary). The apparently rigid gender ideology we find expressed in early modern texts may be a response precisely to the anxiety that the underlying structures of the body were more fluid than common sense understands them to be today. Certainly a pervading emotion found by recent critics in these texts is a (repressed or overt) anxiety about, especially, women’s sexuality and about their proscribed gender roles accordingly.3 By virtue of the meanings invested in their bodies, women’s movements, education, speech, behaviour, and sexuality – at times, their full humanity – have always been proscribed, to varying degrees in different periods in Western history. This working of gender was first named as such when modern feminist theory split gender off from the sexed body as a response to Victorian biological determinism (Moi 2005: 15–21; Chauncey 1982–83: 114–46). Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) influentially asserted that one is not born a woman but becomes one. In the area of psychoanalysis, Freud’s work (1946b, 1953, 1955, 1991) on what he designated the nature of women and the psychological implications of physiological differences provided a vocabulary for conceptualising the meaning of gender, for both his supporters and his feminist critics. Joan Riviere made use of this vocabulary in her 1929 essay, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, to demonstrate that the markers of femininity can be assumed and strategically deployed. Lacan took the idea that femininity is separate from femaleness further, asserting, ‘it is for that which she is not that [a woman] wishes to be desired as well as loved’ (qtd. Homer 2005: 99). Gayle Rubin’s (1975) important essay, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ coined the term ‘sex/gender system’ (166), and drew on Marxist work, anthropology, and psychoanalysis in order to point to the constructed nature of gender and its relation to sexuality. Other work in the field of anthropology which contributed to this debate includes an early text by Margaret Mead (in 1935; see Delphy 1993) and Levi-Strauss’s work on kinship structures, which Rubin invoked. Robert Stoller’s (1984: 65) work on what he called transsexuals helped to develop the idea that sex and gender were separable, and that the latter was socially constructed: ‘gender identity is created postnatally as a result of psychological influences’ including the attitudes of a child’s parents to its gender identity (or ‘parental confirmation’ [50]), and the attitudes of society to gender and sexual difference. However he also speculated about a third element, ‘a biological force, which, though

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 9

hidden from conscious awareness, nonetheless seems to provide some of the drive energy for gender identity’ (65). He helped to develop a vocabulary which differentiated between sex, gender, core gender identity, and gender role (9–10). These are just some of the important contributions to the ideas explored in the writing on how femaleness acquires its meanings. At the same time, in feminist theory the relationship between sex and gender has long been complicated beyond an awareness of gender as the constructed meaning of sex. Moira Gatens, in 1983, offered an analysis of the theoretical and political limitations of the sex/gender divide, an argument that continued to be made ten years later (Delphy 1993). Judith Butler’s work perhaps most famously demonstrates that the meaning of sex, as much as of gender, cannot be approached outside of an already-formulated grid of meanings, what she defines in Gender Trouble (1999: 24) as the heterosexual ‘matrix of intelligibility’. Butler is not the only theorist to argue that sex is always already gender, though. In her work of groundbreaking queer theory, Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick (1994: 29) has argued that ‘sex… could occupy, instead, even more than “gender” the polar position of the relational, the social/symbolic, the constructed, the variable, the representational’. In an equally important text, Making Sex, Thomas Laqueur (1992: 11) demonstrated that ‘almost everything one wants to say about sex – however sex is understood – already has in it a claim about gender’. Others are less happy with these post-structuralist conclusions. Although she defends post-structuralist insights, Catherine Belsey (2005: 3–19) objects to what she sees as a ‘constructionist’ position exemplified by Butler, amongst others. This position, says Belsey, cannot allow for the existence of the real, cannot see the difference between what culture provides and what is always already in existence. Toril Moi sees Butler’s approach as emblematic of a problematic position which, in deconstructing the body as a site of discursive meaning, complicates what should be a straightforward understanding of sex. In What Is a Woman (2005), Moi argues against a poststructuralist problematisation of the concept or the word ‘woman’, insisting that while there may be exceptions, we can assume that a woman exists, and that she has a commonsensically female body whose stability and meaning we can assume. Moi (2003: 179) also objects to Butler’s insistence that there is no way out of the heterosexual matrix, and that the only possibilities for resistance are ‘mimicry or parody’.

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10 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

While Moi’s point that most women have identifiably female bodies is an apposite response to a feminist discussion which agonises about the possibility of speaking about the existence of ‘women’ at all, ultimately I think she misses Butler’s point. Insisting on the links between language and subjectivity, pointing to the discursive nature of gender – gender as a social construct (per)formed, not a function of something essential or natural – is not the same as separating women from their bodies. The meanings of bodies as well as the physical experience of these meanings are both implicated in value systems; they are contingent, not commonsensical. What Butler’s work seeks to do is precisely to establish ways for resistance to be seen as it is lived, by real people in their bodies, as her famous example of drag suggests. What Moi broadly designates the post-structuralist position is a reductive account which leaves out the political intention of much of this work, which is precisely concerned with ways to locate and/or make room for real people in a heteronormative world (where gender becomes a function of heterosexuality [Butler 1999: 30] ). To account for a subject position within language – and thus, within the meanings made available by social structures – and then, from this ‘big discursive machinery’ (Moi 2003: 179), to draw conclusions about possibilities for gendered subjectivity more generally, is not to suggest that all humans are only, or are the same as, subject positions within language. Neither is it to deny agency, or alternative possible positions. It is to work from within a paradigm which sees a connection between cultural texts and the cultures they inform and reflect, and the individuals living within those cultures. As historical specificities will inform what is culturally possible, the material is as implicated in the formation of the subject as the discursive. Even if we accept that sex is as constructed as gender, and is not an absolute that lies beyond the cultural matrix (in Lacanian terms, even if sex is the real of gender, we cannot approach its meaning outside of the gender we will always already have), we are still left with the problem of how we want to value sexual difference. Should we insist that the bodies gendered and sexed female will have their possible meanings mapped out for them within a system which continues to rely on sexual difference to make sense? Moi (2005: 8) is clear about what she sees as the limitations of sexual difference: ‘Women’s bodies are human as well as female… any given woman will transcend the category of femininity, however it is defined. A feminism that reduces women to their sexual difference can only ever be the negative mirror image of sexism…’ Equally, Teresa de

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 11

Lauretis (1987) has argued that once the point about the importance of culture to the meaning of gender has been made, to continue to think of gender as the sign of sexual difference (whether conceptualised essentially or discursively) is to continue to perpetuate the terms of the system it is critiquing. Contrarily, Gatens (1996: 4) complained that the mobilisation of gender as a category tended to ‘encourage or engender a neutralization of sexual difference and sexual politics’, where equality becomes the political goal, at the expense of difference. The liberal (male) subject is thus reinscribed in the attempt to mark the social constructedness of gender. Gatens critiques a gender theory which assumes that gender is only acquired in an arbitrary relation to biology, bears no relation to the body which it sees as a neutral surface, and thus can be recoded in the name of a correct and liberatory identity politics. ‘[T]he whole person’ in this formulation, is ‘the androgyn’ (4). Speaking for the existence of sexual difference is not necessarily the same thing as insisting on a fundamental essentialism. Gatens says that the body is not neutral territory, acquiring meaning only when inscribed by an imposed gendering process which can be altered if social practices can be altered. The sex/gender distinction is, she says, reliant on a mind/body split which characterises the liberal, rational subject (7). Bodies always already have meaning by virtue of their sex; ‘Gender is not the issue; sexual difference is.’ Thus ‘[t]he importance of significaion, and its constituent role in the construction of subjectivity’ cannot be lifted above the body’s meaning (9). Moi objects to what she sees as the purely theoretical nature of a discussion which points to the constructed nature of gender and insists on the discursive workings of sexual difference within a heterosexual matrix. Her answer is – following Beauvoir and Wittgenstein – that we need to recognise that the body is always a situation.4 And yet, it seems to me that Gaten’s point is crucial: to be a ‘theorist of sexual difference’ is to examine the sexed body in its situation, its historical moment (1996: 11). What Gatens calls ‘the body as lived’ (12) can be the always-historically-specific starting point for a theory of sexual difference, a theory which refuses the idea that the body sexed female can ever be lifted outside of social meaning – or gender. Like Moi after her, Gatens sees a connection between the meaning of the biological body and the construction of masculinity and femininity that is not arbitrary, and that is not essentialist or essentialising. Unlike Moi, Gatens sees an ‘acknowledge[ment] of the importance of complex and ubiquitous networks of signification’ as crucial to understanding ‘the historically, psychologically and culturally variable ways of being a man

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12 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

or a woman’. One of the implications of this position is that it is possible to assert, as Moi does, that ‘sex and gender are not arbitrarily connected’ (13) while retaining a post-structuralist interest in subject formation. Thus the insistence on sexual difference as an informing category of experience, which structures and shapes meaning, does not have to reinscribe an essentialist notion of ‘the female’ outside of history or the differences between women. It is possible to insist that having a female or male body will, for the majority of people, enable certain starting points of experience, will subject them to certain, changing, social rules which help to determine subjectivity (although subjectivity always has the potential to exceed the social rules). The meaning of this experience will always be historically contingent and, by extension, contingent on other aspects of identity – race, class, sexuality – which can be seen to acquire meaning in similarly embodied and similarly contingent ways. Unlike Moi (2005: 39), I would not wish to dismiss those subjects whose bodies do not comfortably fit the commonsensical meanings of ‘woman’ and ‘man’, but their difference can be accommodated: by locating meaning in the body and placing the body in society, differently sexed bodies can be seen to be differently gendered in relation to the norms. This line of thinking allows us, like Butler, to deny sexual essentialisms, but to retain the meaning of sexual difference insisted upon by Gatens. Sexual difference, always already gendered, has implications for the workings of sexuality. Queer theory has surfaced the heteronormative assumptions implicit in much early work about sex and gender. The work of theorists like Eve Sedgwick and Jonathan Dollimore has demonstrated the extent to which heterosexuality relies on its homosexual Other. Sedgewick (1994: 16, 30, 32) shows that while sexuality is irreducible to gender, sexuality operates in the same field as gender. The imbrication of gender and sexuality is crucial: it is through modes of gendering that subjects acquire their sexuality, even if that sexuality is dissident. Dollimore (1991: 33) theorises ‘a kind of transgression enabled rather than thwarted by the knowledge that there is no freedom outside history, no freedom within deluded notions of autonomous selfhood’. This transgressive potential arises from the structural reliance of the normative on its repressive relationship with the perverse that it at once creates and tries to contain. The possibility for ‘transgressive reinscription’ always exists. Transgressive reinscription entails ‘a mode of transgression which seeks not an escape from existing structures but

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 13

rather a subversive reinscription within them, and in the process their dislocation or displacement’ (285). As his theory is in agreement with Butler’s, so is his illustration. Dollimore’s example of transgressive reinscription in practice is the transvestite. Queer theory that challenges heteronormative assumptions also has the potential to complicate theories of sexual difference. Insisting on the meaning of sexual difference, on sexual difference’s centrality to the meaning of the body in its always already gendered situation, runs the risk of naturalising a heterosexual relation. This is in part because heterosexuality relies on the meaning of gender difference it polices, and which homosexuality can be seen to be disrupting. Insisting on sexual difference and its relation to gender can lead to the idea that homosexuality is a hatred or fear of difference, or a narcissistic wish for undifferentiation. Such a construction of homosexuality – as the refusal of sexual difference – relies on the reduction of the subject and his/her gender identity to his/her genitals. Furthermore it sees gender as fixed in relation to sex, and recognises only the difference between vagina and penis. The differences within same sexes and within genders are elided: difference becomes a binary formation. The challenge is to insist on the importance of sexual difference in structuring the subject without valorising this heterosexual value system. First, we can insist on the power of sexual difference, and thus of gender, to structure the world, without endorsing this power. In our case study here, Petrarchism, to say the poetic subject is male is not to suggest it should be so. Rather, it is to insist that without surfacing the operations of history and culture in the construction of identity positions and how these positions enable and disable certain manoeuvres of speaking and being, these operations will continue to be naturalised (as gender and thus heteronormativity are naturalised in a system which takes its meanings for sexual difference for granted). To point out the ways othered subjects voice their desires within this system is to pinpoint the always potentially disruptive presence of the other within a system that, as Dollimore has shown, needs its perversion to be proximate in order to displace responsibility for disruption onto the deviant. As much as Petrarchism is widely recognised as drawing on a heterosexual relation in that following Petrarch, the male poet usually desires a particular kind of lady, the epideictic nature of the poetry has also resulted in the charge of sexual perversion. Carla Freccero (2001: 29) has suggested that in using Laura to constitute himself, Petrarch replaces desire with identification in a recognisably Freudian narcissistic construction. In so doing, he articulates ‘homoerotic relations’.

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14 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

The normalisation of heterosexuality within an uninterrogated system of sexual difference has had profound consequences. In Freudian terms, sexual difference is conceptualised as arising from biology and as determining psychic possibilities for the subject. The legacy for homosexuals in the medical system of the West, defenders of Freud’s non-judgemental attitude towards the homosexuals he saw as flawed or wounded notwithstanding, has been well-mapped (Abelove 1986; Glassgold and Iasenza 1995).5 What it sees as the inescapable fact of sexual difference underlies how psychoanalysis begins its task of mapping the origins of consciousness. It is when the child encounters, in Freud, the penis, and in Lacan, the phallus, and has to deal with his or her relation to it, that he or she moves into subjectivity. Since sexual difference is the condition of human subjectivity, and since this difference is understood by Freud patriarchally – such that the subject is the subject who either has or lacks the penis – desire itself is marked by lack. If desire is lack, and this lack is impossible to fill, then it is doubly so for female subjects, who, following traditional psychoanalytic thought, are both the cause and the sign of lack. This burden, whether or not it accurately describes a trans-historical and trans-cultural framework, certainly describes a misogynist Western tradition which has a long classical, Christian, and Enlightenment history (Dollimore 1991: 256; Grosz 1998). Nevertheless, what psychoanalysis offers us is a theoretical model and a vocabulary which at the least seeks to describe the relation between the constitution of the subject and the gendering practices of this Western history. An awareness of the constitutive power of gender allows for a theoretical framework which wants to explore a contained linguistic world – Petrarchism – and its relationship to the gendered positions both reflected and created by its rules. Gendered positions are reflected because the historically specific meanings of what it meant to be men and women informed the genre; and they are created because the linguistic positions that resulted from this meeting of genre, gender, and society in turn fed into the development of an understanding of how desire could and should be spoken, and by whom. The claim I am making is literary, but its implications are wider: I suggest the possibilities for Petrarchan desire, although by no means culturally or historically universal, have an importance that exceeds their historical moment. The genre developed what became one culturally dominant subject position whose terms influenced ideas beyond the literary. I want now to move from a more general discussion about the possibilities of writing about the gendered nature of subjectivity, insisting

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 15

that we can do so while avoiding an essentialised, heteronormative, or a-historical notion of the subject, to a more specific framework within which I plan to work. My project, which relies on a feminist psychoanalytic understanding of subject-formation, relies thus also on a recognition of the importance of sexual difference in the construction of gender, that is, in the construction of a socially-shaped series of meanings about what it is to occupy a body whose sexed meanings are always already gendered. This framework draws on an established use of sexual difference and its implications for the speaking gendered subject which have tended to rely on a reductive notion of ‘the feminine’. I wish to argue here that it is not unavoidably the case: that we can talk about the difficulties a female speaker would have in finding a place within a language that excludes her, and simultaneously be historically responsible. We can theorise a gendered position for the speaker within Petrarchism without needing the notion of ‘Woman’ deployed in that structure to limit the possibilities for what it means to be ‘a woman’: indeed, we can observe the possibilities for appropriating the discourse as well as the difficulties of doing so. If Petrarchism’s conventions reveal the existence of gender as a consequence of seeing sexual difference, then the women writers discussed here demonstrate that there are always possibilities for agency within this always already gendered system. * Luce Irigaray’s work has been presented in the Anglo-American academy as part of a context which includes the work of Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, and certainly a related set of ideas emerges from reading these theorists together (although they have not always all self-identified as feminists).6 Irigaray’s work is a consistent manifesto for the importance of sexual difference: ‘the exploitation of woman takes place in the difference between the genders… and therefore must be resolved within difference rather than by abolishing it’ (1995: 10). Her notion of sexual difference and its relation to both language and subjectivity is important to this project because my contention is that Petrarchism relies on this difference to construct its desiring subject, even as, as Heather Dubrow (1995: 19–20) has pointed out, it makes use of gender in complex and shifting ways. That is to say, the genre needs sexual difference in order to work even as, indeed because, the speaker, starting with Petrarch himself, sometimes shifts between gendered positions. But it is my contention here that sexual

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16 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

difference functions in the genre of Petrarchan love sonnets in ways that echo Irigaray’s point: it makes clear the Otherness of ‘woman’ in its subject’s language, in the Symbolic realm of its constituting possibilities. Irigaray theorises the implications for both male and female subjectivities of the role of sexual difference in structuring the subject. She insists that the conditions for a ‘woman’s… language’ remain impossible in the terms provided by psychoanalysis (1981: 106). She engages at length with Freud’s phallocentric assumptions in a chapter dedicated to the purpose in This Sex Which is not One (1985).7 Irigaray refuses the notion of gender equality, insisting that it is structurally impossible: Instead of saying, ‘I do not want to be the other of the masculine subject and, in order to avoid being that other, I claim to be his equal’, I say, ‘The question of the other has been poorly formulated in the Western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an/other subject’ (1995: 8). And, ‘Instead of refusing to be the other gender…, the other sex, what I ask is to be considered as actually an/other woman…, irreducible to the masculine subject’ (9). This is what Petrarchism as a system demonstrates: the irreducibility of the female subject to the same as the male, within the language of the genre. Irigaray insists on the importance of defining ‘the feminine subject’ (12) precisely because the terms in which to do so – the terms of the female as subject – have been lacking in Western traditions. She calls for a feminine genealogy, which requires ‘a language, images and representations’ suitable for and to women (13). One way to define the ‘feminine’ is Butler’s (1987) way, as not ever something essential but as related to gender as a construct with which we can engage. Such a definition at least avoids the kind of essentialism to which Irigaray’s work can lead. I am looking for a way to locate the place within Petrarchism from which the female subject found a possibility, with the tools at hand, to speak. While Irigaray’s theory is most useful in pointing to the original exclusion of the female speaker from the discourse of desire with which I am concerned, I am not looking for the language of the Other in Irigaray’s sense, a language located outside the signifying system at hand – Petrarchism – but in Butler’s, a language which makes use of

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 17

what is there in order to make (albeit limited) choices, deploy agency, and perform a gendered self in, through, and possibly against, the system. Butler insists that an ‘irreducible’ notion of sexual difference cannot be invoked ‘to give expression to the distinctly feminine side of that binary opposition. If natural sex is a fiction, then the distinctively feminine is a purely historical moment in the development of the category of sex’ (139). Butler points out that the essentialising drive of much of the body of work the Anglo-American academy has designated French feminism – ‘concerned with specifying the nature of the feminine’ – makes gender ‘an essential aspect of bodily life’, not culturally constituted. This ‘comes very near the equation of biology and destiny’. (140). Indeed, Irigaray (1995: 14) does inevitably return to what she celebrates as ‘the unique character of the feminine spirit’. What could be a socially- and thus historically-based argument becomes an essentialist one. Nevertheless, the potential remains within Irigaray’s theory for a specific, situated, understanding of the working of sexual difference in the constitution of the gendered subject within a particular linguistic framework. * In the next chapter I continue to develop the theoretical tools I will need by examining the relationship between psychoanalysis’s model of the subject as developed by Lacan, and Petrarchism. I suggest the two might be related, with implications for Petrarchism’s gendered positions for the development of theories of the modern subject. In Chapter 3 I examine Petrarchism as it developed in early modern England, in order to provide historically-grounded cultural reasons for why the discourse became the gendered form I am saying it did. En route to the culminating discussion of early modern Petrarchism, a reading of Wroth’s poetry in Chapter 4, I examine Shakespeare’s sequence from the point of view enabled by Joel Fineman’s (1986) seminal work. I argue that Fineman’s Lacanian reading of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which he suggests map the moment of emergence of a modern poetic subjectivity, implies that the modern subject of love poetry is by definition not only male, but also heterosexual and misogynist. If Shakespeare’s can be read as both the culmination and the termination of English Petrarchism as it was developed in the early modern period, then there are very specific implications already in place for the women writers who returned to the form through, in part, Shakespeare’s sequence.

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18 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

I focus on Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621), as it is the first full-length amatory sequence authored by a woman. What I hope to offer to the extensive criticism already produced on Wroth’s work is the development of a theoretical vocabulary which decisively makes the point that Wroth’s speaker has difficulty with the Petrarchan form she is simultaneously occupying and, by definition, altering. Thus, Wroth’s Pamphilia demonstrates the difficult position of being the first female Petrarchan speaker in ways which reveal the genre’s fundamental gendering moves. Following its popularity in the 1590s in England, the sonnet gradually fell into disuse. After Donne and Milton (neither of whom wrote coherent amatory sequences of the kind so popular in the 1590s and capped by Shakespeare), there were no great practitioners of the form until the nineteenth century. In 1796, Mary Robinson published a selfconsciously Petrarchan sequence, Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets. Chapter 5 begins with this sequence, the next coherent amatory sequence by a woman in English after Wroth. It also looks at the sequences of the two most famous English women sonneteers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850) and Christina Rossetti (‘Monna Innominata’, 1881). I suggest that, in her own way, each of these writers is enabled and restricted by the combination of her milieu and Petrarchism. These late eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century women are able to invoke specific authorising discourses to construct positions from which to speak Petrarchan desire. Their work demonstrates changing historical possibilities for women even as, in various ways, it also makes clear the gendered rules with which women poets continue to have to engage. In Chapter 6 I address the queer poetics of the Petrarchan sequence of Rosa Newmarch, which has received virtually no modern critical attention. Newmarch’s cryptic Horae Amoris, published in 1903, suggests some ways in which the unspeakable – one woman’s desire for another woman – can make its presence known in the Petrarchan Symbolic. This remarkable sequence demonstrates that Petrarchism’s gendered subject is perversely proximate to the same-sex sexuality that disrupts the heterosexualised sexual difference on which gender relies. Edna St Vincent Millay is seen by many scholars of the sonnet as ‘pick[ing] up where Barrett Browning leaves off’ (Feldman and Robinson 1999: 18; see Jones 1983), in an accepted genealogy of female poetics which is not aware of Newmarch’s work. Certainly if Barrett Browning was the most famous ‘female poet’ of her mid-Victorian milieu, Millay was the most famous of hers. In Chapter 7 I examine Millay’s sustained

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Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference 19

use of Petrarchism in her sonnet sequence, Fatal Interview, in order to chart the development of her dissident Petrarchan subjectivity. If Wroth’s poet bespeaks the difficulties for a female poet of entering the Petrarchan Symbolic, and the intervening poets demonstrate various historically-specific tactics by which they force the Petrarchan Symbolic to accommodate them, with various results, Millay’s poet shows the limits of Petrarchan desire itself. She can do this specifically, I suggest, because she is a female Petrarchan speaker writing at the onset of Modernism. Of all the poets examined here, Millay is the one who manages to find a way to speak about the limits of the Petrarchan system that is neither abject nor compensatory. Each poet strategises from within her historical conditions of possibility. Not surprisingly, to a modern reader, Millay’s voice is most cognisant with a feminist position without, I suggest, taking such a task as its raison d’être. If, in the early modern beginning, Wroth’s poetry grapples with the lack of the desiring woman in the Petrarchan Symbolic, then by the moment of the modern, Millay’s poetry shows the limits of Petrarchan and psychoanalytic desire itself. In doing so she gestures towards, and so makes present, the subject of a woman’s desire.

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20 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

2

The unconscious is Freud’s… Laura… – the force that by refusing to be known sets in motion an unstoppable theoretical machine (Bowie 1987: 173). Psychoanalysis as a method of reading the subject is implicated in early modern literary discourses; its founding fathers make use of them to construct its tools of analysis. For both Freud and Lacan, ‘the experience of literature was an incitement to scientific theorising’ (136). Specifically, psychoanalysis makes extensive use of Renaissance literature. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, for example, the text which offers to theorise the reasons for the social in the human psyche, and the costs, is littered with literary invocations to underpin and prove his assertions about human nature.1 Similarly, Freud (1973) famously read in Hamlet the signs of melancholia, as Hamlet ‘himself’ proves through his behaviour the truth of Freud’s insight into the human psyche.2 Elsewhere he referenced The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and other early modern writers including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ariosto, and Tasso (Finucci and Schwartz 1994: 3). The imbrication of psychoanalytic discourse in Renaissance literature has implications for the theorisation of the modern subject the former has enabled. This chapter will explore the assertion that the gendered subject of psychoanalysis is informed by the literature of the Renaissance. Specifically, I suggest that psychoanalytic models for subjectivity can be seen to have a relation to the subject of Petrarchan poetry. This relation is to be found in the gendering of the subject of desire undertaken by both discourses. If psychoanalysis has helped develop a language which describes (and in so doing in part creates, confirms, and 21

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Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis

22 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

endorses) modern gendered subjectivity, this language is informed by Petrarchan positions on being in love and speaking about it.

Petrarchism in England developed in the first instance, as its name suggests, from the love poetry of the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch (1304–74). Petrarch’s love poems, his Canzoniere or Rime Sparse, were first published in 1470. There were over 170 editions in existence by 1600 (Roche 1989: 70). This enormously influential text thus has a mercurial existence quite in keeping with the nature of its subject. Petrarch himself was working with and adapting a poetic form that had been in existence for a hundred years, since Giacomo da Lentino first began to use it in the Sicilian court of Frederick II.3 Many of the tropes Petrarch was to popularise and Petrarchism was to conventionalise were drawn from Dante’s writing about Beatrice in the Vita Nuova, or originate in the myths of transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.4 In his lifetime Petrarch’s lyrics were deeply personal meditations on his complex desires, on their limitations and enabling effects on his always self-reflexive and protean personality. In time, the Canzoniere accreted commentaries (Roche 1989; Kennedy 2003). The glosses in the editions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries focussed on disparate elements in the texts, constructing various versions of the author and of what it was he was saying (Kennedy 1994). Thus Petrarchism itself is as multiplicitous as Petrarch’s original subject. This hetereogeneity increased as Petrarchism infiltrated discourses of love and courtliness in early modern Europe, passing through troubadour poetry, neoPlatonism, and eventually, in its English incarnation, the early Tudor court of Henry VIII (Forster 1969: 26, 28–30). It arrived at its apex in England in the 1590s. There it became a discourse best suited to courtiers seeking to both express and contain their desires in the court of a female monarch who consolidated her power by developing an iconography of virginity (Berry 1989; Jones and Stallybrass 1984; Marotti 1982). The most popular early modern English Petrarchan subject invoked the language of love to perform a need. This need was as much for political and poetic recognition as it was for sexual or emotional favours. As such, this Petrarchism used the personal to facilitate an engagement with the public arena (Braden 1986a; Jones and Stallybrass 1984; Marotti 1982). The poet spoke himself into being by speaking of his desire, in front of an audience. The performative nature of this way of speaking, and speaking

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The Petrarchan subject

about, desire, was much more easily available to male subjects than it was to women. It is becoming increasingly difficult to state categorically what an early modern experience of being gendered female might have been like. As work continues in this field, it has become clear that while the cultural system of gender oppressed and undermined women’s social potential, it is too simplistic to see all early modern Englishwomen solely as victims of a patriarchal and paternalist gender system. Starting with the Queen, and extending to other women of rank like Mary Sidney Herbert, educated courtiers like Amelia Lanyer, as well as to women of the middling or working classes like Anna Trapnel or Anne Askew who used religion to authorise their public speaking, or to widows whose sexual status and estates could make them freer social agents (Callaghan 2000: 5–8; Jardine 1983: 78–92), women’s lives were more complex affairs than the information we find in the Homilies, sermons, conduct books, pamphlets, ballads, plays, laws, and treatises might suggest. Royalty, nobility, money, marital status, religion, all contributed to the possibilities available to women to forge social and personal identities, together with the laws of gender. Nevertheless, proscriptive discourses about women’s public speaking (and, by extension, publicly circulated writing), were in effect. The gendered nature of the conditions of literary production in the early modern period has received sustained attention, as have the social rules for gender and their implications for identity. In the last few decades, new ground has been broken with regards to thinking about the long transition from manuscript production to print culture. The effects of this material change on notions of authority (Ferguson 1996; Marotti 1995; Marotti 1991; Febvre and Martin 1979) and on how commodification both enabled and limited access to this identity are complex, and involve the nuances of both rank (Saunders 1951) and gender (Wall 1993). In addition, contested understandings of the realms of the public and the private become important to any discussion which seeks to understand the gendered nature of early modern authority. For example, Mary Sidney’s multiple roles as patron, translator, continuer of her brother’s literary and religious-political legacy, all impact on how she might have understood herself, and been understood, as a woman writing (Distiller 2001a; Hannay 1990). These issues: the existence of manuscript culture along with the spread of print; historically specific understandings of the public and the private, the domestic and the political, which were not necessarily in a modern binary relation to each other (Ezell 1993; Clarke n.d.); the modifying material and identity factors provided by rank and by religious identity (Ezell 1993; Wiseman 1992) all relate to, and

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Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis 23

play off of, the gendering of genres. And there were genres deemed appropriate to women, specifically translation, domestic tracts, and religious work. The public performance of desire for profit was not one of them. The link between a woman’s sexual availability and the willingness to engage in public discourse was explicit in the period (Jones 1986). In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is accused of talking with a man at her window (IV.i. 83), and this is proof that she is ‘an approved wanton’, ‘a common stale’, ‘more intemperate in [her] blood/ than Venus or those pampered animals/ That rage in savage sensuality’ (IV.i. 45, 59–61, 65). Elizabeth Cary’s disobedient eponymous heroine of The Tragedy of Mariam is condemned in these conventional terms: ‘She’s unchaste’, says her husband Herod, ‘Her mouth will ope to ev’ry stranger’s ear’ (IV.vii. ll. 433–4). Lynda Boose has drawn out the early modern connections between unruly female speech and female sexuality. Accounting for the linking, and the distrust, of women’s sexuality and speech, Boose points out that for dominant early modern ideology, ‘Through Eve’s open mouth… sin and disorder entered the world. Through her verbal and sexual seduction of Adam – through her use of that other open female bodily threshold – sin then became the inescapable curse of humankind… Perpetually guilty, perpetually disorderly, perpetually seductive, Eve and her descendents become the problem that society must control’ (Boose 1991: 204). The sin of Eve proved not only women’s constitutional availability to sin, but accounted also for her lack of judgement, which facilitated this tendency. According to the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, educator in the household of Henry VIII, a woman may not have public authority, ‘because a woman is a frail thing, and of weak discretion, and that may lightly be deceived: which thing our first mother Eve sheweth, whom the devil caught with a light argument’ (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 25).5 The act of speaking publicly immediately invoked the gendering of speech (Wiseman 1992: 176). Accordingly, a woman who was publicly vocal was not only simultaneously unchaste, she was claiming access to an ‘authority presumed to be masculine’ (Boose 1991: 204). Boose points out that: A discourse that locates the tongue as the body’s ‘unruly member’ situates female speech as a symbolic relocation of the male organ, an unlawful appropriation of phallic authority in which the symbolics of male castration are ominously complicit (ibid.). Thus the right to speak in public in the early modern period was both gendered and, for women, sexualised. The gendering of public

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24 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

speaking is emphasised by what the humanist educational authorities of the time decreed as appropriate learning for women. The attention paid to controlling what a woman was allowed to read was in part intended to circumscribe what she could think, write, and so, importantly, not only what she could say but how she could say it and to whom. Vives, writing as tutor for the future Queen Mary, produced what was in effect a conduct book, translated from the Latin by Richard Hyrde in 1529. The Instruction of a Christen Woman, ‘the most ambitious treatment of female training to be published in the sixteenth century’, went into at least 36 editions by the end of that century, nine in England by 1592 (Butler Holm 1991: 266, 278). The treatise addresses the appropriate behaviour for maids, wives, and widows, in each of its three books. In discussing ‘the learning of maids’, Vives makes it clear that the teaching of eloquence is unnecessary: ‘a woman needeth it not’ (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 23, 24). In contrast, in De Tradendis Disciplinis (1516), he stresses the importance of rhetoric for men. This is significant in a courtly culture where to speak well was to draw attention to yourself as educated and capable, which was a key to political and social advancement, as we will see in more detail in the following chapter. Vives says: Rhetoric is of the greatest influence and weight. It is necessary for all positions in life. For in man the highest law and government are at the disposal of will. To the will, reason and judgement are assigned as counsellors, and the emotions are its torches. Further, the emotions of the mind are enflamed by the sparks of speech. So, too, the reason is impelled and moved by speech. Hence it comes to pass that, in the whole kingdom of the activities of man, speech holds in its possession a mighty strength, which it continually manifests (qtd. Jones 1986: 75). Women do not need eloquence because it is not their place to play a role in ‘the whole kingdom of the activities of man’. Elsewhere, in The Office and Duty of an Husband, a text translated by Thomas Paynell in 1553, Vives instructs, ‘Let not thy wife be over much eloquent… nor have the knowledge of all histories, nor understand many things which are written, she pleaseth me not that giveth herself to poetry, and observing the art and manner of the old eloquence, doth study to speak facundiously’ (Aughterson ed. 1998: 433).

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26 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

when she shall learn to write, let not her example be void verses, nor wanton or trifling songs, but some sad sentence, prudent and chaste, taken out of holy scripture, or the sayings of philosophers, which by often writing she may fasten better in her memory (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 25). Vives, along with other male writers of conduct books like Thomas Salter in his 1579 A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie, declared poetry, and often specifically love poetry, inappropriate material for women to write, as here, or, indeed, read. In a father’s advice manual, The Art of Thriving, or the plaine path-way to preferment (1635), Thomas Powell wrote, ‘Instead of Song and Musick, let them learne Cookery & Laundry, and in steade of reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good Huswifery. I like not a female poetesse at any hand’ (qtd. Jones 1990: 25). In his turn, Salter regales against ‘many unwise Fathers’ who allow their daughters to read ‘bookes, ballades, Songes, sonettes, and Ditties of dalliance’, which ‘lascivious ballades’ will stick in the memories of young and impressionable maids (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 45). This kind of reading is problematic because of the threat to a young woman’s modest behaviour that might result from the influence of such texts on her constitutionally compromised capacity for moral judgement. Vives also proscribes Ovid, whose Metamorphoses is a crucial source underlying the Petrarchan tradition in English. Salter bans not only Ovid, but the entire classical tradition so central to the courtier’s learning in rhetoric and the Petrarchan lover’s arsenal of tropes and stories. ‘I wish all Parents to beware and take heed’, he says, ‘how they suffer their young Daughters, being frail of Nature, to be bold disputers’ (46). Once again women’s constitutional weakness is the reason for the need to control not only what they learn, but what they should be permitted to say, and to whom. Richard Brathwaite, in The English Gentlewoman, wrote in 1631: To enter into much discourse… with strangers argues lightness or indiscretion: what is said of maids may properly be applied to all women: They should be seen and not heard… What restraint is required in respect of the tongue may appear by that ivory guard

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As well as limiting the kind of speech to which they should be granted access, then, Vives also suggests limited reading and writing for women:

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Vives is explicit that a woman’s learning is not for display. Citing, as do so many early modern writers on the topic, Paul’s injunctions against women speaking in church,6 he suggests: let her learn for her self alone and her young children, or her sisters in our lord. For it neither becometh a woman to rule a school, nor to live among men, or speak abroad, and shake of her demureness and honesty… which if she be good, it were better to be at home within and unknown to other folks. And in company to hold her tongue demurely. And let few see her, and none at all hear her (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 25). This text, written in the first instance for a princess and thus a young woman expected to function in a courtly atmosphere, prohibits virtually every aspect of behaviour important to the courtly English Petrarchan lover: the public display of a specific kind of learning, through the writing of love poetry. The prohibition is linked specifically to female modesty, to a woman’s sexual conduct. Although there was a vociferous Continent-wide debate about the nature of women (arguably beginning with Christine de Pizan’s 1405 The Book of the City of Ladies) which raged in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries particularly, which suggests that not all women complied with these social rules (both in the fact that men continued to demand that they should, and in the fact of written responses by women like ‘Jane Anger’ in 1589 or ‘Ester Sowernam’ in 1617), the reiteration of the link between a woman’s public silence, her proscribed reading and writing, and her chastity and therefore her personal and social worth, remained a feature of gender discourse throughout the early modern period. Until Mary Wroth did so in 1621, no Englishwoman published an amorous sonnet sequence, and the implications for Wroth will be discussed in Chapter 4. These are the material inheritances, social and generic, with which women writing about desire in the Petrarchan sonnet would have had to contend. Within this cultural framework, Petrarchism as it developed in England comprised a performance of desire where subject positions became implicitly gendered.

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or garrison with which it is impaled. See how it is doubly warded, that it may with more reservancy and better security be restrained! (qtd. Jones 1986: 78).

I do not mean to suggest a simple or simplistic gendered subject/ object relation. There are excellent analyses of the workings of gender and gendering in the Petrarchan sonnet which are useful correctives to readings that want to flatten out its complex subject constructions.7 It is notable that many of the readings that seek to restore the importance of the woman’s presence to the functioning of the Petrarchan dynamic can do so by paying attention to embodied situations (Schalkwyk 2002; Bell 1998; Bell 1997; Henderson 1995), in other words, to specific material manifestations of Petrarchism in practice. By concentrating on the potentials of the form as it developed through its material history, I do not mean to suggest a reductive power dynamic. I seek to pinpoint the strategies of women who did eventually write in this discourse, and to gesture towards some of the normative cultural ideas it both confirmed and circulated as a result of its popularity. The male subject of Petrarchism, following Petrarch, might sometimes play with or respond to feminisation, but such a game only works within an already gendered situation. From its opening sonnet Petrarch’s sequence highlights the instability of the subject, the fragmentation of the speaker between the ‘I’ that speaks now and the ‘me’ that was, about which I speak (Moore 2000: 35; Dubrow 1995: 23; Greene 1991: 3): You who can hear in scattered rhymes the sound of all that sighing which once fed my heart in my first youthful error, when in part I was a person of a different kind… (trans. Nichols 2002: 3) Petrarch’s speaking subject, like the ‘scattered rhymes’ that constitute him, is multivalent and slippery, moving between past and present, knowledge and blindness, power and powerlessness, hope and despair: indeed, it is from thence that the oxymorons so typical to the genre derive. However, that the form itself encodes an awareness of a subject who shifts, in part between positions overtly gendered and valued accordingly, makes the point that the genre formulated subject positions within its language that are inevitably gendered, whether a specific subject shifts between them or not. Many critics agree that the process of subject formation mapped by this discourse of longing is gendered male in the first instance.8 This gendering can be traced precisely within and through the shifting strategies evinced in the various elements of the discourse. One of the most obvious places where the gendering of positions begins within Petrarchism is in the necessary refusal of the poet’s mis-

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28 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

tress, on one level literally the object of the poetry (Vickers 1981). Being always the desired object, she by definition must be chaste – at least, ideally. Some of the most famous Petrarchan mistresses are, of course, markedly unchaste, vocal, and disobedient (see for example Hulse 1986), but they acquire their potency precisely in their refusal to conform to what was a version of the perfect model of Petrarch’s Laura. The precise meaning of the Petrarchan mistress’s chastity has been long debated by feminist critics and by scholars of the sonnet. The link between the ideal mistress’s chastity, her perfection, and her silence is more than the fact that it is a generic and a structural requirement of the poetry that she be disinterested in responding to the poet’s words. Her object-status is both a refusal and an inability to respond. Her inability to respond, in early modern England, owes as much to the social rules of the time as to the generic inheritances of the poetic form. The language of sonnets is embedded in a specific social exchange, reliant on the social to constitute the interior subjectivity it performs.9 Accordingly, the English Petrarchan subject will by definition be performed into being in a specific, always public, context, through the language which creates him and which is an action. Judith Butler (1999, 1993) has shown that gender is performative, and that the performance of gender is achieved through both language and action: language shapes the subject and dictates the possibilities for action available to that subject, even if it is to refuse, or subvert, the available identity positions. She insists that the iterative, citational nature of the performance is itself the condition for subjectivity. In other words, in the case of the Petrarchan subject, the words through which he speaks himself into being will create the conditions of his possible being, and these will begin with his gendering in social context. It follows that the performance embodied in the Petrarchan act of subject-formation is always already gendered and is always already embedded in the social, through which it achieves its not only its meaning, but the conditions of its being. The subject of Petrarchism in its most popular incarnation in early modern England, then, is the subject of a masculine self, performing his desire in public, in part using his beloved as a reason. This kind of poetry of love, a kind which arguably set the terms for the positions of desiring speaker in a Western tradition which exerted enormous cultural influence from the seventeenth century onwards, has tended to rely on a self-other model, where the speaking subject requires an object of his affections to speak about and sometimes to. If the subject speaking desire is gendered male, the human subject is always already

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gendered in a system which sees desire and language as the conditions for subjective possibility.10 This desiring subjectivity is not only structurally ‘male’. It is implicated in what Jessica Benjamin (1988) has designated a system of domination. Benjamin shows how gendered structures of domination are deeply anchored in the psyche as it develops within Western societies, such that a mutual relationship between two subjects can be rendered impossible. She points out that the development of subjectivity as theorised by Freud depends on this unequal dynamic. A model of subjectformation that we could designate Petrarchan can thus be seen to underlie a dominant Western model of the formation of the modern subject. Furthermore, Petrarchism’s gendered strategies belong to a long history of theorising about desire and its subject which confirms that subject as male, and as driven by loss, lack, and regret. From Plato’s Symposium, to the work of early Christian theologians, this dynamic can be traced through the early modern period, into the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan.11 The gendering of the passive position as feminised and thus disempowered, reduced, weakened, is one version of the meaning of femininity in a model of domination where the subject is male. Such a construction of the feminine has its underbelly, though. Sexual desire has long been conceptualised as a figuration of the death drive the model of desire as lack sees as inherent to human desire (Dollimore 1996: 374). Thus, given the heteronormativity of standard Western models of ‘correct’ desire, and the constitutive maleness of the human subject to this tradition, the figure of the woman, she-who-occasionsdesire, has been open to blame for the sin of Eve, for simultaneously tempting and damning the subject to his own desire. These are two reasons why it might be difficult for a woman to assume the position of desiring subject in a discourse like English Petrarchism: as both sign and cause of lack, she is by definition denied a voice, and guilty of the dangerous sin of desire when she does claim one. Her desire not only violates her propriety, it threatens the whole subject.

The psychoanalytic subject Psychoanalysis suggests a profound link between language, processes of gendering, the formation of subjectivity, and the possibilities for desire. Like the Petrarchan speaker, the desiring subject of psychoanalysis, by virtue of being a subject, is always gendered. Just like the

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Petrarchan subject, his or her desire is always shaped by language, that is, by socially (pre-)determined possibilities. In a psychoanalytic model, the complete subject, the subject marked by the fear of lack but not by its actuality, is the male subject. It is no wonder then that this subject, like the Petrarchan subject, is the one who can access his desire. According to Freud, active desire is a properly masculine attribute. Freud conceptualised libido as masculine, and posited that primary, active, sexuality, as he saw it in children, was male; hence, ‘the sexuality of little girls is of a wholly masculine character’ (1953: 219); ‘the phrase ‘female libido’ cannot possibly be justified’ (1946b: 169). In addition, women are, by virtue of their anatomy, always already psychically wounded: girls suffer the castration boys are only threatened with (1991: 335–6). Freud thus formulated a theory which builds on sexual difference to construct the physical and therefore emotional and intellectual incompleteness of women. The lack of a penis translates into – is the cause of – an inability to attain the fullest or highest human potential. Freud notoriously concluded, ‘I cannot evade the notion… that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men.’ His theory explains the existence of ‘Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women – that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility’ (342). While Freud’s clinical practice and his writing oeuvre in general complicate any sense of the man, doctor, or theorist as straightforwardly misogynist (Appignanesi and Forrester 1993), the anthrocentric bias of his thought is clear. Irigaray (1987: 122) reads into this story of woman’s inadequate, incomplete subjectivity a less comfortable implication for male subjects than the superiority of the possessor of the penis. Woman does not reassure by her inferiority; ‘she threatens by what she lacks’. Furthermore, Freud’s model makes the little boy’s realisation of his Oedipus, which is the condition of his entry into his full subjectivity, dependent on his objectification of the girl. He needs to realise she is less of a subject than he is in order to attain his subjectivity. But, says Irigaray, insofar as she is a separate subject, insofar as ‘woman continues to exist, she continually undoes his [man’s] work’ of reducing her to the object which enables his subjectivity. Thus, ‘for fear of leaving her a subject-life of her own, which would entail his sometimes being

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her locus and her thing, in a dynamic inter-subjective process, man remains within a master-slave dialectic’. In its uncompromising insistence on the crude operations of power, this analysis is as dated as Freud’s initial formulation, both of which subsequently have been carefully nuanced. Yet is it useful in illustrating the workings of Benjamin’s system of domination. It emphasises the starting point positioning of the ‘female’ in relation to the ‘male’ in a dominant Western system of meaning-making that I suggest can be exemplified in the workings of Petrarchism as a poetic model for desiring subjectivity, which became commonsensical enough to have influenced Freud’s notions of the actively desiring subject as by definition gendered male. Freud continues the development of a science of female inferiority, based on biology, already in operation in the English Renaissance. This gendering of access to subjectivity in Freud has specific effects on the access to desiring positions of men and women in clinical practice (see Brooks and Woloch 2000). It is thus highly significant that Freud assumes a Petrarchan understanding of the desiring positions of lover and beloved in his only case study of female homosexuality. In his ‘Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, Freud (1955: 147) understands the desire of one women for another in terms that cast the lover as active and therefore ‘masculine’. His vocabulary draws on Petrarchism and its informing traditions (see also Montefiore 1994: 108). Thus the woman in love ‘worship[s] the lady’, and is obsessed with her love-object. ‘No prohibitions and no supervision hindered the girl from seizing every one of her rare opportunities of being together with her beloved, of ascertaining all her habits, of waiting for her for hours outside her door… and so on.’ The love remains unconsummated: ‘she had always been treated coldly by her and never been allowed any greater favour than to kiss her hand’ (Freud 1955: 153). While this lover looked like a feminine woman, she resembled her father in her physical features, and, ‘Some of her intellectual attributes also could be connected with masculinity: for instance her acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity’ (154). In his insistence on the gendered nature of her behaviour, Freud points to what he considers the most significant component of her homosexuality (in other words, a desire which indicates an inability or refusal to assume the proper female part): What is certainly of greater importance [than her physical or mental ‘masculinity’] is that in her behaviour towards her love-object she had thoroughly assumed the masculine part: that is to say, she dis-

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32 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

played the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine loveobject, but had also developed a masculine attitude towards that object (ibid.). The behaviour understood by Freud to be quintessentially ‘masculine’ (and therefore the indicator of the young woman’s homosexuality, in an understanding of all desire as binary and heteronormative; in this case, according to Freud, the lover ‘changed into a man’ [158]) is the behaviour of the Petrarchan lover. This is an example of the imbrication of the Petrarchan position of desiring lover which was, in the first instance, the position of desiring male lover, with psychoanalytic understandings of desiring subject positions. Lacan takes this further, drawing on the tradition of courtly love which initially animated and certainly informed what would later develop into Petrarchism in English poetry. Joel Fineman (1994) has argued that Lacan is Shakespearean in his theoretical accounts of subjectivity, that is, that Shakespeare’s modern poetic subject, as expressed most fully in the sonnets, is the same subject described by Lacan. Fineman’s argument is one way to suggest the congruencies between a Petrarchan subjectivity and a psychoanalytic model. Perhaps Lacan’s thought owes something to early modern poetry as much as Fineman’s way of reading early modern poetic language owes something to Lacan. In a chapter on sublimation in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan pays sustained attention to the operations of courtly love. He also insists on the legacy of this genre for the sexual relations between men and women in the West. In order to make his point about what the Lady stands for, Lacan addresses the process of subject formation he says Freud first identified, and he, Lacan, formalised into the language of the Symbolic. The Lady in courtly love is a psychoanalytic object. This means she is ‘a point of imaginary fixation which gives satisfaction to a drive’ (Lacan 1992: 113). It is necessary to imbue objects with meaning in this way because, following Freud, the subject is forced to sublimate his initial instincts (Lacan prefers to call them drives, since they are malleable and consist in their energy, not their always-deferred ends). Lacan’s notion of the Thing or das Ding is important to understand why sublimation has power, or rather, from where sublimation draws its power: from the

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real (that which exists, but which we cannot reach since we can only know the world through language). Sublimation ‘raises an object… to the dignity of the Thing’ (112): it invests the object with real meaning, that is to say with a passion that comes from a primal drive and that has been diverted. The Lady is given ‘the value of representing the Thing’ (126). ‘Courtly love is, in effect, an exemplary form, a paradigm, of sublimation’ (128). This is the first point: the idealisation of the Lady in courtly love, which is picked up by Petrarchism, is the result of the deferral of a drive that can never be achieved. It is a way of coping with the cost of entry into the Symbolic. If the elevation of the Lady in courtly love is an exemplary form of sublimation, its ongoing structuring of heterosexual relations in Western culture is proof, says Lacan, of the power of sublimation. The second point has to do with the nature of art, and the rewards art offers in return for the subject’s sublimation of a drive into, in this case, poetry. Art’s reward, says Lacan, comes from the recognition it brings. It comes, in other words, from society. Art is ‘a collective education’ that has done something to our relationship with the Thing, via sublimation (113). The historical moment of the emergence of courtly love (France in the eleventh century) is for Lacan material evidence of how a specific group of people communally developed a code that was at once moral and erotic (the significance of the moral aspect to art’s education will become clear later in this argument). The importance of ‘a social consensus’ to the investments in and returns on the work of art is crucial (145), as it makes clear that the act of sublimation is rewarded within and by a group context. This is a model for the subject’s journey through Freud’s Oedipus and into acceptable human parameters. By way of a detour into the meaning of anamorphosis, Lacan elucidates why the Lady stands for something incredibly powerful in the formation of human subjectivity. At the same time, what she is made to represent precludes her from the realm of the human herself. She enables the poet’s subjectivity but cannot herself ever be a subject. The resonances with Freud’s use of sexual difference in the development of the (male) child’s sense of self are clear. Anamorphosis is a visual effect, exemplified by the hidden death’s head in Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. According to Lacan, ‘It is any kind of construction that is made in such a way that by means of an optical transposition a certain form that wasn’t visible at first sight transforms itself into a readable image’ (135). Anamorphosis is an effect which gestures towards the Thing, that which is outside the Symbolic and which we can never apprehend but only ever gesture towards –

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34 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

or, as Lacan repeatedly puts it, the Thing is that which in the real suffers from the signifier.12 By making use of anamorphosis a visual artist inverts the apparent use of his art, given that anamorphosis arose as a technique at the beginning of the seventeenth century, about a hundred years after the fixing of the rules of perspective. The anamorphic moment in a painting challenges the painting’s purpose to fill space realistically. Instead it opens a place of emptiness which is also filled if one looks at it from the correct angle. However, one cannot see the anamorphosis (the empty or non-sensical moment in the picture) and the picture itself (the artists’s attempt to fill space with a representation of filled space) at the same time. By making use of anamorphosis, the artist completely reverses the use of that illusion of space, when he forces it to enter into the original goal, that is to transform it into the support of the hidden reality – it being understood that, to a certain extent, a work of art always involves encircling the Thing (141). The Lady is courtly love’s encircling of the Thing, whose tantalisingly out-of-reach nature ensures the subject’s existence by standing for the real that he can never reach but towards which his drives are geared. ‘The poetry of courtly love, in effect, tends to locate in the place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture’ (150). This could be a reference to Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents, which describes in its very title the cost of achieving ‘civilisation’ or subjectivity – the effects of the requisite sublimation of the instincts.13 ‘By means of a form of sublimation specific to art, poetic creation consists in positing an object I can only describe as terrifying, an inhuman partner’ (ibid.). The Lady takes this all-powerful form in poetry precisely because in reality at the time she had virtually no power, but was an object of exchange in a feudal kinship system (147). Courtly love is also ‘fundamentally narcissistic in character’: it relies on an ‘element of idealizing exhaltation’ which ultimately is a selfidentification on behalf of the poet (151; see also 111). The narcissistic element of courtly love remains in the form of Petrarchism that developed in England in the 1590s; English Petrarchan poets’ praise is epideictic (Fineman 1986: 5–9). It is designed to reflect back on themselves. So this discourse of love constructs a feminine object that stands for the sublimated drives that ensure the real of the subject, or that ensures that the subject (thinks he) is real. ‘Here we see functioning in the pure state the authority of that place the instinct aims for in sublimation. That is to say, that what man demands, what he cannot help but demand, is to be

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Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis 35

deprived of something real’ (Lacan 1992: 150). It is fundamentally narcissistic in character, and the narcissistic character in this heterosexual relation is the male poet. His fantasy of subjection is enabled by a historical reality where women were not the powerful beings courtly love images them to be in order that the poet can subject himself to them. Lacan stresses that the structures developed in courtly love have been decisive. Although it has completely disappeared now from the sociological sphere, courtly love has nevertheless left traces in… a traditional unconscious that is sustained by a whole literature, a whole imaginary, that we continue to inhabit as far as our relations with women are concerned (112). He sees in the gender relations of courtly love a structure for (hetero)sexual relations in general: ‘The influence of these ideals is a highly concrete one in the organization of contemporary man’s sentimental attachments, and it continues its forward march’ (148). The ongoing influence of the structures of courtly love on heterosexual relations suggest ‘the non-existence of women and the failure of the sexual relationship’ (Homer 2005: 106–7), that is, the non-existence of women in the Symbolic, by definition a phallic realm, and the impossibility of union between two subjects who are fundamentally differently constituted. Lacan’s invocation of courtly love as a model for heterosexuality is not only an example of the influence of literature on the development of psychoanalytic ideas. It also illustrates how the structures developed in Petrarchism (as the popular embodiment of these ideas in poetry) themselves help to inform the psychoanalytic subject. The gendered nature of the speaking subject of Petrarchan poetry has implications for who psychoanalysis says we can be. There is therefore a complex imbrication at work in any attempt to understand the gendering of subjectivity as a modern reader would find it in this by now overdetermined discourse of desire, which is always already a discourse of gender. For a feminist reader, the discourse of gender that has been read out of Petrarchan lyricism and into the subject by psychoanalysis’s formulation of the subject’s normative desire, and by Petrarchism’s influence on standard cultural Western notions of love, will critically reinflect both Petrarchism and the other discourses it helped to influence. I am suggesting that we can read Renaissance literature into psychoanalysis in a way which helps us to see a cyclical process at work: the subject of the Renaissance is seen to inform the modern subject

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36 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

because in some ways the latter draws its self-constituting language from the use it makes of the former. Petrarchan markers of a desire which is always already gendered might have helped shape a particular understanding of how we theorise what it means to be human. Lacan says that there are no essential ethics, there is no ethical component to das Ding or the real.14 Ethics are imposed by the social, by the human. We could suggest that it is the acquisition of prohibitions, which construct the human subject, which simultaneously construct the realm of the ethical, of good and evil. Lacan does formulate the human construction of an ethical realm as implicitly linked to prohibition, and thus to patriarchal control. The ‘problem of evil’ is ‘the fundamental problem’ underlying the relationship between ‘a certain influence of the law as such and a certain conception of das Ding’: it is exactly what Freud deals with when the question he asks concerning the Father leads him to point out [in Civilization and its Discontents] that the latter is the tyrant of the primitive horde, the one against whom the original crime was committed, and who for that reason introduced the order, essence, and foundation of the domain of the law (Lacan 1992: 97). Antagonism underpins the relation of the human subject to the world in which he must live, in other words to others in the social order he inherits. There is a specific conception of human nature at work here. Left to our own devices we would behave in a way Lacan designates evil, that is, anti-social. It is the sublimation of these drives that affords us entry into subjectivity, which is to say, into the collective which shapes us. Lacan also discusses the implications of the sublimation of humanity’s natural anti-social (evil) state for ‘the love life’ of modern man. He suggests, following Freud, that one consequence of the inability to celebrate the drive (because its aim can never be reached; this would be evil) is an emphasis on the object: ‘we demand the support of the object on account of the prevailing characteristics of the object’ (98). As we have seen, he discusses the object-status of the Lady in courtly love as compensatory in precisely this way. From there, he suggests the compensatory object-status of the woman in heterosexuality. There is a link between a model of what it means to be human as a model of domination – of the individual by the collective, explained through a myth of patriarchal contestation solved by the regulatory presence of an all-powerful Father – and the need for an idealised object to replace or compensate for the suppressed drive.

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Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis 37

This sounds like we are back in the simplified territory of master and slave mapped by Irigaray: women can exist to men only in a relation of domination, where by definition they will be denied full subjectivity, and all this in the name of what it means to be human (that is, male). However, as Benjamin points out, the Other is also always a Self, and as such will have life beyond object-status. The other/object’s possibility for speaking back to this system of domination exists. There are ways for women to attempt to speak themselves into being as subjects. These ways will not be unmarked by the inheritances of the system within which they must work. It remains crucial for any feminist critique to identify the powerful and in many ways ongoing existence of a mode of thinking about the subject and about desire that posits a male subject, and that can be seen to operate within a Petrarchan dynamic where desire is desire for the lack of the Other. Such a formulation is intrinsically Lacanian; his famous formulation, ‘desire is desire of the other’ speaks to the subject’s need to be needed by an Other whose desire is always elsewhere. The question of the ethics of this system is important not only because it emphasises the formulation, ‘system of domination’. This discussion allows us to see more clearly the long Western tradition in which the system is implicated. The construction of a dominated (and so dominating) desiring subject who is male, and who exists in a particular relation to language, precedes both Petrarchism and the psychoanalytic thinking about modern subjectivity that it influenced. The subject enabled by Petrach’s writing, the modern subject, bears the traces of earlier modes of thought that in their turn informed Petrarch’s thinking. The Lacanian subject, formulated by his lack and propelled by his unfulfillable desire into language, is remarkably similar to the desiring and so speaking subject of Augustine, one of Petrarch’s major influences. For Saint Augustine, consciousness begins in desire. To discover the self is to discover it as in some sense lacking, absent to itself, and desire is the soul’s reaching out to fill the void. This reaching out… is at the same time the birth of language… The child learns to speak in order to express its desire; at the same time, however, it learns what to desire from a world of objects that adults have named… For St Augustine,… man is his own language… (Freccero 1975: 35). If Augustine’s theory of the speaking subject is Lacanian, it will have Freudian elements. Dollimore (1991: 138) suggests that Freud’s theory of perversion is an unconscious echo of Augustine’s theory of good and

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38 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

evil. Freud’s perverse is a return to, or failure to leave behind, an element of sexuality intrinsic to the development of ‘normality’. Augustine’s theodicy, in its attempt to refute a Manichaean structure which allowed evil a place in the universe, theorised evil as inescapably a part of good, a perversion of good. Following Augustine’s lead, in his formative sonnet sequence Petrarch works through his flawed human nature, struggling with the desire that marks his narcissism, that takes him away from his journey towards God. The English Petrarchists after Wyatt take this cosmic framework and localise it. It becomes a way to struggle with desire for its own sake. The movement towards renunciation becomes an artful display, never really meant, since the point of the performance becomes to express the desire and ability for, and thence to win, advancement. The dynamic of an impossible desire suits this situation, although the emphasis has shifted from spiritual salvation to worldy achievement (including sexual achievement). Within this framework, the position of desiring male speaker is established, expressed, worked through, performed. In the process it accrues enormous cultural power to itself, and informs the model for the desiring Western self. We see in Freud’s formulation of the libido as masculine traces of this tradition: to speak is to desire and to be human, and to be human is to be male. While for Augustine, as for Dante, subtending and ultimately arresting the deferral of desire is the Word of God, to whom all words refer, Petrarch develops a way to self-constitute through language, thus taking further a proto-Lacanian formulation of subject-constitution.15 The poet’s idolatrous love serves to create a circular, self-authorising realm where the poet can refer, ultimately, to himself. Rather than the meanings he generates being referred outwards, they are mirrored back. The self speaking in this system is not speaking to another self; he is speaking to himself. By the Augustinian and Lacanian schemas and the Petrarchan schema that follows on the former and is reflected in the latter as an attempt to deal with the subjectivity the former describes, the subject of language is always already gendered male. In his conclusion to the final chapter of his ‘Introduction to the Thing’, entitled, ‘On the moral law’, Lacan sums up the connections between gendered desire and human subjectivity. In drawing to a close his discussion about the Thing, about that which exists beyond the Symbolic in the context of a meditation on the content of human ethics, Lacan suggests that heterosexual relations are the starting point for our formulations of what it means to be human. Being human means being driven by,

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Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis 39

animated by, subjected to and thus a subject in, the unconscious. This also entails the unconscious awareness of lack that structures the subject in the unconscious, which desire is ever striving to bridge. It is central to my argument that Lacan here conceptualises that which is always on our (that is, men’s) psychic horizon – the real that structures human ethics from beyond the Symbolic – as ‘attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the centre of our desire’, and immediately goes on to connect this image with the image of the woman. Furthermore, Lacan’s serious joke about the power of the woman to stand for what the subject lacks, gives her the power of the Other, the power to formulate the subject’s self through his reliance on her, the reliance of his desire on the impossibility of her desire for him. Thus the child’s reliance on the mother is troped: the subject (in both Lacan and Freud in the first instance the boy child) is subject to the original power, the power of origins, of the mother. In this way, as Lacan says below, he is in her power and so, in this system of domination, he is in ‘grave danger’. That the etymology of ‘danger’ comes to a relation with ‘dame’ in Lacan’s French is apposite, and a precise illustration of where this heterosexual relation of power leaves the woman: as responsible for the subjectivity of the human (male), and as therefore needing to be dominated. Her ability to be a subject herself is precluded by this system. She needs to remain the object to be mastered, in the very attempt of which is the movement of the subject towards himself. Lacan points the way towards a theory of the Petrarchan subject as a model for a particular performance of desire that is by definition fraught with implications for the subjects gendered by and in it. This structure of the subject is linked to the ethical drives that animate definitions of the human, and thus to religion as one structure responsible for constructing responses to the problem of the human condition (in Lacanian terms, the problem of the human condition is that we can never exceed the Symbolic in which we come to know ourselves [falsely], in order to approach das Ding.) This is what Lacan (1992: 84) says: What is all this [‘religious enthusiasms’, a term quoted from Kant] except a way of rediscovering the relationship to das Ding somewhere beyond the law? There are no doubt other ways. No doubt, in talking about erotics, we will have to talk about the kind of rules of love that have been elaborated over the centuries… It’s true: Freud placed at the forefront of ethical inquiry the simple relationship between man and woman. Strangely enough, things haven’t been able to move beyond that point. The question

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of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the centre of our desire. I would say – you will forgive the play on words – that we need to know what we can do to transform this dam-age into our ‘dame’ in the archaic French sense, our lady. Don’t laugh at this sleight of hand; it was in the language before I used it. If you look up the etymology of the word ‘danger,’ you will see that exactly the same ambiguity exists from the beginning in French: ‘danger’ was originally ‘domniarium,’ domination. The word ‘dame’ gradually came to contaminate that word. And, in effect, when we are in another’s power, we are in great danger. Furthermore, this dominated fragile human (male) subject, at the mercy of a being who is not like him (not a human subject), finds its analogue in the relationship between man and his God in the Christian philosophy which informs Petrarchism as it was developed initially by Petrarch, via his spiritual mentor, Augustine. This framework requires language itself to be the tool by which subjects are formed, and to be always and only the language of the Father. Irigaray’s (1985) point is precisely that such language is unable to accommodate any notion of the female except as its Other, her subjectivity a lack in its signifying economy. To see language working to construct subjectivity in such a way is to put a name and a structure to much of the dominant strands of thought within Western philosophy, medicine, and literature (and certainly within psychoanalysis, which, in its original Freudian development, can be seen as a combination of all three). Butler’s work has shown a way out of the apparent impasse such an understanding of the relationship between patriarchy, language, and subjectivity can create: there is no way out of the always already formulated cultural meanings, but subjects can subvert and undermine these meanings by using the tools that pre-exist and constitute the subject. Furthermore, patriarchal values can be understood as something both genders invest in and use, as Queen Elizabeth’s use of Petrarchan discourse demonstrates (of course, specific representational limitations even for powerful female monarchs remained in the period [San Juan 1993]). Gendered rules may privilege male subjects without only emasculating the women who also inevitably play the game. Much work has been done ‘against the inevitability of the perception and institutionalisation of women’s lack’ (Saguaro 2000: 9), and similarly the argument made here is not that Petrarchism, or psychoanalysis, cannot ever accommodate women as subjects, but rather to show that women

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(and other others) have to do additional work to occupy this position within a discourse developed by and for (heterosexual, classed, raced) men. The literary history of Petrarchism functions as a model for a psychoanalytic view of subjectivity which proves the centrality of gender: to discourses of desire, and therefore to the formation of subjectivity itself. This is not meant to be a claim for essential sexual difference, but it is meant to insist that sexual difference, which is also gender difference, historically contingent, is the foundational moment of possibility for English Petrarchism and for the entire tradition of speaking about love to which it gave rise. It is meant to suggest that access to Petrarchan discourse was automatically gendered in the early modern period, given the different social rules for what men and women could be seen to say and do in the realm of erotic performances. This may be an obvious point, but it nevertheless needs to be emphasised given the recent critiques against viewing the Petrarchism of the period as automatically gendered, because of the shifting and fragmented nature of the subject inherited from Petrarch. To embody the sonnets of the Tudor courts in their moment of production is to see the ways that the speaking position within the poetry was materially gendered, and the implications for potential women poets. Bates (1992: 10) has pointed out that the dominant association of ‘courtship’ at court was with rhetoric; ‘a style of discourse which problematizes intention and utterance, sincerity and deception’. For women, marked by the sin of Eve’s deceptive utterance and suspected of natural duplicity, such associations could not but have very different implications than for men. In the remaining chapters I will illustrate how the gendered Petrarchan subject was formed by the speaking positions that were possible for men and women from the time of the discourse’s development in England. I will trace the Petrarchan sonnet through its revival in the nineteenth century and its first uses by a female poet speaking samesex desire in a full-length sequence, to the female Petrarchan poet who solved the problem of how to be a woman and the speaking subject of Petrarchan desire, in the early twentieth century. The language of desire that developed in the course of this history has had ongoing implications for the modern subject of desire, as my afterword will illustrate with reference to a recent manifestation of Petrarchan dynamics.

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42 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

3

The contention that the English Petrarchan subject was initially gendered male makes sense only when the early modern sonnet is placed in its socio-historical context. We can track the development of a speaking subject who, while not a crude master or wielder of power (himself subject to a powerful authority), still depends on an Ideal object to launch himself into language. That this object is most often female is not the last word about the sum total of the Petrarchan subject and its object relations. Rather it is reflective of the constitutive roles of already-existing gendered relations that Petrarchism in turn both helped to propagate and offered the tools to critique (rather, it might be said, like psychoanalysis). The self-other or subject-object relation within Petrarchism does not need to set simplistic terms of male aggression and female victimhood. By insisting that the subject requires, is in some way constituted by, its object, we can recognise that the object’s necessity imbues it with specific kinds of power of its own which makes it more than abject (see de Grazia et al. eds. 1996; Dollimore 1991: 24). Female subjects in the Petrarchan Symbolic also have to engage with the genre’s subject-object relation, and they often do so in ways that reveal the system of domination out of which they are struggling to emerge, as we will see from Chapter 4 onwards. This chapter will seek to track the development of Petrarchan subjectivity in the poetry of the Tudor courts, and to account for why the discourse that resulted accommodated a particular male speaking subject as well as it did. It will begin with a brief overview of Petrarchism.

Petrarchism in England: an overview Because Petrarch himself was synthesising a complex range of traditions, which also had their ongoing English incarnations, it is 43

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England

notoriously difficult to quantify his influence on the poetry of the first English sonneteers (Ferry 1983: 15–16). By the end of the sixteenth century, most of the hundreds, if not thousands, of English Petrarchan sonneteers would not have read Petrarch. They would have approached the tradition he inaugurated either through their own poets, or through the writing of the French Pléiade, Ronsard, DuBellay, and Desportes.1 English Petrarchism, then, is not coterminous with the works of Petrarch, although it is heavily indebted to them. Equally the term ‘sonnet’ to denote a fixed poetic form was still developing its current meaning of a lyric of 14 lines with a specific rhyme scheme and meter, and the notion of a ‘sonnet sequence’ is a nineteenth-century invention (the phrase was coined by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and used to describe the poems in his House of Life [1870/ 1881]). The critical apparatus through which we have formulated these conventions is itself both historically and ideologically contingent upon the nineteenth century, and performs important cultural work in the construction of Petrarchism as a literary discourse (Warley 2005: 23; Holmes 1999). Although the current categorisations are more modern than the poetry, the early modern sonnet sequence remains dominant as a poetic exemplum in the literary canons later generations invented. Petrarch has long been seen as a writer whose works inaugurated a subjectivity that can be understood as modern (Mazzotta 1993: 58–101; Freccero 1975: 37–8, 40). His sonnets play no small role in the discursive mapping of a type of subjectivity that will be familiar, if not commonsensical, to most modern readers. In speaking himself into being in the specific ways expressed by his sonnets, Petrarch also helped to inaugurate the lyric tradition, a poetic genre that is profoundly concerned with speaking about the self, and with speaking the self into being accordingly. By their nature, lyric sequences ‘posit and name selves’ (Greene 1991: 14). A lyric self strives to constitute itself as unitary, to speak itself into coherent being, albeit inevitably temporarily, shiftingly, as much excellent work on Petrarch’s lyric self has demonstrated. In order to accomplish this sense of unity, lyric sequences put [their] speaker[s] in relation to another character cast in the role of object… and [a sequence] largely invents its politics, society, and world from the exchanges of these two. Because these fictions play out that humanist conviction that selves ought to be unified and the equally humanist terror that they are not, the second person is often appropriated so as to cover the gaps and the inconsistencies in

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 45

This is an almost exact correlate to Benjamin’s description of the traditional psychoanalytic subject, which is to say, the subject of Western discourse.2 Greene’s description of the lyric subject – as well as reliant on its object, also coercive (5) – in the context especially of his larger project which sees its ongoing longevity, helps to make the point that the Petrarchan subject is one specific incarnation of the embattled, battling, humanist subject who is by definition also automatically gendered male within a discourse of domination (albeit a complex and shifting one), until women poets start to engage with this silent normativity.3 At the same time, it is no simple matter to refer to the ‘standard’ Petrarchan subject, or indeed to Petrarchism as a static adjective (Roche 1989: 86). [I]t is perhaps better to speak of a flexible convention which expresses itself in an arsenal of commonplaces, images, or topoi, which poets could use in ever-varying combinations for whatever purpose they liked (Forster 1969: 22). Petrarchism is also notoriously contradictory. Its tendency to the paradoxical and to accommodate a subject in flux have been identified time and again as the reasons for Petrarchism’s attraction for, and use by, poets of early modern England, a time of great social, economic, and political change. In addition, Petrarchism has a complex relationship to its constitutional antitheses, and to the anti- or paraPetrarchism which was an integral part of the Petrarchan poet’s paradoxical performance (Bell 1998: 3–4; Forster 1969: 57). The difficulties in generalising about Petrarchism are thus manifold. Nevertheless, there was available to the English versifiers of the later sixteenth century a framework, including a set of rules (made to be broken) and a series of starting points out of which arose this complicated subject. Because of the context in which it developed, without extra work on the poet’s part, this subject position was initially available to male speakers. To lay claim to the masculinity of the speaker of the sonnet is also to enter into the vexed relationship between the identity of the poetspeaker and the writer of any particular sequence. This is a problem older than post-structuralism, as the literary history of attempts to

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the first, which is to say there is likely room for only one speaking voice in such texts (ibid.).

solve biographical hints in Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s sonnets attest.4 The relationship between poet-speakers and their poets is further complicated by the often-changing but ever-present politics of the academy: hence the responses to Shakespeare’s love for his young man (Shepherd 1988); the influence of Sidney’s rank on the reading of his poetry (Low 1993); or the role of modern gender politics in understanding early modern women writers (Ezell 1993). Ultimately, then, to read the position of Petrarchan speaker in Tudor England as ‘male’ is inevitably to read into it through presentist understandings of what gender means, and how it relates to other identity constituents, like social rank and nationality, in the context of a literary canon which does not have an innocent relationship to any of these categories. On this note, another issue which arises when we ask what it means to say the Petrarchan subject was gendered male is that the nature of early modern subjectivity is uncertain to our post-modern eyes. The Renaissance is sometimes seen to be a time when subjectivity shifted from comprising the feudal positioning of a person within institutional and social structures as constitutive of personal meaning, to Hamlet’s inscription of an inner realm, separate from the external trappings of identity: ‘I have that within which passeth show’ (Eisaman Maus 1995: 1; see also Burke 1997; Kuin 1989; Ferry 1983). Equally, however, this position has been critiqued for ignoring the complexities of medieval subjecthood, and for imposing modern definitions of public and private on the early modern subject (McGrath 2002: 10). I make no claims for solving this debate; instead I concentrate on the literary work done by the discourse, through the inescapable lense of my own understandings of the requisite terms. In paying attention to the importance of context, however, some inferences can be drawn about what it may have been like to be a man or a woman at the time, although these inferences themselves will invariably arise from, and thus to an extent be, forms of literary fiction. Like subjectivity, gender identity is difficult to know, not least because it, like subjectivity, is not unitary or static. Like subjectivity, too, gender identity can only be approached through the texts that time has left to us. In reading these texts we can acknowledge and attempt to understand historical difference and the effects of conditions of production on these texts. Accordingly, Petrarchism as it developed in England in the second half of the sixteenth century can be read, following recent critical work to this effect, as a situation – as a socially embedded use of language – which constructs gender in ways that make particular use of gender difference and the social categories of

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meaning which shape perception of this difference in historically specific ways. Teresa de Lauretis (1987) has argued that gender is a product of various social technologies, and, anticipating Butler, that the act of representation produces gender. Petrarchan poetry can be seen as a technology of gender, as Christopher Warley (2005) argues it is a technology of class, and Kennedy (2003) argues it is a technology of nationalism. This does not mean the discourse defined how men and women actually did live their daily lives. Rather it indicates ideological currents, within which the subject always lives and moves. * One of the reasons Petrarchism became such a ‘powerful literary space’ (Waller 1986: 76) in the early modern courtly milieu was its ability to facilitate the expression of different kinds of desire. In addition to the expression of erotic attraction and sexual need, the poetry allows the poet to perform poetic and political requests for recognition. This aspect of the discourse as it functioned in the English courts of the Tudors contributed greatly towards the gendering of the speaking subject within Petrarchism, because the right to perform desire publicly was differently accessible for men and women. Petrarchan desire has always been multiple. The myth of Apollo and Daphne is the subject of Petrarch’s 34th Canzone, and gives the poetry what Gordon Braden (1986a: 141) considers ‘its master trope’.5 In the Metamorphoses, Ovid recounts how Cupid ensures that Apollo will desire Daphne, and that she will always refuse him. Appealing to her father Peneus the river god for help, she is transformed into a laurel tree as Apollo is about to catch her: Even as a tree, Phoebus loved her. He placed his hand against the trunk and felt her heart still beating under the new bark… he kissed the wood: but, even as a tree, she shrank from his kisses. Then the god said: ‘Since you cannot be my bride, surely you will at least be my tree’ (Ovid trans. Innes 1955: 43–4). Implicit in the desire for the woman, then, and perhaps partly in compensation for the impossibility of its fulfillment, the Petrarchan poet wants poetic acclaim, as the pun on Apollo’s laurel in the name of Petrarch’s beloved suggests. So Shakespeare, in 1609, ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this’ (sonnet 18 ll. 13–14) (Booth ed. 2000: 19),6 or Michael Drayton, in 1619, ‘Ensuing Ages yet

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 47

my Rimes shall cherish…/ And though this Earthly Body fade and die,/ My name shall mount upon Eternitie’ (Idea 44 ll. 11–14) (Evans ed. 2003: 98). In some cases, rather than being compensatory, ‘the poet’s own literary career… is in some sense the hidden agenda of his courtship’ (Braden 1986a: 6, 8). In his first sonnet To Licia (1593), Giles Fletcher locates his desire to write poetry first in his aspiration for ‘a laurel garland’ (l. 3), and only once that suit is denied by the Muses as being ‘led’ by ‘fond Fancy’ (l. 8) does he take up Venus’s offer of comfort and so find the topic of his poetry: ‘For now of Love must needs be all my song’ (l. 14) (Lee ed. 1904: 35). Recognising Laura’s laurel potential means recognising an audience for the poetry other than the beloved. In the context of a courtly milieu, poetic recognition is also recognition of the skills necessary for advancement in the court. Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, translated in England in 1561, became extremely popular as a handbook for Renaissance courtly behaviour.7 Castiglione describes a perfect courtier whose eloquence secures his favour with, and thus service to, his prince: ‘[T]he end of the perfect courtier, is, by means of the accomplishments attributed to him… to win for himself the mind and favour of the prince he serves’ (Castiglione trans. Bull 1976: 284). Through his ability to entertain – which arises from his eloquence and wit, deployed with an air of ease and sincerity – the courtier is able to exert his virtuous influence, ‘practising a healthy deception like a shrewd doctor who often spreads some sweet liquid on the rim of the cup when he wants a frail and sickly child to take a bitter medicine’ (289). The ideal courtier’s social skill and inherent goodness have the potential to make him the power behind the throne, influencing the prince to the ways of justice, reason, and truth. No wonder, then, that courtship is a delicate, fraught, hazardous procedure which requires constant prudence, tact, and subtlety because it depends for its effectiveness on the appearance of sincerity… Courtship is consequently a mode which puts sincerity and deception in a teasing and often inextricable juxtaposition (Bates 1992: 2). In this context, the courtier must sound like he spontaneously and sincerely means what he says even as he has to very carefully shape and form what he says. This paradox is one intrinsic to Petarchism, a situation of which all the best Petrarchan poets are aware: ‘What may words say, or what may words not say,/ When truth itself must speak like flattery?’ (Astrophil and Stella sonnet 35 ll. 1–2). Part of the display

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48 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

of effortless wit required of the courtier is demonstrated by Philip Sidney’s Astrophil in sonnet 28 of Astrophil and Stella, where his claim to artlessness takes the form of a highly constructed artistic utterance: ‘I beg no subject to use eloquence/…/… know that I, in pure simplicity,/ Breathe out the flames which burn within my heart’ (ll. 9, 12–13). This demonstration of sprezzaturo, ‘the master trope of the courtier’, (Whigham 1984: 93) not only shows the courtier’s skill and wit. It also bespeaks his innate nobility, in demonstrating a quality that paradoxically cannot be learned or forged even as it displays great learning and subtlety. Thus his claim to deserving what his performance seeks to earn him is established. This performance is implicated in striving to both create, and lay claim to, access to social privilege (Huntington 2001: 7). For Castiglione the perfect courtier is symbolised by Phoenix (a creature who recurs in the Petrarchan poetry of the 1590s).8 While Castiglione’s signor Ottaviano is referring to Achilles’ tutor, it is a significant metaphor. The courtier Castiglione is trying to create is a man rising from the ashes of feudalism to become gloriously reborn in the courts of the absolute Renaissance monarchs, a model that fits well with the situation of courtiers in Tudor England (see Kelly-Gadol 1987; Warley 2005; Heale 1998). However, this courtier is always at the mercy of his ruler. To tell ‘the naked truth, unalloyed by courtiership’ is to risk ending up like Callisthenes, whom Alexander the Great executed for his outspoken tendencies (Castiglione trans. Bull 1976: 320–1). So the courtier has to create a relationship with his prince that is like the relationship of a lover to a beloved: I know that to talk of a courtier being conversant with his prince in this way implies a certain equality that can hardly exist between a ruler and his servant… Well then, I want the courtier… to devote all his thoughts and strength to loving and almost adoring the prince he serves above all else, devoting all his ambitions, actions and behaviour to pleasing him (125). The courtier speaks a language of love that is directly linked to a language of political power, since to love and serve the prince successfully is to exert a moral-political influence over him. In his need to subjugate himself to the prince’s superior power, the courtier is feminised (see Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy in Duncan-Jones ed. 1989: 239; Heale 1998: 76; Braden 1996; Henderson 1995: 33–45; Finucci 1992). It is not surprising, then, that The Book of the Courtier is very concerned with the appropriate ways to fall, and behave, in love. The

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self-focus implicit in the attention to the courtier’s ability to seem to be all that he should be, is clear in the book’s awareness of ‘that universal regard which everyone covets’ (Castiglione trans. Bull 1976: 63), as well as Castiglione’s Cardinal Bembo’s long monologue on Neoplatonic love.9 In Book Four, Bembo describes the holy plane to which Platonic love can elevate the courtier. The woman, the original source of such feeling, is not a factor in the courtier’s relationship with Goodness which she enables. Indeed, ‘Bembo’s Neoplatonic ladder of love leads the courtier towards God as the final destination of a longed-for, upward journey towards the satisfaction of his desires… [This journey] predicates woman’s exclusion’ (Finucci 1992: 70). The Book of the Courtier expressly traces the links for the courtier between the expression of love and the expression of issues of political power, the stress on self-involvement, -interest and, -determination, and the notion of a transcendent Idea (not coincidentally the name of Drayton’s sequence of 1619) which, in leading the poet towards knowledge of himself, is catalysed by the presence of the beautiful woman, but does not require her to be more than an object of inspiration, the cause of the journey. Thus Giles Fletcher can tell his reader in his preface to Licia (1593): If thou muse, What my LICIA is? Take her to be some DIANA… or some MINERVA… It may be she is Learning’s Image… Perhaps under that name I have shadowed ‘Discipline.’… It may be my conceit, and pretend nothing. Whatsoever it be; if thou like it, take it! (Lee ed. 1904: 32). In the same year, Thomas Lodge makes his Phillis a Neoplatonic instrument: No stars her eyes to clear the wandering night, But shining suns of true divinity, That make the soul conceive her perfect light! No wanton beauties of humanity Her pretty brows, but beams that clear the sight Of him that seeks the true philosophy! (Phillis sonnet 7 ll. 1–6) (Lee ed. 1904: 6). For the courtier to achieve his twinned aims of self-knowledge and selfdisplay, he needs his performance of self to be seen by the court. This audience is everywhere present in Petrarchan poetry, which thus carries the legacy of its occasional nature (Marotti 1995).10

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50 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

The two meanings of courtship – to be a courtier and to court – developed in tandem in the sixteenth century (Bates 1992: 8). The feudal position of the courtier, with its attendant imperatives to loyal servitude and its relation to honour and virtue, was well-expressed by a poetry of longing which demonstrated the courtier’s unalterable devotion (see Low 1993). The honour and virtue of the suitor, demonstrated through his loyalty – his constancy – are evidence and guarantee of his nobility (his inborn quality which corresponds to his social aspiration). This is a masculine definition of honour, and a particular figuration of constancy. Both honour and constancy have different inflections for women in the late sixteenth century, being primarily reliant, at least in idealised representations, on chastity and therefore public silence. Traces of the more sexually active woman of the courtly tradition are to be found in Wyatt’s poetry, at the inception of English Petrarchism. But by the time of Elizabeth’s court, the social importance of public female virginity had taken precedence. The emphasis on the virginal woman at the centre of power was not coincidental, given that the Petrarchan way of managing the longing for advancement, expressed in a language of love, acquired maximum cultural valency during the reign of a female monarch surrounded by male courtiers. Schalkwyk (2002: 17) has argued that Shakespeare’s sonnets, even in their most intimate moments, give proof of the public nature of their language. Their meaning depends on their original embodiment in a context which is profoundly social, and which establishes the conditions of possibility for the subjectivity they perform. He demonstrates the private can be shown to be imbricated in the public without being annihilated by it. The language of love and the language of politics can both be present in a language of desire. Their relation will determine who can say what to whom, under what circumstances. From its birth, the sonnet was as directly linked to political power and concomitant self-display as it was to the expression of the dynamics of love. English Petrarchism had its own material pressures, which were clearly shaped by gendered access to public speech and to the language of amatory desire and all that its performance encoded.

‘Small talk with Stalin’:11 Thomas Wyatt and the court of Henry VIII The first English writer to translate Petrarch was Chaucer, who wrote a version of Rime Sparse 132 into Troylus and Criseyde

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(Book 1 ll. 400–20) (Braden 1999: 72–3; Spearing 1985: 300).12 While there were sporadic references to Petrarch in the 127 years between Chaucer’s death and Wyatt’s trip to Italy in 1527, it was only with the latter that Petrarch’s poetry is brought into dialogue with the medieval courtly tradition in a uniquely English sense (Thomson 1964: 152). The third figure in the early development of the sonnet in English was, of course, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, whose formal developments have been immortalised as ‘Shakespearean’. The significance of English Petrarchism’s history for the technology of gender it developed has not been sufficiently remarked, even as there is a comprehensive critical recognition of the ways in which Wyatt’s love poetry is inextricably tied up with his identity as a gentleman courtier, his sometimes dangerously precarious career under Henry VIII,13 and his experience as a diplomat (Greenblatt 1984: 141–3). From its inception in England, Petrarchism developed in a context of masculinity in performance, and under threat; in a relation of complex political domination. Wyatt’s poems ‘imply a situation in which love was politicized and politics were eroticized’ (Spearing 1985: 288).14 While Stephen Greenblatt’s (1984: 120) influential thesis of a Renaissance self-fashioning constituted by ‘power and the convention power deploys’ has been critiqued for reducing all interaction to a pessimistic confirmation of a monolithic power, it is useful in identifying some of the patterns of domination and submission out of which the subject of Petrarchism came to fashion himself. We can nuance this reading with an awareness of the complexities of the power of the object, and of the ambivalences and potentialities of Elizabeth’s iconographies. The ways that love and court politics become entangled in Wyatt’s poetry have been well-mapped: the courtier’s impossible position of self-assertion and submission is accommodated in a language which enables him to perform his frustration at this situation while insisting simultaneously on his loyalty and devotion. The language of frustrated or betrayed love becomes a figuration for the demonstration of the courtier’s worth in a treacherous environment. In such a formulation, Wyatt’s most often cruelly vindictive mistress comes to stand for the corrupt environment in which the speaker has to survive, and against which he needs to assert his frustrated honour which is deserving of reward but unlikely ever to achieve it given the unjust nature of his context. The poet’s feelings towards these women can

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 53

Diverse doth use, as I have heard and know, When that to change their ladies do begin, To mourn and wail and never for to lin, [cease] Hoping thereby to pease their painful woe. And some there be, that when it chanceth so That women change, and hate where love hath been, They call them false, and think with words to win The hearts of them which otherwhere doth grow. But as for me, though that by chance indeed Change hath outworn the favour that I had, I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad, Nor call her false that falsely did me feed, But let it pass, and think it is of kind That often change doth please a woman’s mind (Hiller ed. 1990: 30). This poem expresses the poet’s barbed resignation at having no choice but to be at the mercy of someone’s whim. He acknowledges this by a misogynist projection: it is the nature of women to be inconstant and untrue, and one can do nothing about it. This becomes a way to figure his powerlessness in the face of an immutable and natural fact, the fact of his frustrated courtier’s subjection. The Petrarchan sonnet as it developed through Wyatt’s personal voice serves the purpose of facilitating a performance of an embattled self. This concentration on the self takes place at the expense of the mapping of a cosmic, intellectual, or philosophical context (Spearing 1985: 290–2).15 In this way, ‘for Wyatt public and private life are different faces of the same experience’ (310). The courtly context constitutes the terms of expression of the speaker’s self even as that self reacts against its context. Indeed, it is not always possible to determine if the occasion for a lyric poem is political or personal, as many of Wyatt’s editors have attested, given that the poet uses Petrarchan language to describe the effects of a political situation: ‘The flaming sighs that boil within my breast/ Sometime break forth, and they can well declare/ The heart’s unrest and how that it doth fare,/ The pain thereof, the grief, and all the rest’ (ll. 1–4) (Scott ed. 2003: 25). This lyric, taken to be about Wyatt’s time in the Tower in 1541, could as well be about a mistress. Similarly, in one of his epigrams, Wyatt overtly conflates the language

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figure his disgust and dissatisfaction at the fact of mutability and uncertainty itself:

of love and the language of politics: ‘My king, my country, alone for whom I live,/ Of mighty love the wings for this me give’ (27). The subject of the lyric ‘Patience…’ also could be either beloved or political enemies: ‘Patience, though I have not/ The thing that I require,/ I must of force, God wot,/ Forbear my most desire…’ (39). Klein (1992: 142) has demonstrated that Petrarch’s metaphorical violence is made literal in Wyatt’s poetry, and that this, too, is related to the context of Henry’s court: Klein points out that the king’s method of marrying women for both sexual and political reasons ‘encouraged the darker side of courtly love to emerge’. One could add that his method of dispensing of his wives – accusing them of adultery – would only add to the tendency to see women as ‘double in nature’ (ibid.) so relentlessly expressed in Wyatt’s lyrics. Wyatt’s mistress, in contrast to the mistress of medieval courtly love, is not elevated or ideal, and as such is no divine inspiration. One implication of Wyatt’s tendency to bring his mistresses down to earth (if not lower), might be that he can be credited with complicating the reified subject-object relationship so crucial to courtly poetry. Thus it is possible to read Wyatt’s poetry, as Spearing (1985: 283) does, as a situation in which ‘Lover and lady confront each other as equals, partners and rivals in negotiation, autonomous beings of whom aggression and moral responsibility can equally be expected.’ Partners and rivals, perhaps, but by virtue of the power invested in the author of the situation, not equals. She is, as he reminds her, at the mercy of his pen/ lute (‘Blame not my lute, for he must sound/ Of this or that as liketh me…’ [Scott ed. 2003: 31]). He uses his poetry to express his responses in ways that prefigure later Petrarchan promises to immortalise beauty, with the concomitant threat to record bad or disappointing behaviour for posterity: ‘…if perchance this foolish rhyme/ Do make thee blush at any time,/ Blame not my lute’.16 As much as Wyatt bemoans the lady’s power to make him suffer in lyric after lyric, one of his original sonnets (in other words, not a poem based on a translation) makes her function clear. Significantly for Petrarchism as the English poets of the 1590s came to use it (setting a pattern that Mary Wroth was to make use of in her own way), Wyatt’s sonnet ‘If waker care’ demonstrates how the emphasis in such poetry could easily fall on love itself as the point of the utterance, not the mistress. The poet is clear that it is the return to the emotion he is documenting; an emotion set in motion by the presence of a new lady, but no different from that caused by his previous mistress, his

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 55

If waker care, if sudden pale colour, If many sighs, with little speech to plain, Now joy, now woe, if they my cheer disdain, For hope of small, if much to fear therefore, To haste, to slack my pace less or more, Be sign of love, then do I love again. If thou ask whom, sure since I did refrain Brunette that set my wealth in such a roar, Th’unfeigned cheer of Phyllis hath the place That Brunette had. She hath and ever shall… (ll. 1–10) (Scott ed. 2003: 23. See also n.5, 87). Wyatt’s ‘if… then’ formulation allows for an ambiguity inbuilt to the logic of this performative love that Shakespeare would also pick up on (‘If hairs be wires…’ sonnet 130). Equally, while the sonnet insists on the poet’s undying devotion to his new beloved – ‘She hath [the place that Brunette had] and ever shall’ – the fact of the possible changeability of mistresses makes the place’s structural positioning more absolute than its content. The emphasis is thus on his performance of love, not on the uniqueness of the occasion for its expression. Bell (1998, 1997) has written in detail against such a reading of courtly verse, insisting on the importance of women’s participation in the writing and exchanging of this verse (see also Heale 1998: 42–6). The practices of courtship required responses from the woman to whom the poetry was addressed. Her ‘willing collaboration is essential to poetrymaking and love-making’ (Bell 1998: 74). She asserts that a concentration on the poet’s presence at the expense of the mistress’s is a function of modernist poetics. Early modern conditions of performance, circulation, and reception, she says, would have stressed the dialogic nature of courtly poetry (26–8). Bell provides some fascinating examples of the dialogic situation in practice (see Chapters 3 and 4). In this way her argument resonates with Schalkwyk’s (2002: 59–101) illustration of how the poetry functions in its context to privilege the response of its original audience. I would suggest that there is a difference between individuals making use of Petrarchan moments and postures and gestures in a real dialogue, and the fully discursive exploration of Petrarchan potentialities within sequences. The former explores the discourse in physical action, the latter, in its more formally literary incarnation. As much as the material

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‘brunette’ (possibly Anne Boleyn, given line 8’s emendation from its original ‘Her that did set our country in a roar’):

conditions of the poetry’s production will feed into the poetry’s possibilities, the formal aspects of the genre will also shape the conditions of possibilities for the actual use of Petrarchism by individuals. Petrarchan subjectivities both reflected and helped to create positions that could be occupied and performed. The extent of this relation is impossible to recover, as our evidence of the effects of artistic discourse come to us only through more discourse, artistic, visual, sociological, or religious, with the imbrication of each in the other. Thus, real women and real audiences might well have mitigated an individual poet’s performance. The beloved’s necessary presence offers a range of possible empowerments. At the same time, the fact of her presence in a social context in order to enable the poetry could work to ensure her value as token, in the poetry and in the court. Wyatt’s famous sonnet, ‘Whoso list to hunt’, can be read as a poem which ‘figures all courtly women in the system of male competition and reward which dictated their significance and limited their power’ (Heale 1998: 56). Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, alas, I may no more: The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind; Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore, Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I, may spend his time in vain; And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written her fair neck round about: ‘Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame’ (Hiller ed. 1990: 29). On one level about the typically ever-elusive mistress, this poem has also long been recognised as relating to Wyatt’s connection with Ann Boleyn, about to become the King’s second wife. Spearing (1985: 288) comments on the ‘erotic charge of the play of power and submission’ in the poem. If this is correct, this ‘dominance hierarchy’ (Klein 1992: 135) is a ménage a trois: the poem contains the lover, the mistress, and the lord. The poem begins with an invitation: ‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’ (l. 1). By the sestet, though, it is clear that this invita-

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56 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

tion was nothing but a false promise: ‘Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt’ (l. 9). After the initial invitation, every two lines there is a progression, marked by a conjunction: But… (l. 2) Yet… (l. 5) Since… (l. 8) And… (l. 11) And… (l. 14) The logic of the poem is thus as follows: An invitation: ‘whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind’; a qualification of the poet’s own abilities to hunt: ‘But as for me, alas, I may no more’; a complication, in that despite his inability to continue the hunt he cannot abandon it: ‘Yet…/ Fainting I follow’; a capitulation: he finally gives up, ‘Since in a net I seek to hold the wind’. The poet’s hopeless situation, outlined in the octave, is explained in the sestet by two straightforward explanations, marked by the replacement of words that propel the narrative, with the two ‘And’s, which, building a series of statements as they do, function to suggest the immutable nature of the reason for the poet’s hopeless situation. The hind is out of bounds because she belongs to Caesar. This is a sonnet about the superior power of the lord who owns the desired animal; it is homotextual, in Janet Halley’s (1989) terms, and homosocial in Eve Sedgwick’s (1985), in that the mistress is used as a token of exchange between men. It also fits an Oedipal formulation: the Lord’s prohibitive prior claim on the lady thwarts the poet’s desire for her, and the poem (the self in language) comes into being as an expression of his realisation and acceptance of this fact. This is an ideal model of the constituent elements I am suggesting became the staples of English Petrarchan subjectivity in the 1590s: a self accounted for psychoanalytically, with all this entails for its male and heterosexist biases. A complication comes in the final line, with the second ‘And’. The first reason the hunter cannot achieve his hunt is clear in the fact of the collar about her neck. The second, though, suggests something about the hind: ‘And wild for to hold…’ This would seem to suggest that not only does she belong to a man of greater power, she is herself elusive, untamed, unownable on some level. On the one hand, such a formulation bespeaks her Otherness, and confirms her place in the Self-Other schema. Wyatt’s poet perfectly articulates the position of otherwor(l)dly power given to the woman. At the same time, the words given to her to speak are written on her collar; her wildness is written onto her as is her status as owned. The wildness is not a sign of the possible presence of her subjectivity, but a construction of and warning from her master to those who would attempt to poach her. It further guarantees his sole right to her. Jonathan Crewe (1990: 42) reads this poem as being about the subjectivity of the deer/ dear woman, a subjectivity she refuses to account

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for. The sonnet, he suggests, reveals the ‘failure of the masculine “I”… his place in the order of precedence will always be that of the one who comes behind the hind’. He shows how the deer ‘renders itself doubly invulnerable to possession by withdrawing into the endless self-division of being and seeming, wildness and tameness. Its identity is thus secured as a form of nonidentity, or more precisely of non-selfidentity’. Thus the hind is ‘crafty’, in the double sense that poetic language is crafty. ‘She is at once bound and free, single and double, truthful and dissembling’ (42–3). While I do not agree that the feminine subject is the subject of the sonnet, what is interesting about Crewe’s reading is its recognition of the structure of domination on which the formation of Petrarchan subjectivity depends: there is room for only one, and at the expense of the other. In Crewe’s reading, she is the only true and possible subject of the poem because the poet’s subjectivity by definition exists in the movement of desire, is always only striven for, never achieved. The result is a ‘misogynisitically ironic form’ (42). The second relevant implication of this reading is that even in wanting to speak for her presence in the sonnet, Crewe can do so only by positing her as double, as not one, and as beyond the reach of the poet accordingly. Marguerite Waller (1987) has shown how the poem coerces its readers into the subject position of the aristocratic, heterosexual, male hunter. Beginning with the same assumption as Crewe, that the poet is a subject speaking himself into being via the permanently elusive energy of desire, Waller shows that the condition of desiring a female object is the illusory term of possibility for this self to pretend to itself that it is stable. She demonstrates this by comparing Petrarch’s permanently unstable subject in his poem 190, on which Wyatt’s sonnet is based, to the increasingly, happily, striving hunter of ‘Whoso list’. In Petrarch’s poem 190, the collar says something significantly different: ‘“No one must touch me,” she had round her neck/ written in diamonds and topazes:/ “Since it please Caesar to create me free”’ (ll. 9–11). This is a very different kind of a lord, with a different relationship to the wildness of his creature: Petrarch’s Caesar gifts his hind with freedom; in creating her freedom, he is closer to God than to the allpowerful but still mortal king his name functions to denote in Wyatt’s poem. Petrarch’s Caesar also has a different relationship to the poet. They are not in competition, as they are in Wyatt’s poem. In both cases Caesar’s superior power to the poet is obvious, but in Wyatt the emasculating and frustrating power of the lord is a paramount theme of the poem. In Petrarch, it is the hind’s freedom that is emphasised.

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The prohibition inscribed on the collar refers to Caesar’s ownership of his deer, but it also recalls Christ’s words in John 20.17. Christ says to Mary Magdalene, ‘Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum’: ‘Do not touch me for I have not yet ascended to my Father’ (qtd. and trans. Waller 1987: 7).17 Greenblatt points out that Petrarch is evoking Christ’s ‘quintessential moment of suspension, of poise between states of being’, between the earthly world and heaven. In Wyatt, this echo becomes ‘bitterly’, and multiply, ‘ironic’ (148).18 In Petrarch’s poem, the encounter with the hind occurs in the morning, and ends with the sun’s passing ‘the midday mark’ (l. 12). The poet’s ‘unglutted’ eyes are ‘weighed’ with ‘weariness’, ‘and I fell in a stream: she went away’ (l. 14). Her disappearance has often been read as a presage of her death, at the ‘noon’, or middle, of her life (Thomson 1964: 199). Wyatt loses the lady, not to God’s will, or Fate, or however he might have conceptualised death, but to a more powerful man. Even if we read Wyatt’s last line as evidence that Caesar does not himself truly possess her, that her Otherness provides her with an elusive quality that precludes her capture in Petrarchan language, she is still the Lord’s possession in material terms if not in emotional, and it is this material possession that thwarts the poet’s physical access and circumscribes his ability to hunt her. Barbara Estrin (1984: 441–4) provides an intriguing, and counterintuitive, reading of this sonnet which is in line with her project to locate the woman’s elusive subjectivity in Petrarchism. She asserts that in ‘Whoso list’, Wyatt is more identified with the lady than he is in any of his other sonnets. Estrin links this sonnet to the myth of Acteon. The poet has become the hunted: the ‘behind’ of l. 5 suggests ‘be [come the] hind’. He enlists others (the readers of the sonnet) in the hunt as she enlists him. The ‘“I” that hunted’ is cast off, and ‘he emerges her’. They are both Caesar’s. ‘To be possessed by Caesar is to acquire, by association’ Caesar’s power. Thus, like Acteon the poet is transformed. But, unlike Acteon,… Wyatt becomes part of the seat of power and is therefore sympathetic to it. Acteon has only his own understanding. Wyatt gains a new understanding. He emerges as the woman (442–3). This reading, while interesting and innovative, misses the crucial function of the female body as an interlocutor between the poet and ‘Caesar’. If he comes to identify with the mistress in this poem it is not

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because he comes to ‘understand the pain of being desired’ (444), but because the unreachable beloved, in facilitating the poet’s expression of his frustration at being subject to a difficult master, functions in the end as a sign of the poet’s questing and ultimately frustrated subjectivity. He is not identifying with her; he has made it clear he cannot even locate her subjectivity. Instead he is appropriating her body, her object-status, to signify his own subjugated subjectivity. In this he sets the groundwork for the development of Petrarchism in England as a gendered discourse of desire performed.

Till Sidney, from Sidney Conditions in Henry VIII’s court suited the application of a Petrarchan language of courtship to the business of courtiership, and Elizabeth’s court was the next environment where such a language could flourish. The nature of Henry VIII’s court, where Wyatt and Surrey first began to develop what would become a specifically English Petrarchism, is inextricable from the poetry’s meanings. It was the corrupt and unsafe atmosphere of the court that allowed for the development of a language which fused ambition and service with the position of the simultaneously despairing and hopeful, suffering, subjugated lover. This confluence developed further under the rule of Henry’s daughter.19 Petrarchan iconography was used extensively, in Elizabethan portraiture and in literary and other written representations (For examples see Klein 1998: 27–8; Forster 1969: 133–9).20 The multitudinous presence of Petrarchan tropes makes it clear that Elizabeth’s unmarried status was conducive to propagating a language of idealised and idealising desire. The queen was aware of the possibilities encoded in Petrarchan positions for a woman ruling a court and a country steeped in patriarchal norms.21 The queen could contain conflict by casting herself as the aloof and ideal beloved on whose attention her courtiers’ fate depended (Erickson 1991: 26). That the language of Petrarchism was so comprehensively taken up in Elizabeth’s court suggests that it was as useful to courtiers as it was to the queen.22 Here are ‘Verses made by the Earle of Essex in his Trouble’: The ways on earth have paths and turnings known, The ways on Sea are gone by needless light. The birds of th’air the nearest way have flown, And under earth the moles do cast aright.

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60 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

A way more hard then these I needs must take, Where none can teach nor no man can direct; Where no man’s good for me example makes, But all men’s faults do teach her to suspect. Her thoughts and mine such disproportion have: All strength of love is infinite in me; She useth the advantage time and fortune gave, Of worth and power to get the liberty; Earth, Sea, Heaven, Hell, are subject unto laws, But I, poor I, must suffer and know no cause (May 1991: 254). Essex makes good use of the figure of the Petrarchan lover who has lost his way, and is at the mercy of the elements. This echoes Wyatt and Surrey’s storm-tossed poet-lover, translated from Petrarch’s Canzone 189. Equally, the mistress’s power is both emotional and political. Her typical aloofness, figured as the cause of his suffering, speaks to his reliance on her recognition of his state. Expressed in the language of Petrarchan love, this poem is clearly an appeal to the Queen for a mercy that is as much material as it is affective. Given Essex’s fate, Petrarchism’s ability to figure the lady’s power as a matter of life or death is no mere posture; as Edward de Vere put it, in a poem which most likely dates from ‘his heyday at court’ (270) in the 1570s: She is my pain, she is my ease therefore; She is my death, she is my life also, She is my salve, she is my wounded sore; In fine, she hath the hand and knife, That may both save, and end my life… (276–7). By engaging with her power through their Petrarchan writings, her courtiers were not only acknowledging the control she had over their material and emotional states. They were also trying to assert themselves to, and sometimes over, her, given that ‘Petrarchan discourse… shifts power and authority to the writing subject’ (Clarke 1997: 293). As the example of Elizabeth’s relationships with her courtiers suggests, this relation of domination is complex in nature. The position of female beloved was used by Elizabeth to her own advantage, even as it forced her to occupy a particularly tenuous position of power which both inscribed her as the source of goodness and made her available for representational contestation and manipulation, in the very act of petition. The fact that it was available for Elizabeth to use suggests the

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 61

position of Petrarchan object is not always and only one of negation and powerlessness. In an essay which did pioneering work on gender, Joan Riviere (in Saguaro ed. 2000) pointed out the investments and compensations in performing socially-sanctioned femininity. The complexities of Elizabeth’s presence on the throne, and her deployment of gender as a strategy in her self-representation, make impossible any easy summation of contemporary lyrical positions as simplistically hierarchically gendered.23 Nevertheless, the conflation of courting and courtiership inscribes a masculine speaking subject: as well as arising historically from a feudal model that applied specifically to men, it fits best within a normative heterosexuality, especially in Elizabeth’s court, because the relationship outlined by Castiglione is literalised. Elizabeth is clearly the exemplar of a woman who wielded power successfully within the misogynist context of early modern ideologies of gender. The point is that she did so by manipulating the available discourses. By 1547, both Wyatt and Surrey were dead, although their poetry continued to circulate in manuscript. Ten years later their work was made widely available for the first time by Richard Tottel’s publication of Songes and Sonettes, written by the right honourable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, or Tottel’s Miscellany, as it has become known.24 The first extant sonnet sequence in English is Anne Lok’s religious poetry (1560); thereafter Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (1582) is an amatory sonnet sequence with 18-line poems. There was some experimentation with sonnet sequencing between Tottel’s Miscellany, and Sidney’s seminal Astrophil and Stella, published for the first time in 1591, although most of these sequences were not concerned with love or Petrarchan posturing.25 It was not until the 1590s, following Sidney’s sequence, that English Petrarchism became the poetic craze and social posture for which it has become notorious. For Lisa Klein (1998: 216), the capacity of the Petrarchan sequence to hold complex issues of literary matter, personal identity, authority, and politics, is suggested by the influence of Sidney’s life and work on the sequences which succeeded his. Klein reads Sidney’s Petrarchan desire as a substitution for political action, the expression of which gave birth to new possibilities for the discourse. Whether Astrophil and Stella is read as a negative example of how not to channel one’s energy into erotic love (Sinfield 1980), as a frustrated acting out of Sidney’s failed courtly aspirations (Duncan-Jones ed. 1989: x–xii), or as an ironic, performative comment on his private affairs (Marotti 1982) there is no doubt that in this sequence Sidney updated the Petrarchan idiom and re-energised the poetry of courtly love.

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62 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

As with Wyatt, and as Klein’s (1998) assessment attests, Sidney’s social situation has often been read as intimately connected to the tone and purpose of his love poetry. For Anthony Low (1993), Sidney’s poetry, with its impatient lover, marks the culmination and point of dissolution of an older, aristocratic language of love and service by demonstrating its inadequacy in the changing political, economic, and cultural structures of Elizabeth’s realm. After Astrophil and Stella, according to this formulation, the Petrarchan position no longer works for frustrated courtiers because the feudal system out of which it evolved was itself mutating. An older system of patronage whose logic depended on the value of nobility, honour, and virtue was damaged by the Tudor tendency to create new gentry: ‘Preferment seemed ever less likely in men’s eyes to be a confirmation of noble worth, and ever more likely to be a step up the ladder of manipulation, pretension and greed’ (27). This is one way to account for the formulaic nature of much of the Petrarchism of the 1590s, which became the hollow repetition of a recognisable stance for the sake of rehearsing a posture. Is it significant that Elizabeth, a powerful woman, signifies for Low the marker of Petrarchism’s limit, its failure to continue to serve the needs of male courtiers? Arguably when the symbolic lady achieves incarnation, in the figure of Elizabeth, she signals the end of the ideal and idealising work of the language of love she inspires. Astrophil and Stella, in reworking the terms of Petrarchism, emphasises the discourse’s standard features, either by directly commenting on them to refuse them, or by implicitly extending or developing them. The sequences that followed on from Sidney’s which themselves added something new to Petrarchism in English poetry similarly reveal the standard procedures within which they seek new ways. Those poets most immediately influenced by Sidney were his friends, among which was Fulke Greville, who went on to write Sidney’s biography as well as poems about his life that formed part of the lionisation of Sidney after his death.

Caelica (c. 1580s) Greville’s Caelica is a collection of 109 poems of which only 41 are sonnets in the modern sense. They were probably started in the 1580s, although their original dates and order of composition is unknown (May 1991: 89; Powell ed. 1990: 8) Sidney’s sequence rejected the lover’s Petrarchan agreement to remain patient and instead sought to reformulate the terms of Petrarchan virtue to include desire.26 Greville’s sequence is the first to reject Petrarchan terms of desire by providing an overt English Protestant alternative. In doing so, he not only reveals the discourse’s inadequacies

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 63

for his purposes: earthly desire is not a pathway to the Ideal goodness of God, but something to be repudiated before spirituality can be prioritised. He also lays bare some of Petrarchism’s basic constituting elements, specifically the denigration of the woman that is the other side of her elevation. Wyatt’s women were both admired and resented; Astrophil’s Stella is adored, praised, sometimes railed against, and occasionally threatened, but Greville’s mistress (or mistresses) is ultimately viewed with disgust. For Greville, the Petrarchan Idea is a starting point, as it is for Drayton in Idea (1619). If for the latter it is the reason for poetic display, for the former the Petrarchan facilitates, even if it cannot ultimately provide, a route towards God. This route takes him to and through the misogyny that seasons Wyatt’s praise, and that is sprinkled through Tottel’s Miscellany, amongst the standard Petrarchan idealisations. It is because Caelica cannot temper its misogyny with idealisation (both extremes are related to each other as mutually denying of the humanity of women) that in the end Greville must reject Petrarchan formulas to achieve his purpose. Greville’s sequence begins typically enough, being concerned with Love. However, it becomes clear that the function of these early poems is to establish the falseness of earthly love. Greville’s poet has more of a relationship with the boy Cupid, than with Myra/ Caelica/ Cynthia,27 and it is the relationship with Love that matters. She is the excuse for the self-exploration, and the scapegoat to enable the repudiation of heterosexual desire: Was ever man so over-match’d with boy? When I am thinking how to keep him under, He plays and dallies me with every toy; With pretty stealths, he makes me laugh and wonder. When with the child, the child-thoughts of mine own Do long to play and toy as well as he, The boy is sad, and melancholy grown, And with one humour cannot long agree. Straight do I scorn and bid the child away, The boy knows fury, and soon showeth me Caelica’s sweet eyes, where love and beauty play, Fury turns into love of that I see. If these mad changes do make children gods, Woman, and children are not far at odds (Powell ed. 1990: 42).28 The single line of devotion about ‘Caelica’s sweet eyes’ is itself related to the active power of Cupid, since her eyes are shown by the boy to

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64 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

the poet, as punishment. Furthermore, the ‘love’ of line 12 belongs to Cupid, whose ‘fury’ is the emotion that is transformed by Caelica’s eyes. The poet sees the mistress, but is entirely concerned with the emotions of Love personified. Even in the earlier poems of the sequence, which explore standard Petrarchan stances, long before his transformation away from the Petrarchan, this speaker really is not all that interested in women. The poem, about Love’s power, is ultimately a criticism of women as changeable and capricious as powerful children. That the poet allows the plural ‘children’ to stand with the exemplified ‘Woman’ emphasises that all individual women fall under this rubric: it is the essential nature of Woman Herself that makes her similar to children. In a poem which makes explicit use of Ovidian transformation, and thus draws also on Petrarch’s numerous physical, emotional, and spiritual transformations, the poet describes how he holds fast to Caelica as she changes shape in his arms, spanning the elements, from stone to cloud to water, all of which have allegorical significance for the nature of his constancy and of his desire. Finally, he repudiates her for her shifting nature, in moral terms: When I beheld how Caelica’s fair eyes, Did show her heart to some, her wit to me, Change, that doth prove error is not wise, In her mis-shape made me strange visions see… I’ll hold no more, false Caelica, live free; Seem fair to all the world, and foul to me (ll. 7–10, 35–6). This exploration of love culminates in a poem which tells a story of thievery and deception, an allegory of how the poet fell in love. The poem concludes: ‘Love is not his that raves: hope is untrue’ (l. 60) (51). Because ‘Myra says, No’ (l. 55), as indeed she must according to the Petrarchan script, Love is, after all, a child, with a child’s powerlessness (‘The little lad fears the rod’ [l. 53] ). He is also a weakling, ‘He is not…there [in the poet’s heart] a god’ (l. 54). He is revealed, and by analogy with the opening vignette, he is a liar and a trickster, at least when it comes to his promises to the poet. The Petrarchan poet must continually hope; this poet finds that ‘hope is untrue’, in a way which radically undermines the nature of Petrarchan love. Thus, after Cupid proves false, the Petrarchan ‘paradise’ of the mistress proves to be a ‘common field’ (sonnet 38 l. 2, l. 14). Because Love and women are false, the poet establishes a reason for renunciation of earthly love.

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66 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

O Love, thou mortal sphere of powers divine … If I by nature, wonder and delight, Had not sworn all my powers to worship thee, Justly mine own revenge receive I might, And see thee, tyrant, suffer tyranny … Love therefore speak to Caelica for me, Show her thyself in everything I do; …. Let never man love worthiness in vain (poem 9 ll. 1–24, pp. 30–1). Here is the feudal knight honourably serving his lord, true to his noble word despite his bad treatment, tinged with the bitter Elizabethan courtier. As early as sonnet 16, however, he is hinting at a religious solution: ‘Fie foolish earth, think you heaven wants glory,/ Because your shadows do yourself benight?’ (ll. 1–2; p. 35). This is a Neoplatonic impetus which in the course of the sequence renounces the Idea and moves straight to the source, becoming more Protestant than Petrarchan. In order to effect this change he rejects the woman’s role as idealised Other, concentrating on building a case against her worthiness as object of the poetry by invoking misogynist stereotypes about ‘woman’s nature’. Greville’s mistress is far more flavoured with Eve and her deceptive tongue (with a touch of Wyatt’s spicy mistress) than with Laura and her inspiring goodness. Satan, no woman, yet a wand’ring spirit, When he saw ships sail two ways with one wind, Of sailors’ trade he hell did disinherit: The Devil himself loves not a half-fac’d mind. The satyr when he saw the shepherd blow To warm his hands, and make his pottage cool, Manhood forswears, and half a beast did know, Nature with double breath is put to school. Cupid doth hide his shafts in women’s faces, Where smiles and tears dwell ever near together,

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Greville initially attempts to make constancy its own reward, as a way of containing his rage and disappointment, and as a strategy to demand better treatment:

Petrarchism in Early Modern England 67

This sonnet is about doubleness and mutability, which it reads as duplicity and fickleness. The lessons of nature in the octave teach not only that women are untrustworthy, but that their behaviour, indeed their very existence, is good cause for ‘fear’ (a word repeated in the last three lines: clearly a very present emotion for the poet). Its insistence that no means yes is also the logical culmination of the Petrarchan poet’s attempts to cajole, convince, and sometimes coerce his lady (see, for example, Sidney’s ‘grammar rules’ sonnet, where Stella’s repeated ‘No’ is transformed to a ‘yes’, because ‘grammar says…/ That in one speech two negatives affirm’ [sonnet 63 ll. 13–14] and Drayton’s ‘No and I’ game in sonnet 5 of Idea). It is the end result of Wyatt’s bitter resignation pushed beyond reluctant patience. Here, though, the intimation is not that her chaste ‘no’ can be manipulated into an acceptance of the poet. Rather, her ‘no’ is a denial of guilt, which, by definition, is proven by the denial. Women’s constitutional doubleness is a sign in this poem of their constitutional guilt. By nature women are guilty of sexual incontinence and deception. There is no way such creatures can be pathways to a higher Truth or Good. As Greville’s sequence progresses, deceitful women abound. By Renaissance definition, if women lie by nature they also lie (down) by nature, and so: ‘be he once to Hymen’s close yoke sworn,/ Thou [Cupid] straight brav’st this good-fellow with the horn’ (poem 31 ll. 13–14, p. 46). Wyatt’s sometimes untrue courtly mistress in Caelica becomes the occasion for an extended meditation on the folly and inadequacy of earthly love, that is to say, of a male subject’s love for a by-definition problematic female. The last section of the sequence addresses ‘Man’ himself (‘… man, forsake thyself, to heaven turn thee’ [sonnet 86 l. 13]; ‘Man, dream no more of curious mysteries/… /For goodness only doth God comprehend’ [poem 88 ll. 1, 17]). It also pays direct attention to the subjects of politics and wordly power, unmediated by Petrarchan analogy. Significantly, the eloquence that for Castiglione was central to the courtier-lover’s sense of self is denounced by this poet. The nobility from which the courtier’s eloquence is

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Where all the arts of change give passion graces; While these clouds threaten, who fears not the weather? Sailors and satyrs, Cupid’s knights, and I, Fear women that swear, Nay; and know they lie (38).

68 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

Eloquence, that is but wisdom speaking well (The poets feign) did make the savage tame; Of ears and hearts chain’d unto tongues they tell; I think nobility to be the same: For be they fools, or speak they without wit, We hold them wise, we fools bewonder it (poem 92 ll. 13–18). This poet is on his way to rejecting all that English Petrarchism stands for: first, the lady, and then, courtly poetry and the values of display and nobility it facilitates. It is no surprise that he repudiates the usual rewards hoped for by the courtly Petrarchan poet, for their earthly and corrupt natures. ‘Rewards of earth, nobility and fame,/ To senses glory and to conscience woe’ (poem 91 ll. 1–2) are replaced by a search for salvation of a specific kind: ‘The earth must burn, ere we for Christ can look’ (poem 89 l. 18). The final poem of the sequence is addressed to Jesus, imploring the occasion of the second coming: ‘Sion lies waste, and thy Jerusalem,/ O Lord, is fall’n to utter desolation/…/ Lord, thou no longer live a God unknown/…/ Rather, sweet Jesus, fill up time and come’ (poem 109 ll. 1–2, l. 24, l. 29). The sequence moves from Cupid to Jesus via a denigration of Caelica/ Myra/ Cynthia and so a refusal to perform for courtly profit. This is both a rejection, and a variation, of the Petrarchan poet’s Neoplatonic use of the mistress to achieve (or attempt to achieve) knowledge of the Good, of the self, and so, ultimately, to achieve selfhood. Because his poet cannot abide women, the usual Petrarchan formulation fails. The requirement of subjugation to a woman’s cruelty (in other words, her constant virtue) and capriciousness (a figuration of her inexplicable power, which is the result of her goodness, signified by her constant virtue) is impossible, given that women are not virtuous and pure in the world of this sequence. Rather, their doubleness – their not-oneness, their distance from the (hu)man subject – is made evident in their false natures. Their duplicity figures their sexual voracity, the clearest evidence of their flawed and fallen natures. The Petrarchan constituting other is inadequate for this poet, who in the end switches genre by rejecting the performative, courtly aspect of English Petrarchism along with the lady inspired by the Laura-laurel ideal. Instead he pulls out the Neoplatonic thread and links it to his Protestant God, bypassing the Lady and the rewards

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supposed to flow is also nothing but a deceptive empty display to dazzle fools.

promised by her praise. In rejecting Petrarchan desire with its idealising heterosexual reliance, the poet reveals the terms of the Petrarchan argument, its reliance on an other figure, usually, in the terms of its context, female, to act as purified, static object to the poet’s striving subject. Greville’s ultimately anti-Petrarchan sequence is useful in that it clarifies the generic through what it chooses to reject. Similarly, Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) purges the nobility and the other, putatively higher, purposes to the poetry. In this case, because of the pornographic sexual violence the sequence enacts, what it points to is Petrarchism’s constituting heterosexuality. At its worst this is revealed to be ‘a simple, misogynistic sexism’ (Huntington 2001: 42). Edmund Spenser is the other writer whose exceptional use of the Petrarchan sequence is useful in illustrating ways that gender tends to work in the Elizabethan Petrarchan discourse.

Amoretti (1596) Spenser’s Amoretti were written for his fiancée Elizabeth Boyle. The sequence performs a year’s worth of Petrarchan service that gradually reveals its anticipation of victory. It becomes a celebration of socially sanctioned sexuality, in looking forward to the wedding that is due to occur by the sequence’s close. Spenser’s mistress, in her role of aloof beloved, is exceptionally ‘cruell and unkind,/ as is a Tygre that with greediness/ hunts after bloud…’ (sonnet 56 ll. 1–3).29 Indeed, the poet attributes a bloodthirstiness to his mistress that is notable for its graphic ferocity: So she with flattring smiles weake harts doth guyde unto her love, and tempte to theyr decay, whome being caught, she kills with cruell pryde, and feeds at pleasure on the wretched pray: Yet even whylst her bloody hands them slay, her eyes look lovely… (sonnet 47 ll. 5–9). As becomes clear, the mistress’s wildness and cruelty are necessary to the worth of the poet’s victory. He remarks in sonnet 26, ‘So every sweet with soure is tempred still,/ that maketh it be coveted the more:/ for easie things that may be got at will,/ most sorts of men doe set but little store’ (ll. 9–12). The poet has just expressed the sequence’s first possible hint at reciprocity, ‘But yet if… ye hide/ a close intent at last

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70 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

Why then doe I, untrainde in lover’s trade, her hardness blame which I should more commend, sith never ought was excellent assayed, which was not hard t’atchive and bring to end? … Onely my paines wil be the more to get her, but having her, my joy will be the greater (sonnet 51 ll. 5–8, 13–14). In this sequence the mistress’s resistance is evidence not of her greater power than the poet, or of her own mind. Instead, as well as troping her maidenly modesty, it serves to heighten the chase and sweeten the victory. She proves she is worth having by being hard to get. And that she is indeed there for the having is evident in the ways she is imagined once the poet knows he will eventually attain her. The tyger becomes a caged bird (sonnet 65); ‘my glorious spoile/ gotten at last’ (sonnet 69 ll. 13–14); a bee caught in a spider’s web (sonnet 71); and, most famously, a wild deer akin to Wyatt’s. Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace, seeing the game from him escapt away, sits downe to rest him in some shady place, with panting hounds beguiled of their pray: So after long pursuit and vaine assay, when I all weary had the chace forsooke, the gentle deere returnd the self-same way, thinking to quench her thirst at the next brooke. There she beholding me with milder looke, sought not to fly, but fearelesse still did bide; till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke, and with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde. Strange thing me seemd to see a beast so wyld, so goodly wonne with her owne will beguyld (sonnet 67). The gentleness of his method of capture contrasts with her earlier savagery. Her willingness to submit belies the violence of the chase, com-

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to shew me grace…’ (sonnet 25 ll. 9–10). He thus concludes the following sonnet, ‘Why then should I accoumpt of little paine,/ that endless pleasure shall unto me gaine?’ (sonnet 26 ll. 13–14). The more difficult she is to vanquish, the greater his achievement, his poetic skill, and his masculinity. The greater, too, his concomitant pleasure:

plete with panting hounds, and recuperates the sense of triumph that informs the tone of some of the other sonnets which celebrate her capitulation. Anne Lake Prescott emphasises the implications of the hunting imagery, however disavowed in this sonnet. It ‘hints at an almost inevitable anxiety about captivity and dismemberment; deer are not wrong to tremble’. Prescott discusses the deer as a symbol of transition in the literature informing the poetry of the Renaissance. Spenser’s sequence, concerned as it is with timeliness, invokes the ‘ancient metaphor’ in part to ‘touch… on… a feminine fear of imprisonment and wounding that must be put by when it is time to do so’ (Prescott 1985: 35), when it is time for the maiden to become a wife. The deer’s capitulation marks her willingness to submit to penetration/ dismemberment. For all that sonnet 67 recapitulates the hunt as ‘pastoral repose’ (36), the implications for the deer remain and are registered in the poem. This poet is more aware than his quarry of what his victory entails, which is entirely appropriate under the circumstances: the marriage of an older man and a young bride. This deer, unlike Wyatt’s, is fated to be captured. Her ownership is not in question. By her own actions is it appropriate she should belong to the hunter. Similarly, her emblematic thirstiness tropes a desire for religious knowledge (47–52) which here is woven into the different knowledges, spiritual and physical, that fittingly accompany Christian marriage. This sonnet echoes poem 190 by Petrarch, to which it refers, in its engagement with forms of knowledge, with what can be known by the mortal poet. The figuration of the hunt as a quest for knowledge resonates with Petrarch’s use of the myth of Diana and Acteon. Acteon’s punishment is for looking on Diana’s naked body, and so acquiring a knowledge of the goddess to which he is not entitled. Lacan used this myth to describe Freud’s relation to knowledge (Brooks 1991: 52). In doing so he pointed out the importance of looking to the relation of domination which underlies the system of gender difference on which the meanings of the psychoanalytic subject, as of the Petrarchan, depend. Psychoanalysis traditionally relies on a visual economy (see Rose in Saguaro ed. 2000). It is the sight of the presence or absence of the penis that marks the subject’s entry into gender and so into subjectivity. [T]his valorization of the visual is by no means an arbitrary element in Freud’s thought: an erotically-invested visual relation to the world – and in the first instance to the body – is for Freud the very

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model of intellectual inquiry, curiosity, research. Scopophilia – erotic pleasure in looking – is for Freud in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality one of the ‘component instincts’ that makes up human sexuality from earliest childhood, and one that takes as its particular object the genitals and their functioning. Scopophilia… is closely related to the instinct or drive for knowledge… The erotic investment in seeing is from the outset inextricably bound to the erotic investment in knowing, in the individual’s development and also in the Western philosophical and literary traditions. Sight is the sense that represents the whole epistemological project; it is conceived to be the most objective and objectivizing of the senses, that which best allows an inspection of reality that produces truth. ‘I see’, in our common usage, is equivalent to ‘I know’ (Brooks 1991: 54). The hunt for the hind is another way for the Petrarchan poet to use an image of the female body to find knowledge of himself.30 When the woman’s bodily capture is ensured, the knowledge it holds assured, sight loses its Petrarchan imperative. In the Amoretti, the deer recurs in a later sonnet, this time with the poet cast as her lost fawn. The sonnet is full of the action of his seeking to see her. Accompanied by an image of her face in his mind, he can find only traces of her body in the material world. The solution is to cease to seek the body of the hind, and to turn inward to his own thoughts. Lackynge my love I go from place to place, lyke a young fawne that late hath lost the hynd; and seeke each where, where last I saw her face, whose ymage yet I carry fresh in mynd. I seeke the fields with her late footing synd, I seeke her bowre with her late presence deckt, yet nor in field nor bowre I her can fynd; yet field and bowre are full of her aspect. But when myne eyes I thereunto direct, they ydly back return to me agayne, and when I hope to see theyr trew object, I find my selfe but fed with fancies yatne. Ceasse then, myne eyes, to seeke her selfe to see, and let my thoughts behold her selfe in mee (sonnet 78). In this quest for the deer, the poet’s eyes are useless, idle. It is significant that, disarmed of his penetrating or possessing gaze, he is here

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72 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

cast as a fawn and not a hunter. The poet can afford this metaphor because he knows he already has her; in effect the hunt is over. In this sonnet the poet does not need to see her to know her, and accordingly the relation between poet and mistress is differently figured. Anticipating the union of marriage already ensured by the deer’s submission, the poet and deer are here ultimately one: ‘her selfe’ is ‘in mee’. Having been captured, she can be internalised. The function of the mistress is clear: when her attainment is ensured, she becomes the poet. What he sees through her body is himself. This destruction of her own body is what Diana is resisting when she fragments Acteon’s body (Vickers 1981), significantly transforming him into a deer whose fate is to be dismembered. That this relation is understood by Spenser’s poet as a relation between mother and child further serves to suggest that her role is as constituting (m)other. Despite the sequence’s highly unusual use of Petrarchan postures to work towards a marriage, it cannot actually document having (although it eagerly anticipates it at times, as in the sonnets about her ‘Fayre bosom’ [sonnet 76 l. 1]; ‘Her brest that table was so richly spredd,/ my thoughts the guests, which would thereon have fedd’ [sonnet 77 ll. 13–16]). Indeed it must end on a note of absence, as the poet documents ‘leav[ing] the presence of my love’ (sonnet 87 l. 1) in the final three sonnets of the sequence. This return to loss, albeit temporary, in a sequence which celebrates the inevitable capture of the mistress-deer, suggests that the Petrarchan subject cannot exist within the discourse if it becomes a discourse of attainment, even if he can push the boundaries to make it a discourse of anticipation. Indeed, Shakespeare’s poet, who has his woman, does not fulfil his idealising desire: instead, she reveals the inadequacy of his heterosexual lust, and the terrible tragedy of its ability to constantly renew itself: ‘My love is as a fever, longing still/ For that which longer nurseth the disease…’ (sonnet 147 ll. 1–2); ‘No want of conscience hold it that I call/ Her ‘love’, for whose dear love I rise and fall’ (sonnet 151 ll. 13–14); and perhaps most famously, ‘Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action…/…/All this the world well knows, yet none knows well/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell’ (sonnet 129).

Shakespeare’s sonnets (1609) The poet of Shakespeare’s sonnets is often taken to be the ultimate inscription of the Petrarchan subject. He is both Petrarchan and paraPetrarchan in who and how he desires. With two beloveds, a fair

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 73

young man and a ‘dark’ lady, Shakespeare’s poet has two very different kinds of desire. Shakespeare’s poet loves and admires his young man. He also manages a relationship where the male beloved has the upper hand emotionally and socially.31 He also has to contend with other poets for the attention and patronage of his male beloved.32 On the other hand he struggles with the desire he feels for his lady, blaming her for her sexuality and her sexual availability.33 In both relationships the poet is abject, differently, and has recourse to different strategies of self-constitution accordingly.34 How one reads Shakespeare’s Petrarchism will depend on one’s sexual as well as one’s textual politics. For me, the difference between the two beloveds, and the poet’s different emotion for each, can be seen as foregrounding the role of gender in the subject-object relation of poet and beloved that is one facet of the poetry’s development of speaking subjectivity. Joel Fineman (1986: 6) has famously argued that ‘in his sonnets, Shakespeare comes upon. i.e., he “invents”, the only ways in which or through which subjectivity, understood as a particular literary phenomenon, can be coherently thought and effectively produced in the literature of the West’.35 In other words, to summarise Fineman’s extremely dense argument, by moving from modes of writing that correspond to Lacan’s Imaginary, to the Symbolic, Shakespeare moves from a visionary subject, a subject of vision, who presents what he sees (the ideal young man), to a subject whose language can only represent (the duplicitous lady). Linguistic representation succeeds visual reflection in Shakespeare’s sonnets as the poet moves from the man to the woman. The visual mode pre-exists the linguistic mode, the realm of the Symbolic, and individuation (although for Lacan, the mirror phrase is never fully transcended). In this sense the young man is also not a subject – he is the pre-Oedipal mother. This suggests that the beloved, even when truly ideal – because male – cannot be a subject within Petrarchism; the discourse speaks a self into being within a self-other mode. Schalkwyk (2002: 7, 10), in suggesting that the language of the sonnets is performative, not descriptive, says that Fineman’s account of their working is wrong. For Schalkwyk, the Lacanian structure Fineman supplies is the argument’s limitation, since he says to ask the sonnets to describe a linguistic subject is to fundamentally misrecognise their performative nature. However, in the model suggested here, allowing for the public constitution of the self performed in the sonnets by restoring them to their embodied moment of production (to their Symbolic, in other words) is to return the poetic self to its historical moment of production. Thus the linguistic Lacanian subject can be

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74 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

restored to the historical specificity of its time precisely through insisting on the embodied nature of the language which constitutes its Symbolic achievement, and the social audience who enable its performance. Retaining Fineman’s Lacanian structure allows us a useful way to understand the poet’s two relationships. It is precisely the movement from seeing to speaking that characterises the structure of the sequence (and of individual sonnets), and which accounts for the difference that gender makes. The sonnets to the young man, says Fineman, are sonnets of visionary truth, of sameness. The young man is ‘fair, kind, and true’ (sonnet 105 l. 9): not just blonde but light, which enables vision; not just compassionate but kind to his kind – to those like him, which includes his poet; and for these reasons, not just faithful, but an accurate reflection. Shakespeare’s poet stresses this homology, in lines like, ‘Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise’ (sonnet 62 l. 13). The poet tries to find recourse in this strategy of ideal substitution when he has to deal with the disruptive, the splitting, force introduced by the dark lady, who, Fineman says, is the sign of linguistic and sexual difference. In one of the sonnets which suggests that the two beloveds have paired off, abandoning their poet, he says: That thou hast her it is not all my grief, And yet it may be said I loved her dearly; That she hath thee is of my wailing chief; A loss in love that touches me more nearly… But here’s the joy, my friend and I are one; Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone (sonnet 42). In her Otherness, her by-definition-female duplicity, the woman brings in the ‘difference’ that the poet ‘leaves out’ of his ideal romance with the young man (sonnet 105 l. 8). This version of the Petrarchan woman – the constitutional liar, the woman whose very being ensures her duplicity – is familiar from Greville’s sequence. Her female doubleness is also Irigarayan and in Shakespeare’s sequence, it is the source of her dark and denigrated power. Because the woman is the difference which comes between the homologous men, ‘the difference between likeness and difference is… difference itself’ (Fineman 1986: 16). If the progression from the Imaginary to the Symbolic is the acquisition of modern poetic subjectivity, this subject, by the definition provided by Fineman, is male. And misogynist: Fineman is explicit that in his formulation, Shakespeare’s

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Petrarchism in Early Modern England 75

modern poetic subject’s heterosexual desire is desire for ‘that which is not admired’ (17). In this Symbolic order, ‘that which is not admired’ is the female. In Fineman’s account, the heterosexual lust experienced by Shakespeare’s poetic subject is a disruption of his idealised homologous visionary poetics. Fineman suggests that Shakespeare’s poetic subject experiences the retrospective nature of his ideal homologous love through the debased nature of his heterosexual lust: the very present and the very presence of the lady… will situate the poetics of ideal visionary presence in a retrospective past, marking it as something which exists ‘now’ only as an imaginary ideal after which the poet lusts… her very presence will elicit a desire that her very presence at the same time will frustrate (24). The poet, in other words, lusts after the woman, he experiences lust after he encounters her and loses his young man to her. Her introduction of difference – of femaleness – introduces the awareness of sexual difference necessary to the acquisition of modern poetic (that is to say, of Lacanian, psychoanalytic) subjectivity. At the same time she introduces the awareness of loss, the lost plenitude of the poet’s Imaginary relationship with his young man. She marks heterosexual desire-asloss. As her difference enables the poet’s shift into the realm of the Symbolic, so this move ensures his existence as split subject, as desiring subject, as subject experiencing lack he will ever strive unsuccessfully to fill. The desire of this subject is an awful lust, ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame’. The self entering this language, then, is not only male, but the nature of his desire includes an awareness of its inadequacy, which, since it is desire for the woman, ensures its misogyny. If the Petrarchan poetic subject is at first male, and in need of a (m)other against which he may differentiate himself, and if Shakespeare’s poetic apotheosis of the Petrarchan subject makes this clear even as it also makes clear the problem that a sexually active, desiring, woman entails for the discourse, then a particular gendered inheritance is mapped which implies that the place within English Petrarchism for the female is as passive, quiet, reflective object. The woman who moves into the linguistic realm (the realm of public [hetero]sexual activity) is, as Shakespeare’s sonnets suggest, disgusting. In an erotic mode dependent on an ideal woman, this is annihilating. Fineman’s reading of the subject of Shakespeare’s sonnets suggests a way in to reading the first Petrarchan sequence by an Englishwoman. If

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76 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

Shakespeare’s poet marks the invention of a modern poetic subjectivity, then Wroth’s sequence, whose publication post-dates Shakespeare’s sonnets by some 12 years, illustrates that this subjectivity most easily accommodates a speaker gendered male. Schalkwyk (2002: 55) complicates the idea that the silence of the beloved is only disempowering, by pointing out that the sonnet, in its embodied moment, asks for a response even if it cannot or does not record that response. He suggests that the woman’s voice in Petrarchism can be seen to reflect the social parameters of what is acceptable and possible for her to say and do, and as such that there is space for her presence, even if it is socially-determined presence – because indeed, all presences will have to operate according to such rules, especially in as socially embedded a form as Petrarchism (74).36 By reinserting the sonnets into their original moment of performance, Schalkwyk inflects the beloved’s silence differently. However, he also points out the coercive nature of this moment, how it constitutes the poet’s attempt to speak something into being (29–58). Thus the initial act, though it may bespeak the poet’s dependence on the beloved’s response, is also an attempt to elicit the desired response, to shape the beloved’s words to the poet’s script. We are back to the poetry of praise in order to convince, and to convince in order to mirror the poet’s words back to himself. In Fineman’s terms the mirroring poet is a male poet, which is why Shakespeare’s ideal beloved is also male, the only way to ensure the beloved is a fair, kind, and true reflection. This male poet is made miserable by a beloved whose female meaning – otherness, disruption, deferral, difference – carries the mark of the nature of language. Women who speak in this Petrarchism do have a choice. They can follow a set script which circumscribes both their words and their actions: Stella’s ‘No no no no, my dear, let be’ of Astrophil and Stella’s Fourth Song. Alternatively they violate the norms which entitle them to a place in the discourse: Shakespeare’s sexually active dark lady, by virtue of what she is, cannot be accommodated in Petrarchan staples. Instead, she redefines the terms – after her, oxymoronically in a discourse started by Laura’s blonde beauty, black is beauty’s heir (sonnet 127) with all the (racist) moral implications this suggests. Some women, writing in languages and societies other than English, were able to take cognisance of the choice to reformulate Petrarchan terms before their British counterparts.37 One example is French poet Louise Labé, whose sonnet 23 (published as part of her Euvres in Lyons in 1555) is the response of a beloved.38 Crucially, the sonnet makes it clear that by virtue of her speaking back, she breaks the condition of

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78 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

Ah me! what good is it to me, that once So flawlessly you praised my golden tresses, The beauty of my eyes, which you compared To double Suns, whence Love with wondrous skill Darted the rays, the cause of all your pain? Where are you now, you short-lived sighs and tears? Where is that Death, which was supposed to crown Your steadfast love and your repeated oath? Was this the goal of all your Policy Under the mask of service, to enslave me? Forgive me, dear, that this one time I am Beside myself with anger and contempt: But I am certain that, where’er you are, You’re suffering torture, just as much as I (qtd. and trans. Kuin 1999: 155). The idealising praise of the original lover in this formulation is worthless to the beloved who responds. In occupying the place of the speaker, she must speak to a desire that cannot be met. Both belovedturned-lover and original lover are suffering the torture of unrequited love. The original lover will only love a beloved he cannot have. In responding positively, in speaking of her love, she has lost him. While both of them now suffer, she has lost something by shifting positions as the poem’s protest registers. He has not.39 Once it is developed in English poetry, the Petrarchan framework becomes available for appropriation, refusal, and reworking by English poets. So to suggest that Petrarchism is in some senses fundamentally gendered is not to suggest that these rules set the limit for what the form can do. Rather they determine a way of recognising the structure as well as what various poets do with the structure – in much the same way that Freudian and Lacanian models are simultaneously refused and reformulated in their own terms by feminist theorists like Butler, de Lauretis, Grosz, Irigaray, and Benjamin. The first Englishwoman to engage with Petrarchan structures was the niece of Philip Sidney, Mary Wroth. Drawing on the authorising history of her famous uncle as well

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her status. This shifting of roles nicely echoes Labé’s literary career, where she crossed both gender and class boundaries to become one of the most oppositional Renaissance women writers of love lyrics (Jones 1990: 155–78). The beloved-turned-lover, by definition, is addressing a beloved whose attention is elsewhere:

as of others of her family, Wroth wrote a sequence which demonstrates the gendered nature of the discourse she entered. In doing so she was the first of many women poets in English to find ways ‘to maneuver within the chastity-silence equation, men’s ownership of education and publishing, and the masculine perspective built into erotic conventions’ (Jones 1990: 2). In the case of Petrarchism, poetic tradition and social ideology comprise the matrix that asserts its constitutive power on the subjects who speak. Nevertheless, these subjects have available to them the capacity for negotiation40 with the conventions they flout, as Wroth’s poetry makes clear.

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4

Mary Wroth was the first Englishwoman to publish a Petrarchan sequence, which she did in 1621 when her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus appeared appended to her pastoral prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. The events surrounding this act of publication are themselves telling for our purposes, as will be discussed below. Her poetry reveals the gendered limitations of the Petrarchan self-other mode of subject constitution, and of the ontology of desire as lack. Wroth’s sequence makes it clear that as she inherits it after the poetic work of the Tudor period, the poetic subject of desire in this crucial Western tradition is supposed to be male. In so asserting, I do not wish to return to a theme already covered in Wroth criticism, some of which found in her work proof of the virtual impossibility of a woman speaking at all within the confines of dominant Renaissance gender ideology. Wroth’s poetics in these readings figure either the terrible cost to a female subject of speaking in public; or the marking of a private, internal, oppressed female subjectivity; or both. Subsequent to these readings, many scholars have found other ways to interpret Wroth’s poetry, for instance refiguring silence or interiority as refusal or subversion, or recasting her suffering Petrarchan poet as political spokeswoman, as successful artist, or as heroine.1 In the context of a reading of Wroth’s work as informed by and concerned with a community of women (see also Feinberg 1991: 175–6, 179, 189), Naomi Miller (1996: 36) resists the discourses of victimisation that have tended to accrue to early modern women writers: ‘to start from the assumption of their passivity, objectification, and lack of control is to reinscribe them yet again according to the male-authored figurations of gender which their voices attempt to engage and revise’. By insisting Wroth’s poetry reveals the gendered nature of the genre 80

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The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth

she inherits I do not mean to suggest that we should then read her as silenced by it. In her struggle to speak from within Petrarchism she is the first in a trajectory of women poets writing in English. By charting her difficulties with the language that constructs her poet, Wroth is the first writer to offer comment from a woman on a specific phallocentric Symbolic language. She begins a process that Edna St Vincent Millay, in another time and place, completes, as I suggest in Chapter 7. I will be arguing not that the sequence is evidence of the female lover’s simple silencing, but that in the emphasis it inevitably places on her poetic voice, it reveals her poet’s distance from and difficulty with the position of lover in Petrarchism. This means her access to the expression of her desire in public, and thus of her Petrarchan subjectivity, registers as impeded. It is not that she cannot speak of her love and thus her self; she has written a sequence that does just that. Rather, the point is that in entering a discourse whose subject position is gendered, her poet’s gender becomes an issue in the poetry and the male-as-norm is revealed as a constituting assumption. In this framework, Petrarchism as Wroth inherited it does not offer ‘a potential model for her own subjectivity’ (Dubrow 1995: 161), as some have argued (Dubrow, and Moore [2000: 127] amongst them). Instead, as Irigaray’s theory enables us to see, Petrarchism’s seventeenth-century Symbolic is revealed to have no assured place for a woman to be its subject. Miller (1996: 4) explicitly finds Irigaray’s ideas useful in explaining Wroth’s representations of women as ‘the speaking subjects of difference’. She argues that ‘Wroth’s figurations of gender are not simply oppositional, but in many ways ‘other’ in emphasis’ (ibid.). Miller reads Wroth’s sequence in the context of other women writers of lyrics in order to suggest that she is not an isolated woman struggling in the dark against a male-dominated tradition (35–6. See also Smith 2000: 415).2 While such readings are undoubtedly at least partially correct – the Continental women writers of lyrics are evidence of a community of sorts – I find no evidence of this sense of community in the sequence itself. While it may be true that Wroth’s sense of herself as an author developed in such a context (see Miller 1996: 143–81), in my reading of the sequence it is precisely Pamphilia’s extreme version of Petrarchan isolation that is of poetic and thematic importance. As will be discussed in more detail below, in this reading Pamphilia repeatedly insists on her need to remain out of the public eye (see Masten 1991; Distiller 2001b). There is a further complication to reading Wroth’s poetry as driven by a figuration of gender, where the fact of the poet’s femininity is

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The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth 81

seen as some sort of a problem for her access to the power of the subject, however partial that power must always be. Christopher Warley (2005) has recently cast early modern sonnet sequences as actively forging a new sense of social order, involved as they are in bespeaking a courtier subjectivity in terms that seek social empowerment. These sonnet sequences share ‘a social desire, a yearning for an idealized social order that, in turn, articulates the social position of the speaker’ (6). Warley replaces Fineman’s ‘poetic subjectivity’ with ‘social distinction’ as the crucial work done for modernity by the Petrarchan sonnet (ibid.). This classing work is initially accomplished through gender, which is ‘a primary discourse by which this tradition is conceptualized’ (14). Reading Wroth’s speaker not only for her gender but also for her class identity, Warley finds a conservative poetics of nobility in the sequence, which seeks an older order through its identifications with the past.3 Warley (177) endorses William Kennedy’s (2003: 163–80, 215–32) reading which emphasises the similarities between Wroth’s poet and Sidney’s based on their ideology of noble rank. With a different emphasis, Rosalind Smith (2000: 416) finds a similar nostalgia at work in the sequence: in hearkening back to the court of Elizabeth, the sequence stages a withdrawal from its own Jacobean context. If Wroth’s sequence works through its conservative alliance with and yearning for an older social system whose time is passing, experienced in part via her identification with her famous Petrarchan uncle and father, then the radical gendered voice I am locating here cannot be read out of this context. I have been suggesting that the social positioning of the courtier poet is precisely what is responsible for the gendering of the position of speaker in the genre. I am insisting on rank’s imbrication with gender and with historical circumstance. At the same time I would not wish to dilute the urgency of gendering in the context of the development of a Petrarchan poetics in English. The courtier poets struggle with the definitions of honour and constancy in their uncertain and rapidly changing social worlds. In part, their project is to redefine their positions by reworking these terms in their favour. For Warley (2005: 178), it is finally the concern with honour that establishes the emphasis of Wroth’s sequence: The ‘honor’ in the final sonnet is ‘not only… sexual honor… but… also… the other traditional sense of honor, the one Astrophil returns to again and again: honor as the outward sign of an inner nobility… Her nobility is proven, in the sense of both tested and established’. Such a reading, while exceptionally productive in many ways, misses the difference gender makes to notions of honour and constancy in the period. As Anthony Low (1993: 27) has

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documented, for the courtier poets of the Tudor courts the definition of honour was changing from aristocratic noble virtues and ideals to ‘social climbing and competition for spoils’. Low also identifies Sidney’s Astrophil as the poet for whom an older, more aristocratic code of honour and nobility proves inadequate. The feudal relationship troped in the lover’s adoration of his mistress ‘obliges the lover, if he wishes to escape the stain of shameful recreancy, to remain loyal to his love and to his mistress until death, regardless of the length and intensity of his suffering or the small chance of success’ (21). This is why Astrophil cannot honourably give up his commitment to Stella, despite the public dishonour it brings.4 The love to which he has sworn his fealty inspires him to perform as a gentleman even as it causes his status to be compromised. Low finds ‘the theme of honour’ (21) in Sidney’s sequence is ‘deeply ambivalent’ (22) for this reason: Astrophil discovers in the course of his sequence that the older values to which he is committed will no longer serve him. Thus the nostalgia identified by Warley in Wroth’s sequence could belong equally to Sidney’s. Both poets could be seen to hearken back to a time when honour and constancy meant something more stable, and was associated with birth. However, Sidney’s Astrophil, for all his dissatisfaction with his lot, also responds in part by seeking to redefine notions of virtue to include desire. If he can accomplish this task he will have made room for his importunities to be recognised and validated as honourable. In the end, his refusal to renounce his desire becomes proof of his noble constancy, even as Pamphilia’s decision to give up her desire is proof of her noble constancy. While both attempts to rework access to nobility may implicate each poet in a nostalgic, backward-looking social politics of rank, their different genders determine the different outcomes of each of their attempts’ relation to the poetry’s desire. And if, in both a Petrarchan and a psychoanalytic model, desire is the starting point for subjectivity, then to renounce desire is to mark a problem with access to the Symbolic that is the realm of phallocentric subjectivity. Desire – or at least its public, Petrarchan performance – is precisely what Pamphilia has to hide. A woman’s honour was tied to her reputation, at least in theory (aristocratic women, among them Penelope Rich [Hulse 1986: 275] – the ‘real-life’ Stella – and Wroth herself, were clearly capable of extramarital liaisons). For the public discourse of female honour, chastity is crucial. Wroth’s Pamphilia does not insist on the right to include her desire in her definition of virtue because to do so would be to compromise her femininity (think of Greville’s debased Caelica). The danger of being seen to desire is an insistent theme in the poetry, and as such brings together both issues of social context and of gender.

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Pamphilia to Amphilanthus stages an engagement with the Petrarchan rules of speaking desire that reveal the profoundly gendered nature of those rules. Wroth’s poetic speaker has to manage the contradiction of being both actively and publicly desiring, as the Petrarchan form by definition inscribes, and a woman who merits admiration – mutually exclusive positions within this social and poetic framework. The conditions of the sequence’s production themselves bespeak the problematic status of a woman claiming the ‘authority presumed to be masculine’ which publication entailed (Boose 1991: 204. See also Wall 1993). Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, accused Wroth of slandering his family in one of the episodes in the Urania. Accordingly, Denny wrote Wroth a poem, the original title of which referred to the relevant characters in her romance. ‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Seralius’ also appeared in seventeenth-century commonplace books under the title, ‘To the Lady Mary Wroth for writing the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’. Denny’s main terms of censure are revealing. He attacks her behaviour in terms of her gender. This entails the reprimand that she should stick to writing about religious matters, no doubt a nod in the direction of her famous aunt Mary Sidney: Hermaphrodite in show, in deed a monster As by thy words and works all men may conster Thy wrathful spite conceived an idle book… Wherein thou strikes at some mans noble blood thine… …vain comparison for want of wit Takes up the oystershell to play with it Yet common oysters such as thine gape wide And take in pearls or worse at every tide… How easy wer’t to pay thee with thine own Returning that which thou thy self hast thrown And write a thousand lies of thee at least… By which thy plainly seest in thine own glass How easy tis to bring a lie to pass Thus hast thou made thyself a lying wonder Fools and their babbles seldom part asunder Work o’the Works leave idle books alone For wise and worthier women have written none.5 Her act of writing negates her femininity, making her a hermaphrodite and a monster. Worse than this, his reference to her ‘common oyster’

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gaping wide to receive all the rubbish of the sea can be read not only as an attack on her mind and her ability to reason, but as an insulting and pornographic slur on her sexual behaviour. Wroth may have had illegitimate children with a man with whom she had a relationship for most of her life (her cousin, William Herbert, possibly the Amphilanthus of the sequence’s title), but Denny’s insult implies that she is indiscriminately sexually available. He thus attempts to undermine what she has written by implying she is a shameful failure to her ‘sex’. Wroth replied with a poem that copies the rhymes of Denny’s line for line. Called ‘Railing Rimes returned upon the Author by Mistress Mary Wroth’, it replies: Hermaphrodite in sense in Art a monster As by your railing rimes the world may conster Your spiteful words against a harmless book Shows that an ass much like the sire doth look Men truly noble fear no touch of blood… Can such comparisons seem the want of wit When oysters have enflamed your blood with it But it appears your guiltiness gaped wide And filled with dirty doubt your brains swollen tide… How easily do you now receive your own Turned on your self from whence the squib was thrown… By which you live to see in your own glass How hard it is for you to lie and pass Thus you have made yourself a lying wonder Fools and their pastimes should not part asunder Take this then now let railing rimes alone For wise and worthier men have written none. Since she cannot return the attack in a specifically gendered manner, because he has not transgressed socially accepted gender norms, she instead shows him to be a fool. Nevertheless, the Urania was retracted in December of the year it was published.6 This was perhaps due to Wroth’s weakened socio-political status as she battled to make ends meet as an impoverished widow, banished from courtly favour. She expended a fair amount of energy trying to reclaim all the copies of the Urania. In her letter to the politically influential Duke of Buckingham she says: ‘My Lord,… I have with all care caused the sale of [my book] to be forbidden… which from the first were sold against my mind I never purposing to have had them published’ (qtd. Roberts 1983: 236).

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Whether or not this is true, she asks Buckingham to procure her the king’s warrant to force all copies of the book in circulation to be returned. The extent of the displeasure she had incurred may be inferred from a letter she wrote to William Feilding, Earl of Denbigh, in which she enclosed copies of both of the furious letters Denny had sent her, in the first of which he tells her to repent you of so many ill spent years of so vain a book and… redeem the time with writing as large a volume of heavenly lays and holy love as you have of lascivious tales and amorous toys. Significantly, he invokes her aunt, who translated so many godly books and especially the holy psalms of David, that no doubt now she sings in the choir of Heaven those divine meditations… which being left us here on earth will beget her daily more and more glory in heaven as others by [whom] shall be enlightened… with which prayer for you I end (239). Denny is invoking the commonplace stereotype of the pious woman, with its concomitant implication that a woman’s only active duty is to spiritually uplift others with her purity and goodness (the role of the Petrarchan mistress, and, arguably, the role of the woman within Petrarchism). Thus that Wroth wrote about ‘lascivious tales’ instead of ‘holy love’ is not only outrageous but selfish and unnatural. This stricture on her right to write about worldly matters is apposite to her poet Pamphilia’s difficulties in articulating her desire publicly, a difficulty she never resolves in the course of her sequence. Smith (2000: 413) emphasises that Denny’s critique ‘was only a skirmish in an attack vigorously answered by Wroth and taken by her from the level of private correspondence to wider circles of manuscript circulation’. We should not underplay Wroth’s agency by insisting on her victimisation and silencing in the episode, she says. The point is well taken. Yet Wroth was forced to recall all the copies of her manuscript. This squabble illustrates that to venture into the realm of circulation beyond a controlled family sphere, in order especially to make public display of apparently personal matters (one of the functions of Petrarchism), was an activity fraught with specific risks for women. It indicates, too, that Wroth herself was aware of these rules, and subject to them. This was the case, her poetry suggests, as she engaged in the task of

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The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth 87

… one heart flaming more than all the rest The goddess held, and put it to my breast, Dear son, now shoot said she… He her obeyed, and martyred my poor hart, I, waking, hoped as dreams it would depart Yet since: O me, a lover I have been (ll. 9–14). For the heart of the poet to be singled out from ‘all the rest’ is typically Petrarchan, as is the idea that the speaker is in pain as a result of her love. Here, however, stylised Petrarchan pain is inflected by the double torment: Pamphilia’s heart, already burning, is subsequently martyred by Cupid in a striking image of impalement. Venus’s cruelty is notable. The emphasis that results from the intense doubling repeats in this opening sonnet. Pamphilia invokes both an image and a dream. By supplanting the acquisition of her lover-status to a dream within an image, she actively defers the poetic speaker from the Petrarchan staples into which this opening sonnet simultaneously inserts her. Throughout the sequence Pamphilia displays an awareness of Petrarchan conventions by intensely invoking, and simultaneously deferring from, them. Perhaps one of the most discussed conventions in terms of its implications for the traditional beloved is the blazon. Nancy Vickers (1981) has psychoanalysed and deconstructed the use of the blazon in Petrarch’s poetry, in order to insist on the gendered implications of this mode of description which, she says, has extended beyond the Petrarchan into wider cultural fields both then and now. Petrarch’s descriptive project scatters Laura’s body into pieces, in order, ultimately, to see himself. The blazon, Vickers suggests, is the response of a man caught looking with desire at a powerful woman, a man transgressing the limits of what is allowed. In response to the potential disintegration with which he is threatened as a result (this figures castration anxiety), he dismembers her, reducing her to a collection of silent objects. The typical mode of description of the beloved in Petrarchism, then, is implicated in a gendered language of power and a related system of domination. Elsewhere Vickers (1990: 96) asserts that the blazon is, following Cixous, a ‘“libidinal and cultural – hence,

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writing a Petrarchan sequence from the point of view of a woman lover. That Wroth is actively engaged in appropriating a tradition is clear in the first sonnet of the cycle. Lying asleep, in ‘Death’s image’ (l. 2), Pamphilia dreams of Venus and Cupid:

political, typically masculine – economy” of description’ implicated in homosocial competition. It is significant to note in this regard that Wroth’s sequence contains no examples of blazon of the beloved.7 Instead, she obsessively splits herself into parts. Her eyes and her heart are the most frequently apostrophised.8 In Song 3 (P21), a radical fragmentation of self can be found which moves from the physical into the psychic: Stay, my thoughts, do not aspire To vain hopes of high desire: See you not all means bereft To enjoy? No joy is left; Yet still methinks my thoughts do say Some hopes do live amid dismay;… Thought hath yet some comfort given Which despair hath from us driven… (ll. 1–10). The fragmentation typical of the Petrarchan lady is internalised: within the Song she is separate from her thoughts, a kind of dual vision of personal subjectivity: ‘despair hath [comfort] from us driven’. Turning explicitly inward, the first female Petrarchan lover does not find a subject position. Instead she becomes multiple: the Irigarayan not-one, outside of the Symbolic economy which cannot accommodate her. The intensification of the emotions informing Petrarchan tropes which functions to effect a distancing from them is also found in the ways Pamphilia utilises the typical trope of the lover’s lost heart. The peculiarly painful inflection established in the first sonnet continues throughout the sequence (it extends to the trope of burning with desire, as will be seen below). Punning on ‘part’, and thus establishing an economy of parts, she says to Amphilanthus, In your journey take my heart… So in part, we shall not part… But can I live having lost Chieftest part of me… Yet dear heart go, soon return As good there, as here to burn (Song 4 [P28]). The suffering, burning lover is typical to the genre; the lover split into parts by her very identity as Petrarchan lover is not, at least not in English. She has to cope with the lack which she understands as being

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But if you will be kind… Send me your heart which in mine’s place shall feed… There shall it see the sacrifices made Of pure, and spotless love which shall not fade While soul, and body are together found (P30 ll. 9–14). By conceptualising herself as having an empty space whose possibility for acquiring content depends on what he can supply, she invariably invokes the nothing whose pun on sexual difference was contemporary slang. She also anticipates the Lacanian phallus, the transcendental signifier. There are further consequences for Pamphilia’s conception of her heart’s displacement. The image of her lover’s voracious heart feeding inside her breast and voyeuristically viewing her innermost ‘sacrifices’, gives a violent, uncomfortable twist to the typical Petrarchan trope of the lost heart. That she explicitly emphasises the ‘pure, and spotless’ nature of her love takes on a gendered resonance, given that her need for Amphilanthus’s heart is an expression of desire. By contrasting her beloved’s rapacious, gazing heart to her own ‘pure, and spotless love’, Pamphilia withdraws from the reality of the sexual importunity vocalised by, for example, Astrophil, who as a male lover can say, ‘But ah, Desire still cries, give me some food’ (sonnet 71 l. 14). By purging her longing of desire, Pamphilia remains within the public discourse of the good woman. She also takes on the identity typically available to a woman within Petrarchism, she who does not desire. In psychoanalytic terms, she who does not desire is no subject at all. Pamphilia’s need to purge her poetry of her desire because of the rules for speaking of desire for women, results in the image of her displaced heart – the gap at the centre – remaining a lacuna. The desire that would enable the movement into subjectivity is lacking, is replaced by lack. Absence and loss, as typical Petrarchan motifs, are central to Wroth’s poetry, but again their invocation is different in quality, bringing an absoluteness which contains no hope for change: ‘The missing of the sun awhile makes night/ But absence of my joy sees never Light’ (P23 ll. 13–14). The fundamental absence at the heart, and in the heart, of the speaker of these poems sits uncomfortably, as does

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caused by the giving away of her heart. Thus having engaged in the activity of giving away the ‘chieftest part’ of any lover’s self, she goes on to predicate a fundamental absence within herself which can only be filled by his organ:

Pamphilia herself, with the courtly, public nature of Petrarchism. This publicity is something of which Petrarchan lovers are well aware. Astrophil defines himself against those myriad poets who ‘poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes…/ do sing’ (sonnet 15 ll. 7–8), and although he may be staking his claim as an inventor, as opposed to a slavish imitator with nothing interesting to add to an exhausted tradition, his poetry still rests firmly and confidently on the tradition he derides. Without poor Petrarch’s long deceased woes, there would be no Astrophil; and he needs the public awareness of the Petrarchan tradition in order to set himself up as a true lover, not merely a poet utilising a tradition. ‘I can speak what I feel, and feel as much as they’, he says, ‘But think that all the Map of my state I display/ When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love’ (sonnet 6 ll. 12–14). Similarly Pamphilia says, ‘It is not love which you poor fools do deem/ That doth appear by fond, and outward shows’ (P46 ll. 1–2). It is a typical strategy of the best Petrarchan lovers to identify themselves as being truly in love, and not merely with the poetry they can produce from a Petrarchan situation. After all, poetry of praise that does not profess its praise as genuine is no praise at all. Both Astrophil and Shakespeare’s Will display this awareness (Shakespeare’s poet says, ‘I will not praise, that purpose not to sell’ [sonnet 21 l. 14], and, ‘Who… can say more/ Than this rich praise: that you alone are you…/ You to your beauteous blessings add a curse,/ Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse’ [sonnet 84]). Significant here is that Pamphilia’s responses to her context display, not an opportunity to enhance her own status as a lover, but a self-imposed deprivation of meaning – another self-created absence. Firstly, she is very aware of a need to be silent in order to protect herself – she has to ensure that she does not ‘betray my heart’s most secret thought’ (P39 l. 2) – which directly contradicts the ‘relentlessly public’ nature of Petrarchism (Masten 1991: 76). Silence is a feature of Renaissance love poetry (see Braden 1990). Witness Shakespeare’s poet’s insistence that, looking on the young man, ‘we…/… lack tongues to praise’ (sonnet 106), or Astrophil’s ‘What may words say, or what may words not say,/ Where truth itself must speak like flattery?’ (sonnet 35 ll. 1–2). However, not to be able to speak because you have not the skill, because you cannot, is very different to not being able to speak because you are afraid to, because you may not. As a woman in a Renaissance context, Pamphilia does not have the same access to the language of Petrarchan love and desire as Sidney’s Astrophil or Shakespeare’s Will. Male poets could enter into a public debate about the

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problems of expressing sincere love within a tradition of praise poetry; officially, women were not to enter public debate at all, let alone one concerned with the expression of desire. In this way historical possibilities inform the Symbolic, and the position of desiring speaker is marked by gender as an informing constituent. In order to avoid having to speak her love, then, Pamphilia says to those around her: Good now, be still, and do not me torment With multitudes of questions, be at rest, … must I ever be oppressed With your tongue torture which will ne’er be spent? Well then I see no way but this will fright That Devil speech; Alas I am possessed, And mad folks senseless are of wisdom’s right (P52 ll. 1–11). Her words, the very entities of subjectivity for the Petrarchan poet and for the Lacanian subject, are rendered worse than nonsensical: ‘I am possessed/ And mad folks senseless are of wisdom’s right.’ Speech becomes a devil, the torture instrument of the outside world from which Pamphilia must hide her love, and therefore her words – that is, her desire, her desiring self, her self. While she has succeeded in producing a Petrarchan sonnet-sequence she has also to be seen to recant that very sequence, as the Symbolic register in which she must attempt to work has no pre-constituted space for her. Thus as she invokes the tradition so she simultaneously defers from it. In Pamphilia to Amphilanthus the process of self-constitution is a hollow activity, an activity of absence. Wroth expressed for the first time the absence of the female lover in the Petrarchan Symbolic. This is a remarkable paradoxical achievement. If the female lover is absent, it is in part because the gaze of her beloved is not focussed on her. A major Petrarchan trope, the power of the beloved’s eyes, is taken up by Pamphilia in ways that suggest it cannot function for her as it traditionally has done in the genre. The notion that the lover uses the beloved as a mirror (from which he propels himself into the Symbolic and into subjectivity) relies implicitly on the presence of light. The act of self-mirroring can only take place in the light of love, and the source of this light is the beloved’s eyes. Amphilanthus, whose name means ‘lover of two’, must constantly be reminded of his role: ‘Dear famish not what you your self gave food;…/ Your sight is all the food I do desire/ Then sacrifice me not in hidden fire’ (P15 ll. 1–10).

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Although she addresses Amphilanthus’s eyes repeatedly, there are other sets of eyes that also function as important presences in the poetry. For male courtly poets, the attention of the eyes of others are sometimes as much to the point as any recognition or favour from the beloved, as we have seen in the previous chapter. For Pamphilia, the ever-present eyes of others are an ongoing problem: Take heed mine eyes, how you your looks do cast Least they betray my heart’s most secret thought; Be true unto your selves for nothing’s bought More dear then doubt which brings a lover’s fast. Catch you all watching eyes, ere they be past, Or take yours fixed where your best love hath sought The pride of your desires; let them be taught Their faults for shame, they could no truer last; Then look, and look with joy for conquest won Of those that searched your hurt in double kind; So you kept safe, let them themselves look blind Watch, gaze, and mark till they to madness run, While you, mine eyes enjoy full sight of love Contented that such happinesses move (P39). To be seen to gaze, to be caught casting your looks, is to ‘betray my heart’s most secret thought’. The angling metaphor – Pamphilia’s eyes must ‘cast’ her looks carefully and ‘catch’ all watching eyes – suggests that this is a world where bait is laid in order to create situations of betrayal. Petrarchan love, which was designed to be sung to the skies, is here the lover’s ‘most secret thought’. Pamphilia’s ‘eyes enjoy full sight of love’, but only after the main instruction of the poem is achieved: once they have caught the other watching eyes. They first have to ‘look… for conquest won/ Of those that searched your hurt’. The right to gaze on the beloved is deferred until after Pamphilia’s victory over the other eyes in the poem. Enjoyment of the full sight of love is not experienced in the poem, but only anticipated. The terms of the imagined (or imaginary) victory draw on the traditional Petrarchan idea of a conquest but here the war is not with the beloved or with Love, but with the other watching eyes. These eyes ‘searched your hurt in double kind’. The ‘double kind’ here extends to the two possible meanings of ‘hurt’: wound and heart. Pamphilia’s Petrarchan heart is always wounded. In P1 it is impaled on Cupid’s flaming arrow as we have seen, and as a Petrarchan lover her

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heart experiences the pain of unrequited love. There is a sense in this poem of the searing gazes of others opening her hurt heart, looking into her wound. Like the image of being ravished by others’ gazes in P29, there is the sexual connotation of another kind of privacy having been violated by these watching eyes. To be seen to be gazing is expressed in terms that link the shame of being an active gazer to the shame of being sexually revealed – an implication that only works for, and is only relevant to, a female lover in a specific personal-political context. It is not surprising that Pamphilia emphasises to her eyes that in order for them to be safe, they need to keep watch and not to be watched. They must give these others nothing to see: ‘So you kept safe, let them themselves look blind/ Watch, gaze, and mark till they to madness run’. In a frenzy of frustration, jealousy and curiosity, these invading ravishers will ‘run to madness’ when Pamphilia’s self-protection works to hide her own gazing. She cannot be seen to be looking with desire on Amphilanthus. That is the scandal for which the others look. It is only when the watching eyes are diverted with their own frenzy, deprived of reason and so of the ability to watch carefully, that Pamphilia’s eyes can gaze contentedly on her beloved. However, even here, the suggestion is not that she will have gone through all this torment with the outside world in order to create a safe space in which to receive the gaze of the beloved. Rather, she will be contented that he exists. There is no mirroring or returned moment of recognition of her secret glance. This is a very different situation to that of the usual Petrarchan lover, who is pierced or branded by the arrows or beams of love that shoot from his mistress’s eyes. Once again, Pamphilia’s relation to a typical Petrarchan experience is mediated through the social implications of her gender, resulting in an intensification of suffering and a distance – or difference – from the usual Petrarchan positions. In this sequence, then, Wroth repudiates the binary on which sexual difference depends, by refusing, or being unable to, to invoke any of the strategies which rely on the self-other mode of subjectconstitution. She cannot use her beloved as a mirror, because she has no access to the right to gaze; any gazing she does must be internal, ‘in my heart, unseen of jealous eye’. Furthermore, he is no use to her as an ideal Image because he is always already looking elsewhere, as his name suggests. I have been suggesting that the stylised Petrarchan lover’s pain has a more intense quality in this sequence, notable from its first sonnet. While some poets resist or despair of their position as unrequited lover, as an expression of frustration or impatience, this element of the

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discourse is notably transformed in Wroth’s sequence. In her poetry Pamphilia repeatedly mourns her status as Petrarchan lover: ‘if with grief I now must coupled be/ Sorrow I’ll wed: Despair thus governs me’ (P10 ll. 13–14); ‘I should not have been made this stage of woe/ Where sad disasters have their open show’ (P48 ll. 13–14). She distrusts Petrarchan desire, because of its public aspect. What is enabling for the male poet is compromising for the female speaker. Wroth’s subject’s entry into the realm of public desire is accompanied by ‘Fear to be marked’, that is, seen (but, perhaps, unconsciously, also gendered in the terms offered by the Petrarchan economy): When I beheld the Image of my dear With greedy looks mine eyes would that way bend, Fear, and desire did inwardly contend; Fear to be marked, desire to draw still near, And in my soul a spirit would appear, Which boldness warranted, and did pretend To be my genius, yet I durst not lend My eyes in trust where others seemed so clear… Yet in my hart unseen of jealous eye The truer Image shall in triumph lye (P98). The return to her heart, to the image of the beloved engraved there, is typically Petrarchan (as in Sidney’s famous line, ‘Fool, said my Muse to me, Look in thy heart and write [AS sonnet 1 l. 14] ). What is noteworthy in this, and other poems to this effect in the sequence, is that the act of being seen by others’ ‘jealous eye[s]’ is the reason for Pamphilia’s retreat inward to an ideal Imaginary state. The entry into the Petrarchan Symbolic is a move she constantly resists, and yet it is this move that the Petrarchan poet typically embraces; indeed, it is his raison d’être: the image of the mistress inspires his writing. Arguably, her poet is unable to embrace the gendered position available to her in this economy. If one of the models for desire in Western thought accounts for the lack that enables it by seeing the female body as lacking, Wroth’s Pamphilia’s desire, lacking its object differently, reveals the cost for a desiring female speaker of the psychoanalytic logic which feminises lack. Instead, as I have suggested, her lack comes to stand for the lack of the subject gendered female in such an economy. Her lack, circularly, inscribes the nothing on which the until-now-always-male Petrarchan lover’s speaking depends for its thing-ness, its signifying phallic presence (albeit, in Lacanian terms, an illusion of presence).

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Her Petrarchan desire, rather than offering her the (always-deferred) chance for redemption, is obsessively cast and recast in the sequence as dangerous, destructive rather than constituting. Petrarchan poets typically burn with desire as evidence of their suffering; Pamphilia is immolated by hers. From the sequence’s opening sonnet, where her ‘heart blazing more than all the rest’ is impaled by Cupid’s arrow, marking her in typically Petrarchan fashion as the isolated lover, the trope of ‘the fires of love’ (P33 l. 14) is a primary image in the sequence. But the fire image, although conventional, is unconventionally apocalyptic in this instance: Pamphilia’s ‘soul, and dying heart entire’ are likened to ‘the ashes of some happy fire’ (P15 ll. 5–7); ‘Mine eyes can scarce sustain the flames my heart/ Doth trust in them my passions to impart… Yet love I will till I but ashes prove’ (P55). The subjectivity brought into being by this desire is ultimately a kind of burnt offering, something reduced to ashes, to nothing but traces. At the end of the sequence, Pamphilia renounces this fire, fully aware that in rejecting desire she is choosing silence: My muse… lay thyself to rest… Write you no more… Leave the discourse of Venus and her son To young beginners and their brains inspire With stories of great love, and from that fire Get heat to write… (P103 ll. 1–11). She opts for ‘constancy’ in the final line of this last poem, which in this context signifies both unchanging emotion, and chastity. Pamphilia’s choice of chastity, although it means she has to stop writing, is also a choice to renounce this suffering without end, without profit, without hope, that is her gendered experience of Petrarchan subjectivity. While the suffering poet is a typically Petrarchan position, what it leaves out in Pamphilia’s case is the possibility of the pleasure of the self performed in, achieving, the Symbolic. This, I suggest, is because as a subject gendered female, her access to selfhood is compromised by the economy which seeks to define her. For Jeff Masten (1991: 81), ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus clears a space for a nascent subject without articulating what it is that fills that emergent… space’. As the first woman to attempt in English to enter a discourse which had previously been reserved for the exploration of a subjectivity explicitly gendered male, Wroth’s poetry marks her subject’s remove, and removal, from its Symbolic economy.

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In the terms of this economy, and indeed, because of the male poet’s fluid subjectivity, the ‘distinction between subject and object’ in the discourse remains ‘crucial’ (Clarke 1997: 292). Despite Miller’s (1996: 12) understandable dislike of what she calls ‘victim feminism’, the object in Petrarchism was initially the female beloved, whose function implicated the discourse in a gendered system of domination. The importance of this fact extends beyond a recognition of the workings of gender in one Western discourse of desire; together with other feminist work to this extent, it implies that the Lacanian Symbolic in the first instance has place only for the heterosexual male subject, implicated also in formations of class.9 The implications of this link between the modern matrix of subjectivityformation and Petrarchism as a language of desire within the sonnet, which produces a self-contained linguistic speaking subject, have not been sufficiently noted. The connection suggests that, just as Fineman insists on the importance of Shakespeare’s poet’s subjectivity for the modern poetic subject, so should scholars of Wroth be insisting on her importance. Wroth is the first woman to enter the amorous sequence as its other, and to begin to speak back. This makes her important not just to readers of the sonnet or of a woman’s literary history, but to students of cultural and/ or psychoanalytic textuality as well. Petrarchism operates within a phallic realm. This means that as a language it does not convey intersubjective experience (Benjamin 1988: 125). It cannot represent the other as a self and not an object. Desire in this model is desire for self-constitution, not mutual recognition between two subjects (126). Jessica Benjamin suggests that an ‘intersubjective mode of desire is expressed in spatial rather than symbolic representation’ (ibid.), and that the dominant Symbolic order of the West, our shared language, is not able to accommodate the intersubjective. Benjamin discusses Winnicott’s deployment of the idea of space as the means through which an intersubjective mode of being – and thus of representation – is possible. Winnicott sees the gendered-female idea of inner space and containment not as passivity, as is traditional, but as the ability to hold oneself – an ability crucial to introspection and self-discovery. This ‘inside’ is the internal version of the safe transitional space [necessary to the child’s development]… that allows us to feel that our impulses come from within and so are authentically our own (128). Pamphilia’s intense interiority can be recast as an other language in these terms, if we replace the traditional understanding of woman as

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the sign of lack within a phallic economy with an intersubjective mode of representation. This is one way for the woman within Petarchism to write back, to alter the terms to enable her object-status to become subject-status without repeating the self-other structure which by definition would exclude her. Wroth’s poetry illustrates the difficulties facing the first woman writer within Petrarchism to move out of the position of object. She cannot access the position of desiring subject within a Petrarchan Symbolic economy. At the same time it provides the signs of an alternative possible language of the self, a spatial language, troped in the poetry as internal, where the other self can express itself, beyond the patriarchal heterosexual economy where woman cannot occupy the ‘I’. Benjamin is careful not to allow this model to become an Irigarayan celebration of essential female difference, even as it allows for an Irigarayan recognition of the multiplicity of desire and of zones of pleasure on the female body, the body without the single focus of the phallus (130). ‘The point’, for Benjamin, is not to invalidate the dominant mode of representation,… the world of phallic, symbolic functioning…, but to challenge its privilege in expressing, and so circumscribing, desire… The phallus as emblem of desire has represented the meeting of subject and object in a complementarity that idealizes one side and devalues the other. The discovery of another dimension of desire can transform that opposition into the vital tension between subjects – into recognition between self and other self (130–1, 132). This is the intersubjective ideal. Wroth’s poetry hints at the alternative space for expressing the desiring woman as subject of the poetry, but, with its painful awareness of the constituting force of the social world,10 it also demonstrates how difficult it is for Pamphilia to make this space within a phallic Symbolic economy – within, in other words, Petrarchism. It is patently not impossible, and if images of spatiality and the reworking of notions of constancy are two strategies, then when the amorous sonnet sequence is taken up again by Englishwomen roughly 200 years later, it becomes clear that there are still others.

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5

With the exception of Milton, who made important formal and thematic contributions to the English sonnet,1 virtually no one wrote sonnets in the seventeenth century (Houston 2003: 152; Going 1976: 15). In the eighteenth century, when sonnets did start to come back into vogue, they tended to be as single poems, capturing a thought or moment, describing a landscape or speaking to an event or person in the poet’s life. They were ‘sonnets of sensibility’ (Curran 1986: 30) rather than the kind of extended meditations on identity that followed on from Petrarch. Amatory sonnet sequences were well and truly out of fashion; none appear to have been written between Wroth’s 1621 sequence and the first sequence examined in some detail in this chapter, Mary Robinson’s 1796 publication of the sequence of 44 sonnets, Sappho and Phaon. Even at the sonnet’s height in the late Victorian era, the next time in English literary history after the 1590s when the sonnet attained the same kind of prominence as it had in Elizabeth’s late reign, amatory poems either as single sonnets or as sequences were not as popular as they were during the Elizabethan era (Phelan 2005: 107–8). Nineteenth-century writers of sonnets on a wide range of themes (such as landscape, travel, religion, philosophy, melancholy, or specific individuals) included Wordsworth,2 Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Hopkins, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti,3 as well as scores of less canonised writers.4 Along with these important male sonneteers,5 some women writers were engaging with the Petrarchan Symbolic, and developing strategies for expressing desiring female voices within this tradition.6 As the English canon began to be formalised as part of a concerted nationalist and colonial agenda (Viswanathan 1989), the position of poetess (distinct, that is, from poet) become available to women. The gendering of 98

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public authority and of expressions of desire remained, albeit within changing historical contingencies. Mary Wroth’s poetry of desire, written in the only language available to her, Petrarchism, marked the exclusion of a woman speaker as a desiring subject from the Petrarchan Symbolic as she inherited it. Two hundred years later, the Petrarchan sonnet had become part of a canonical literary tradition in English. Mary Robinson’s sequence demonstrates an engagement with the sonnet’s literary history as a way of articulating a woman’s desire for poetic recognition, and uses classical authority to make space to rearticulate female desire. Two of the Victorian period’s most famous women poets engaged in Petrarchan undertakings. The sequences of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti suggest other ways specific women found strategies to enable their presences in the Petrarchan Symbolic. These strategies are unsurprisingly nuanced by what was possible for women in their historical moments. Each draws on other discourses to legitimise her expression of public desire. Between them, Mary Robinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti wrote poetry which found strategies to articulate female desire for the first time in the history of the Petrarchan sonnet in English. Each poet has her own recourse to the expression of a desire that is at once revolutionary and also contained within a socially sanctioned form. Because they channel their speakers’ desiring voices through various discourses of respectability, containing the expression of desiring female subjectivity within the parameters set by these structures, these women perform a poetic strategy that is differently authorising from Wroth’s class-inflected interior monologue on the one hand, and Rosa Newmarch’s turn-of-the-century gender-bending on the other, as will be discussed in the following chapter. The poet of an amatory sequence, if she is a woman and is to remain within the rules of the Petrarchan Symbolic, once she begins to be able to talk of desire thanks in part to the opening up of the position of poetess to some women, cannot have her desire in the same way as male Petrarchans since Petrarch have been able to. Male Petrarchans from Petrarch to Astrophil to Shakespeare grapple with their desire, sometimes threaten to renounce it, sometimes transform it, but they all inhabit it as the force which enables them to speak in public, and to achieve recognition. The women who inherited the Petrarchan tradition as a form canonised within the history of the love sonnet in English, can for the first time write about and with desiring voices. However, each of these women poets finds a way to authorise her desire by channeling it into an alternative discourse: by invoking classical myth and literariness,

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companionate marriage, or Christian spirituality. These are strategies to enable the poetic voice to be simultaneously female (issuing from a woman, in a time before the category itself was deconstructed), ‘feminine’ (that is, performing a socially-sanctioned female gender), and desiring. At the same time they demonstrate that access to desire in the Petrarchan Symbolic is impeded for female subjects, and that different strategies are required by women writers to their male counterparts.

Sappho and Phaon (1796) Mary Robinson was the first woman after Wroth to write an erotic sequence, and to do so from the point of view of a female poet-lover. In her time, the latter half of the seventeenth century, she was wellknown as a poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, and an actress (Robinson 1995: 116). It may well be that in her sequence she is identifying with Sappho: both were women in the public eye, both were performers of their talents, and both were publicly deserted (Robinson was the mistress of the Prince of Wales, and then of Colonel Banastre Tarleton, whom Curran [1986: 31] identifies as ‘the prototype of her Phaon’). Certainly, as will be seen, Robinson goes to some lengths to redefine Sappho’s signification as a woman whose passion was well-known. Daniel Robinson (1995: 117) reads Mary Robinson’s sequence as in part designed to ‘showcase her abilities’; writing ‘legitimate’ sonnets (her term for Petrarchan sonnets in the Italian form) was an assertion of her own legitimacy as a poet, he suggests. Certainly, Robinson’s concentration in her Preface on the legitimacy of the form of her sonnets suggests that she is engaging with her literary milieu as much as expressing a personal experience.7 By marking her return to the strict Italian form, Robinson was engaging with the ongoing debate about whether or not English was up to the restricted rhyme scheme of Petrarch’s sonnet structure.8 Robinson begins her Preface by locating her undertaking in literary history. She denotes the form first innovated by Surrey, and made popular by Shakespeare, which ends on a rhyming couplet, as ‘modern’, and comments on the final couplet’s tendency to sum up, invert, or resolve the ideas worked through in the poem. She prefers the so-called Italian form, the ‘ancient’ and ‘legitimate’ sonnet, for its abilities to form longer narratives without, as she sees it, closing down the thoughts of each sonnet at its conclusion: With this idea, I have ventured to compose the following collection; not presuming to offer them as imitations of Petrarch, but as

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So while she is rendering a critique and an offering an exemplar, statements of poetic self-confidence, she also makes sure the reader knows she has the authority of Milton behind her ‘sonnet claim’ (Robinson 1995: 99). It is notable that for Robinson the Italian form’s legitimacy also comes from its age, as this is the same endorsement she uses for Sappho’s love poetry. These opening paragraphs mark an important tension in Robinson’s Preface and in her project. On the one hand she is attempting something bold that lays claim to the right to speak in public (of poetry, and through Sappho, of desire, although as we will see Sappho’s voice has to be carefully modulated in order to allow this dangerous activity). On the other hand, she can only do so by first hedging her bets on her readers’ responses through careful groundwork, to ensure that the poetry she produces is read in the right way. She invokes historical – thus, established, respected – authority (Milton; the Greek reception of Sappho) to effect this filtering. The full title of her sequence is Sappho and Phaon. In a series of Legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, and Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess. Thus three emphases are presented at the start. The first two are concerned with her self-conscious poetic claim and her selfinsertion into an ‘ancient’ and ‘sublime’ tradition. Not only does the sequence offer an engagement with issues of poetic form, but the title indicates that she will meditate on as well as illustrate this formal debate. And indeed, her concern is not only with issues of form, but of quality as well. She continues: To enumerate the variety of authors who have written sonnets of all descriptions, would be endless; indeed few of them deserve notice: and where, among the heterogeneous mass of insipid and labored efforts, sometimes a bright gem sheds luster on the page of poesy, it scarcely excites attention, owing to the disrepute into which sonnets are fallen (234). Robinson’s concern with poetic standards suggests that her sequence is aspirational to the Petrarchan laurel. ‘Every school-boy, every romantic scribbler, thinks the sonnet a task of little difficulty. From this ignorance

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specimens of that species of sonnet writing, so seldom attempted in the English language; though adopted by that sublime Bard, whose Muse produced the grand epic of Paradise Lost, and the humbler effusion, which I produce as an example of the measure to which I allude… (qtd. Feldman and Robinson eds. 1999: 233).9

in some, and vanity in others, we see the monthly and diurnal publications abounding with… the non-descript ephemera from the heated brains of self-important poetasters…’ (ibid.). This is an implicit claim to be able to do it better, although she is also careful to demonstrate that she is neither vain nor self-important. ‘Sensible of the extreme difficulty I shall have to encounter, in offering to the world a little wreath, gathered in that path, which, even the best poets have thought it dangerous to tread; and knowing that the English language is, of all others, the least congenial to such an undertaking…, I only point out the track where more able pens may follow with success….’ (ibid.). Pointing to the difficulties of the task she has undertaken also points to her skill in having at the least begun it, if the reader’s judgment goes against her, and having pulled it off, if the reader is impressed. Robinson says that she is concerned with the fate of the sonnet because the question of standards is important to those who would see good sonnet writing given its proper due (ibid.). But she is also concerned with the importance of the poet to society. As poetry has the power to raise, so has it also the magic to refine… That poetry ought to be cherished as a national ornament, cannot be more strongly exemplified than in the simple fact, that, in those centuries when the poets’ laurels have been most generously fostered in Britain, the minds and manners of the natives have been most polished and enlightened (234–5). She goes on to critique Britain’s lack of recognition of its poetic geniuses during the poets’ lifetimes, ‘as if it were the peculiar fate of genius, to be neglected while existing, and only honored when the consciousness of inspiration is vanished for ever’ (235). Here is a writer who has thought deeply not only about the literary history into which she wants to insert herself, but also about the relation between that literary history and public culture and recognition. Petrarch is her emblem of the poetprophet appreciated in his own time (236). In comparison, ‘It is… a national disgrace, that this Island, so profusely favored by nature, should be marked, of all enlightened countries, as the most neglectful of literary merit!’ (ibid.). This exclamation is immediately followed by a statement which genders the public literary realm that Robinson has been at pains to value as aesthetically and socially important: I cannot conclude these opinions without paying tribute to the talents of my illustrious country-women; who, unpatronized by

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In addition to the burdens of an undiscriminating poetic culture and social neglect, the writer who is also a woman must battle the gendered rules for public poets, where the best she should hope for is personal betterment, unsupported and unacknowledged by the structures that enable poetic recognition. Robinson’s anxieties about standards and her insistence that good poets should be valued, extend to making a point about the obstacles faced by good women poets. The first section of the Preface, dealing as it does with the literary and social milieus into which Robinson is writing, makes it clear that this writer is educated, aware, and critical. As much as it is an exemplar of what the Italian form can do in English, her sequence is a demonstration of her abilities. As such it is evidence which serves to counter the attitudes (against the sonnet, against poets, and against women writers) she critiques. In folding together these three components, Robinson makes a place in the identity of poet and in the public arena for women to be poets, not poetesses. Her awareness of the prejudices of her audience extends beyond an awareness of literary and poetic histories as social and gendered formations. She continues in the following sections of her Preface to engage with representations of Sappho, in order to rehabilitate ‘the story of the Lesbian Muse’ (ibid.). The third issue she explores, then, comprises commentary on the different presentations of Sappho in English literary history. First, she says she was interested in this classical story because it ‘presented to my imagination such a lively example of the human mind, enlightened by the most exquisite talents, yet yielding to the destructive control of ungovernable passions, that I felt an irresistible impulse to attempt the delineation of their progress’ (ibid.). Robinson has already said that the Italian sequence enables the exploration of a narrative. Now she points out that she wants to present a passionate struggle in a narrative progression, to a didactic purpose: ‘to excite that pity, which, while it proves the susceptibility of the heart, arms it against the danger of indulging a too luxuriant fancy’ (ibid.). If the story of Sappho enables such an exploration, to such a purpose, it must also be redefined as worthwhile of such attention. Robinson runs the risk otherwise of associating herself, an undervalued woman poet, with a woman sometimes cast as the exemplum of weak femininity: crazed by excessive feeling, ruined by her sexuality, abandoned, selfdestructive (by the eighteenth century Sappho had acquired these

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courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature, and ennoble themselves by the unperishable luster of mental pre-eminence! (ibid.).

associations, even as the period saw an attempt to recoup her as a sublime poet [Reynolds ed. 2000: 149–64], as Robinson’s work testifies). ‘Ovid and Pope have celebrated the passion of Sappho for Phaon; but their portraits, however beautifully finished, are replete with shades, tending rather to deprecate than to adorn the Grecian Poetess’ (ibid.). Ovid’s account, translated by Pope in 1707,10 takes the historical person of Sappho and links her to the mythical Phaon, in some versions of his myth made magically irresistibly beautiful by Aphrodite (this explains how he was able to get the attention of the otherwise same-sex oriented Sappho). Ovid’s Sappho is old and unattractive, and her allure comes from her poetic skill and reputation (‘If nature denies me the gift of beauty,/ let my name’s measure be my stature/…/… my beauty seemed sufficient when you heard me read my songs; you insisted then/ that those words made me forever beautiful’ [trans. Isbell 1990: 134];11 or as Pope had it: ‘To me what Nature has in charms denied/ Is well by wit’s more lasting flames supplied’ [Wharton 1895]). Sappho’s main complaint in Ovid is not only that Phaon has abandoned her. It is that in drawing her desire away from women, he has made her unable to write of them, and since he has left her she cannot write at all: I do not make songs now for a well-tuned string,… No Pyrrhan girls please me now, nor do those from Methymna, nor any from Lesbos… … Nor do I find pleasure in the hundred others I have loved in shame. Yours is now the love these maids once had… … grief kills my art and woe stops my genius. The gift of song I enjoyed will not answer My call… (trans. Isbell 1990: 134, 140) His abandonment constitutes the theft of her poetry. Furthermore, Ovid’s Sappho is shameless in her grief. She engages in self-display to her own disadvantage, describing her own plainness and wretched physical state. And, since ‘Love and decency are not the same’, ‘No one could avoid seeing me; still I tore/ open my robes and exposed my breast’ (137).12 This Sappho publishes her own shame in detail. She is also explicit about her ability to please Phaon sexually: …I must have pleased you in all things but especially when

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In Pope’s translation, more propitious in some ways, this aspect of the poem remains: In all I pleased, but most in what was best; And the last joy was dearer than the rest: Then with each word, each glance, each motion fired, You still enjoyed, and yet you still desired, Till all dissolving in the trance we lay, And in tumultuous raptures died away. The taint of transgressive sexuality, both hetero- and homosexual, then, accrues to Ovid’s Sappho. Ovid’s Sappho is guilty of that quintessentially female sin, sexual incontinence: in dreaming of Phaon, ‘Throughout every part of my body a great/ pleasure rushes and I discover/ that now I can no longer control myself’ (trans. Isbell 1990: 138). As Pope has it: ‘Then fiercer joys; I blush to mention these,/ Yet while I blush, confess how much they please’. Pope’s version contains a line that has no corollary in the modern translation I have used here: ‘Let female fears submit to female fires’. Before beginning her work of redress, Robinson offers an ‘Account of Sappho’ which works hard to present her as a poetic genius, universally appreciated. She concludes with a defense of Sappho’s reputation, both poetic and by implication sexual: When it is considered, that the few specimens we have of the poems of the Grecian Muse, have passed through three and twenty centuries, and consequently through the hands of innumerable translators: and when it is known that envy frequently delights in the base occupation of depreciating merit which it cannot aspire to emulate; it may be conjectured, that some passages are erroneously given to posterity, either by ignorance or design. Sappho, whose fame beamed round her with the superior effulgence which her works had created, knew that she was writing for future ages: it is not therefore natural that she should produce any composition which might tend to tarnish her reputation, or to lessen that celebrity

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we toiled at the task of love. Then, I recall, my playful abandon delighted you… and when our joys were at last one joy, the deep weariness that filled our spent bodies (135).

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Sappho’s representation as the exemplary female poet had been in circulation since classical times, as had the version of Sappho as ‘an early exemplar of “unnatural” or monstrous sexuality’ because of her love for women (Andreadis 2001: 28). In the English tradition of translations of Ovid, Sappho’s same-sexuality was gradually ‘reconfigured in favor of a representation of the preeminent female poet as creatively and emotionally debilitated’ (35).13 She also functioned as an example of ‘the suicidal abandoned woman’, following these English versions (31–7). Sappho’s famous passion, as much as it is what Robinson says drew her to the story in the first place, is a problem because it undermines her claim to universal poethood and reinscribes her as a woman (emotionally extreme, sexually uncontrolled, and so vulnerable to social and mental breakdown). Robinson rescues Sappho’s poetic sensibility from the exigencies of her gender: If her writings were, in some instances, too glowing for the fastidious refinement of modern times, let it be her excuse, and the honor of her country, that the liberal education of the Greeks was such, as inspired them with an unprejudiced enthusiasm for the works of genius: and that when they paid adoration to Sappho, they idolized the muse, and not the woman (qtd. Feldman and Robinson eds. 1999: 238–9). It is clearly important that Robinson’s readers are sympathetic to the idea of Sappho before they start reading. To this end she recasts Sappho’s extreme passion as the sensibility of the supreme poet, so in touch with human feelings as to be almost preternaturally able to describe emotion.14 Robinson’s Sappho, most importantly, is ‘genuine’, characterised by an authenticity which made her poems special: They possessed none of the artificial decorations of a feigned passion; they were the genuine effusions of a supremely enlightened soul, laboring to subdue a fatal enchantment; and vainly opposing the conscious pride of illustrious fame, against the warm susceptibility of a generous bosom (qtd. Feldman and Robinson eds. 1999: 239).15 In the Preface, then, Robinson presents a Sappho who is profoundly human, gifted with expression, and a woman who knows her own

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which it was the labor of her life to celebrate (qtd. Feldman and Robinson eds. 1999: 238).

worth (237). She is also the victim of envy. In these ways Robinson defends Sappho against imputed faults of both character and poetry. She insists that whatever womanly weakness was in her, her poetic skill outweighed. This Sappho is rescued from the calumnies of the historical and poetical record at the expense of her gendered behaviour: she is reclaimed as the poet at the expense of the woman. Jerome McGann (1995: 55) has called Sappho and Phaon ‘the single most important English contribution to the Sapphic tradition’, despite the fact that it has had little poetic influence. As much as the gender of the writer was not an element under discussion during the theorising of the sonnet going on at the time, McGann sees Sappho and Phaon as a revolutionary statement of female poetic and philosophic authority. It insists on a female perspective on an old debate about what constitutes the ideal, and in doing so offers comment on what it means to try and live and work in an inadequate context: ‘The ideal demands made by Robinson’s work are thus revolutionary ones in a social and political sense’ (72), as well as in an artistic sense. This reading sees Robinson’s sequence as a radical interruption into a tradition that positioned female sensibility as irrational and inferior to masculine rationality. Finding a similar intention in the work, Robinson (1995: 117) reads the sequence as a ‘critique towards Renaissance sonnets which consistently silence the female voice’. He sees Robinson involved in ‘combating the literary patriarchy’ (ibid.). In my opinion, as my reading of the Preface to the sequence makes clear, Robinson’s project is more ambivalently feminist than either of these two reading suggest. In the terms of my argument this is to be expected: as a woman entering the Petrarchan tradition in English, Robinson would necessarily have to compromise with a Symbolic that positioned women as something other than full subjects. That she works hard to reclaim Sappho from her own history in order to do so is apposite. She does not challenge the fundamentally heterosexist and gendered terms by which Sappho has been judged. Instead she seeks to construct a different Sappho, one who leaves the rules intact but this time is on the right side of them. Of course, this is as much a function of what was possible in Robinson’s own historical moment as it is of her poetic project. It does mitigate the sequence’s challenge to the literary patriarchy, though. At the same time Robinson’s Preface does important work to insist on a woman’s right to be recognised as a poet in public. The ‘Sonnet Introductory’ begins the sequence by reiterating the Preface’s emphasis on the sensitive nature of the poet, and on the relation

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Favored by Heaven are those, ordained to taste The bliss supreme that kindles fancy’s fire; Whose magic fingers sweep the muses’ lyre, In varying cadence, eloquently chaste! (ll. 1–4). The true poet will achieve true fame, whose nature is made clear precisely by its chaste eloquence: Well may the mind, with tuneful numbers graced, To Fame’s immortal attributes aspire, Above the treacherous spells of low desire, That wound the sense, by vulgar joys debased (ll. 5–8). Again Robinson is working to defend poetic passion against the charges traditionally or implicitly brought against Sappho as the embodiment of the (emotionally, sexually) uncontained woman. By implication, she is characterising the female poet of unrequited desire. The rest of the sonnet casts poetic expression as succour for ‘passion’ and ‘hopeless love’. This is an attempt to purify Petrarchan desire of the charge of indecency which would otherwise be leveled again a woman who tried to speak it. It is also implicitly a response to Ovid’s Sappho, who is precisely ‘By memory goaded, and by frenzy driven’, as she documents to her detriment. Robinson continues: For thou, blest Poesy! with godlike powers To calm the miseries of man wert given; When passion rends, and hopeless love devours, By memory goaded, and by frenzy driven, ‘Tis thine to guide him ‘midst Elysian bowers, And show his fainting soul, – a glimpse of Heaven (ll. 9–14). The kind of poet that Sappho is, miserable, passionate, in hopeless love, is calmed, guided, and ultimately saved by divine Poesy. Poetry legitimates extreme emotion, and in this case, female sexuality. In the next two sonnets, Robinson explicitly marks the holiness of chastity in comparison to the dangers of passion. Sappho becomes a victim of the latter, as the sequence goes on to insist, while never

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between poetry and passion. It also is quick to define the quality of the ‘fire’ kindled by poetic ‘fancy’:

losing her association with the former, via the shared holiness of poesy and of chastity. If ‘blest Poesy’ soothes the tormented poet, and offers her ‘A glimpse of Heaven’, then by virtue of her status as poet the passionate Sappho is enabled a heavenly connection. Passion leads to the elevated realm of the divine, which as the next sonnet elucidates, is the ‘Temple of Chastity’. II. The Temple of Chastity High on a rock, coeval with the skies, A Temple stands, reared by immortal powers To Chastity divine! ambrosial flowers Twining round icicles, in columns rise, Mingling with pendent gems of orient dyes! Piercing the air, a golden crescent towers, Veiled by transparent clouds; while smiling hours Shake from their varying wings – celestial joys! The steps of spotless marble, scattered o’er With deathless roses armed with many a thorn, Lead to the alter. On the frozen floor, Studded with tear-drops petrified by scorn, Pale vestals kneel the Goddess to adore, While Love, his arrows broke, retires forlorn. The celestial, light, aerial, cool atmosphere of the temple of chastity is in direct contrast to the earth-bound, sunken, watery, voluptuous bower of pleasure described in the following sonnet. From the image of the temple in heaven the reader is invited to ‘turn to yon vale beneath’: III. The Bower of Pleasure. Turn to yon vale beneath, whose tangled shade Excludes the blazing torch of noon-day light, Where sportive Fawns, and dimpled Loves invite, The bower of Pleasure opens to the glade: Lulled by soft flutes, on leaves of violets laid, There witching beauty greets the ravished sight, More gentle than the arbitress of night In all her silvery panoply arrayed! The birds breathe bliss! light zephyrs kiss the ground, Stealing the hyacinth’s divine perfume; While from the pellucid fountains glittering round,

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The appeal of the colours, scents, and sights of the bower contrast with the cold and controlled beauty of the temple, with its thorny roses, icicles, and scattered solidified tears. The contrast serves to make the point that passion’s ‘glorious tomb’ is of a different realm, and in counterpoint, to chastity’s celestial joys. A dichotomy is established at the beginning of the sequence between chastity and passion, which is mediated by poetic genius. In this way Sappho’s passion enables her ascension to the heavenly realm, through poetry. The fourth sonnet, the first in the narrative now that the stage has been set, is titled, ‘Sappho Discovers her Passion’. That such a discovery will lead her to her tomb, is a foregone conclusion. Equally, that this Sappho is doomed to her passion becomes not a function of her weak nature, but of her poetic gift, which ensures her salvation. Having discovered her passion, Sappho ‘Contemns its Power’ in terms which invoke the dichotomy between rationality and desire with which poets have struggled since Petrarch (Astrophil is perhaps the most famous English example, not least for his refusal to relinquish his passion in the face of all the good reasons to do so). Sappho, following on from the terms of the introductory sonnet, recognises that there are ‘nobler passions’, including the passion for poetic recognition, which are yet powerless to satisfy the poet in the face of Love’s emotional imperatives. V. Contemns its Power O! How can Love exulting Reason quell! How fades each nobler passion from his gaze! E’en Fame, that cherishes the Poet’s lays, That fame, ill-fated Sappho loved so well. Lost is the wretch, who in his fatal spell Wastes the short summer of delicious days, And from the tranquil path of wisdom strays, In passion’s thorny wild, forlorn to dwell. O ye! who in that sacred temple smile Where holy Innocence resides enshrined; Who fear not sorrow, and who know not guile, Each thought composed, and every wish resigned;

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Small tinkling rills bid rival flow’rets bloom! Here, laughing Cupids bathe the bosom’s wound; There, tyrant passion finds a glorious tomb!

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Here the Temple and the Bower reappear as morally and emotionally opposed spaces. Like Wroth’s Pamphilia, Robinson’s Sappho is the reluctant or helpless Petrarchan lover whose overwhelming emotions, in addition to being typically inexorable, are dangerous, ‘poisonous’. In Sappho’s case, her desire is ultimately annihilating. Or, as she puts it when she ‘Discovers her Passion’, and taking her lead from Ovid, ‘Mute, on the ground my lyre neglected lies,/ The Muse forgot, and lost the melting lay;/ My down-cast looks, my faltering lips betray,/ that stung by hopeless passion, – Sappho dies!’ (sonnet IV ll. 5–8). Sappho’s paradoxical Petrarchan position is that to cease to speak is to cease to exist. There is more at stake for a poet whose sense of self-worth is based on her fame, though, when her beloved, instead of inspiring song, disables it. Since Robinson has already gone to some lengths to justify Sappho’s respectability on the basis of her poetic reputation, what Phaon has taken is at once her inspiration, her poetic reputation, and the kind of social reputation that only women can lose. No previous Petrarchan poet’s poetic skill has been so imbricated with his right to speak, with his sense of public self. No beloved has been so destructive to her poet’s livelihood. In this case livelihood, self-constitution, social viability, and life cohere because the poet is a woman. Passion is extremely dangerous for Sappho, even given the sequence’s initial work to enable it to ensure her poetic salvation. Throughout the sequence she struggles with the tension between reason and passion (see for example sonnet VII, where she ‘Invokes Reason’ thus: ‘Come, Reason, come!… Estranged from thee, no solace can I find/…/ Now passion reigns…’ [ll. 1, 5, 7]). Reason is aligned with hope, truth, and the right kind of fame. Love belongs to the realm of passion, blood, ‘vagrant fancy’, Folly, pleasure, and Frenzy (see sonnet XI). This Sappho is a true Petrarchan lover in her inability to renounce her inexorable passion. Despite her invocations to Reason, she has only to lay eyes on her beloved and her ‘Passion Increases’ (sonnet VIII). She is also a truly virtuous woman, in her determination to escape the bower of pleasure even if it means choosing death. Standing on the ‘dizzy precipice’ from which she is about to jump, Sappho sees death as her soul’s only way to ‘Welcome returning Reason’s placid beam/…/To calm rebellious Fancy’s feverish dream’ (sonnet XLIII ll. 10, 12). This poet lover has to give up her life in order to renounce the feverish, frenzied lover’s state. While many Petrarchan lovers

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Tempt not the path where pleasure’s flowery wile In sweet, but poisonous fetters, hold the mind.

threaten to die, Robinson’s Sappho is the first one to actually selfdestruct. It remains significant that Robinson casts the effects of her destructive passion as interwoven with what justifies and ennobles her woman’s desire. Her great emotional frenzy becomes, not the sign of her femaleness, but of her poetic genius, even as the cost of her passion is so high because she is woman. In sonnet X, perhaps the first blazon of a male beloved by a female poet is given in a sequence in English. The descriptions are conventional, and notable again is the emphasis on the dangerous quality of the desire he occasions: ‘Dangerous to hear, is that melodious tongue,/ And fatal to the sense those murderous eyes…’ the sonnet begins. Such statements are as generic as the fact that Love hides in the poet’s eyes and from thence shoots his arrows (ll. 3–4); or that his lips are like Cupid’s bow strung with rubies (l. 8); that his brow is ‘polished’ (l. 9) and his hair is ‘golden’ (l. 10). At the same time, the danger to the poet with which this sonnet begins takes on special resonance in light of the reader’s knowledge that her passion is literally fatal. Sappho’s suicide, as I have been suggesting, cannot be lifted out of the meaning her gender lends to her passionate actions. Like Wroth’s poet, then, this Sappho literalises the pain of the Petrarchan position in a way that cannot be prised apart from strictures of the gendered public realm in which it must perform itself. It is because Robinson is aware of the different rules for women lovers that she fashions a Sappho whose intense emotion is the result of her poetic soul, not a sign of the weakness of her gender. In order to accomplish this, Sappho walks the thin line between Petrarchan staples, which emphasise passion over reason, and acceptable femininity. Sappho also displays the marks of the gendering of self-display in this tradition. In sonnet XIII ‘She Endeavors to Fascinate Him’ in terms that are highly gendered. XIII. She Endeavors to Fascinate Him Bring, bring to deck my brow, ye Sylvan girls, A roseate wreath; not for my waving hair The costly band of studded gems prepare, Of sparking crysolite or orient pearls: Love, o’er my head his canopy unfurls, His purple pinions fan the whispering air; Mocking the golden sandal, rich and rare, Beneath my feet the fragrant woodbine curls. Bring the thin robe, to fold about my breast,

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Sappho attempts to present herself, but to do so in an unadorned, and therefore modest, elegant, and chaste, manner. This is a physical selffashioning which relies on social codes, where to be a woman publicly self-presenting for the purposes of enjoying one’s own display (‘idly gay’) is to be wanton. At the same time, given the tendency within her genre to describe women as beautiful body parts as a means of their idealisation and concurrent objectification, Sappho needs to negotiate her femininity, her respectability, and her subjectivity very carefully. She must simultaneously present and conceal her ‘charms’. This poem may be a response to Ovid’s Sappho’s self description, where she details her lack of attention to her physical self and her lack of care for how she appears to the world. These are signs of her distraction. Robinson’s Sappho, although she rejects both Reason and Hope (sonnets XI and XVI) never relinquishes her propriety to her passion. Between Robinson’s sequence and the famous sequence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which also enters into the tradition of amatory sonneteering self-consciously expressing a woman’s voice, is a short collection of three poems which make it clear that the gendered rules of the Petrarchan Symbolic were obvious to those who paid attention to what Laura was allowed to say and do, as Petrarch did not. Elizabeth Cobbold’s three ‘Sonnets of Laura’ (1825) begin with an epigraph: ‘Lately discovered in a Casket enclosed in a Tomb at Avignon, supposed to be that of Petrarch’s Laura, and now first translated into English’ (Feldman and Robinson eds. 1999: 178). The sonnets’ playful engagement with Petrarch are clearly marked. Laura’s voice is also multiply encased: in a translation, in a supposition, in a casket, in a tomb. Anything Laura may actually have to say to Petrarch is thus well and truly insulated, and delivered from beyond the grave. As Christina Rossetti was to do in more extended and less playful form, Cobbold reworks Laura’s silence, and her position as muse. She allocates to Laura the same suffering and longing as Petrarch, and in so doing makes room for her in the Symbolic as a subject (insofar as the sonnets speak her ‘voice’), while at the same time demonstrating why Laura was not able to be a poet herself. She thus demonstrates the

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White as the downy swan; while round my waist Let leaves of glossy myrtle bind the vest, Not idly gay, but elegantly chaste! Love scorns the nymph in wanton trappings dressed; And charms the most concealed are doubly graced.

complexities of and limitations for Laura’s own poetic, desiring subjectivity. Cobbold’s poetry makes the point that Laura continued to be bound by gendered rules which proscribed her speaking back. For example, Cobbold’s second sonnet is a reply to Petrarch’s sonnets about Laura’s veil. Cobbold redesignates the meaning of the famously fetishised veil to suggest why Laura needs to hide behind it. Not surprisingly the reasons have to do with the social possibilities for gendered desire. The first sonnet about Laura’s veil is the eleventh poem in the Canzoniere. Here Petrarch berates Laura for retiring behind her veil precisely because she realised he was in love with her, and dependent on seeing her: I have not seen you lay your veil apart in sunlight or in shade from when you first saw what desire I had driving all other wishes from my heart. While I still kept such thoughts well locked away, which have destroyed my mind in its desire, I saw your face adorned with sympathy; but from the moment Love made you aware you’ve kept your lovely blond hair veiled from me, and kept your love-arousing eyes cast down. Now what I most desire has been withdrawn, and in both heat and cold, and fatally for me, you still keep veiled those eyes that once delighted with their light (trans. Nichols 2002: 11). To this poem and others like it, Cobbold’s Laura replies: II. The Veil What weak remonstrance! – how I joy to find The well invented fraud thy faith deceive! The veil that shades the face obscures the mind, And love is ever fearful to believe; Else had my cheerful and unguarded smile, The pleasure that I felt when you were nigh, The welcome gay, the look devoid of guile, The tear of rapture springing to my eye, Told a fond tale that you should never learn, Of fears I would not for the world reveal,

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Because of pride, honour, and fame – because of the rules of female propriety and its relation to reputation – Laura cannot afford to show Petrarch that she returns his love. Like Stella who is subject to the ‘Tyrant honour’ of the Eighth Song of Astrophil and Stella, and like Wroth’s Pamphilia, Laura is bound by a code similarly enforced by sinister (multiple, guarding) ‘Argus’ eyes’ (Astrophil and Stella Eleventh Song l. 42). Together with Cobbold’s sequence, which is equally aware of the rules for women who wanted to speak of desire in public, Mary Robinson’s initial post-Renaissance foray into Petrarchan subjectivity makes it clear that even as women poets drew on authorising traditions on order to write, they were aware of the different rules available to women exploring desire in public.

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) Elizabeth Barrett Browning was ‘England’s first unequivocally major female poet’ (Stone 1995: 3). This reputation, combined with the romantic story of her elopement with her subsequently even more famous husband, has given the 43 poems in Sonnets from the Portuguese the autobiographical frame their counterparts in other sequences have often refused to confirm. As a result, the sequence has been judged accordingly, either positively or negatively. One recurring charge is the assertion that the poems are too biographical to be art. In 1883, Eric Robertson declared, ‘“They are not primarily works of art; they are spontaneous expressions of strong feeling”’ (qtd. Leighton 1992: 109). For Alethea Hayter (1962: 105, 108), the Sonnets from the Portuguese were ‘not enough removed from personal relationship to universal communication’. They reveal ‘the weight of human emotion not quite burnt up into the flames of art’.16 Their apparent spontaneity tended to be read as typical of woman’s work: not really poetry, because not crafted, but more expressions of a typically feminine overflowing of emotion. More recently, feminist assessments have tended to take the sonnets less at their word, and see more of their craft, at the same time understanding Barrett Browning’s unconventional formal decisions as important innovation and not inadequate technique (see Morlier 1999: 98).17

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Of hopes I almost tremble to discern; Of bliss my heart would from itself conceal. Come, blessed veil! thy friendly aid I claim, Guard of my pride, my honor, and my fame.

The history of negative artistic assessment suggests that the sequence’s autobiographical nature, as well as being one of the reasons for why it makes such compelling reading, has also been one of its biggest limitations. The poet’s gender is foregrounded in the romance narrative (she is the delicate invalid, rescued from a tyrannical father by a dashing young poet), playing into the tendency to read women’s writing in terms of their lives, and to read their lives as revolving around their hearts. Furthermore, in being read as a woman writing about her personal life, Barrett Browning is denied her tradition. As Dorothy Mermin (1981: 360–1) observes, ‘The male poets presented their own experiences and feelings as exemplifying those of modern man, or at any rate the modern sensitive intellectual or poet, but the modern woman’s personal experience could not easily be made to carry so heavy a contextual burden’. This is not least because of the lack of poetic tradition of female lovers whose voices might have ‘validate[d] her own and define[d] by contrast its particular quality’. In fact, Sonnets from the Portuguese is highly educated both formally and thematically about the conventions on which it draws and the rules it breaks.18 One cannot help but read the story behind the sonnets along with their emotionally honest glimpses into the hopes, uncertainties, and joys of the poet who we know is really in love. Ironically, this situation makes the sequence successful as a Petrarchan exercise. Its sincerity and immediacy, which Hayter complains of as too unformulated and too directly personal, achieve the believability someone like Astrophil is always striving to present. On one level, then, the sequence is perfectly Petrarchan, achieving what earlier poets had frantically performed. On another level, though, the sequence inverts the constituting requirements for this kind of narcissistic, performative Petrarchism. It may be because its subject is differently constituted that the poetry rings truer, as poetry of emotional connection and not as poetry of display. The poet of Sonnets from the Portuguese, far from needing her beloved to be absent, is reliant on his presence, his voice, and his desire, for her own. The other sequence famously written to a spouse, Spenser’s Amoretti, does not take the opportunity as this one does to celebrate mutuality and dialogue. Instead, as we have seen, Spenser’s knowledge of his beloved’s assured reciprocation is the hunter’s knowledge of his prey’s certain capture. Barrett Browning’s sequence, while it draws in many ways on Petrarchan staples, offers a poetic subject who only comes into being because her beloved is also a subject. In this way the sequence offers an alternative model of the desiring subject, one who need not occupy the position of dominating speaker.

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Mermin (1981: 352) has explained the poetry’s authentic sincerity as arising from the ‘painful dislocations in the conventions of amatory poetry’ that are caused by a female lover. In this sequence, because she is a woman within Petrarchism, the poet is simultaneously subject and object, resulting in an embarrassing abjection, Mermin suggests (353). Thus read, the poetry is profoundly destabilising of our expectations of love poetry. It is so, I suggest, and not only because the object here becomes subject. It is so also because in doing so, she does not (cannot) reinscribe the system of domination within which she has had to find a voice. At the same time, the sequence only succeeds in offering this alterative starting position because in the end the poet’s desire is towards the sanctioned expression of desire in marriage. We can recognise a dynamic Dierdre David (1987: 24) locates in the writing of intellectual Victorian women, Barrett Browning among them: the simultaneous ‘resistance to and the complicity with hegemonic patriarchy’. Barrett Browning’s sequence offers an intimate portrait of a woman’s sense of her desiring self within a genre which tended to preclude precisely such an expression. In this way her sequence is revolutionary. Its effect is to reformulate the Petrarchan subject utterly, while remaining within the social Symbolic that the Petrarchan subject helps in the end to comprise. Because her desire, although its achievement involves a difficult journey through mistrust and fear, is never socially transgressive, she is able simultaneously to rework Petrarchan subjectivity and leave unchallenged aspects of the Petrarchan Symbolic, which insist on social sanction for speaking women, and for women spoken about by a watching public. The danger of love for a woman Petrarchan poet is a recurring theme, in this sequence and in the others we have examined. Barrett Browning’s sequence manages to find a safe space from which to love, which is the space of mutuality represented by an equitable marriage. The sequence begins rather ominously, with the first sonnet marking the sense of fear that will haunt the poet until the sequence resolves her doubts: weeping at the thought of ‘the sweet, sad years, the melancholy years…/ — of my own life’19 (ll. 7–8), the poet becomes aware of a lurking presence that has snuck up on her from behind. This ‘mystic Shape—/— drew me backward by the hair;/ And a voice said in mastery, while I strove…/ ‘Guess now who holds thee?’’ (ll. 10–13). The poet’s helplessness and fright is not mitigated by the ‘silver answer’, ‘“Not Death, but Love”’ (l. 14), nor is the sense of threat much alleviated. After her capture, she worries that their love is not fated to be (sonnet 2), and gives her reasons: their age difference, the difference in their personalities and experiences of life (sonnets 3 and 4).

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She reiterates these early concerns in the first section of the sequence: ‘O my fears,/ That this can scarce be right! We are not peers,/ So to be lovers; and I own and grieve/ That givers of such gifts as mine are, must/ Be counted with the ungenerous’ (sonnet 9 ll. 6–10). The poet’s reluctance to give in to the love that has her by the hair results in an initial inversion in the sequence. The beloved is the one offering love. It is this starting point that creates a different kind of speaking subject, and which enables the poet to embrace a desire that is safe to speak. As the poet of the Sonnets from the Portuguese makes clear to her beloved, her reluctance is not the result of paucity of feeling: What can I give thee back, O liberal And princely giver,… who hast brought the gold And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold, And laid them on the outside of the wall, For such as I to take, or leave withal, In unexpected largess? Am I cold, Ungrateful, that for these most manifold High gifts, I render nothing back at all? Not so. Not cold! – but very poor instead! (sonnet 8 ll. 1–9). The poet is afraid she cannot match his generosity, cast here, as elsewhere in the sequence, as proof of his royal nature. This is a sequence enabled by a beloved who is the opposite of aloof. The nobility of his emotions pervades the sequence, and rescues desire from the charge of impropriety that would otherwise accrue to a willing woman’s acceding to union. The honourability of his intentions, which reflect his nature, allow her response. It is most significant that the sequence begins with her objections to the possibility of reciprocation. The poetry is not initiated by her desire, which would threaten her proper femininity in the Petrarchan schema. Instead, the poetry is elicited by his. The sequence’s early worries that the relationship is impossible culminate in a poem which tries to warn him off. Sonnet 4 presents the beloved with the image of the poet’s grief like ashes from a ‘sepulchral urn’ (l. 2) which ‘I overturn/— at thy feet’ (ll. 3–4). She shows him ‘how the red wild sparkles dimly burn/ Through the ashen greyness’ (ll. 6–7): — if—/Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up,… those laurels on thine head,

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If the first poem reworks the reluctant Petrarchan lover into an assaulted woman who stands to lose something by the attack (the sexual threat is evident), this fourth sonnet is the first in the sequence which begins to imagine her reciprocal desire. Significantly, desire is troped as fire, and, like Wroth’s burning, as destructive; here, though, the poet is concerned that she will destroy her beloved, not herself be immolated. This new dynamic relates to the poetry’s inception via his desiring subjectivity. His desire, which initiates the sequence, could, she warns start an answering conflagration in her. Only once the sequence is underway does the poet’s desire begin to kindle, and it is reliant on the beloved’s decision not to extinguish the vulnerable little sparks: ‘If thy foot in scorn/ Could tread them out to darkness utterly,/ It might be well perhaps. But if instead/ Thou wait beside me—’ (ll. 7–10). Crucially, then, this sequence begins with the noble desire of the beloved. It is not coincidental that such a nobly desiring beloved is a man; in the context of the genre and of the sequence’s times, this certain, active desire cannot retain its clear and uncomplicated nobility if it issues from a woman beloved (or, indeed, as we have seen from Robinson’s Sappho, from a woman lover, at least not without a justificatory preface to explain and excuse her behaviour by invoking alternative authorising discourses, and introductory sonnet work). There continues to be a fundamental mutuality which enables and animates the Sonnets from the Portuguese. The beloved is required to be an active participant, a full subject, in order for the poet to work through her typically Petrarchan oscillations and doubts: This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost, I should not love withal, unless that thou Hadst set me an example, shown me how, When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed, And love called love. And thus, I cannot speak Of love even, as a good thing of my own. Thy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak, And placed it by thee on a golden throne, —

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O my beloved, will not shield thee so, That none of all the fires shall scorch and shred The hair beneath. Stand further off then! Go. (ll. 9–14).

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The poet is clear here that her love depends on his. The image of the crossing beams of lovers’ eyes is a reworking of a standard Petrarchan notion. Beams of light, sometimes troped as Cupid’s arrows, shoot from the beloved’s eyes and cause the lover to fall in love. The imagery of assault and the helplessness of the pinioned lover that results resonates with tropes of war and enslavement so typical to the genre in the 1590s. Here, however, the engagement of eyes begins in his earnestness, not Cupid’s violence or the beloved’s high disdain. It draws an answering beam from her eyes. The entire dynamic is different to the norm: no aloof beloved needs be manhandled into object status. This is not a discourse of domination, not a poetry of mastery, but profound mutuality: ‘What I do/ And what I dream includes thee, as the wine/ Must taste of its own grapes’ (sonnet 6 ll. 10–12). That her beloved is also a poet, a ‘Most gracious singer of high poems’ (sonnet 4 l. 2) further emphasises the role of his speaking in relation to her own by insisting on his poetic agency (it bears noting that Rossetti’s beloved is also a poet in his own right, as is discussed below: entry into the Petrarchan Symbolic for these Victorian poets depends on a poetic mirroring). She confounds his role as object in the poetry by insisting on the importance of his voice saying the opposite of what a beloved is supposed to say: Say over again, and yet once over again, That thou dost love me. Though the word repeated Should seem ‘a cuckoo-song,’ as thou dost treat it, Remember never to the hill or plain, Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain, Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed! Beloved, I, amid the darkness greeted By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain Cry… speak once more… thou lovest! Who can fear Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll — Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year? Say thou dost love me, love me, love me — toll The silver iterance! — only minding, Dear, To love me also in silence, with thy soul (sonnet 21). She casts his imagined repeated utterance in terms of images of natural beauty which tends to occur in multiples: stars, flowers. Throughout the sequence their love is troped as natural, and flowers in particular symbol-

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And that I love (O soul, I must be meek!) Is by thee only, whom I love alone (sonnet 12 ll. 5–14).

ise this quality. In the final poem of the sequence she offers a concluding image of her poetry as flowers: ‘— here’s eglantine,/ Here’s ivy! – take them, as I used to do/ Thy flowers.—/ And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine’ (sonnet 44 ll. 10–14). In giving him her poetic flowers in exchange for the ‘many flowers/ Plucked in the garden’ that ‘thou hast brought me’ (ll. 1–2), she also figures their emotional exchange as an exchange of flowers, as the poems, ‘these thoughts’, ‘unfolded too’, along with his flowers, in her ‘close room’ (ll. 4, 6).20 Flowers represent the best product of the poet’s processes. In sonnet 21, the enabling condition for her to produce desire, which is to say in the terms of the sequence, poems (which she casts in the end as flowers), is that he presents her with an inestimably large bouquet of ‘I love you’s. While she makes maximum use of the standard romantic gesture of presenting the beloved with flowers (enabling them both to be beloved and lover, recipient and giver), she is also careful to ask for more than just a romantic performance, as the final line makes clear. The penultimate line makes his voice the ‘silver answer’ she has heard in the first sonnet, the voice of Love. He is present in the sequence as beloved, lover, poet, and Love itself. His plenitude of presence is in stark contrast to the beloved’s typical absence, usually the constituting condition for this kind of poetry. It is because he is present that she can overcome her fears, that she can work up to acknowledging her desire. It is because his love enables hers that the poet can find the facilitating logic of love: Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright, Let temple burn, or flax! An equal light Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed. And love is fire: and when I say at need I love thee… mark!.. I love thee!.. in thy sight I stand transfigured, glorified aright, With conscience of the new rays that proceed Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures Who love God, God accepts while loving so. And what I feel, across the inferior features Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s (sonnet 10). This poem utilises some of the most staple of Petrarchan conventions: ‘love is fire’; the lover is ‘transfigured’ by beams of light from eyes which, here, again, are her own, reflected in his. Typical too is her

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insistence on the redeeming, ennobling, transformative nature of his love. What is unusual is that this sequence traces the process of coming to terms with having love, not the process of coming to terms with wanting love. It is having his love that enables the poet to grow towards her own glorified transfiguration, not desiring a love she cannot have. The beloved is no pathway to an Ideal self. Instead, his love ennobles and elevates her sense of herself. For the first time, the poet’s subjectivity is reliant on the beloved’s presence. Ultimately, if his initial desire kindles hers, his continuing presence allows her to relinquish her renunciation of life and hope, and embrace a desire which is earthly and real and reciprocated: When our two souls stand up erect and strong, Face to face, silent, drawing nigh and nigher, Until the lengthening wings break into fire At either curvéd point, – what bitter wrong Can the earth do to us, that we should not long Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher, The angels would press on us, and aspire To drop some golden orb of perfect song Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay Rather on earth, Beloved, – where the unfit Contrarious moods of men recoil away And isolate pure spirits, and permit A place to stand and love in for a day, With darkness and the death-hour rounding it (sonnet 22). Here two lovers’s souls stand revealed to each other. ‘Face to face’, their communication is via their sight of each other. The mutual gaze, so central to reworking the subject-object dynamic of Petrarchism, recurs again, here perhaps to the sequence’s most profound effect. In addition, the poet asks for a love that is embodied in an imperfect mortality. This poet imagines a meeting of souls that makes sense in, and draws power from, the world in which both are immersed. No idealisation of an objectified beloved is possible here (‘I grant I never saw a goddess go/ My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground’, as Shakespeare wryly commented on the tendency to bleach the beloved of her humanity in sonnet 130). The poet is specifically requesting a love that is human, mutual, and also physical. She casts this physicality as the one moment of perfection allowed on earth. This is a remarkable sonnet of sensuality, tempered and calm. No destructive Sapphic

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passion is called into being here. Rather, this poet can ultimately ask her beloved to meet her as a lover, in a safe and contained ‘place to stand and love in’. The poet of the Sonnets from the Portuguese can offer this new poetic subject, this Petrarchan poetry of the self in doubt and in transformation that is yet a self who does not need the beloved to be an absence. She can do this because she is a female lover, and so not constituted by the system of domination that has come to define Petrarchan love. She can also do so because, as a female lover writing from mid-Victorian England, she is protected by her marriage. Images of safety constitute an important enabling emotion to the sequence’s journey, as in sonnet 24’s ‘I lean upon thee, Dear, without alarm,/ And feel as safe as guarded by a charm’ (ll. 6–7). His absence, the threat he will cease to love her and so abandon her, is the chimera that must be overcome before the poet can progress from fear to trust. In achieving her transformation the poet achieves also the state which enables marriage. It is ultimately the safety of the socially sanctioned which gives this poet her desire.

Monna Innominata (1881) Christina Rossetti has suffered more than most women writers from the critical tendency to seek biography as the first and foremost factor informing their work. Most of the information available about her is biographical, and her poetry has tended to be read in terms of her life (See Mayberry [1989: 1–2, 11–17, 55]).21 Her ‘sonnet of sonnets’, the 14-poem-long sequence which speaks back to the Petrarchan tradition out of which it arises, has been no exception. The critical search for the single referent behind the poetry was only encouraged by the comment of her editor and brother, William Michael, who edited her Poetical Works after her death that he is ‘certain that this “sonnet of sonnets” was a personal utterance’ and that ‘The introductory prosenote… is a blind… interposed to draw off attention from the writer in her proper person’ (Rossetti 1914: 462). The beloved of Monna Innominata may or may not be Charles Bagot Cayley, the second suitor Rossetti rejected on religious grounds. ‘Real’ people lurk somewhere or other behind most of the famous Petrarchan sequences in English. In Rossetti’s case, however, given her family’s life-long engagement with the Italian Renaissance tradition (her Italian father was a scholar of Dante), it is clear that she is writing about and through Petrarchism as much as she is exploring many of the emotional and spiritual issues that constitute the major concerns of her poetry.

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Early in her career Rossetti wrote a biographical article on Petrarch where she engaged with an ongoing discussion, in her society and in her family, about the historical existence of Laura. In ‘Francesco Petrarca’ published in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography in 1863, Rossetti rejects an allegorical or secular framework for the religious, valuing Petrarch’s poetry for its representation of the journey from earthly desire to heavenly love (Martinez 2003: 100–1). Petrarch’s elusive persona and Laura’s inaccessibility are read as evidence of the impossibility of full knowledge and expression of God, in keeping with the taciturn Tractarianism of which Rossetti was an adherent. This interpretation of Petrarch’s love poetry may have functioned as a significant influence on the thought and poetics of the young Christina Rossetti (103). In the Preface to Monna Innominata, Rossetti makes it clear that she is directly engaging with the silencing of the idealised sonnet mistress of the Petrarchan tradition: ‘Beatrice [and]…. Laura… have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness’.22 She goes on to talk about the many nameless sonnet ladies, ‘many a [one]’ of whom ‘one can imagine… as sharing her lover’s poetic aptitude… Had such a lady spoken for herself, the portrait left us might have appeared more tender, if less dignified, than any drawn even by a devoted friend’. Rossetti notices that the objectification of the lady, although it brings ‘honour’ and bestows on her ‘charms’ through its praise, cannot capture her voice. Most especially, the tradition disallows her ‘tender’ response: it disallows her reciprocal desire. Importantly for the Petrarchan nature of her sonnets, and for the Christian discourse she turns to in the course of her sequence, Rossetti also is explicit that the love she is about to reinscribe is one that can never achieve its desire: while ‘one can imagine’ a lady who is also a poet, at the same time ‘the barrier between them might be one held sacred by both, yet not such as to render mutual love incompatible with mutual honour’. This is an important caveat, as it insists that the Lady’s articulated desire does not compromise her ‘honour’: her feminine value, her acceptable behaviour, her chaste intention. This is a sonnet lady who can become a sonnet poet on the same terms as usual, which are that she cannot have her love. Rossetti is imagining the existing Petrarchan situation, where love is impossible, with the lady being given a chance to talk back. She concludes her Preface with a reference to Sonnets from the Portuguese, in a comment that suggests that while Rossetti appreciated the sequence, she recognised that it was doing something other than

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Or had the Great Poetess of our own day and nation only been unhappy instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to us, in lieu of the ‘Portuguese Sonnets,’ an inimitable ‘donna innominata’ drawn not from fancy but from feeling, and worth to occupy a niche besides Beatrice and Laura. There has been some discussion about the implications of this closing point. William Whitla (1987: 90) finds it ‘ambiguous’. It might be a critique of Barrett Browning’s sequence, he suggests, or it might be pointing to the difference between Barrett Browning’s and Rossetti’s. The former is drawn from ‘feeling’, but the latter will be reliant on ‘fancy’ since it is a fictional response to a generic situation (ibid.). Rossetti herself commented, ‘Surely not only what I meant to say but what I do say is, not that the Lady of those sonnets is surpassable, but that a ‘Donna innominata’ by the same hand might well have been unsurpassable’ (qtd.: 91). Barrett Browning did not write an anonymous ideal lady talking back, because her love was a requited one. What Rossetti explicitly is saying is that unhappiness is a condition of Petrarchan love, that only a woman writing about an impossible love could write Laura’s voice back into the tradition. The poet should not achieve her desire. This is one reason why the sequence is so consonant with Rossetti’s poetic voice.23 It allows her to explore loss, regret, pain, and yearning, and to deflect these emotions into the promise of the life to come. The belief with which the sequence begins and ends, that mortal love is mutable and unreliable, that it cannot be expected to remain and therefore that the only true love is divine, is a recurring concern of her oeuvre generally. By entering Petrarchism from within its constituting rules, Rossetti ensures that her poet’s desire will be safely honourable, that is, it is from the beginning a never-to-be-met need. By rechannelling her desire into the love of God she authorises the exploration of the disappointing nature of earthly love. Rossetti’s spiritual framing of an already doomed love enables the containment of a desire whose achievement is always deferred. Monna Innominata literally inscribes its dialogue with the tradition from which it comes and to which it is speaking by prefacing each of its 14 sonnets with two quotes, one from Dante and then one from Petrarch. The quotes speak to and about the sonnet that follows,

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allowing Laura to speak, since it tells a different story, one where ultimately there is no insuperable barrier.

sometimes drawing out the sonnet’s idea by pointing to two aspects of its argument, sometimes by repeating from each master one main idea central to the attending poem.24 The sequence itself begins by charting the speaker’s location in a typically painful and contradictory position. She is suspended in a condition of eternal waiting and imminent loss. She is in a state of anticipating parting even as she anticipates meeting. A condition of longing is mapped out: Come back to me, who wait and watch for you: – Or come not yet, for it is over then, And long it is before you come again, So far between my pleasures are, and few (sonnet 1 ll. 1–4). This is anticipated and confirmed by the two epigraphs, which William Michael translates as: ‘The day that they have said adieu to their sweet friends’ (from Dante, ‘Lo dì che han ditto a’ dolci amici addio’) and ‘Love, with how great a stress dost thou vanquish me today!’ (from Petrarch, ‘Amor, con quanto sforzo oggi mi vinci!’). Together these epigraphs insist on a condition of sad parting, and a complete subjection to Love, significantly in that order. The first sonnet ends, ‘Ah me, but where are now the songs I sang/ When life was sweet because you called them sweet?’ Even at its inception, this sequence is nostalgic for what it has lost. Its hope is hopeless, its best is past. The contradiction is encoded in the first song’s mourning of its loss of its own songs. The poet’s life was sweet because the beloved called her poetry sweet; the conflation of poetic subjectivity with the poetry itself is implicit. Since he is gone, the poetry cannot be sweet, life cannot be sweet, and, with typically paradoxical logic, this is because he is not there to name the songs sweet even as his absence is the condition of the songs. His absence is emphasised in the second sonnet, along with the condition of constitutive loss. From Dante’s opening epitaph, ‘It was already the hour which turns back the desire’ (‘Era già l’ora che volge il desio’), something is belated. Ironically, Petrarch introduces the sonnet with ‘I recur to the time when I first saw thee’ (‘Ricorro al tempo ch’ io vi vidi prima’), since the sonnet mourns the poet’s inability to ‘remember that first day,/ First hour, first moment of your meeting me’ (ll. 1–2). This is in direct contrast to both Dante and Petrarch, who note in detail the exact moment of first laying eyes on their ladies.25 Rossetti’s poet may be marking her love as atypical, as Astrophil does in his second sonnet, where ‘Not at first sight…/ Love gave the wound

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So unrecorded did it slip away, So blind was I to see and to foresee,… If only I could recollect it, such A day of days! I let it come and go As traceless as a thaw of bygone snow; It seemed to mean so little, meant so much; If only now I could recall that touch, First touch of hand in hand – Did one but know! (ll. 5–14). The repetition of ‘if only’ marks the regret with which the sonnet is saturated. This most important moment, this ‘day of days’, has been ‘unrecorded’ by the unseeing poet, but it is also unrecorded by the poetry itself. A poem which described ‘that touch,/ First touch of hand in hand’ would be sweet poetry, which is impossible in the terms of the poetry itself, as the first sonnet has made clear. If Petrarch’s poetry is bittersweet, Rossetti’s poetry of or for the unnamed lady of the traditions on which he drew begins by marking that it can have no sweet moments. The lady’s desire contains no pleasure. Her pleasure will be found only in the next life. This is a Petrarchan poet deprived of pleasure in a new way. She is deprived of even the pleasure of imagined satisfaction, since she knows at the start that she can have none. Even the anticipation of the beloved’s presence is deferred into a dream, in the following sonnet. Sonnet three uses its dream logic to make the connection between sleep and death, and from there finds the solution to the beloved’s absence. The satisfaction is again deferred, this time not into a forgotten and so unknowable past, but into the next life. ‘O ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!’ – Dante. [‘Oh shades, empty save in semblance!’] ‘Immaginata guida la conduce.’ – Petrarca. [‘An imaginary guide conducts her’] I dream of you, to wake: would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on; Nor find with dreams the dear companion gone,

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which while I breathe will bleed’ (Astrophil and Stella sonnet 2 ll. 1–2). She is also suggesting her love is more thoughtful, more considered, less impetuous, than a love kindled in an instant. In being specifically forgetful of its start, though, she is charting how the love has missed its most incandescent moment:

As, Summer ended, Summer birds take flight. In happy dreams I hold you full in sight, I blush again who waking look so wan; Brighter than sunniest day that ever shone, In happy dreams your smile makes day of night. Thus only in a dream we are at one, Thus only in a dream we give and take The faith that maketh rich who take or give; If thus to sleep is sweeter than to wake, To die were surely sweeter than to live, Though there be nothing new beneath the sun. This sonnet is extraordinary for the typical Petrarchan elements it invokes, only to deny them to its speaker. By beginning with invocations of both emptiness and guidance, the sonnet’s epigraphs suggest that the ways usually open to the Petrarchan poet will be closed to this one. Typically, the beloved can function as the poet’s guide to knowledge – of himself, of truth and goodness, of God. We see this most explicitly in Petrarch’s sequence, and we see a version of it in Greville’s, even though for the latter it is the rejection of the Petrarchan mistress that enables the poet to find his god. Here, the beloved leads the poet to the realisation that death is better than life. The loss of the poet’s dream of the beloved is like the loss of summer. By implication, waking life is wintery, bleak, desolate and barren. The memory of the dreamed experience of reciprocation is enough to make the poet ‘blush’, which since it is for the second time, seems to echo an earlier flush, perhaps of passion. Thus, while the dream itself is sweet, writing about it is not – or is not unambivalently, since it is tinged with shame or embarrassment. The biblical echo in the final line reinforces the idea that waking life is stale, emphasising again that the next life is preferable. The following sonnet begins with the lady demonstrating her awareness that she enabled his poetry. The progression is from the deferred pleasure of her own love in the dream sonnet to the overt products of his: ‘I loved you first: but afterwards your love,/ Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song/ As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove’ (sonnet 4 ll. 1–3). The epigraphs mark the all-consuming, and productive, nature of this love: ‘A small spark fosters a great flame’ (‘Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda’ – Dante); ‘Every other thing, every thought, goes off, and love alone remains there with you’ (Ogni altra cosa, ogni pensier va fore,/ E sol ivi con voi rimansi amore’ – Petrarca).

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Which owes the other most? My love was long, And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong; I loved and guessed at you, you construed me And loved me for what might or might not be… (ll. 4–7). The lady is explicit in her charge that he had full reign to use his imagination to actively construct an ideal image of her: ‘You construed me’. This is a more assertive, productive activity than guessing at someone. Like Cobbold’s Petrarch, this beloved-as-poet did not try to know his lady, but loved her for what he imagined ‘might or might not be’. Such a charge is an implicit accusation against the poetry of praise he produced, as well as a gesture of modesty. She goes on to insist that since their love makes them one, ‘weights and measures do us both a wrong’ (l. 8). While she is insisting that true love is unity, she is also saying that his poetry is not better than hers, and that his poetic reputation belongs as much to her as it does to him. Her audacious venture into the realm of his poetic achievement, her claim to it, is quickly recouped in the next sonnet, which places what in sonnet 4 is a mutual and mutually productive desire firmly in a religious framework. The lady’s poetic aspiration and her concomitant sexuality are both contained by a higher authority as soon as they make an appearance in the sequence. She begins by blessing her beloved with God’s presence, and moves on in the sestet to designate for herself ‘To love you without stint and all I can…/ To love you much and yet to love you more’ (ll. 9, 10–12). Her role is to love him because, as she ends sonnet 5 by demonstrating, she knows after all her correct place: ‘Since woman is the helpmeet made for man’ (l. 14). Because in this sonnet, he is to her as God is to him, he rebukes her for loving him more than she loves God, an accusation she answers in the following sonnet. She insists on the imbrication of divine and human love, using God to both authorise and contain her earthly passion: Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke, – I love, as you would have me, God the most;… Yet while I love my God the most, I deem That I can never love you overmuch; I love Him more, so let me love you too;

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The poet goes on to claim a stake in the poetry she helped to produce, even as she marks the difference between their responses to the love they both felt:

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Her right to love him – to be a poetic subject – is authorised by God. What she loses in the process, though, is her pleasure, which must by these rules be deferred to the next life. This poet is negotiating her right to be a speaking Petrarchan lover who is also female – and who thus both is desiring and ‘honourable’, a very tricky proposition in the Petrarchan Symbolic. The religious frame contains her desire and makes it safe to talk back, by positing pleasure only in the afterlife. Sonnet 7 tries for a dialogue with the beloved, after sonnet 6’s firm insistence on the correct and sanctioned nature of her love. But it flounders on the inevitability of love’s loss. The epigraphs mark the plenty with which it begins, as well as the reliance of this plenitude on genuine dialogue: ‘Here is always Spring and every fruit’ (‘Qui primavera sempre ed ogni frutto’ – Dante); ‘Conversing with me, and I with him’ (‘Ragionando con meco ed io con lui’ – Petrarca). ‘Love me, for I love you’ – and answer me, ‘Love me for I love you’: so shall we stand As happy equals in the flowering land Of love, that knows not a dividing sea (ll. 1–4). The fruitfulness invoked by Dante is confirmed by the ‘flowering land’ that is a love where mutuality is represented by the presence of two voices. The rest of the octave of this sonnet celebrates Love’s sturdiness through a series of images – Love’s house is built on rock, it withstands the howling winds, its citadel is always guarded, its liberty is guaranteed. Yet the sestet reneges on the promises set up in the octave, because of the realities of life: My heart’s a coward though my words are brave – We meet so seldom, yet we surely part So often; there’s a problem for your art! The poet can rhapsodise about the ideal land of Love as much as she likes, the real world is a place of inadequacies, and of parting. The discrepancy between this reality and the lovers’ feelings she gives to him

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Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such I cannot love you if I love not Him, I cannot love Him if I love not you.

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Still I find comfort in his Book who saith, Though jealousy be cruel as the grave, And death be strong, yet love is strong as death. Although she finds ‘comfort’ in a different Book to mutable earthly love’s, the cost is the removal from the land of plenty and eternal Spring, to jealousy, the grave’s cruelty, and death. That love’s strength is recouped in such a different environment serves to emphasis its power, but also to characterise it very differently. No longer idyllic, it is the one force that can transcend mortality, but to do so it needs God. The lover’s dialogue has been replaced by the Word of God, as protection against the ravages of death and destruction. Thus, the first eight sonnets (and so the first eight ‘lines’ of the octave of this sonnet of sonnets) work to establish first, that love is always already lost and second, that God has sanctioned the poet’s desire. The relation between these two propositions is not arbitrary; her desire is sanctioned because it can bring no dangerous or unlawful pleasure. In the course of this initial argument, the poet also glances at the kind of poetry produced by desire, both hers and her beloved’s, and points out that while his poetry is full of his imaginings of her, hers is full of the loss of him. The ‘octave’ of the sequence ends with the story of Esther – in the terms of sonnet eight, the mistress who used her power to godly purpose. Significantly, while sonnet seven ends by proclaiming the strength of death and the equal strength of love, sonnet eight begins by invoking death: ‘“I, if I perish, perish” – Esther spake:’ (l. 1). This ‘bride of life or death’ (l. 2) ‘put[s] on… loveliness, to take/ Her husband through his eyes at unaware;’ (ll. 5–6). She plays her role as desired object for a specific purpose: ‘She spread abroad her beauty for a snare,/ Harmless as doves and subtle as a snake’ (ll. 7–8). The octave ends on this very resonant simile. Although the sonnet seems to acknowledge her subjectivity by making it clear she played the sonnet mistress ‘And built her people’s house that it should stand’ (l. 11), emphasising her political wiles and efficacy, the references are to her beauty as a ‘snare’, and the use of her typically Petrarchan net of hair as a trap (l. 9). Given that the charge of duplicity refers us to Eve, in the image of the snake in the middle of this description, the poet’s admiration for Esther has to be ambivalent. This poet is unclear on the

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to solve. For herself she takes refuge in the solution she has suggested since sonnet 3.

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If I might take my life so in my hand, And for my love to Love put up my prayer, And for love’s sake by Love be granted it! (ll. 12–14). There is a missing final clause: If, like Esther, I could deploy my female beauty as a trap, if I could use my love to get Love to grant my prayer, then… what? This is the one moment in the sequence where having is contemplated, but the poet cannot even verbalise such an impossible hope. At this extremely dangerous moment in the sequence, when the poet considers violating the code of feminine honour to become an Eve and no longer be the chaste and virtuous Laura, comes the volta of the sonnet of sonnets. Sonnet nine marks the start of the ‘sestet’ of the sequence. Something happens, and even the memory of happiness vanishes: ‘Thinking of you, and all that was, and all/ That might have been and now can never be…’ (ll. 1–2). The poet blames herself for not being able to hold on to her earthly love: For woe is me who walk so apt to fall, So apt to shrink afraid, so apt to flee, Apt to lie down and die (ah woe is me!) Faithless and hopeless turning to the wall (ll. 5–8). The repetition of the word ‘apt’ as the poet’s way of expressing her tendencies to weakness stresses that it is her mortal frailty that is to blame. If it is aptness that causes her behaviour, it is something suited to who and what she is. This could be as much a comment on her gender as on her human frailty, especially given that the preceding sonnet has marked other notorious aptitudes of women. That she is weak, unable to sustain the relationship, aware, as she says of her own unworthiness (l. 4), could be an extension of women’s constitutional weakness as proven by the sin of Eve. Esther then serves to emphasise the danger of female sexuality. Thereafter, having confronted the shadow of Eve, the poet finds she does not have the strength to continue on the path of desire. This is the cost of authorising her voice with God’s love. No male Petrarchan poet needs to fear that his desire, if put in a Christian context, will lead him to such a place of shame and damnation.26

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implications of playing the mistress. Having described Esther’s behaviour and its results, she concludes:

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Let us go fall asleep, dear friend, in peace: A little while, and age and sorrow cease; A little while, and life reborn annuls Loss and decay and death, and all is love (ll. 11–14). This resurrected love, born out of the speaker’s weakness and redeemed by faith, is romantic love transmuted to religious love. The following sonnet recoups the fact that in their earthly context, the poet and her beloved are doomed to part, but that love itself will not end. ‘[A]t the Judgement’ he is charged to clarify the nature of her love for him: ‘My love of you was life and not a breath’ (ll. 13–14). This defense is necessary because of the earthly judgement she faces as a woman who spoke about love, as the epigraphs emphasise. They stress first, the gossip that the lovers need to transcend and then the difficulties they face: ‘Come after me, and leave folk to talk’ (‘Vien dietro a me e lascia dir le genti’ – Dante); ‘Relating the casualties of our life’ (‘Contando i casi della vita nostra’ – Petrarca). Many in aftertimes will say of you ‘He loved her’ – while of me what will they say? Not that I loved you more than just in play For fashion’s sake as idle women do. Even let them prate; who knew not what we knew… (ll. 1–5). Having established that her love will not be understood by the world as his will be, she goes on in sonnet 12 to demonstrate that it is a selfless love, one that is enough for itself. In ‘commend[ing]’ (l. 4) him to another possible love he might have, she establishes the transcendent nature of her love for him. Having gone this far, she is able, in the following sonnet, to give him back to God. Using the same verb, she ‘commend[s] you back to Him/ Whose love your love’s capacity can fill’ (ll. 13–14). In sonnet 12 she imagines a worthier woman for him, someone with ‘nobler grace,/… readier wit than mine… sweeter face’ (ll. 4–5). In sonnet 13 she bows to God’s superiority, ‘Without Whose Will one lily doth not stand/ Nor sparrow fall at his appointed date… To Whom the world is neither small nor great,/ Whose knowledge

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In sonnet 9 the poet tries to find solace ‘as best I can’ in love, which ultimately is the love of God, as she has already pointed out in sonnet 6. Thus sonnet 10’s vision of love is overtly redemptive in a religious sense: ‘Faith… outruns the rest, makes light of everything’ (ll. 3–4), until,

foreknew every way we planned’ (ll. 3–8). Because she is ‘Helpless to help and impotent to do,/ Of understanding dull, of sight most dim’ (ll. 11–12) and also full of ‘love and love’s goodwill’ for ‘all that touches you’ (ll. 9, 10), she is able to renounce him, to give him back to the God who can love him better than she ever can. This is the ultimate response to the charge of frail and idle woman’s love. It also means that she loses the poetic subjectivity brought into being by the need to speak of her love for him, to him. The final sonnet of the sequence, then, resolves the sequence by bringing it to ‘Silence of love that cannot sing again’ (l. 14). There is a kind of a circling back to the first sonnet, which ends by invoking the memory of sweet songs. The first sonnet stakes the sequence’s claim to its melancholic and inadequate nature, its constituting loss, by constructing the poems as mere echoes of, in that they are the results of, lost sweetness. The final sonnet closes the possibilities of any more singing whatsoever. A sequence that begins by marking its awareness of itself as the traces of an impossible love ends when it gives up that love to God. For the poet of Monna Innominata to speak herself into being in the Petrarchan Symbolic is to speak of loss, yearning, pain, and the impossibility of fulfillment. This is not unusual for a Petrarchan poet, although the strategy by which she authorises her right to speak this way is. She anticipates an end to her suffering not in the achievement of her poetic laurel (she cannot have this and still remain honourable; that is to say she cannot anticipate with pleasure public acknowledgement of her desire). Instead her compensation is deferred, it resides in her faith in a better life to come. Robinson, Barrett Browning, and Rossetti together demonstrate that women were beginning to find strategies to enable them to enter the Petrarchan Symbolic as subjects. Significantly, they could do so only by relying on other discourses which authorised their desires by framing them as controlled or socially sanctioned in various ways. Twenty years later, Rosa Newmarch published a sonnet sequence which ventured into new territory, hinting as it did at a desire that could not be socially sanctioned.

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6

Sexual identities are difficult to write about, not least because the act of description will tend towards constructing an inevitably artificial classification. Thanks to queer studies, it has become clear that human sexuality exceeds the labels that societies develop to contain and channel its energies. Sexual identities of the past become even more difficult to write about, given the distances and differences of history and culture. Sexual identities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer the specific complexity of emerging at the time that modern homosexuality was constituted, along with the implications for heterosexuality (a backformation of ‘homosexuality’; as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick [1994: 72] has pointed out, ‘a whole cluster of the most crucial sites for the contestation of meaning in twentieth-century Western culture are consequentially and quite indelibly marked with the historical specificity of homosocial/ homosexual definition, notably but not exclusively male, from around the turn of the [twentieth] century’1). It is therefore easier to look for recognisable sexualities in the writers of that time than it is to seek for modern categories in earlier writers. But such a project – to locate homosexual identities in the writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – is complicated by the reality that many of them, including those that have since become icons of gay and lesbian history and literature, were married (Oscar Wilde and John Addington Symonds are perhaps the two most prominent, but Virginia Woolf and Vita SackvilleWest are later examples). The category ‘bisexual’ confounds attempts to speak for a gay or lesbian identity formation in this period (as in any other, including our own, as Marjorie Garber [1995] has demonstrated). Critics working on sexuality in recent years have reiterated time and again the extraordinary difficulty of being able to say – that is, to theorise – exactly what homosexuality is (see, for example, Dollimore [1991: 32] and 135

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Queering the Petrarchan Subject: The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch

Sedgwick [1994: 85]). To assert for most of the writers at the turn of the twentieth century a straightforwardly modern gay or lesbian identity is thus to leave out of the equation much murky detail (a lesson that queer studies reintroduces into gay and lesbian identity politics). Rosa Newmarch, too, was married. There is no documentary evidence, beyond the tantalising ambiguity in her poetry, that she identified with or lived what we would now label a bisexual’s life. There are only two pieces of literary critical writing that deal with Newmarch: John Holmes (2005: 112–19) and Florence Boos (2004: 267–9) discuss her poetry in terms of its relation to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s. Holmes’s is the more sustained engagement. Both critics agree that her sonnet sequence deserves more attention than it has currently received. Because she is generally unknown as a poet, basic bibliographic information follows.2 Rosa Newmarch was born Rosa Jeaffreson in 1857, married in 1883, and died in 1940. She was a prolific and well-known music critic, and instrumental in bringing to the attention of the English public the music and biographies of Russian and Czechoslovakian composers. She spent time in both countries (which influences can be seen in some of her poems), and learned to speak both languages, amongst others of the region, such as Bulgarian. Horae Amoris was the first of two poetry books that she published, in 1903 and 1906. The second, Songs to a Singer, contain some love poems to a woman (although we cannot assume that Newmarch was not focalising through an imagined male speaker). The 34-sonnet sequence that comprises Horae Amoris is remarkable for its exploration of the speaker’s love for a married woman in a way that continually hints at, but never names, a same-sex erotics. In order to account for the gender-indeterminacy of the sequence, I first want to put it in its context. What contemporary ideas was Newmarch framed by when she wrote her deliberately unspeakably gendered poet into being?

‘“The mute sin”’: Nineteenth-century theories of homosexuality Although there were differences as the century progressed, the time in which Newmarch lived had very little tolerance for homoerotic behaviour, usually, in the public sphere, understood as sexual activities between men. The death penalty was actively enforced in England until 1836, and only removed from the Statute books in 1861. In the nineteenth century the description ‘the mute sin’ to describe homosexual sexual activity was written into law, although the phrase has its roots in seventeenth-century theology (White ed. 1999: 3, 26). In 1810 clients of a gay brothel, The White Swan, were prosecuted. The terms in

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which their activities were described in the press suggested the unnamability of, specifically, sodomy: The Times’s first report on the matter began, ‘The existence of a Club, or Society, for the purposes so detestable and repugnant to the common feelings of our nature, that by no word can it be described without committing an outrage upon decency, has for some time been suspected…’ (qtd.: 9). In a book published three years later, recounting the events of the case, the author offers to ‘consider the origin and progress of this crime, which is so detestable, that the law of England blushes to name it…’ (13). By the end of the century, the namelessness of the act of sodomy had influenced the identity of the homosexual which was being legislated and pathologised into being. Oscar Wilde’s lover, Alfred Douglas, coined the phrase, ‘the love that dares not speak its name’ in his poem ‘Two Loves’, published in 1894. It came up as evidence against Wilde in his second trial in 1895 (54–8). Tellingly, in his sentencing speech, the judge called Wilde’s putative crime ‘so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise to the breast of every man of honour who has heard the details…’ (59). Not only the act, but its effects, are unspeakable. While overwhelming public approbation faced those considered guilty of ‘the mute sin’,3 the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw numerous scientific (and not-so-scientific) attempts to identify, quantify, and classify same-sex oriented sexuality. Literary and cultural historian John Addington Symonds was the first in England to, as his collaborator in another project on the same topic, Havelock Ellis (1930: 72), put it, ‘deal seriously, from the modern point of view, with the problem of homosexuality’. In his Preface to Studies in Sexual Inversion, the collated texts of his writings on the subject, Symonds (1928: n.p.) also addresses the difficulty of naming the desire he wishes to explore. Insisting first on its prevalence in all cultures and throughout history, he proceeds: Endowed with inextinguishable life, in spite of all that has been done to suppress it, this passion survives… Yet no one dares to speak of it; or if they do, they bate their breath, and preface their remarks with maledictions. Those who read these lines will hardly doubt what passion it is that I am hinting at… Surely it deserves a name. Yet I can hardly find a name which will not seem to soil this paper.4 Symonds’s work was followed by, and fed into, sexologist Ellis’s extensive survey on what he called sexual inversion in what was

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 137

initially the first, and subsequently the second, volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. First published in German in 1896, the book appeared in English the following year. Between them, Symonds’s and Ellis’s texts circulated the defenses, such as they were, of homosexuality, insofar as they sought to present its incurable manifestation (as opposed to the kind of homosexuality that depended on context, or was present to a small degree in, especially, women) as a congenital condition and therefore not a sign of insanity, criminality, or disease.5 Ellis’s work on homosexuality, in many ways progressive and humane, retained a commitment to heterosexuality as the preferred norm, and to the logic of a gendered binary through which heterosexuality makes sense of its subjects and its Others. For example, in The Psychology of Sex, which summarised the findings of his monumental series, he speaks out against a normative conception of sexual behaviour as stigmatising and unreflective of reality. However, he adds, ‘To remain within the normal range, all variations must at some point include the procreative end for which sex exists. To exclude procreation is perfectly legitimate, and under some circumstances morally imperative. But sexual activities entirely and by preference outside the range in which procreation is possible may fairly be considered abnormal; they are deviations’ (Ellis 1948: 126).6 Ellis uses nature to prove the hereditary and constitutional qualities of homosexuality, conceived as a condition of intersexuality. Thus male and female as defining and heterosexually-informed concepts are still the presiding terms (see esp. 195, 202). Treatment of those suffering from homosexuality is in most cases useless. ‘Neither is it altogether a matter of congratulation to render an invert capable of procreation. The offspring of an invert united to a sound partner have, indeed, a fair chance of turning out satisfactorily, but the risks are too serious to enable us to say that they may be lightly run’ (214).7 Despite Ellis’s intention to win positive recognition for homosexuals, the language of normality and abnormality is in evidence, with the elevation of heterosexuality as the most desired end of a process even if that process includes an ‘abnormal stage’ (3), or in more modern terms, a phase. Ellis’s conception of gender as heterosexually structured encodes a value system that is both normative and rigid. The two sexes are opposite in nature, he says, although they each exhibit the other’s characteristics to greater or lesser degree (the most extreme physical manifestation being hermaphroditism and the

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 139

It is… equivalence and not equality… with which we are here concerned. There is no such thing as equality in the world of living things, even if there is in the realms of death. No two living things are equal, or indeed any single thing always equal to itself; it would be absurd to speak of the ‘equality’ of two whole sexes… the sexes are perfectly poised in complete equivalence… the two halves of the race are compensatory in their unlikeness (Ellis 1934: v, vi). Not surprisingly this complementarity encodes traditional gender roles. He concludes: Woman’s special sphere is the bearing and rearing of children, with the care of human life in the home. Man’s primary sphere remains the exploration of life outside the home, in industry and inventions and the cultivation of the arts… All that we have found in our long course of investigation is in harmony with this primitive and fundamental distinction between the two main spheres of masculine and feminine activity… Woman breeds and tends; man provides; it remains so even when the spheres tend to overlap (447–8). If the defenders of homosexuals had a heterosexually gendered framework through which to read the identities they were attempting to explain, this had specific consequences for women, whose gendering entailed proscriptions around the expression of sexuality even in its most sanctioned forms. Notable in this regard is the different emphasis of most of the period’s accounts on male and female homosexualities. ‘Xavier Mayne’ (Edward Stevenson), one of the few writers on the subject, along with Symonds, who was himself in possession of a same-sex sexuality, found that sexual gratification was a natural and healthy part of the life of the male invert. But he found it ‘pernicious’ in the female (qtd. White ed. 1999: 108).8 While Symonds goes to great lengths to prove the moral, spiritual, and social benefits of love between men, using the Greeks to authorise his stance, he sees love between women as degraded. Because of the position of

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most extreme psychic manifestation being homosexuality.) The two sexes are complementary to each other in their absolute gendered difference:

140 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

There was no opportunity in the harem or the zenana of raising homosexual passion to the same moral and spiritual efficiency as it obtained in the camp… and the schools of the philosophers. Consequently, while the Greeks utilized and ennobled boy-love, they left Lesbian love to follow the same course of degeneracy as it pursues in modern times (1928: 96). Similarly, in A Problem in Modern Ethics (1928: 196), where he strives to differentiate among different types of inverts in order to argue for the naturalness of some of them, he is explicit that ‘under certain restrictions… [sexual inversion] can be simply natural in a certain percentage of male persons’. Within this turn-of-the-century atmosphere generally – where at best, homosexuals were to be pitied, and at worst, at first literally and then socially pilloried (White ed. 1999: 11) – the understanding of ‘sexual inversion’ was highly gendered, and tended to concentrate on men. As long as the discourse that sought to defend inversion against condemnation could do so only in heterosexuality’s terms, there was inevitably less of a vocabulary for women who desired women. In 1892 Symonds wrote to Ellis, when they were collaborating on Sexual Inversion (a collaboration Symonds’s family erased after his death): ‘as to female Sexual Inversion we do not know very much… I should notice the fact that while there are numerous paiderastic myths I do not know of one which sanctions female perversion’ (qtd. White ed. 1999: 91). Similarly, even in the third edition of the volume on sexual inversion in Studies on the Psychology of Sex, printed in 1930, Ellis was commenting on how little was known ‘of sexual inversion in women. Even so lately as 1901 (after the publication of the first edition of the present Study), Kraft-Ebing [the German sexologist who worked on homosexuality] wrote that scarcely fifty cases had been recorded’ (203). The reasons, he says, are fourfold: first, men are not threatened by or particularly concerned with female inversion; second, ‘it is less easy to detect in women; we are accustomed to a much greater familiarity and intimacy between women than between men’ (204). Third, in a much-quoted passage, Ellis says that women themselves often do not realise that what they are feeling is sexual attraction for another woman. Even if they do, women don’t like to talk about it. Lastly, ‘well-marked and fully developed cases of inversion are probably rarer

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women in ancient Greece, he says, what he calls Lesbian love was not valued.

in women, though a slighter degree may be more common’ (ibid.). So female sexual inverts are harder to spot, are not as sexual as men, and, judging from the case studies in this chapter, are better at controlling their sexual impulses towards other women. As ‘Miss V. aged 35’ (229), the subject of case study 38, recounts of her sexual encounters with the women she loved, ‘I hated this feeling and have succeeded in overcoming it pretty largely… We [she and her companion of many years] both consider sexual feelings degrading and deleterious to real love… I came to the conclusion that it was impossible to obtain physical satisfaction through the woman I loved’ (233–4). Even many of those women willing to talk about their inversion to Ellis, and aware of their sexuality, were not able or willing to embrace it as a lived identity or sexual practice. Instead, as this example illustrates, many chose platonic and devoted friendships with other women as the best solution. They are not quite women (they will not marry or have children, Ellis’s fundamental definition for complete womanhood as indeed it was Freud’s, and they tend to be masculine in either looks or psychology, or both [222]), and not quite homosexual (they are not sexually aware, or not sexually active, or both). As White (ed. 1999: 69) puts it, in Sexual Inversion ‘lesbians are seen as both failed men and failed women’. While men who desired men could still identify as men, thanks in part to the work of self-identified male inverts like Symonds and Carpenter, women who desired women ‘were denied positive female identities grounded in same-sex desire’ (Holmes n.d.: n.p.).9 If the context in which Newmarch would have lived and written was in transition from considering same-sex desire unspeakable to finding scientifically-endorsed ways of speaking about it, it was nevertheless a movement whose vocabulary was better able to express male sexualities. The unspeakableness of same-sex female desire has always been inflected by the socialised stigmatisation of female desire in general. The resulting Victorian conceptualisation of women’s sexuality may have morphed since into more complex and differently coded variants, but the inability of the social Symbolic to recognise women’s desire outside of the terms set for it by a patriarchal value system is precisely what Irigaray is attempting to account for, and what this book has mapped through the history of Petrarchism as a language of the desiring subject. It is therefore no surprise that the expression of one woman’s desire for another has a history of deferred or disguised expression (Yorke 1992: 189; Collecott 1992). Thus we need to add to the difficulties of writing about early twentieth-century same-sex sexualities, mentioned

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 141

above, the strategy of ambiguity, which may be a disguise or a deferral, that tended to characterise much of the writing about women’s desire for other women until fairly recently (Virginia Woolf [1993: 75] coyly put it in 1928 that even to suggest that ‘Chloe liked Olivia’ would constituted a new direction in women’s writing). Newmarch’s sequence is a perfect example of ambiguity of desire in action. In the absence of biographical information, it is impossible to speculate about her experience of her sexual or gendered identity. We are free to take the poems at their own word: but what word, exactly, is that?

Horae Amoris (1903) As with many of the personas of sonnets sequences and their writers, there are parallels between the speaker of this sequence and its author. Both are writers, both listen to Tchaikovsky and know something about Russia, both have a moderate feminist sensibility, both are approaching middle age (see Holmes [n.d]; and sonnets XIV, XV, XVII, XXI, XXX). But while the speaker of a sequence can never be simply conflated with the author, in this case the relationship between them is complicated by a specific writing effect: unlike Newmarch, the speaker of the sonnets is continually ‘somewhere in between’ (Holmes 2005: 115) male and female, making use of both gendered positions in his/her images, analogies, and identifications in the sequence. It is impossible to know whether the speaker is meant to be male or female, although the tortured nature of his/her love hints at unspeakable desires. Newmarch’s poet uses the Petrarchan situation – an impossible love which causes the lover great pain, a beloved who cannot be achieved – and twists it to enable the inclusion of a possibly same-sex desire that manages to register and resonate with the rules of the Petrarchan Symbolic, rules that seek to exclude a desiring woman. The gender-bending of the sequence’s identifications and expressions makes radical new use of Petrarchism’s poetics of gender. Petrarch often shifted gendered positions (Dubrow 1995: 28), and I have suggested that this movement between two positions serves to reinforce the set gender parameters of each position. In Newmarch’s sequence, gender becomes the site of instability, and the poet’s suffering is differently inflected accordingly. The typically Petrarchan love that can never be, with its spiritual lessons for the poet, becomes something else. The first sonnet, titled ‘Love Among the Ruins’,10 characterises the poet’s love as problematic, as cause for suffering and dismay. Robert Browning’s poem of the same name is a celebration of love as ‘best’, as

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142 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

it concludes, triumphant over glorious cities and their proud monarchs and battle-ready men, the memories of which are reduced to the ruins of the title. The poet’s lady waits for him amongst the ruins, alive and present. Newmarch’s poet’s ruins do not function to emphasise the vitality and power of her love. Instead, they imply that the love of this sequence has arisen out of destruction and despair. Sonnet 1 begins: No radiant cupid is this love of mine, To sport with when the summer sky is blue, In sheltered bowers of rose and eglantine. It is the child of bitterness and rue, Born in the wreckage of a fallen shrine At sundown, while the night wept tears of dew; Upon its birth one star of bale did shine, And fed by pity and despair it grew.11 This octave looks forward to the events of the sequence which it anticipates and summarises. The ‘wreckage of a fallen shrine’ is on one level the failed marriage of the poet’s beloved. The sequence charts how the friendship between the devastated and wronged wife and the poet develops into the poet’s desire for the wife. The poet seems always to know that the relationship can never be, and in the end the wife returns to her husband. The poet’s changing feelings are mapped in terms of friendship and service (Holmes 2005: 115). Such a progression draws on the tradition of the imbrication of service with love (Schalkwyk 2002; Jones and Stallybrass 1984) that has caused so much trouble for critics of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man. As in those sonnets, casting the relationship in terms of service allows a vocabulary that has been put to one kind of use to suggest another meaning for the devotion the poet writes about, while embedding love firmly in the social sphere of power relations and sanctioned behaviour. The child Love, the cupid of this sequence, is recharacterised in the first sonnet from the Anacreontic cupid typical of the Renaissance Petrarchan tradition to a ‘child of bitterness and rue’. While the ‘pity’ it is fed by is the poet’s pity for the wife’s suffering (which the first section of the sequence maps in detail), the speaker is never explicit about the exact reasons why this love can never be anything other than ‘fed by… despair’. The opening sonnet lays emphasis on the questions: why is this love so impossible? Why will it by definition never deliver happiness? The absolute Petrarchism of this situation is at once standard and profoundly unusual, because of the way Newmarch refuses

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 143

to gender the speaker, starting from the sestet of this sonnet and continuing into the sequence. It may be typical that s/he cannot have her/his love. It is profoundly atypical that the reason, the ‘barrier’, as Christina Rossetti put it, should be simultaneously highlighted and rendered unseeable. The ambiguity that surrounds the nature of this love constitutes the first time the Petrarchan Symbolic is made to accommodate a desire that might be the desire of one woman for another. By its ambiguous presence, the way it is in the poetry without rupturing the Petrarchan skein, this same-sex desire is perversely proximate to the standard Petrarchan subjectivity it both is and is not. Its very ambiguity marks it as trangressive of the language it invokes. The opening poem’s octave characterises the poet’s love, highlighting its Petrarchanly painful nature and at the same time emphasising the unspoken reasons for its impossible existence. In the sestet, s/he addresses this unfortunate child directly, in a narrative which begins to confound the gendered desiring positions of the sequence: O love of mine, thou child of misery, Whose mother grudged thy late untimely birth, And taught thee no caress, no ways of mirth, I hold thee dearer than all else beside: Thou hast her look who bore thee unto me In that same hour when all her gladness died. Who is the mother of this child? If the child itself is ‘No radiant cupid’, its mother is not Venus, the traditional solution. On one level the mother of this love is the beloved, whom the child resembles (in a maternal twist on the typical imprint of the beloved’s face on the poet’s heart) and who the poet loves accordingly. In this figuration, the poet is the child’s father, equally responsible for its birth but not part of the labour of bringing it into the world. His (in this case) love for the child is the natural love of a parent, of someone who sees a part of himself in the product of a relationship. The beloved’s suffering is then troped as the pain of labour, exclusively woman’s work. However, as much as the final line’s ‘her’ refers to the beloved, whose pitiful situation initiated the relationship, thus making the hour of the child’s birth ‘that same hour when all her gladness died’, the hour of the birth of the poet’s love could also be the hour of the death of the poet’s gladness. If the poet experiences a sanctioned desire, being handed the child of love s/he cocreated is a perfectly Petrarchan bittersweet moment of

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desire and despair. If the beloved is unaware of the poet’s feelings, understanding the relationship as a friendship, as the sequence suggests she might, then who is not glad of the child’s birth? Is it the reluctant beloved who never intended the poet to love her? Is it the suffering poet who never intended to fall in love with a woman who can never love her/him back? The confusion and conflation of the subject positions because of the metaphors of motherhood and birth rely on gender to be resolved, and gender is what the sequence refuses to deliver. The strategy of complex and shifting identifications, the gendering and regendering that renders the poet androgynous, recurs throughout the sequence. At times it results in the conflation of traditional subject and object of the Petrarchan schema as in sonnet VIII, where the addressee could be the beloved, or the poet talking to him/herself: ‘But let the greatness of your suffering hold/ Your life exempt from mean and sordid ill’ (ll. 10–11), the poet advises either her/himself or the beloved. ‘Live to be/ A witness how affliction’s alchemy/ Transmutes a shrinking heart to sterling gold’ (ll. 12–14). The poet’s advice to a suffering soul is equally applicable to the wronged wife and her/his despairing self. This is a differently-inflected love to the usual Petrarchan situation. The beloved’s suffering sparks the poet’s pity, which in turn births her/his love. This is a love born of suffering, and the poet’s desire for the beloved is utterly imbricated in the emotion of suffering. Not only does her suffering cause the poet’s love, her suffering causes the poet to suffer in an intense identification, which becomes a conflation, that began with the image of the love-child’s birth in sonnet 1 and continues throughout the sequence. In the first sonnet the beloved is partially troped as the mother of the poet’s poor love-child. Later in the sequence the beloved is repeatedly cast as a child (in sonnets II and IX, for example, discussed below), making the lover either adult, or mother, once nurse, as we will see. The conflation of positions of beloved as both mother and child, echoes the intense identification which signals the conflation of positions that occurs between lover and beloved across the sequence. One effect of this conflation is to further confound gender identifications. If the lover and beloved share other positions, gender is one of the positions they might also share, given that the lover’s gender is an open and overt question. As we have seen, in sonnet VIII it is impossible to know which one of them is being addressed. Sonnet II, titled ‘The Vision’, continues to link poet and beloved in an agony of suffering: Through working days and waking nights I see Her piteous, stricken face Heaven made to win

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 145

The smiles of old and young, from brow to chin Stained now with tears and seared with agony; While, drawing near, she stands and lifts to me Tired arms and hands grief wears too weak and thin To halve the burden of a strong man’s sin, And eyes whence joy is hunted utterly. I may not take her sorrows; yet God knows That every evil thought I ever knew, And every cruel deed and word untrue, Is paid with interest o’er and o’er again When I behold this vision of her woes And bow my head in unavailing pain. The ‘unavailing pain’ caused by the vision of the beloved’s suffering becomes some sort of reprisal. From the outset this love of bitterness and rue, conceived and delivered in suffering, is different in kind to typical Petrarchan desire. This is not a love that will enable the poet to come to self-knowledge, or to benefit from the displays of wit that comprise poetry set in motion by unrequited need. This is a love which the poet can only experience as punishment. Thus the intense identification between subject and object, because of the gender ambiguity of the sequence, functions to hint at a same-sex desire which is utterly impossible even at it leaves its traces behind. In this sonnet, their mutual suffering stresses the conflation of subject and object. Another kind of doubling also occurs. The metaphor of the ‘strong man’s sin’, like the first sonnet’s mother, has a double referent. Is the poet meaning to invoke the errant husband, the cause of the wife’s grief? Or is s/he invoking her/his own history of ‘cruel deed and word untrue’ for which his/her pain at the beloved’s suffering is some sort of ironic recompense? And if the latter, is the poet being metaphorical, indicating the magnitude of her/his transgression? And is that transgression ultimately the unspeakable desire for another woman? That the poet is playing with gendered identifications is explicit in sonnet IX, where the metaphors s/he invokes to describe her/himself switch between gendered positions. Grief thawed: her soul cried out for sympathy. She leaned her bruised life for a space on mine, As children, scared in falling, run and twine

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The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 147

Now I am like a nurse whose faithful heart, Set fast upon the child chance gave to her, Records the years to come, regrets those flown, And yearns her time of service to defer. So do I count the time till we must part, And fate once more has brought her back her own. Although the sequence refuses to deliver the answer to the question of the poet’s gender, there are places where the nature of the identification seems to suggest a leaning towards the poet’s desire as samesex-oriented. In this sonnet, it may be significant that the masculine identification belongs to the stranger, someone outside the bonds of love and service exemplified by the caring, faithful, female, nurse. The sonnet – and the poet – progress from the independence of the male stranger to the emotional commitment of the devoted nurse, bound by love and loyalty to dedicate her life to the child’s. Furthermore, if the poet and the nurse are alike in loving the beloved/child and so being emotionally dependent on the charges they undertook first out of duty, they are also alike in being vulnerable precisely because they can never truly be family, despite the strength of their loving bond. Like the nurse, vulnerable to the end of the terms of her service, the poet anticipates losing the relationship that s/he has troped in terms of service, and which clearly encodes an impossible desire. There is never any suggestion that real union is possible between the two: the lover can never replace the errant husband as a new husband. This is as impossible as a nurse having the security of a mother to the child she raises. While the reason could be the beloved’s commitment to her marriage, the absolute impossibility of switching the terms of relation, as well as the social vulnerability encoded in the example of the nurse, hint at another reason why it might be literally impossible for the lover ever to replace the husband. As sonnet IX anticipates the termination of the poet’s service, so it comes to pass. The poet repeatedly invokes these terms: ‘An outcast at the gates I fell and cried:/ “After long years of loyal service done/ Am I supplanted?” ’ (sonnet XXII ll. 9–10); ‘Should that day come – as

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About a stranger’s knees, and bid him see How they are hurt; childlike she came to me. I felt her shuddering sobs, tasted the brine Of tears uncomforted, and could but sign My life away to serve her loyally.

come it surely must – / When from her presence with sad steps and slow,/ Like a discharged steward I must go…’ (sonnet XXIII ll. 1–3). In sonnet XXI the poet tells a Russian folktale which prefigures the wife’s choice of her husband over her friend (‘But she was true, and though she loved him yet/ And though his pleadings tore her soul in twain,/ She chose not love, but duty for her doom’ [sonnet XXI, ll. 12–14]). By sonnet XXVI the poet has lost the wife back to the husband, in a sonnet ironically titled ‘Spring the Destroyer’ (‘Not the life-giver, but the layer low/ Of burgeoning trees…’ [ll. 5–6]). Thereafter the poet expresses her/his betrayal in series of desolate images. S/he is like a cynical Christ: ‘he who knows/ Rejected love and useless sacrifice/ Enacts th’eternal Cavalry in his heart’ (sonnet XXVII ll. 12–13); like a ‘screaming petrel’ in a ‘gale’ who ‘flies/ Straight for the beacon, with bewildered eyes,/ Trusting where that clear star shines all is well,/ And beats about some refuge to compel/ Till faint, with broken, baffled plumes it lies./ I, too, have dashed my heart out on the light/ Set up to guide another’s vessel home…’ (sonnet XXIX ll. 4–10). Once the wife has returned to her husband, the sequence ceases to concentrate on her, and turns to the poet’s devastation. The penultimate sonnet, called ‘The Problem’, addresses the beloved for the last time: When all is done, what have you been to me? A vision of uncomforted despair; A weary child to humour and to bear Across life’s mire; a daily mystery Of smiles and tears to which I held no key; A thorn-set rose; a bitter fount; a care I’d not have changed for all the world holds fair; And, in the last, a gnawing memory. And through the years, what have I been to you? A shield upheld a moment in the strife; A hand to clutch at when you feared to fall; A song that soothed and passed? Would God I knew If in the drama of your ruined life I had in truth played any part at all. The octave of this sonnet reiterates the beloved’s suffering and its effect on the poet, repeats the characterisation of the beloved as a child, and confirms once more that the love she brought into being was painful and bitter. It also functions to prove the lover’s commitment to his/her

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charge (‘a care/ I’d not have changed…’), and combines the by-now familiar motifs of suffering, childlike beloved, painful love, and devoted lover into, finally, inevitably, the poet’s ‘gnawing memory’. Thus the octave rehearses the main themes of the narrative and performs its inevitable conclusion. The sestet shifts to focus on the beloved’s experience of the relationship, and it is no surprise that the poet cannot offer any certainty in this regard. S/he knows s/he was useful in a time of need, but has no way of knowing how deeply s/he touched her/his beloved, since their needs of each other were so fundamentally different. In the sequence’s emphasis on the relationship as a mutual, if unequal, experience, it once again resonates with that other ambiguous Petrarchan tale of same-sex desire, Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man. Newmarch’s poet may cast the relationship in terms of service, but it is clear that it is a love relationship from the poet’s side (as Shakespeare’s sonnets suggest the poet is more emotionally invested in his young man than that fair youth will ever be in one of his poets). As early as sonnet XII, s/he is declaring: I am too human to be quite content With selfless service, though my daily food Be the reward of silent gratitude. Sometimes rebellious love makes violent The tides of life, when, fierce as blasts storm-sent Across Atlantic seas, sweeps on this mood In which, by passion’s mocking tempest-brood, The fiction of my comradeship is rent (ll. 1–8). The lover’s feelings are often cast as storms or winds, ‘passion’s… tempest-brood’. Life’s ‘tides’, its inexorable natural forces, include a desire that cannot be refused even if it cannot be named. The suggestion that desire is as powerful as a storm, and that the poet’s pent-up passion is like a storm about to break, is most extensively addressed in sonnet XIII, titled ‘Before Storm’: Throughout this August day the thought of thee Has brooded o’er my prostrate heart, O Love, As yonder purple tempest-cloud above The leaden shimmer of the sultry sea. There burst no pent up tear-showers to set free My burdened thoughts; no winds awake to move

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150 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

But when night falls, for which the hot noon aches, The brazen bonds are loosed, ease comes to us, No more the long day’s passion is repressed, But trembles with the thunder-throb, and breaks In keen, swift flashes, far more dangerous Than the blue lightening lambent in the West. As the title of this sonnet suggests, and as is the poet’s bitter tragedy, the storm of his/her desire never breaks. Instead, we are left here with the sexually charged image of flashing skies, which stand for a less dangerous incarnation of the poet’s repressed passion. The thing itself can not be troped directly, and can never be released. Night becomes the time when passion is allowed to thunder its way across the poet’s skies, but that is all it is allowed to do. This sonnet may refer to a dream, the place where repressed desires can be expressed, or it may be describing a charged and tormented poet, freed from the self-control necessitated by day and light. What is explicit is that although the poet’s desire is as natural as the earth’s forces and more destructive to her/him, it cannot be unleashed. It is not allowed direct expression. Cast in terms of service and in terms of natural images of powerful elements, it cannot ever be specifically itself. This desire is doomed to be denied. It cannot be expressed. Is it the love that dare not speak its name? If its articulation lies in hints and suggestions, in the places where the metaphors and images of the sonnets shift through indeterminate identifications, its genesis is in silence. This is first made explicit in sonnet X. The octave details the loss of the poet’s youth, and the aging effects of suffering on the wife. The sestet continues: On old and suffering hearts Love has no power: – She thinks this – yet last night when she sat there, Her tragic face lit by the leaping flame Upon my hearth, what wild wish went and came, Born of our silence and the fire-light hour, To hold her hands in mine – to kiss her hair? The poet’s wish, ‘born of… silence’, cannot even be named: ‘what… wish…/.. to kiss her hair?’ the poet asks. It is as if her/his desire is

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Th’incumbent cloud; the hush, the faintness, prove All life surchanged with electricity.

unfamiliar to her/himself, as if it catches her/him by surprise. Furthermore, this wish is ‘wild’. It is clearly recognisably desire – troped as it is by fire – but a desire which comes from an unexpected, and indeed, an unspeakable, source. This desire is expressed through nature and in silence. It cannot be directly spoken. In itself this indicates a female speaker in the Petrarchan Symbolic. The speaker is talking about something so foreign to the rules of the genre that it cannot be named, only hinted at. This is more than the traditional courtly love of a married woman, although it cannot (or will not) say exactly what it is. Ultimately, I believe that the sequence hints at a female lover without ever confirming this hint. This is a strategy to allow for the possibility of a love that has not been expressed in these terms before. Holmes (2005: 119) suggests that Newmarch might be dramatising the intermediate gender position which was the only one available to same-sex desiring women ‘at a time when theirs was less “a love that dare not speak its name” than a love which had no name to speak’. If Newmarch’s poet wants to say something that she (that is, both Newmarch and a female poet desiring the wife) dare not say, she has found a way to gesture towards the unspeakable. That ‘[t]he rhetoric of the unspeakable is not merely a means of avoidance or self protection but a positive strategy with both political and aesthetic dimensions’ (Halpern 2002: 12–13) is clear in this sly sequence, which insists on the power and naturalness of its desire while also demonstrating that its desire is something forbidden. This is both an adaptation of the Petrarchan Symbolic, and an engagement with the heterosexist Symbolic of the homophobic social world. 90 years later, when Jeannette Winterson repeats the same tactic in Written on the Body (1993), the story of an ungendered narrator’s affair with a married woman, it means something different. Winterson is stressing the difference that gender makes to a discourse of desire by pointing out that the same story has radically different meanings depending on its hetero- or homosexuality. In part this is a critique of the social formulations of desire. Newmarch, on the other hand, might be seeking to align hetero- and homosexualities, using (the possibility of) the former to make space for the latter. In seeking to represent something ‘which had no name to speak’, Newmarch figures a way through the Symbolic by refusing to commit to its starting-point positions. Her speaker’s identity remains elusive, and this is the condition of her/his speaking her/his desire. For this reason, desire and silence take on a radically new meaning in Petrarchism. No longer is silence

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the threatened end of desire. Rather, it is the place where desire speaks. A few decades later, Edna St Vincent Millay, writing in a different society, uses the Petrarchan Symbolic to reveal the limits of Petrarchan desire itself. She does this by, for the first time, writing a woman’s desire in the love language of the West. Newmarch’s sequence silently points to Petrarchism’s perversely proximate; Millay’s eloquently demonstrates the connections between Petrarchan desire and what it means to be human, a link she can make by virtue of her poet’s gendered positioning.

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7

Edna St Vincent Millay was, at the height of her popularity, America’s most celebrated woman poet. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, which she did in 1923. In 1925, Genevieve Taggard (1993: 137) wrote of Millay that she ‘is really the first woman poet to take herself seriously as an artist’. Locating Millay in a trajectory that begins with Sappho, Taggard finds ‘the meagre list in our own tongue [to comprise] Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett – none of them very adequate to our desire. And then – suddenly, quite dazzlingly, in America,… Edna St. Vincent Millay’ (ibid.). She was also well-known for her independence and unconventionality; this has translated into a reputation for feminist activism. As John Timberman Newcomb (1995: 261) puts it, ‘Millay… was seen by many as a prototype of the “modern woman,” especially in her assertion of the right to and need for female self-determination of body, mind, pocketbook, and voice’. Amongst the many sonnets that she wrote, Millay wrote two extended sonnet sequences. I will concentrate on Fatal Interview, since Millay’s other sequence about a love relationship, Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, published in 1942, deals less with love and desire and more comprehensively with a relationship after desire has gone; with its domestication, with mourning and death. Fatal Interview, first published in 1931, is a sequence of 52 sonnets which charts the course of a heterosexual love affair from the point of view of the female lover. It was extremely popular in its own time. Issued during the Depression, it sold 33 000 copies in its first ten weeks (Griffith 2003: 463; Milford 2002: xiv). Since the 1930s it has experienced a sometimes uneven reception history due in part to Millay’s adherence to traditional poetic forms during the heyday of Modernism.1 With a feminist revival of 153

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Edna St Vincent Millay and the Dissident Petrarchan Subject

interest in the poetry of Anglo-American women, her work fared better in the late 1970s (beginning with an essay by Elizabeth Perlmutter Frank in Twentieth Century Literature in 1977 [Thesing ed. 1993: 15]) and in the 1980s, albeit through a feminist lense that tended to distort aspects of her most famous sequence by sacrificing the details of its Petrarchan history to a feminist poetics. Millay’s sequence does more than offer the voice of a desiring woman to the Petrarchan tradition, although it does also do that. For the first time in the history of love sonnet sequences written by women, her poetry bespeaks an intervention into the nature of Petrarchan desire itself. It is because her poetry remains within its conventions while also marking their limits, at a time when some kind of access to the public language of desire was more possible for a woman, that it is able to accomplish this feat. Wroth was able to begin the investigation into Petrarchan love by a woman lover by similar means: by writing a poetic voice that showed its experience of exclusion. Her poet could not claim desire in Petrarchan terms as her own because of the rules of gendered access to desire operating in the public sphere. Millay’s poet in Fatal Interview writes in a different time. Access to a public language of desire is still costly for a woman, as her poetry demonstrates (and as some of her critics have noted). But because of her different milieu – the social Symbolic which informs her linguistic subject – Millay’s poet can more directly engage with her desire. In speaking more directly of her desire within the bounds of the Petrarchan sonnet, she pushes what Wroth begins to its conclusion. In speaking in part about a woman’s often highly sexual desire, the poet of Fatal Interview inverts the usual place of the woman in Petrarchism. At the same time as reading as feminist in this way, Fatal Interview is also simultaneously bound to traditional formal and thematic concerns. The sequence’s reception history has tended to struggle with this apparent contradiction.2 Since the 1970s Millay has been read as either radically feminist or problematically failing to achieve the feminist position to which she putatively aspired. For example, Millay is lauded for being one of the first American women poets to speak ‘as a woman’ with ‘something significant to say about being female’ (Alkalay-Gut 1983: 240). Her work is seen as groundbreaking and liberating for other women: Millay… moved far beyond the prescribed boundaries of the lyric genre and took unprecedented risks with her subject matter by favoring women’s sexuality as a theme. In doing so she was redefining

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Millay’s sonnets have also been read as charting the difficulties of maintaining this liberated position, or as bespeaking an underlying, unconscious, or disavowed anxiety which results from the seizing of emancipated gendered sexuality. So, according to Jane Stanbrough (1979: 184, 196), ‘Fatal Interview is an extended metaphorical illustration of the consequences to women of their limited range of experience and their susceptibility to emotional exploitation’; despite her reputation for defiance and freedom, Millay’s poetry belies ‘an overwhelming sense of personal vulnerability – and ultimately of woman’s vulnerability – to victimization by uncontrollable conditions in her environment’. In Phyllis Jones’s (1983: 58) reading, Millay’s poet ‘is “fatal”ly altered by what she hoped to transcend’; or in Karen AlkalayGut’s (1983: 241, 242), Millay is one of the women who ‘were… unable to fulfil themselves in literature because they were incapable of coming to grips with the more serious problems of being women and poets’, and who resorted to various poetic strategies to ‘disguise[…] and protect[…] the vulnerable inner core’. One of her most thoughtful and comprehensive critics, Cheryl Walker (1991: 136, 164), sees Millay’s poetry as on the one hand mannered and dated, guilty of offering a girly persona that by definition could not age gracefully, and on the other still ‘topical for its exploitation and critique of the ideology of sexual liberation’ with its ambivalent inheritance in the ongoing commodification of women’s bodies. Ultimately she concludes, ‘[W]e are likely to be disappointed in Millay if we want from consciously feminist poetry more than the beginnings of feminist consciousness’; Millay, she says ‘was not really subversive’. But Fatal Interview is not setting itself a subversive feminist agenda. This despite the fact that the woman who speaks in Fatal Interview is passionate, committed to her desire, and sexually self-aware; the relationship, contrary to the Petrarchan formula, is both initially requited and consummated. At the same time, the sequence also relies on conventional Petrarchan formal and thematic elements. It remains within the Petrarchan Symbolic. Millay’s sequence is remarkable in the terms developed in this study because in writing about a woman’s desire she simultaneously expresses something about the nature of desire in general. Wroth’s poetry points to the lack of the woman in the Symbolic;

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the culturally accepted idea of ‘feminine virtue’ – an accomplishment that encouraged other women to reevaluate the limitations placed on their lives by their heritage and their society (Peppe qtd. Griffith 2003: 470. See Peppe 1995).

the writers that follow, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, find different ways to authorise their presences by invoking existing discourses to inflect their Petrarchism and contain their dangerous desire; Newmarch reveals an unnamable desire which is Other to the heterosexuality in whose name female beloveds are most often addressed; Millay manages to speak to the underlying principles of Petrarchan desire. The sequence does this because, while it inevitably inverts Petrarchism’s expectations by constructing a desiring female voice, it also enacts a poetic dialogue with its own tradition that is more conventional that those who want Millay to be a specific kind of radical feminist voice can allow. Yet in its explorations of the limits of human desire, its charting of the tragedy of the split subject, the sequence is indeed radical. Furthermore, the reason the poetry can speak the limits of Petrarchan desire cannot be read outside of the gender of the lover. Millay calls into question not only assumptions about women’s proper desire, but the possibilities of desire itself to deliver on the promises of fulfilment so insistently requested by the male Petrarchan writers who developed the discourse in English poetry. The sequence cannot help but read as feminist when a woman claims the position of desiring subject, and when she publishes her sexuality without shame. At the same time, the poetry is concerned with mortality and loss on what it establishes as a fundamentally human canvas. Her poet attempts to say something at once deeply personal and also more general about the tragedy of human love’s inevitable mutability. Millay’s sequence offers an exploration of what happens when Petrarchan desire is consummated. Like Shakespeare’s poet, Millay’s explores the implications of heterosexuality in action. Her different time and place, as well as her different gender, enable a different conclusion to Shakespeare’s, although perhaps a no less unhappy one. The sequence’s title comes from Donne’s ‘Elegy 16. On His Mistresse’: By our first strange and fatal interview By all desires which thereof did ensue, By our long starving hopes, by that remorse Which my words’ masculine, persuasive force Begot in thee, and by the memory Of hurts which spies and rivals threatened me, I calmly beg;… (ll. 1–7) (Abrams and Greenblatt eds. 2000: 1254). What the poet is begging for from his mistress in this elegy is her restraint and patience. He enjoins her to behave appropriately, as

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behoves a woman, and not to attempt to pass as a man and journey with the poet into the man’s world outside: ‘Thou shalt not love by ways so dangerous./Temper, oh fair love, love’s impetuous rage’ (ll. 12–13). Millay’s sequence is an outright rebuttal of such a position, as the speaker precisely ventures into the realm of public and unabashed desire so long deemed inappropriate to women. By venturing a female lover into the position of Petrarchan speaker, the sequence does not so much demonstrate the limitations of Petrarchism for a women subject (as Wroth’s sequence does), or evince strategies for entering the Petrarchan Symbolic (as Robinson, Barrett Browning, and Rossetti do, and as Newmarch in her own way does), as chart a Lacanian sense of the nature of desire in general.3 For Lacan, desire (which is linked to both need and demand [Lacan 1989: x]) gives rise to speech which in turn constitutes the human subject. This subject is by definition alienated, and his desire can never be satisfied (46). I have been emphasising that this description serves well for the Petrarchan subject too. In order to appreciate Millay’s poetics, a little more detail on Lacan’s theory as outlined in Ecrits (Sheridan ed. 1989) is in order. Lacan has famously said that ‘what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language… [L]anguage and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it’ (1989: 163).4 To acquire language is to enter into a pre-existing framework, which inexorably shapes the subject, who ‘thereby submit[s] his desire to systemic pressures of that order: in adopting language he allows his… instinctual energies to be operated upon and ordered’ (Bowie 1987: 109). The reason the subject submits himself to the structuring and ordering of language, of the unconscious realm, has to do with the nature of human desire, which cannot be understood outside of the process of symbolisation that gives rise to the human subject’s formation in language, in the unconscious. We cannot ever really know our desires, since we can only access them once they have been shaped by our entry into language (Lacan 1989: 164). But entering language is a splitting experience, one that guarantees selfalienation, not least because to enter the Symbolic is to submit to social law. Drawing on linguistic theory, Lacan asserts that meaning is always elsewhere; or, intrinsic to all speech is ‘a frustration inherent in the very discourse of the subject’ (46). Thus this subject who speaks can never attain himself in the act of speaking. Due in part to the oedipal injunction, which ‘cover[s] the

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whole field of our experience with its signification’ (72), there is always ‘a gap between desire and its object(s) which the subject is bounded by, and bound to’ (Bowie 1987: 119). Speaking is always speaking ‘for another’, and in doing so the subject ‘rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it [speech] like another’ (Lacan 1989: 46). To speak is to speak oneself into being, and simultaneously into a realm already shaped by another. The act of speech is always a demand: speaking is always speaking for another. And if speaking is always speaking for another, Lacan’s statement that desire is desire of the other – the subject’s need to be desired by the other – makes desire the place out of which speech comes, and marks the relationship between subject and other as characterised by desire: ‘man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other, not so much because the other holds the key to the object desired, as because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other’ (64). Desire and speech are imbricated. To speak is to be, and to be is to be in the realm of the other – which is also the realm of the Symbolic, of the Unconscious (‘the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other’ [61]), out of which the subject finds the terms by which he constitutes himself. This is one way that the links between language and subjectivity have been made overt by Lacan. As I have been suggesting in the course of this book, the model of the subject who exists because he speaks and who speaks because he desires, even as his desires are shaped by the rules he inherits through the genre of his language, is a model for the subject of Petrarchism. Given the gendering that takes place in Petrarchan language, and given that Petrarchan subjectivities have in part helped to form notions of the modern psychoanalytic subject through the ways of talking about desire Petrarchism enabled, Petrarchism becomes an analogue for a tradition of speaking desire within Western culture. Within this rubric, the subject allowed to perform his desire is by definition male. The female subject who wishes to speak desire – that is, following Lacan, who wishes to speak, and in so doing who comes into existence as a subject – has a different task ahead of her. Millay marks the limits of desire for a female lover who can both speak and consummate her love, as Wroth marks its difficulty for a female subject who, in Wroth’s context, cannot. An additional conclusion which arises from the process of tracing the ways female Petrarchan poets navigate their exclusion from the Petrarchan Symbolic is that the usual Petrarchan subject cannot see the void that constitutes his being because he has the illusion of selfhood

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in the Symbolic (he is able to aspire to having the phallus, as Lacan puts it [320–1]). Female Petrarchans like Wroth and Millay, because they do not have access to the same illusion, are thrown up against the void that is at the heart of Lacanian subjectivity. This is especially piquant given that in psychoanalytic theory, woman are made to stand for the lack that propels the subject into knowledge of himself as a (gendered) being in the Symbolic. What this suggests is that while none of us can ever know ourselves, the female poetic subject (closely involved with the language that constitutes her) knows that she cannot know. She is closer to the truth of the void than the Petrarchan male subject can ever be. In an unpublished and probably fictional interview almost certainly written by her lover and life-long friend Arthur Davidson Ficke (Thesing ed. 1993: 313), Millay is represented as possessing a satisfyingly Lacanian sensibility. When ‘The Interviewer’ asks ‘The Millay’, ‘how you came to be a poet?’, she replies: You see, as a child, I was very fond of doughnuts. Do you see? I used to eat doughnuts beside a pump in Camden. And there, in my beautiful Maine, with the sea always calling me in the distance… – there I ate my doughnuts; and always as I ate my doughnuts I was aware of a hurting lack, I was aware of a great hunger, – a something that was there yet not there. And one day, after a little shower of rain had fallen, I heard a bird singing in the silver silence; and at the moment, as I ate my doughnut, I became a poet, for at that moment I discovered that the poignant and heart-breaking charm of the doughnut is the hole in the middle of it. It was then that I knew that that-which-is-not is the most exquisite and desirable part of that-which-is; and I determined to have it for my own; and that is what we call being a poet (314). Whether or not these words are Millay’s, and Thesing suggests that they are not, they represent Ficke’s playful parody of her style which is also a knowing tribute to her sensibility. They suggest, at the very least, a nice convergence with Lacan’s ideas about why one speaks. They resonate, too, with Irigaray’s notion of the female subject’s speech as ‘that-which-is-not’ one, which is ‘the most exquisite and desirable’ for a woman speaker precisely because it occupies the place of the hole in the doughnut: the place outside the phallocentric Symbolic. ‘Millay’s sonnets often testify that women, too, know the lust that the Renaissance sonnet traditionally allowed only men to feel. But it

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would be too simple to say that through its act of bestowing on the woman desires as impatient as the man’s the poem bestows on the woman poet the capacity to write sonnets as weighted as a man’s’ (Fried 1986: 14). Instead, Fried argues, because of its literary history the sonnet accommodates a woman poet’s desire differently to, less fully than, a man’s: ‘The woman’s desire cannot resonate in the room of the sonnet with the same force as his desire; it is a room that has been designed to amplify his tones and silence hers’ (ibid.). I have been suggesting throughout this book the accuracy of such a statement, and demonstrating some of the ways that female Petrarchan writers developed strategies to cope with the silencing of their desiring voices; of their coming into being as subjects, in other words. Millay’s solution, Fried suggests, is to ‘treat[…] the sonnet as an echo chamber’, sounding its gendered history (ibid). From its first public forays, Millay’s poetic voice bespoke a dissonant Petrarchan subjectivity that is marked by the speaker’s difference from the traditional Petrarchan self. Reminiscent in some ways of Shakespeare’s sonnet 131 (‘My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun’), his famous questioning of the very terms of the tradition in which he writes, as well as its ability ever to describe his selfconsciously compromised ideal love, is an early sonnet of Millay’s. In her first published volume of work, Renascence and other poems (1917), Millay includes the following sonnet: Thou art not lovelier than lilacs — no, Nor honeysuckle; thou are not more fair Than small white single poppies, — I can bear Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though From left to right, not knowing where to go, I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear So has it been with mist, — with moonlight so. Like him who day by day unto his draught Of delicate poison adds him one drop more Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten, Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed Each hour more deeply than the hour before, I drink — and live — what has destroyed some men (Millay 1991: 41). The first quatrain is almost entirely devoted to a refusal of Petrarchan terms of comparison. Linking this quatrain to the next through its

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rhyme scheme and with its enjambed line which emphasises the contingency of the poet’s confusion to the beloved’s beauty (‘though…’), the poet recasts the terms of the beloved’s beauty while still insisting on its power. Far from being caused by recognising in the beloved the standard perfections of nature, the lover’s emotion is related to something at once more diffuse and more mysterious: ‘So has it been with mist – with moonlight so.’ She expresses the sense of being lost and being enveloped, while refusing reductive and standard specificities. The sestet constructs a complex link to this state of emotion, by operating along the lines of an extended metaphor whose anchoring term is rendered as diffuse and mysterious as the effect of the beloved on the poet. By likening love to poison, the poet activates a standard Petrarchan trope: love is dangerous, it threatens to kill the poet. This is an implicit reference to the beloved’s irresistible power combined with a permanent unavailability. It refers also to the typical metaphor of love as a war, or Love as a cruel overlord, oppressor, or victorious general. Love’s implacable strength over the poet is acknowledged by troping the emotion as deadly. In Millay’s sonnet, the beloved’s poisonous beauty becomes something the lover has slowly built up a resistance to, and thus she is able to survive her position as doomed Petrarchan lover. Besides its clever conceit, where the poet retains her ability to praise while critiquing or resisting the position in which she is placed – a typically Petrarchan endeavour – the poem is remarkable for the dissident Petrarchan subjectivity it bespeaks. The poet is special because she manages to transcend her position while remaining firmly within it, a feat Petrarchan poets have been attempting since Astrophil. The gender of the speaker, undisclosed in the poem itself, might resonate off the poem’s final line: the reason this poet needs to redefine the terms of her love, and in doing so is able to survive it, might be precisely because she is a female speaker. Her cynical attitude to the Petrarchan staples is thus further inflected: not only is the poet aware of, and unconvinced by, Petrarchism’s standard descriptive structures and conceptualisations of desire, she is speaking from the position of the typical object of such structures. Thus an expression of self-awareness from the early stages of Millay’s amorous sonneteering. She returns, more directly, to talking about writing sonnets, in a poem published posthumously: I will put Chaos into fourteen lines And keep him there; and let him thence escape If he be lucky; let him twist and ape

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Flood, fire, and demon – his adroit designs Will strain at nothing in the strict confines Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape, I hold his essence and amorphous shape, Till he with Order mingles and combines. Past are the hours, the years, of our duress, His arrogance, our awful servitude: I have him. He is nothing more nor less Than something simple not yet understood; I shall not even force him to confess; Or answer. I will only make him good (Millay 1988: 153). Recently, a number of feminist readings have tried, unsuccessfully, in my view, to make sense of this difficult sonnet. Most, if not all, of these readings seem to assume a heterosexualisation of the poetic action. For example, Moore (2000: 195, 199, 200) suggests that Millay inverts the traditional ordering of form as male and content as female, concluding that the reference to rape together with the gendering of Chaos as male presents us with an obviously female speaker in a poem which ‘sexualizes the poetic act’. For Fried (1986: 9, 11) this sonnet characterises itself as an ‘erotic prison’ which documents a female poet’s struggle to manage ‘perhaps the divisive forces of sexuality, or whatever the force may be that tears poems apart rather than inspires them’ by troping ‘a kind of male anti-muse’. It is true that the poem works best if we gender the speaker female, particularly given its reference to a community used to being ‘under duress’, in ‘awful servitude’ to Chaos. However, to allow the presence of a rape to stand for the presence of (hetero)sexuality, such that the poem becomes about poetry as heterosex, seems to me problematic. In sexualising the speaker’s descriptionand-demonstration of her relationship with writing, such a reading makes dominance intrinsic to heterosex, and sex intrinsic to rape. The poem is talking about writing, sexuality, and power, and the relationship between the three. However, such readings as those quoted above almost romanticise this relationship. What seems to me most notable about this sonnet, in the context of the tradition explored here of the difficulty for women of claiming the position of speaker of the love sonnet, is the sense of the poet’s mastery over her craft of sonnet writing. This poet has solved the problem of finding a place from which to speak about desire within the comprehensive linguistic structure that is the Petrarchan sonnet in English. That the process is violent, one of mastery and control, is apposite. It has long been remarked that

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inverting the terms of a patriarchal order does not constitute an escape from that order. ‘Pious rape’ is a very disturbing concept, perhaps a kind of Petrarchan oxymoron (it may owe something to Donne’s final line of one of his most famous religious sonnets, ‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’: ‘Take me to you, imprison me, for I,/ Except you enthral me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me’). If it is, what it may be suggesting is that the position of female sonneteer within this specific tradition – of woman master – is itself an oxymoron whose existence both inverts and reveals the dominating nature of the subject-object relation intrinsic to the poetic form.5 That Millay had an informed understanding of the poetic and gender dynamics of this tradition is evident in her most sustained exploration of it. At the same time her concern is not only to insist on the possibility of a female speaker of desire. Fatal Interview is framed by, and interspersed with, sonnets about mythological gods. Because of this, the poems are about a love that is profoundly and uniquely human; about the tragic nature of human desire, where fulfilment is also death. Millay’s poems place human desire within the framework of nature and mortality, marking the inevitable cycles of the moon, the seasons, and life and death. Her sequence is clear about the fact that it is the human, mutable, and transient nature of desire that makes it what it is; the gods cannot understand this. No wonder: in Lacanian terms, desire is what makes us human, and what marks the limitations of our human subjectivity. The speaker of the first sonnet of Fatal Interview has sometimes been taken to be the poet herself (Moore 2000: 206; Walker 1991: 157; Gould 1988: 138).6 Instead, sonnet 1 strikes me as a ventriloquisation of a composite classical god (interestingly, the only critic who seems to concur is the far-from-feminist James Gray, who identifies the speaker as Hermes7). The speaker is Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who is the only mythological character possessed of a ‘wingéd helmet’ and a ‘wingéd heel’. Inevitably his winged nature also evokes Cupid, the Petrarchan god of love: What thing is this that, built of salt and lime And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show, Has power upon me that do daily climb The dustless air? — for whom those peaks of snow Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath Go labouring to a doom I may not feel, Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath

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My wingéd helmet and my wingéd heel. What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this That hastening headlong to a dusty end Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss? Up, up, my feathers! — ere I lay you by To journey barefoot with a mortal joy (sonnet 1). The ‘thing’ the god cannot understand, and yet is drawn to is mortality and thus mortal love itself, ‘a pearled and roseate plain’ spread below the airborn god, of the earth, in opposition to his heavenly position (the imbrication of desire with mortality is played out in the course of the sequence, as will be discussed).8 This ‘thing… built of salt and lime’ ‘that hasten[s] headlong to a dusty end’ nevertheless ‘turn[s] upon’ the elevated god ‘proud eyes of bliss’ that tempt him to renounce his immortality, ‘To journey barefoot with a mortal joy’. When this poem is read with the final sonnet in the sequence, Millay’s point seems to be the utter and devastating human-ness of desire, an emotion that at once marks the limit of human life – of subjectivity, we might say – and that marks its unique quality. The sequence ends with a narrative about Selene, a daughter of the moon. The goddess of the moon and of chastity so beloved of Petrarchan poets was, of course, Diana, who is also inevitably invoked. Just as the figure of winged Cupid shadows Mercury in the first poem, given the Petrarchan discourse in which the sonnets are situated, so Diana and her emblematic female chastity cannot but be heard as an echo of Selene. Here, however, it is not chastity that defines the moon or her daughter, but the effects of mortal love, which remains beyond Selene’s comprehension and so drive her ‘mad’: Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian cave, Mortal Endymion, darling of the Moon! Her silver garments by the senseless wave Shouldered and dropped and on the shingle strewn, Her fluttering hand against her forehead pressed, Her scattered looks that trouble all the sky, Her rapid footsteps running down the west — Of all her altered state, oblivious lie! Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored, Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust, And deep into her crystal body poured

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Addressed to Selene’s mortal beloved, to whom, in one version of the myth Zeus granted immortality but not eternal youth, and in all versions is in stasis in an endless sleep, the sonnet makes the point that his ‘earthen’ nature, desired by the goddess, ‘poured… the hot and sorrowful sweetness’ of its mortal nature into ‘her crystal body’. Reminiscent of the scene of Venus’s lust for Adonis, the violent coupling of the overwhelmed mortal and the powerful goddess resonates with the gendered power dynamics of ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’.9 The description of a doomed relationship between a mortal and a god also plays on and inverts the relationship between the poet and her beloved. In the sequence he is sometimes cast as a god (for example in sonnet 12 he is Zeus: ‘Olympian gods…/ be advised too late that he/ Whom you call sire…/ … lies abed with me.’ [ll. 1–4]) – and thus to an extent he is exonerated from his inability to match her mortal desire. It is her desire that sets in motion the poetry, and that, in fulfilling itself, brings to its inevitable conclusion the relationship itself. When immortal Selene overpowers human Endymion, she pays the price for imbibing of a mortal condition which disrupts her because her nature is fundamentally unsuited to it. In contrast the mortal poet desires her godlike male beloved, and from the beginning of the sequence understands and anticipates the consequences of this fundamentally impossible union. ‘Even in the moment of our earliest kiss/…/ Sat the dry seed of most unwelcome this;/ And that I knew, though not the day and hour’ she tells him in one of the sonnets of parting (sonnet 46). She also therefore manages the consequences of the affair: Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly; In my own way, and with my full consent.… If I had loved you less or played you slyly I might have held you for a summer more, But at the cost of words I value highly, And no such summer as the one before. Should I outlive this anguish – and men do – I shall have only good to say of you (sonnet 47). Mortal and doomed she may be; but the final poem suggests that her desire is neither unholy nor unreasonable (infused as it is by the

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The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust: Whereof she wanders mad, being all unfit For mortal love, that might not die of it (sonnet 52).

symbol of the goddess of chastity herself, that standard emblem for the Petrarchan mistress, whose objectivity is the usual figuration of the female in this poetic form). On the contrary, it is what makes her human. She is aware of the enormous power of mortal desire, and also of its inevitable, natural end, throughout the sequence, and marks this awareness explicitly: ‘I only hoped, with the mild hope of all/ Who watch the leaf take shape upon the tree,/ A fairer summer and a later fall/ Than in these parts a man is apt to see’ (sonnet 46 ll. 9–12). The inevitability of death is what locates this sequence in the realm of nature, of the mortal, of the actual and not the ideal or idealising; for example sonnet 9: ‘When you are dead…’; sonnet 14: ‘Since of no creature living the last breath/ Is twice required…’; sonnet 31: ‘When we that wore the myrtle wear the dust…’; sonnet 35, where the inevitability of winter tropes the inevitable loss of love; sonnet 41: ‘I said in the beginning, did I not? — / Prophetic of the end…’; and sonnet 46: ‘Too season-wise am I, being country-bred…’ In typically Petrarchan terms, Love is formulated as a sickness (‘Nay, learnéd doctor, these fine leeches fresh/ From the pond’s edge my cause cannot remove:/ Alas, the sick disorder in my flesh/ Is deeper than your skill, is very love…’ [sonnet 4 ll. 1–4]), a prison, (‘Not that I shriek not till the dungeon shake,/ ‘Oh, God! Oh, let me out! Oh, let me go!’/ But that my chains throughout their iron length/ Make such a golden clank upon my ear,…’ [sonnet 5 ll. 7–10]); a fire, and a wound. At the same time, ‘this love, this longing’ is always understood to be human and thus mutable, implicated in the cycles of nature: This beast that rends me in the sight of all, This love, this longing, this oblivious thing, That has me under as the last leaves fall, Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring. The wound will heal, the fever will abate… (sonnet 2 ll. 1–5). That her lover is cast as a god places him above these cycles, and also marks the limits of his abilities to be true to them, thus ironically ensuring the end of the affair. The human subjection to death is captured within a discourse of desire which makes use of the limits of what it means to be a subject within such a discourse to make its point. This is a different canvas to one concerned with finding a woman’s voice. The placement of the latter as part of the former is perhaps clearest in the sonnets in this sequence addressed to or about other women.

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Illustrative of the telescoping that can occur when a critic overlooks the broader context of the sequence, Artemis Michailidou (2006: 44, 47) sees these sonnets as ‘a good example of Adrienne Rich’s description of encoded language… which conceals the extent of women’s feelings for each other’ (see Rich 1987), and obliquely connects this reading with relatively recently discovered evidence of Millay’s homosexual affairs or, as she puts it, ‘how Millay’s negotiation of a polymorphous sexuality is facilitated by repeated references to other women’s erotic experiences’. Sonnet 6 is addressed to the beloved, but is about other women: Since I cannot persuade you from this mood Of pale preoccupation with the dead, Not for my comfort nor for your own good Shift your concern to living bones instead; Since that which Helen did and ended Troy Is more than I can do though I be warm, Have up your buried girls, egregious boy, And stand with them against the unburied storm. When you lie wasted and your blood runs thin, And what’s to do must with dispatch be done, Call Cressid, call Elaine, call Isolt in! — More bland the ichor of a ghost should run Along your dubious veins than the rude sea Of passion pounding all day long in me. Michailidou proposes not only that the poet positively draws on the erotic experiences of the women she invokes, but also that she created a female, feminist community as one of the primary intentions of the sequence (see also Peppe 1995: 59). However it seems to me that in this sonnet, the poet is in competition with the ghosts of tragic dead women, whose ideal and idealised appeal she contrasts with her own flawed vitality. The poet invokes the ‘pale’, ‘bland’, ‘wasted’ character of ideal literary and mythological Woman in order to contrast it with decidedly un-ideal, explicitly ‘rude’ but profoundly ‘living’ nature of her real, unruly, uncontainable ‘sea of passion’. Furthermore, while the ‘buried girls’ with whom the beloved is infatuated are preternaturally beautiful in a way the poet cannot match (‘Since that which Helen did…/ Is more than I can do’), their mythological beauty is destructive. Not only has ‘that which Helen did… ended Troy’, the fixation on women who cannot exist outside of fantasy risks wasting the limited living time the beloved has on ‘ghost[s]’. This is a rebuttal of the usual position of the sonnet

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mistress, and of the objectification of the figure of Woman in the history of Western culture.10 One thinks of Stella, lauded by Astrophil as the reason for and the source of all his clever, fluent, energetic poetry, whose only possible script is, ‘No no no no my dear, let be.’ Even Wroth’s Pamphilia can only stage her Petrarchan desire by simultaneously withdrawing it: ‘I should not have been made this stage of woe…’ In this context Millay’s invocation of ideal women, created by men, with whom she cannot compete, functions not only to point out that no real woman will ever match the literary model of ideal femininity. She also points out that their presence in her beloved’s imagination exacts a cost on both him and her: he will die never having experienced real passion, and she is overlooked because of the power of the impossible patriarchal ideal. Later, in sonnet 26, the poet again invokes mythological women to contrast herself to them, because she is living: Women have loved before as I love now; At least, in lively chronicles of the past – Of Irish waters by a Cornish prow Or Trojan waters by a Spartan mast Much to their cost invaded – here and there, Hunting the amorous line, skimming the rest, I find some woman bearing as I bear Love like a burning city in the breast. This poet is clearly a reader of a specific tradition of love literature, ‘hunting the amorous line’ as she does. Within this tradition, she notes, she finds echoes of herself. Implicit to such a statement is the valorisation of her love as mythologically ideal: it may only be ‘in lively chronicles of the past’ that similar emotion from women is to be found. The poet uses this connection with the women of myth to mark her present-day passion as heroic, epic, and unique: I think however that of all alive I only in such utter, ancient way Do suffer love; in me alone survive The unregenerate passions of a day When treacherous queens, with death upon the tread, Heedless and wilful, took their knights to bed. Unlike in the earlier poem, here the poet draws on an identification with mythological women in order to suggest her isolation from ‘real’

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living women. What she emphasises is not only the destructive consequences of the love of Helen – ‘Love like a burning city in the breast’ tropes not only the Petrarchan staple of the lover’s suffering and defeat at the hands of the mighty warlord of Love, but the destruction of Troy already referred to once in this poem. She also suggests that this intense, driving, consuming mythological love marks the women who felt it as dangerous and antisocial: ‘unregenerate’, ‘treacherous’, ‘heedless and wilful’. These women, powerful and driven by an uncaring and irresistible force, bring ‘death upon [their] tread’. While this may well be a defiant embracing of a disobedient female sexuality, one that refuses to be denied or diluted, it is also a profoundly isolating positioning of the speaker. She is an uncontrollable and uncontrolled force, and out of time and place in her emotion. She also, in enacting her desire, ensures ‘death’. These rebellious desiring women mark the limits of Petrarchan (and Lacanian) subjectivity by revealing the cost of challenging the limits. It is because they are women – subjects gendered female and thus placed outside of the economy of desire whose limits they mark – that they can perform this function. The concern of the poet of this sequence with the mutability of love and the impossibility of holding onto desire, seen in the light of her gendered voice, is thus profoundly dissident within a tradition developed to facilitate the desiring, speaking male self. She both embraces its possibilities to talk about the desire that generates it and reveals its limits, that is to say, the limits of desire implicit to the constitution of the subject, and the limits of the Petrarchan tradition as one gendered instantiation of this linguistic subjectivity. The third sonnet in this sequence which invokes other, mythological, women, evinces a complex relationship with the Petrarchan idealisation of the female beloved. At the same time, the sonnet resonates with the Shakespearean strategy of coping with the vulnerability of being in a relationship with a male beloved who has the emotional and social upper hand. Given that Millay’s poet sometimes casts her beloved as a god, sonnet 16 displays a negotiated settlement with the mythological past, and with the idealised beloved and his temporary affections: I dreamed I moved among the Elysian fields, In converse with sweet women long since dead; And out of blossoms which that meadow yields I wove a garland for your living head. Danae, that was the vessel for a day Of golden Jove, I saw, and at her side,

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Whom Jove the Bull desired and bore away, Europa stood, and the Swan’s featherless bride. All these were mortal women, yet all these Above the ground had had a god for guest; Freely I walked beside them and at ease, Addressing them, by them again addressed, And marvelled nothing, for remembering you, Wherefore I was among them well I knew. This apparently idyllic, almost pastoral community of women on second glance is much more ambivalent company for the poet; at best, none were active participants in the encounters that have made them famous. At worst, of course, as Yeats reminds us, they were rape survivors. While the poet here stresses their identities as consorts, in the special position of having their mortal lives touched by divine attentions, the poem’s final lines enables an ironic reading of this apparently blessed group of human women. In stressing the convivial exchange and counter-exchange between herself and other women visited by gods – ‘Freely I walked beside them and at ease,/ Addressing them, by them again addressed’ – the poet suggests a happy group of contented, chatting women. However, the final couplet connotes rather than provides the reason for the poet’s inclusion in this community. Since she has to remember the beloved to make sense of her inclusion, he has, like the god-lovers, come and gone. She is suggesting both that he has left her, and that he is like a god. Both are ironic responses to what is actually an unsatisfactory situation, despite the dreamy, heavenly veneer. Furthermore, by casting him as the abandoning god fulfilling a recognisable script she at once attempts to absolve herself of the pain of having been left, and to make herself part of a special company of women, who can be seen as specially chosen, and not as violated and abandoned. This strategy is defensive and compensatory, and while the poet in this sonnet draws comfort from a community of women she also passively accepts her – and their – placement as abandoned, used, used up. Jones (1983: 58) suggests ultimately that by writing love poetry at all, Millay and other self-consciously feminist writers betray their imbrication in sexist ideology. While reworking the Petrarchan tradition enables Millay and others to ‘imply that the conceptions and language of male romantic love have been incomplete, unrealistic or absurd…[,] the very act of engaging the terms of male romantic love ultimately seems to validate its general framework’. Such a conclusion is inadvertently Irigarayan in its suggestion that women cannot write love

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poetry on their own terms. To enter the discourse at all, Jones concludes, is to accept the ‘values’ of amatory sonnet sequences (59) – in other words, of Petrarchism. If this is true, then Millay’s project is doomed to failure, if her project is to find an essentially female voice for a poetry of love. I have been suggesting that it may be more accurate to see her poetry’s task in terms both wider, and more specific. Fatal Interview does not seek primarily to explore a woman’s right to talk about love, although it does do this too. More immediately, it marks the limitations of human, and Petrarchan desire: the love Millay’s poet writes about, suffers for, dedicates her life to, draws its value from it mortality. Furthermore, this book has been suggesting that to see the terms of engagement between women love poets and the Petrarchan Symbolic as only oppositional, resulting in a binary either/or, is to miss the complexities of the operations of subjectivity. To suggest that women writing love poetry can operate in a register free of the inheritances of a phallocentric economy of meaning is also to perpetuate the fantasy of arriving at a place of unmediated selfhood. Millay’s poetics enable an awareness of the nature of the economy while simultaneously speaking about her (always circumscribed) desire within this economy. The Petrarchan poets of the 1590s use the position of desiring lover to generate poetry and to channel a need that is social, personal, and erotic. In the process they develop a language of erotic desire that is public and gendered, and that therefore posits particular positions for poets gendered female and the complex relation such speaking voices have to the material bodies that produce them in societies. Mary Wroth, the first woman to write an amatory poetic sequence, reveals the gendered rules of the discourse and the enabling power of rank in the form. She shows the lack that is the woman upon which early modern Petrarchism relied. About 200 years later it was clear that while women could more directly address their desires, they still needed to carefully navigate the gendered rules of the Petrarchan Symbolic and the social world with which it interacts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrates that by the nineteenth century it was possible for a woman to use the sonnet sequence to celebrate a particular kind of love, one sanctioned by the social convention of marriage, while Mary Robinson and Christina Rossetti show that female passion still needed to be contained and controlled. Rosa Newmarch suggests that the heterosexist economy on which the Petrarchan Symbolic depends could be made to accommodate its perversely proximate homosexual other, but only through strategies of indirection. What Edna St Vincent Millay does that is

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revolutionary is not only engage with Petrarchan and other staple literary conventional positions for women in relation to the public expression of a desire that has most often been the desire of men. She is able to examine the sexual desire her poet expresses more fully than it had been examined to date. Her poetry suggests in more profound ways than Petrarchism previously had been able to suggest, that desire, once achieved, will always die, and that the subject of desire will die along with it. This is Lacan’s insight into the nature of the modern subject: this subject is called into speech, into being, by desire, and is ever striving to meet the need, which activity is the condition of his existence, of life itself. Millay’s (1988: 41) poet, ‘born a woman and distressed’ is better able to articulate this awareness than her male counterparts, occupying as she does a more obviously constructed relationship to subjectivity in the first place. Her radical Petrarchism, then, resides not only in her expression of female desire, but in what that expression allows her to realise about the nature of desire itself. What makes her passionate and obstinate and ultimately revolutionary, is her commitment to remaining the speaking subject of this tragic desire. This is a variation on the Petrarchan position, which more usually charts the lover’s doomed struggle to be rid of his painful emotions. Thus, like all the best Petrarchans, she is both typically and antiPetrarchan. In the face of what her liminal positioning enables her to understand about the impossibility of ‘peace’, she chooses her destructive and doomed desire nevertheless, and does indeed, I would suggest, find a language in which to do so: Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain; Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink And rise and sink and rise and sink again; Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath, Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; Yet many a man is making friends with death Even as I speak, for lack of love alone. It well may be that in a difficult hour, Pinned down by pain and moaning for release, Or nagged by want past resolution’s power, I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It may well be. I do not think I would (Millay 1988: 99).

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Twenty years ago, Jessica Benjamin (1988) psychoanalytically theorised the difficulty for women in Western societies to be the speaking subject, rather than the object, of desire. She traced how the development of gender identity and of the emotion of desire in the young child are related, and reformulated Freudian and Lacanian narratives to show how the father, he who has the phallus, becomes the carrier of active desire, while the mother’s desire is denied and repressed. Part of Benjamin’s project was to rework the standard psychoanalytical model which, pace Freud, sees femininity as physiologically and inevitably passive and envious. At the same time, she demonstrated that subjects are easily gendered along the lines traced by Freud, where the position of actively desiring self is male, and the female cannot access, let alone speak, her desire in straightforward ways. ‘Though we may refuse [Freud’s] definition’ of the feminine, she says, we are nevertheless obliged to confront the painful fact that even today, femininity continues to be identified with passivity, with being the object of someone else’s desire, with having no active desire of one’s own… The gender division that now exists does not allow for reconciliation of agency and desire within femininity (87, 123). In the same year, Nancy Vickers extended her earlier analysis of the implications of Petrarch’s mode of description for Western aesthetics. In ‘Vital Signs: Petrarch and Popular Culture’ (1988), she showed that Petrarchan subjectivities could be found in contemporary pop music. Two decades later, current popular performances of the self for profit continue to demonstrate that Petrarchan inflections remain powerful cultural signifiers, and thus that the access to full subject-status remains 173

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Conclusion: Petrarchism Today

more complicated for female subjects. The speaking of desire is the analogue for access to subjectivity in psychoanalytic discourses, as it is in lyric poetry. In more recently-developed genres, influenced by this gendered history, the subject speaking desire in public remains in the first instance the male subject. This means a discourse of domination is reinscribed, at the expense of the usually female other to the masculine self (the implications for homosexuals of the performance of hypermasculinity described below are also negative). Petrarchan formulations can be found in the most commercially successful and globally popular form of music currently dominating mainstream world charts: gangster rap. Both Petrarchism, and gangster rap (an offshoot of hip hop), tend to construct a particular kind of gendered subjectivity whose performance of self relies on the social context out of which that self speaks. Both confound distinctions of public and private by displaying personal narratives for profit. Both discourses make use of similar stylistic devices, and have thematic parallels. While neither Petrarchism nor gangster rap are monolithic forms – indeed both have multiple influences and are multivalent accordingly – what can be seen as the dominant or usual speaking subject of desire in each case (there will always be exceptions) can be seen to have similar characteristics. Pointing to the similarities between Petrarchism and gangster rap throws each into focus, and allows for a discussion of the operations of, particularly, gender, in the realm of performance for profit in Western poetic signifying systems. Hugh Grady (2002: 2, 16, 20) has explored the ‘cognate’ relationship between cultural ‘themes’ of early and late modernity. The early modern period, says Grady, is a good arena for staging what he calls ‘allegories’ of the present. Provided that any account of the past is properly historicised, he suggests this period is a useful place of echoes for the concerns of the present. Specifically, Grady suggests that the early modern era’s literary explorations of a new kind of subjectivity map the beginnings of what would become the modern subject. He is careful to sketch a theory of subjectivity that does not reduce the subject to a product of ideology, but rather takes into account subjectivity as both constituent of, and resistant to, dominant discourses of power: ‘Modern subjectivity is paradoxically both a social and a private mythology’ (22). It is on this hinge of the public and the private subject, on the nexus of the constituting power of context and the individual’s engagement with and response to this inherited field of meanings, that Petrarchism

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operates. The typical – that is, male – Petrarchan poet is an individual subject at great pains to perform himself, located within and formed by a shared framework, and his eternal battle is to speak himself into being as part of, and apart from, this framework which sets the limits for his conditions of possibility while at the same time offering the starting points to push and mutate these conditions. By the early 1990s hip hop had achieved economic and artistic success undreamed of by its early proponents, and it was at this point that critics contend hip hop’s mission as the voice of resistance for the African American communities from which it came was affected (Light 2004). Certainly, it is possible to chart a movement where the communal discourse which concerned itself with social issues gave way to one which celebrates the individual’s escape from poverty through the opportunities offered by the commodification of the music. It is this later development which I am suggesting might be seen as inadvertently mimicking the social and poetic dynamics of Petrarchism. This commercially successful brand of hip hop, which seizes upon the street cred value and the style of urban black American youth culture, has been designated gangster (or gangsta) rap because of its valorisation of gang culture and lifestyle. Transforming the tendency in earlier hip-hop to comment on, by reflecting, life on the streets of the ghetto, gangster rap is no longer concerned with black nationalism or with social justice. It is instead a powerful signifier of the results of ghetto living, and an endorsement and perpetuation of that lifestyle. Clarence Lusane (2004: 357) calls gangster rap both ‘vulgar, profane, misogynist, racist, anti-semitic and juvenile’ and, quoting Robin Kelley, reflective of ‘“the lessons of lived experiences”’. Thus the socially uplifting message of hip hop, initially expressed in part by the depictions of the conditions lived by young black Americans in the 1970s and 80s, becomes an authorised display of the effects of those conditions on the formation of young masculinity. Eric Watts (2004: 594) points to the imbrication of commercial success and the performance of authenticity which has come to both endorse and demand the criminal activity of gangster rappers, in a process he calls ‘spectacular consumption’. With reference to Guy Debord’s and Jean Baudrillard’s work on spectacle and on consumption respectively, Watts argues that: spectacular consumption describes a process through which the lifeworld of the artist, the meaning of representation, and the

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Conclusion: Petrarchism Today 175

176 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

Watts questions the performative aspect of authenticity in gangster rap culture, insisting on its links to the commodity value of ‘the street’. By showing how the focus on the ‘“street” orientation as the means for successful performance in both public and private sectors’ (ibid.) generates a particular construction of masculinity which relies upon the display of strength and of goods (including women), Watts makes a point about the subject of gangster rap that resonates with the structure of the Petrarchan subject. If, as Marotti (1982) asserts, Petrarchan love is not authentic love but is an expression of ambitious desire, then for the usual speaking subject of gangster rap, gangsterism is not authentic gangsterism, it is a performance insisted upon and rewarded by corporate and consumer power. Thus the gangster rapper has achieved the rewards the Petrarchan poet can only work towards, and thus, despite its anti-authoritarian posturing, gangster rap reflects and reaffirms establishment values (see Haupt 2003) – as the Petrarchan poet longs for achievement in the terms of the court. Put differently, while Petrarchism is a discourse of desire, gangster rap is a discourse of attainment. The song, by its existence on CD and as a video, is proof of the success the artist has worked so hard to attain. If Petrarchism makes sexual frustration complicitous with career aspiration and in so doing establishes one of the ‘master tropes’ of literary history, as Braden (1986b: 6) suggests, and if this master trope is a trope of mastery in which the female subject is objectified and used for the profit of the poet, then it may be the case that in the context of late capitalism, this master trope is refracted as the relentless performance of sexual and material achievement. The structural and thematic similarities extend beyond this initial point, that the subject of gangster rap is a version of the desiring Petrarchan male subject satiated. Just as the kind of Petrarchism I have been discussing was in its time the discourse of the court – the discourse of the centre of power, a way for those near that centre to advance in it – so gangster rap, as an incarnation of commercially successful hip hop more broadly, now occupies a mainstream position in the economy of the music industry globally, and offers economic and thus social advancement in a late capitalist context.1 Along with the celebration of the victory over poverty which comprises much of the lyrical content, comes an almost neurotic iteration of an aggressive masculinity, hypersexual, wealthy, socially powerful within his clique of homies. Like a modern Petrarch-

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operations of the culture industry get transformed based upon terms generated by public consumption of the art (ibid).

ism, gangster rap has become the medium through which one kind of marginalised male subject asserts his masculinity.2 Given hip hop’s genesis, this self is often overtly raced. One example is Fifty Cent’s song ‘P.I.M.P.’, where the artist casts himself as a slick and classy incarnation of an old racist stereotype, the black pimp (www.50centonline.com). The success he performs is defiantly anti-social, a kind of reclamation through reveling in the stereotype. 50 Cent can be seen to be embracing the subject position created for him by a racist establishment, and profiting from it. Notable is the misogyny, which spoils any claim this performance may have to social activism or even commentary, reducing it instead to replicating the kind of exploitation it might be giving the finger to in the first place. The conflation of a celebration of an essentialised masculinity with misogyny has its own history; Aisha Durham (n.d.) has identified misogyny and essentialism as shared challenges for the subjectivities constructed in hip hop and in the black nationalism that helped it to grow (see also Morely 1992: xviii–xxi). Of course, essentialised masculinity and the objectification of women are issues for many philosophies and traditions. It may be, if the lines of connection I am suggesting hold, that gangster rap’s gendered strategies of representation draw their impetus not only from hip hop’s forms of BC nationalism, but from a signifying tradition which relies upon the use of women’s bodies: Petrarchism. In the literal display of female bodies, most often as body parts, in the music videos, the blazon is reinvigorated for the twenty-first century as women are celebrated as a series of anatomical parts (groins, midriffs, breasts, ‘booties’) to be paraded, like jewelry or cars, as success symbols. Dubrow (1995: 93) says that Petrarchism’s relationship to sexuality is informed by ‘hostility’. In a particular kind of Petrarchan counterdiscourse, one that reacts against the rules of the game by emphasising fulfilled erotic desire, ‘the complicated… relationship between desire and aggression’ is evident. If there is in fact a structural link between Petrarchism and gangster rap, then Vickers’ (1981) argument has powerful implications for the representational systems available to discourses of love: when the male subject of Western love poetry speaks desire for the female Other, it is an act of aggression, in reaction to the perceived power of the woman to see herself generate desire. If we add to this formulation the history of slavery, and the racing and gendering of black bodies that resulted, the politics of the popular language of love set in motion by Petrarchism and currently picked up by and in some ways intensified in hip hop, are inescapable.

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Conclusion: Petrarchism Today 177

There are other thematic similarities between Petrarchism and gangster rap: one is the use of alter egos whose fictionality is embedded in the life of the artist. For example, Eminem has three intersecting identities, all of them functioning to some extent in his music as personas: Marshall Mathers (the person), Eminem (the artist), and Slim Shady (the character).3 He constantly plays these three identities off against each other, shifting the speaking ‘I’ between them. He repeatedly insists on naming himself as Slim Shady (‘My name is’). He refers to this persona as separate from the artist (‘Without me’). And he also confounds this distinction by alternately insisting that he means what he says (‘I’m Shady’), and lampooning those who take his lyrics literally (‘Role model’). Then, called to account for the things he (or Slim Shady) says, the artist points to his personas’ status as performance, refusing responsibility for their words. He is sometimes mocking, as in ‘Role model’, where he critiques listeners who emulate his persona by suggesting he will kill himself and others, and that they should follow his example. In ‘Cleaning out my closet’ he bemoans the fact that members of the public have objected to the lyrical content of his music, casting himself as a victim of misunderstanding and prejudice. Even in these distancing moves, he confounds or compounds the different subjectivities he espouses. The different speakers respond differently – the ‘I’ that is picketed in ‘Cleaning out my closet’ is either Marshal Mathers or Eminem, whereas the ‘role model’ is closer in tone and activities to Slim Shady, aware of his existence as alter ego to a rock star. This refraction between personas is exacerbated when, like Philip Sidney, Eminem makes use of events in Marshal Mathers’s life. In ‘Cleaning out my closet’ he refers to his muchpublicised relationship with his mother, and names family members, including his daughter Hailie. In ‘I’m Shady’ he switches between the ‘I’ that is Marshal Mathers/Eminem, talking about his lifestyle in a mock inventory of what drugs he does and doesn’t do, a list which only makes sense in the context of tabloid gossip written about the artist, and whose incorrect assumptions he sets out to clarify, and the insistence, ‘I’m Shady’. This is a version of Astrophil’s deconstructive irony (Spiller 1992: 108, 112–13), equally playful but much more vicious. The difference in quality reflects the different social contexts of both discourses: Astrophil (and Sidney), for all their impatience and frustration, are tightly bound to a social code in whose terms they want to succeed. Eminem has already succeeded, and it is this success which enables him to reject the norms of a society which (the master narrative goes) marginalised him, leaving him with no option but the lifestyle whose celebration informs his music, guarantees his authenticity, and results in his success.

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178 Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition

The marginalised self, performed, shares another conceit with Petrarchism. Ongoing competition with rivals is a central theme of hip hop, usually expressed in a celebration of the skills and successes of the artist. Astrophil’s ‘You take wrong ways’ is the Elizabethan version of Will Smith’s (2005) sentiment expressed in ‘Lost and Found’, where he asserts his right to an original and individual voice, and criticises the generic content of current rap music. Eminem celebrates his persona’s success by suggesting it has spawned a host of imitators, in part an ironic reference to the fact that he is white, in ‘The Real Slim Shady’. The image he deploys in this song, of scores of identical imitators all standing when Slim Shady is called, is surely one that Elizabethan sonneteers would relate to as they entered the hall of mirrors that is Petrarchism with the hopes of being seen. In both Petrarchism and hip hop, then, newcomers have to contend with a series of overarching rules or generic requirements. Individual utterances inevitably draw their context from the other utterances that have preceded them, in an overt system of repetition, where fragments are replayed and recontextualised, and thus reworked. Petrarchism is Renaissance sampling. When Michael Drayton, in a dedicatory sonnet to his 1594 version of Ideas Mirrour writes, ‘Divine Sir Phillip, I avouch thy writ/ I am no pickpurse of another’s wit’ (repeating in his last line the final line of the octave of Astrophil and Stella’s sonnet 74), he ironically is demonstrating his wit through his awareness of, and ability to make use of, successful work that has gone before. ‘The repetitiveness that is the fundamental praxis of Petrachism’ (Dubrow 1995: 2) finds its echoes in the themes and language of gangster rap. The ideology of Petrarchism is suffering; the ideology of gangster rap is suffering transcended. Both ideologies find expression in repetition. The desire for advancement drives one of the core narratives of gangster rap (the rise from the ghetto), even as the performance of success through the acquisition and flaunting of the symbols of that success – the bling factor in mainstream hip hop, its obsession with rides, cribs, ice, and, of course, boos, shortys, baby mamas, bitches, hoes, and honeys – constitutes the utterance itself. The relentless display is itself a repetition of these themes (British MC Ms. Dynamite [Naomi McLean Daley] comments on the consumerism that has become the hallmark of mainstream hip hop at the expense of its genesis as a discourse of social and political protest in ‘It Takes More’). The language in which this performance of desire takes place has its own vocabulary, a shared generic register. Here is the repetition of tropes we see in Petrarchism also. At the same time, the audience has

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Conclusion: Petrarchism Today 179

to be part of the inner circle in order fully to understand the references. In this way the notion of the coterie is extended for commercial purposes, inviting the purchaser to feel part of the circle even as his or her modern version of patronage – the purchase of the CDs and related merchandise – is what funds the prince around whom the circle gathers. The ‘coterie’ functions in other ways as well. The production of records in the elite hip hop stables relies on an overt system of patronage; for example Dr Dre facilitated the rise of Eminem, who himself has a number of protégés, perhaps the most successful currently being 50 Cent, who himself has facilitated the rise of rapper The Game, in an aristocracy of gangster rap. Songs are sometimes intensely self-referential in this regard, reciting their pedigree by naming the more senior players as friends or mentors, or performing these connections by recording guest appearances on songs or videos. Just as the Petrarchan poet demonstrates his learning and ability through references to a poetic and philosophical tradition, so is mainstream hip hop replete with internal references which demonstrate social connection and therefore power, and a place in the history of hip hop. Hip hop (as an umbrella term under which gangster rap falls) has its own cultural practices and a specific historical and political genesis from the ghettos of New York in the 1970s; as such it has its own multivocal, performative, gendered and raced context that is not reducible to an exact analogy with Petrarchism. But there are fascinating similarities, which shed light on the enduring links between gender, public performance, desire, and profit. The court is a different centre of power to the corporations of America and the consumerist culture they reflect and perpetuate, but both kinds of subjects exist in a structurally similar relation to the centre of power towards which they respond. Hip hop’s MC, ‘rooted in values of alienation, self-assertion, and oral expression’ (Morley 1992: xxx), is similar to Petrarchism’s socially and sexually frustrated subject, seeking to assert himself through his poetry. The former’s ‘performance style is… rooted in boasting and competition’ (Light 2004: 145), a modern version of the Petrarchan poet’s relentless and defining need to differentiate himself. William Kennedy’s (1994: 281) caution is apposite, that, ‘The sheer diversity of Petrarchan imitation should discredit any idea that one kind of unmediated interiority, socially determined subjectivity, or ideological expressiveness dominates the Petrarchan lyric’, and any attempt to offer a comment on a form of gendered subject-constitution will be unable to reduce to formula all the possibilities within a subject-object

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(or, indeed, subject-subject) relationship. Nevertheless, English Petrarchism as a specific, if complex, mode of speaking, with attendant recognisable discursive formations, had wide-reaching influence on later representations of a desiring linguistic subject. Indeed, Kennedy also comments on the ‘uncanny’ connection between Petrarchan concerns and ‘our late modern aesthetic, psychoanalytic, and sociocultural understandings’ (4). At the least, then, the contexts of Elizabeth’s court and of twenty-first century America might be seen to be echoing off each other, in Grady’s sense, which is that the present, late modernity, finds echoes of itself in the early modern era. The reading offered here, of the Petrarchan subject as an illustration of the working of a dominant Western subjectivity, and its re-emergence in gangster rap as an example of its ongoing efficacy, depends on accepting that sexual difference structures the world. This can be a double-edged sword. As Benjamin (1988: 184–224) has shown, a system that relies on gender polarity will always result in structures of male domination. Within our current structures, the individual will continue to be normatively gendered; or, to put it another way, patriarchy is not a matter of personal location, it is structural (187, 216). This means that gender oppression is built into the structure, not into the individual, who has the potential to be and do otherwise to some extent, given the chance. Petrarchism is an excellent example of how a structure formulates possibilities. Individual subjects may move within these possibilities, may even discover unspeakable possibilities or the limits of what is possible. But the rules of the structure lay down the law for the rules of the subject, which entails the rules of gender, based on an understanding, an interpretation of, sexual difference.

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Conclusion: Petrarchism Today 181

Notes Sex, Gender, and Sexual Difference

1 See Hutson (1999: 150) for how the single example provided by Montaigne may have been over-generalised in recent early modern literary theory. See Beecher (2005: 1014) for a critique of ‘the anxiety-and-indeterminacy school of Renaissance sexuality’, where he argues that certain modern critics have simplified a complex sixteenth-century set of texts, bodies, and cultural and gender experiences. 2 Many critics of, especially, early modern drama, have found examples of how this apparently strictly-controlled gender identity is vulnerable to its own performativity, and in its reliance on the realm of the social for its authorisation (see, for example, Quilligan 1995). Twelfth Night is the play most often used in the last few decades to point to an early modern performance of the fluidity of both gender and sexuality, although Lorna Hutson (1999: 148–55) has objected to the ways in which readings of medical discourse have been combined with this single play to produce general statements about how plays functioned in relation to actual early modern women. She points out the centrality of class and of a gender-specific rhetorical skill to the workings of Twelfth Night, and so complicates its ‘place in the history of sex and gender’ as reliant only on Galen’s theory of body heat and sexual sameness (174). In the process she insists on the complexities of gender identities in the face, especially, of their imbrication with class in the period. 3 For example, Louis Montrose (1983) characterises the Elizabethan sex/gender system as the result of a society that cannot tolerate powerful women. The story of gender he reads from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the story of the seizing of male power over the female, in a culture where male anxiety about the power of mothers is expressed by systematically disempowering the female. See also Orgel (1996a). Of the culture’s refusal to allow professional Englishwomen players on the stage in the later sixteenth century, Orgel comments, ‘The problem here is obviously not with theatre but with women, on whom the culture projects a natural tendency towards promiscuity of all kinds… Behind the outrage of public modesty is a real fear of women’s sexuality, and more specifically, of its power to evoke men’s sexuality’ (49). 4 Butler (1987: 128, 129) also uses Beauvoir’s notion of the body as a situation but comes to almost the opposite conclusion from Moi: that both sex and gender are constructs, and thus that sex may have been gender ‘all along’: ‘When the body is conceived as a cultural locus of gender meanings, it becomes unclear what aspects of this body are natural or free of cultural imprint. Indeed, how are we to find the body that pre-exists its cultural interpretation?’. 5 Freud has been misappropriated by homophobic therapists and theorists who (wilfully or otherwise) misunderstood his theory of perversion, as 182

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Chapter 1

Dollimore demonstrates (1991: 171–5). At the same time, ‘it remains true that the limitations of the psychoanalytic project itself also facilitate subsequent conservative appropriations of it’, as psychoanalysis encodes ‘the idea of a normative sexuality achieved by passing through the sequential stages of a universal psychosexual development’ (173). Ultimately, Dollimore concludes that homosexuality undoes psychoanalysis, which relies on the concept of perversion to exist (all infants are polymorphously perverse, before they ‘achieve’ the Oedipal phase), and is simultaneously disrupted by the ongoing existence of perversion (197–8). 6 In a special issue of Yale French Studies designed to ‘retranslate’ some of the ideas of French Feminism anew, Christine Delphy (1995: 196) challenges the notion that there is any such thing. ‘French Feminism’, she says, is an imperialist construction of the Anglo-American academy, and is consisted of the resulting English commentary on a disparate collection of writers, French and others. 7 As does Hélène Cixous. Cixous (1981: 95) argues for the right of women and girls to be defined in an alternative way, not by a system of thought which privileges men and positions women as at worst defective, and at best the weaker Other half of a binary. Within this ‘masculine economy’, ‘women’s libidinal economy is neither identifiable… nor referable’.

Chapter 2

Petrarchism and Psychoanalysis

1 Literary writers Freud quotes as evidence for his psychoanalytic statements include Goethe, Voltaire, Heine, Rousseau, Twain, and Shakespeare (‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…’) (1946a: 28, 100 and 122, 34, 84, 108, 110, 123). 2 Philip Armstrong (2000) has traced the role played by Hamlet in the thinking of both Freud and Lacan. 3 For details of the early genesis of the sonnet see Sproxton (2000) and Spiller (1992). 4 Marguerite Waller (1980) has shown that Petrarch’s own work, as well as the Petrarchisms that resulted, are fundamentally intertextual. Petrarch’s poems have to be read in and with a community of other poets and poems. See Sara Sturm-Maddox (1981) for Petrarch’s debt to Dante. 5 I have modernised the spelling of all primary texts quoted from this anthology. 6 Here Vives refers to 1 Corinthians 14; other writers, like John Knox in his The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), uses Paul’s ban on women having authority over men in 1 Timothy 2 to argue for the monstrosity of a female ruler (Trill et al. eds. 1997: 37). 7 Heather Dubrow (1995) has shown that Petrarch’s shifting subject positions within his own poetry, his vacillations between power and powerlessness, and between gendered positions which he shares with Laura, make it difficult to insist that the form is constitutionally fixed along expected gendered lines. Barbara Estrin (1994) has argued that Petrarch writes a Laura who can imagine herself out of his story and into others of her own making, a kind of Irigarayan subject exceeding, escaping, the discourse that

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Notes 183

8

9

10

11

12

uses her as its Other. In this way, says Estrin the woman’s desire sets the scene, and defines the genre. Elsewhere Estrin (1984: 431) objects to what she calls ‘ “Petrarchan” readings’ which, by her definition, deny the complexities of the relationship between poet and mistress by denying her ‘reality as a woman, his potential as a man’. Naomi Miller (1996: 5–6) usefully positions much of this work as appropriate reaction to a new historicist overemphasis on positions of domination and subordination; she stresses the importance of locating the complexities within, and the range of, possible subject positions in early modern texts. Also useful are Foucault’s (1980) notion of power as something which the overpowered are also implicated in perpetuating, and Butler’s (1997) demonstration that the subject is both subjected to and enabled by power as a condition of existence. See, for example, Crewe (1990: 21, 28): the Renaissance literary subject is ‘implicitly masculine’ and ‘depends on conspicuous symbolic repression of the feminine’; ‘full poetic subjecthood’ is ‘phallic empowerment within a universal symbolic order’; or Rigolot (1986: 287), who works from the premise that we can ‘take for granted that, for any Renaissance writer [of love poetry], the frame of reference is male-oriented’; or Freccero (2001: 22) whose psychoanalytic argument shows not only that ‘petrarchism… is predominantly gendered male’ but that it also grows from a tradition which ‘posits a certain heteronormative arrangement of gender and sexuality’. Schalkwyk (2002: 30) has argued that the language of the early modern sonnet should be understood as ‘force and action’, not description. Sonnets, he demonstrates, are forms of language that rely on a specific social moment. Marotti (1986, 1982) and Bell (1998) have also argued similarly, with different emphases, that early modern sonnets acquire their valency through the embodied social context to which they speak. The binary model has its limitations: Dollimore (1991) has shown how the apparently other is the perversely proximate in Western discourses of self and other, desire and sexuality. Naomi J. Miller (1996: 20) suggests a triangular and not a binary formulation of the workings of early modern subject-formation in order to recognise the differences within genders and subjects, as well as between them. She calls for ‘heterosocial figurations of gender’ along the lines of Sedgwick’s (1985) homosocial triangular figuration of male desire. Bruce Smith (1996) suggests a circle is the best image to capture the interplay of modern sexualities with the earlier sexualities we attempt to understand. Nevertheless, Miller (1996: 22) (amongst others) attests to the prevalence of the gendered binary in a range of early modern discourses. Fineman (1986) has identified it in Shakespeare’s sonnets, as characteristic of modern poetic subjectivity, as will be addressed in the next chapter in more detail. Fineman’s formulation also makes clear the misogynistic nature of this kind of desire, and Dollimore (1996: 278) and Stephen Greenblatt (1984: 115–56) both point to its English Petrarchan formulation in suggesting that a natural aggression is channelled through submission to a higher power into a kind of passivity. See Greenblatt’s (1984: 19–21) discussion of this painting as a challenge to the nature of perception. Greenblatt’s reading resonates in many ways with Lacan’s: ‘To see the large death’s-head… we must throw the entire

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184 Notes

painting out of perspective in order to bring into perspective what our usual mode of perception cannot comprehend… the limitations of vision are grasped as structural, the consequence more of the nature of perception than of the timidity of the perceiver’ (19). ‘The effect… is to resist any clear location of reality in the painting, to question the very concept of locatable reality upon which we conventionally rely in our mappings of the world’ (20). 13 In a discussion on Freud’s concept of sublimation, Lacan again makes the point that there is a fundamental contradiction in the individual’s selfformation, as he has to negotiate between his libidinal drives and what is acceptable through ‘social regulation’, resulting in ‘the construction of a system of defences’. As a result, there is an eternally and ‘fundamentally conflictual position of man relative to his satisfaction as such’ (1992: 95). We can never achieve what we really desire. This is Freud’s incest taboo, after which the subject seeks substitutions, and from which Lacan’s theory of the split subject develops. 14 ‘[T]he good is radically denied by Freud. It is rejected at the beginning of his thought in the very notion of the pleasure principle as the rule of the deepest instinct’ (Lacan 1992: 96). 15 John Freccero (1975: 37, 38) describes the process by which Petrarch finds a way to make himself ‘autonomous’ as ‘poet laureate’, through his ‘mirror relationship [with] Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him as poet laureate’. This is taken up in detail by Braden (1986a).

Chapter 3

Petrarchism in Early Modern England

1 Anne Ferry (1983: 125) points out that English poets tended to translate the same poems of Petrarch. She suggests they were translating and working on their own English models, that they were not interested in Petrarch’s overall sequence or its aims. 2 It is perhaps not incidental that Ilona Bell (1998: 3, 4) refers to Petrarchism as Renaissance psychoanalysis, ‘the richest vocabulary available to analyze subjectivity and to express desire’. She, too, takes it as given that both discourses define ‘subjectivity and desire as masculine’. 3 Even if one sees Petrarchism’s roots in Sappho’s poetry, as Roger Kuin (1999: 146) does, the fact remains that it became ‘a discourse dominated by men’. 4 Schalkwyk (2002: 25) argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets are ‘“pure” autobiography’: they constitute the records of embodied moments of exchange between specific people in specific situations. There is nothing fictional about them, which is why they refuse to conform to any of the conventions of fiction, hence their famous frustrating opacity. At the same time, the selfconsciously ironic relationship between Sidney and Astrophil makes clear the difficulties of any straightforward understanding of autobiography in the great English Petrarchan sequences (see Sinfield 1980). 5 Sturm-Maddox (1992) has complicated Petrarch’s relation to the laurel through Laura, arguing that the poet’s love for the lady and his desire

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6

7

8 9

10

11 12 13

14

15 16

for glory may exist in a more ambivalent and complex relation. For the purposes of English Petrarchism, though, the relation is more straightforward. All extracts from Shakespeare’s Sonnets are from this edition. In all poetic extracts quoted in this book I modernise spelling, bearing in mind its various audiences. Following general critical consensus, I do not modernise Spenser, whose archaisms are deliberate. The popularity of Castiglione’s book in sixteenth-century England points to its use as a handbook for the upwardly mobile, ironically despite its original purpose to separate the truly aristocratic wheat from the aspiring chaff (Whigham 1984: 15, 18–19). Warner (1996: 17) proposes the phoenix as an emblem for Petrarch’s poetic strategy, which is also a strategy of self-constitution. The historical Pietro Bembo was one of the first Italian promoters of Petrarch to introduce Neoplatonic elements to what would become the Petrarchism developed in English sonnets. Marotti famously stated this case in its most extreme form, arguing that ‘Love is not love’ at all. Instead, Marotti (1982: 402) explicates those poems where the ‘language of ambition’ is converted into ‘the language of love’. The display of learning and of wit, the lover’s frustration at not getting what he deserves, are ways for courtier poets to manage the competitive atmosphere of the court. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (1984: 54) have suggested that the structure of the two kinds of desire – the ambition of the aspiring courtier, and the erotic longing of the lover – were similar. Thus they both could be modelled on court hierarchies in an attempt to refashion relations of power and submission to which both lover and courtier were subject. Petrarchan love poetry functioned ‘as a complex displacement of the ideological pressures of the court’. For a critique of Jones and Stallybrass see Warley (2005: 41–2). Greenblatt (1984: 136–7); Holahan (1993: 71) also characterises Henry as Stalin. See Thomson (1964: 152–66) for Petrarch’s influence on The Clerk’s Tale. For biographical information see Heale (1998), Rebholz (ed. 1988), Daalder (ed. 1975), Muir (1963). For critical commentary see Spiller (1992: 83–101), Heale (1998), Klein (1992), Caldwell (1989: 230–1), Spearing (1985: 278–82), Thomson (1964). Jonathan Goldberg (1992: 59) usefully complicates the received tradition of a ‘hypermasculine’ and heterosexual Wyatt, pointing out the necessity of ‘open[ing] up sexual possibilities not written within a heterosexualized oedipal plot’ (61). Ferry (1983: 82–3) demonstrates how Wyatt’s alterations to Petrarch in his translations served to stress the lover’s emotional state. This is a theme later English Petrarchans take up with a vengeance: ‘Lo, Dear! what wonders great by thee are wrought,/ When I but little favours do enjoy’ (Henry Constable, Diana sonnet I [1592 text]) (Lee 1904: 79); or Astrophil’s vituperative Fifth Song, which concludes: ‘You see what I can say; mend you your froward mind,/ And such skill in my muse you, reconciled, shall find,/ That all these cruel words your praises shall be proved’ (Astrophil and Stella ll. 88–90).

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17 See Waller’s (1987: 8) excellent reading of the multiple resonances of this quote, including the implications of its gesture towards Matthew 22:21: ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ 18 Thomson (1964: 198) says Wyatt’s translation of the phrase on the collar is from one of Petrarch’s glosses, even as, ‘Wyatt’s portrait of the wild tameseeming lady owes nothing to either Petrarch or the commentators’. She gives the original as, ‘It has pleased my lord to set me free’ (197–8). This version of Petrarch retains its emphasis on the hind’s freedom, while also pointing to its reliance on the power of her lord. Replacing ‘create me free’ with ‘set me free’ makes the links to God less overt. Nevertheless, they are still there, and still lacking in Wyatt’s poem. It makes sense that Thomson would find ‘Whoso list to hunt’ an imitation of Petrarch that is ‘among [Wyatt’s] most un-Petrarchan, wordly, and egotistical’ poems (196). A number of commentators on the Italian original note the difference in tone between the two poems, Wyatt’s alteration from Petrarch’s dreamy, contemplative atmosphere to a context of hunting and wordliness (Thomson 1964: 197, Spearing 1985: 303). 19 Leonard Forster (1969: 41) suggests that the dearth of Petrarchan language in the courts of Mary and Edward make it clear that their courts were not suited to the discourse. Diana Henderson (1995: 27) reads Mary’s reign as too brief to register on an extended cultural map, and too concerned with ‘the extremity of her attempt to reinstate Catholicism and her unfortunate marriage to Philip II of Spain’. The delay in its flourishing under Elizabeth, has been accounted for by Steven May (1991: 49–50), who posits that it took time to establish the court of each sovereign, and Elizabeth’s gender meant a comprehensive reshuffling of courtly structures and workings. In addition, he suggests that in the 1560s, when it was an urgent topic, addresses of love to the queen were too serious and too new to be available for courtly use. It was only with the firm establishment of Elizabeth’s rule that the language of love could be deployed in poetry as a device to entreat and display, to work and entertain. 20 The multiple interpretative potential of Elizabethan iconographies, including the slipperiness of the meanings associated with gendered representations, have been explored by Orgel (1996b). 21 Marotti (1982: 398) suggests that she ‘specifically encouraged the use of an amorous vocabulary by her courtiers to express ambition and its vicissitudes’. This might have been because Petrarchan discourse ‘enabled the Queen to hold powerful and dangerous suitors or potential rivals at arm’s length while keeping them on a string’. Forster (1969: 129) comments that she undoubtedly ‘read Machiavelli and Petrarch. (The combination is suggestive.)’ See, for example, the discussions of Elizabeth’s use of Petrarchan language in her poem to her last serious suitor, the Duke of Alencon in Bell (1998: 108); Forster (1969: 129); Klein (1998: 27). 22 ‘Elizabeth was more the creature of the Elizabethan image than she was its creator. Her power to shape her own strategies was itself shaped – at once enabled and constrained – by the existing repertoire of values, institutions, and practices (including the artistic and literary conventions) specific to Elizabethan society and to Elizabeth’s person within it. She had

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23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31

32

33

the capacity to work the available terms to serve her culturally conditioned needs and interests. By the same token, however, her subjects might rework those terms to serve their turns’ (Montrose 1986: 310). See also Berry 1989. See Henderson 1995. For a discussion about the power of the mistress in a sonnet sequence see Hulse 1986. Hulse describes the workings of power in the Elizabethan court as more complex and shifting than simply hegemonic (286). For a summary of many of the main points about Tottel’s Miscellany see Heale 1998: 191–6. On these experimental sequences see Harris 1971. For example: ‘Alas, have I not pain enough, my friend,/…/But with your rhubarb words you must contend/ To grieve me worse, in saying that desire/ Doth plunge my well-formed soul even in the mire/ Of sinful thoughts, which do in ruin end?/…/If that be sin, which in fixed hearts doth breed/ a loathing of all loose unchastity:/ Then love is sin, and let me sinful be’ (sonnet 14); or, ‘The wisest scholar of the wight most wise,/… says,/ That virtue, if it once met with our eyes,/ Strange flames of love it in our souls would raise;/…/It is most true, for since I her did see,/ Virtue’s great beauty in that face I prove,/ And find the effect, for I do burn in love’ (sonnet 25). For example, the bulk of the initial sonnets are about or Cupid or Love: egs: 12, 13, 15, 19, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37. All quotes from Caelica are from this edition. All references to the Amoretti are from Evans ed. 2003: 106–41. For more on the deer as a symbol of religious meaning, and for its use as a metaphor in early modern continental poetry, see Allen 1960: 99, 105. For example, in sonnet 26 the young man is addressed as, ‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage/ Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit…’ (sonnet 26 ll. 1–2). In the triad of sonnets 33–6, the young man is a ‘sun of the world’ whose heavenly powers are ‘stained’ by his mismanagement of his earthly duties to those who depend on him, most notably the poor poet. In sonnet 37 the relationship is troped so as to emphasise the poet’s multiple dependencies: ‘As a decrepit father takes delight/ To see his active child do deeds of youth,/ So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,/ Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth/…/So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised,/ Whilst…/… I in thy abundance am sufficed’ (ll. 1–4, 9–11). Sonnet 57 registers protest at the poet’s abject status in terms with social and economic resonance: ‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend/ Upon the hours and times of your desire?/ I have no precious time at all to spend,/ Nor services to do, till you require…’ (ll. 1–4). ‘There lives more life in one of your fair eyes/ Than both your poets can in praise devise’ (sonnet 83 ll. 3–5, 13–14); ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,/ Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,/ That did my ripe thoughts in my brain in-hearse…?/…/… when your countenance filled up his line,/ Then lacked I matter…’ (sonnet 86). ‘In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,/ And thence this slander, as I think, proceeds’ (sonnet 131 ll. 13–14); because she has her ‘Will in over-

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34

35

36

37

38

39 40

plus’ (sonnet 135 l. 2), she is ‘the bay where all men ride’, ‘the wide world’s common place’ (sonnet 137 ll. 6, 10). On this point, Smith (1996: 118) has demonstrated the importance of inflecting the subject-object binary so as to avoid reductive logic: ‘the sexually desiring subject needs the subjecthood of the desired object. Within the fiction [of Shakespeare’s texts] that need entails constantly shifting relations between subject and object, master and slave’. Fineman (1989: 8) argues elsewhere that ‘the Lacanian subject in particular, and the psychoanalytic subject in general, [are] epiphenomenal consequences of the Renaissance invention of the literary subject’. See chapter 2 above for more on the relationship between Renaissance literature and psychoanalysis’s construction of the subject. See also Hulse (1986: 285), who rejects the separation of the personal and the contextual in making sense of Astrophil and Stella: ‘The creation of the fictional poetry… is inseparable from the creation of an actual human relationship and from the shaping of the political arrangements of their society. It is hard to know at any moment, and pointless to ask, which is cause and which is effect.’ Roger Kuin (1999) has suggested that since for Mary Wroth, as the first female amorous Petrarchan sequence writer in English, the subversive possibilities inherent in the Italian gendered syntax are not available, she has greater difficulty in scripting herself into Petrarchism, since she is forced to use its complex psychic, social, and material conditions as they had been fixed by a hundred and fifty years of masculine use. For more on the role of gender in Labé’s work see Rigolot (1986). Relevant to the reading I am about to offer is Rigolot’s explanation of grammatical issues in another of Labé’s sonnets: ‘[L]ove, which grammatically must be expressed in the feminine, must also be ungrammatically masculine when, in a female-authored discourse, the love object becomes a man’ (292). See Schiesari (2001) for an account of the gendered difference Continental women poets made of Petrarchism’s trope of loss. ‘[N]egotiation, in the sense of a range of interpretative positions through which subordinated groups respond to the assumptions encoded into dominant cultural forms and systems of representation’ (Jones 1990: 2). Jones is drawing on the definition developed by Stuart Hall and others as part of the cultural studies work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Chapter 4

The Petrarchism of Mary Wroth

1 For some examples of the range of readings not discussed in the course of this chapter, see Fienberg (2002), Lewalski (1993: 251–63), Wall (1993: 330–8), Krontiris (1992: 121–40), Masten (1991), Feinberg (1991), Lamb (1991), Jones (1990: 1–35, 118–54), Beilin (1987: 208–43), Paulissen (1982), Roberts (1979). For an overview of some of this criticism and references to other readings see also Miller (1996: 39). 2 It should be noted that Ann Rosalind Jones (1990: 143) has a different opinion. Jones says of Wroth (and Gaspara Stampa, to whose work Wroth’s is compared), that ‘Stampa and Wroth were solitary as love poets: they wrote

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3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

as exceptional women rather than as members of a group. Symptomatically, their alter egos engage in frustrated monologues rather than coterie dialogues’. Dubrow (1995: 144) has also pointed out the importance of Wroth’s family to her writing, for which ‘her status as a Sidney may well be as important as her status as a woman’. Wroth’s editor, Josephine Roberts (1983), points to the family’s role in Wroth’s identity and her sonnet sequence. ‘My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toys,/ My wit doth strive those passions to defend…/ I see my course to lose myself doth bend:/ I see, and yet no greater sorrow take/ Than that I lose no more for Stella’s sake’ (sonnet 18 ll. 9–14); ‘Your words, my friend, right healthful caustics, blame/ My young mind marred, whom love doth windlass so/ That mine own writings like bad servants show,/ My wits, quick in vain thoughts, in virtue lame;/…/Sure you say well; your wisdom’s golden mine/ Dig deep with learning’s spade; now tell me this,/ Hath this world aught so fair as Stella is?’ (sonnet 21). This poem, and its reply, and all poems from Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, are from Roberts (1983). Roberts discusses this exchange in her Introduction (32–7), as do Moore (2000: 127–31); Miller (1996: 149–52) and Krontiris (1992: 123–6). For a critique of this publishing history as a ‘narrative of scandal and withdrawal’ that is used to prefigure the dynamics of the poetry, see Smith (2000: 409–13). Jones (1990: 7) confirms that ‘The power play involved in exposing a female beloved to the view of male connoisseurs in the descriptive enumeration of the blason is exposed by women poets’ much less frequent and less visually fixated uses of the genre’. See also Feinberg (1991: 177). See Smith (2000: 417) for a discussion of Wroth’s use of self-blazon in the opening sonnet of the sequence. And of race, although I have not addressed them here. See, for example, Hall (1995). We can read Benjamin’s explanation of the problems with splitting private and public together with Schalkwyk’s (2002), as discussed in the previous chapter. Benjamin suggests that to insist on the split between public and private is to insist on the splitting of the father and the mother. This splitting, she shows, maintains a phallic structure which devalues the female and reinscribes systems of domination for everyone (1988: 204).

Chapter 5

Strategies of Legitimation 1796–1881

1 Specifically, as well as some that focus on religious themes, he wrote occasional and political sonnets. He also rejected the Shakespearean form so popular in the Elizabethan era in favour of a new use of the Italian rhyme scheme, in conjunction with a less rigid structure. See Honigmann (ed. 1966). 2 Wordsworth has been credited with following Milton to reconceptualise the sonnet both formally and thematically, shifting it from a dialectical engagement with loss to a unitary and revelatory expression that, in his terms, was

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more ‘manly’. See Wagner (1996). Curran (1986: 39–49) details Wordsworth’s central role in the revival of the sonnet’s reputation in the nineteenth century. See also Phelan (2005: 9–33). John Holmes (2005) has argued for the importance of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sequence, The House of Life (first published in 1870, and then in revised and extended form in 1881), for inaugurating the late Victorian craze for sonnets. With the revival of the sonnet, an extensive body of sonnet criticism developed, focussing on debates about form (the concern with poetic form generally has been identified as key to understanding the period, see Curran [1986]). Opinions abounded on whether or not English was suited to the Italian rhyme scheme, and whether sonnets rhymed in Petrarch’s typical octave-sestet pattern (abbaabba cdcdcd) were signs of great poetic skill or too artificial. While the aesthetics of the sonnet were being actively discussed, gender was not a feature of the debate (Houston 2003: 148–50, 152, 158, 164). However, Phelan (2005: 6–7) locates in the sonnet in particular in the nineteenth century a ‘site of contest… between male and female writers’. Wordsworth certainly implicitly gendered his developments of the form by casting them as ‘manly’. Both men and women wrote sonnets, although the sonnet revival has begun to be credited to women writers, specifically Anna Seward, whose sonnets published in 1799 were written from 1773, and Charlotte Smith, the first woman to publish a collection of sonnets, although not in sequence. Daniel Robinson (1995: 99ff) suggests that the choice of the sonnet for these women was not arbitrary; making what he calls the sonnet claim is, he says, an assertion of canonical poetic legitimacy authorised by the great male writers of the sonnet in the past: Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton. It is always too easy to read women’s writing primarily through their biographies, a critical activity on which a branch of women’s literary history depends, but which can ghettoise women writers in simplistic theoretical territory. See Woolf (1993). Her A Room of One’s Own is a seminal text in this regard. Charlotte Smith’s enormous popularity and influence on the development of the nineteenth-century sonnet tradition has recently begun to be acknowledged by critics. Smith introduced formal innovations (Robinson 1995: 110; Curran 1986: 31), and developed the sonnet as an individual poem which captured a moment of (usually melancholic) feeling, often through an interaction with a feature of the landscape. No sonneteer writing during or after Smith’s career could help but be influenced by her. This is true for canonical sonneteers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, as much as it is true for Mary Robinson. Robinson (1995: 110) suggests that her engagement with formal debates was a response to Smith’s popularity, an attempt to stake her own claim to poetic skill. All quotes from Robinson’s Preface and from her sequence are from this edition. As Ovid’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’. McGann (1995: 68–9) comments on the change of title.

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11 I will quote from this modern translation as it is more concerned with fidelity to the original than Pope’s (which uses heroic couplets and so sometimes fits content to form), and as such provides a sense of Ovid’s characterisation. I will refer to Pope’s, whose translation Robinson clearly knew (she quotes lines from Ovid, and Pope’s translation of the same lines, at the start of her sequence), as we go along. 12 Pope’s Sappho is especially distracted: ‘But when its way the impetuous passion found/ I rend my tresses and my breasts I wound;/ I rave, then weep; I curse, and then complain;/ Now swell to rage, now melt in tears again… Stung with my love and furious with despair,/ All torn my garments and my bosom bare,/ My woes, thy crimes, I to the world proclaim;/ Such inconsistent things are love and shame’. 13 At the same time, the charge of tribadism that had been associated with Sappho had, by the seventeenth century, been both recognised and stigmatised (Andreadis 2001: 2, 5, 8). 14 McGann (1995: 22–6) locates Robinson’s project in the discourse of sensibility. 15 This concern with authenticity becomes very important to the reception of the sonnet in the following 100 years (Holmes 1999; Curran 1986: 32). 16 The other charge is that the poetry is too self-deprecating. See Stephenson (1989: 70). 17 For details of a slightly earlier, and less positive, feminist reception see Leighton (1988: 13). 18 See Morlier (1999: 98–100) for the example of sonnet 1. Sharon Smulders (1995: 20–1) examines Barrett Browning’s use of Renaissance tropes in sonnet 37. Leighton (1988), too, has pointed out the Sonnets’ immersion in their own literariness and their engagement with an inherited language of love. 19 All poems from Sonnets from the Portuguese are quoted from Feldman and Robinson, eds. (1999: 216–32). The editors note that later editions of the sequence have an additional sonnet, inserted by Browning between sonnets 41 and 42 (263). Because of Barret Browning’s characteristic use of ellipses in her poetry, I will indicate excised text by means of – in order to differentiate between my ellipses and her own. 20 Barrett Browning wrote to her husband, ‘my poetry… is the flower of me… the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground & the dark’. Qtd. Mermin (1981: 352). See also Leighton (1988: 14). 21 See also Whitla’s (1987: 85) objection to the tendency to read her poetry as biography: ‘Rossetti’s late-Romantic composite lyric, embodying the subjectivity of the poetic persona inherited from Wordsworth and his contemporaries, resists easy biographical equation with real life’. For a relatively recent example of the reductive tendency to cast the poetry as a reflection of the life see Marsh (1994). 22 The preface and all poems from Monna Innominata are from Rossetti (1914: 58–64). 23 Rossetti’s poems tend to rework similar themes; most of her love poetry demonstrates a thematic concern with love’s end. Significantly, ‘the poems about failed love… portray romantic love… as itself in need of transformation’ (Mayberry 1989: 56).

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24 Whitla (1987: 103–9) points out that each extract itself speaks about or comprises the speech of, a poet. Translations of the epigraphs quoted here are William Michael’s (Rossetti 1914). Whitla (1987: 98–100) also provides translations. 25 Dante recalls the exact moment he saw Beatrice for the first time, including what she was wearing and what his reactions were: ‘she appeared to me almost in the beginning of her ninth year, and I first saw her near the end of my ninth year. She appeared dressed in the most noble of colours, a subdued and decorous crimson… At that moment, and what I say is true, the vital spirit… began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected;… At that point the animal spirit… was stricken with amazement, and speaking directly to the spirit of sight, said these words: “Now your bliss has appeared”… Let me say that from that time on Love governed my soul…’ (trans. Musa 1999: 4). Petrarch famously noted in his copy of Virgil, ‘Laura… was first seen by me… in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of Saint Clare, Avignon, in the morning hour…’ (trans. Nichols, back cover). 26 Astrophil may consider the social shame of his commitment to his desire, and Sidney may be offering a didactic lesson on the religious cost of desire, according to some readings (Sinfield 1980); but Astrophil can insist on reworking the terms of his honour, as we have seen in the previous chapter, without the kind of social cost that continues to dictate the possibilities of Stella’s responses, no matter what she might actually want.

Chapter 6 Queering the Petrarchan Subject: The Poetry of Rosa Newmarch 1 On the sexual politics of back-formations see Garber (1995: 40). 2 This information is taken from her Obituary in the May 1940 issue of The Musical Times 81 (1167): 233–4. 3 Although Graham Robb (2003) has usefully complicated the picture of life for nineteenth-century homosexuals as unremittingly grim. 4 A Study in Modern Ethics was first published in 1891. Symonds also mentions the biblical injunctions against ‘the “unmentionable vice”’ in his Problem in Modern Ethics (1928: 196). 5 See Ellis’s chapter, ‘The Study of Sexual Inversion’ in Vol. II for an overview of the relevant literature in Europe and England (1930: 65–74). 6 Ellis (1948: 127, 131) prefers the term ‘deviation’ to Freud’s ‘perversion’ (1948: 126), and objects to the implications of the latter. 7 Ellis later reiterates, ‘Certainly it may be laid down as a general rule that it is not desirable a person constitutionally predisposed to homosexuality should procreate’ (216). 8 Stevenson’s book was called The Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (1909). 9 Elsewhere, Holmes (2005: 101) points out that by the late nineteenth century the earlier women sonneteers had been effaced, to be replaced by a tradition which began with Sonnets from the Portuguese and included Monna Innominata. ‘None of these offered a model of female selfhood frank in its

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sexuality or free of a sense of inferiority… For all that their presence and stature render these poets emancipatory examples to subsequent writers, none of them explore in their sonnet sequences the potential for female identity to be defined either through sexuality or apart from masculinity or both’. 10 This first sonnet draws on a rich intertextuality, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Bridal Birth’ to George Meredith’s cynical Modern Love to Robert Browning’s poem of the same name as the opening sonnet, ‘Love among the Ruins’ (Holmes 2005: 112–13). 11 All references to the sequence are from Newmarch (1903). I am grateful to John Holmes for making me aware of this sequence, and for providing me with a copy.

Chapter 7 Edna St Vincent Millay and the Dissident Petrarchan Subject 1 On Millay’s reception history see Griffith (2003: 469), Jones (1983: 41–2), Klemans (1993: 202–4). On her use of the sonnet form during Modernism’s literary moment see Gould (1988), Fried (1986: 8), Gray (1967: 27–8). The opposition of Millay’s early work and modernism is usefully complicated by Kaiser (1995: 27–34). 2 For statements on Millay’s emblematic quality see Britten (1967: 47, 163); Thesing (ed. 1993: 2); Milford (2002: xii); Tate (1993: 61). The ‘modern note’ of the sequence was recognised at the time of its publication, together with its ‘traditional quality’ (Britten 1967: 126, 163). Not surprising, then, that Millay has been seen as a poet whose technique ‘bridges’ the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (166). Or, as Allen Tate (1993: 62) puts it less generously, ‘her poetry does not define the break with the nineteenth century… because [unlike Eliot]… not being an intellect but a sensibility, she was not aware of it… she has been able to use the language of the preceding generation to convey an emotion peculiar to her own’. 3 The only other critic I have found who notices this dynamic finds it in Millay’s earliest work: The persona of ‘Renascence’ moves through a Lacanian formulation; ‘the speaker learns the Law by first passing through a mirror stage and then encountering Logos’ (Walker 1991: 147). 4 See also, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious’ in Ecrits (Lacan 1989: 330). 5 Fried’s (1986: 10) reading of this image delivers an almost opposite interpretation: ‘pious rape’ is ‘a mildly coercive inquisition’, one which refuses to force Chaos into any particular shape but instead is content to render up a good poem. ‘That alone will yield the solution, that is the way to make the prisoner speak up – to reform him, not to punish him or make him squeal’. ‘Cruelty’ and ‘arrogance’ are replaced by ‘an inescapable gentleness’. I cannot reconcile this reading with the complex notion of ‘pious rape’. At the same time Fried recognises that this poem ‘explicitly equates sexual and poetic dominance’ (11). 6 Jones (1983: 51, 54) sees the lover as casting herself as an angel. At least two critics read the speaker of the first sonnet off the characters in the last

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194 Notes

sonnet. Britten (1967: 124) recognises that it is ‘unlikely’ that the speaker of sonnet 1 is the poet, and identifies the speaker as Diana (Selene), invoking the last sonnet. Holly Peppe (1995: 53), too, discusses ‘the mythical frame story of Endymion and Selene’. 7 ‘It was because she was bold enough to examine the problem of the psychological distance between man and woman – one that cannot be reached and should not be violated – that Edna Millay may be said to have made an original contribution to the literature of the love duel’; ‘she does not speak of these matters simply as a woman… she assumes the man’s role and she plays it with no nervous air… because her own intelligence partook of both masculine and feminine characteristics, the poems convey the impression that the exactitude of science, in control of the impulses of intuition, has been brought to bear…’ (Gray, 1967: 17, 19. The identification of Hermes is also on p. 17). 8 Moore (2000: 207) suggests the ‘thing’ of line 1 is the beloved. 9 This sonnet has been repeatedly read as inscribing Millay’s sympathies with and identification for Diana as Selene, and her ‘contempt’ for the mortal Endymion (Michailidou 2006: 48, see also Peppe 1995, Klemans 1993). Jones (1983: 57) suggests that the speaker obliquely ‘characterizes herself… as the moon’. Moore (2000: 221) sees the goddess’s ‘eternally suspended desire’ as the enabling condition of more poetry. In their eagerness to read Millay’s poetic subject as suitably feminist for a later oppositional framework, these critics have missed the sequence’s relationship to its own generic history. In her discussion of this final poem Michailidou (2006: 48) notes, Throughout the sequence, [the poet] has been oscillating between submission and proud independence, vulnerability and power; refusing to deceive herself about the inadequacy of her partner, the speaker finally realizes that she is a survivor and that her strength derives from the ability to be true to oneself. This teleological reading of the poetic subject’s journey seems to me to strain the poetry. The oscillation Michailidou observes is fundamentally Petrarchan, and is a strategy to negotiate and explore desire crucial to the genre. The speaker’s conceptualisation of her partner’s inadequacy is a complex comment on the nature of desire itself, as I am in the process of suggesting, and this comment frames and initiates the sequence; it does not emerge in its course. This is not to suggest that the sequence is not feminist; as I have suggested above and will discuss below, Millay’s awareness of the limits of Petrarchan desire cannot but be read along with the poet’s gender and gender of her speaker. Millay also establishes a desiring female lover, frankly sexual and self-aware, and in this she is a revolutionary Petrarchan and feminist poet. Because this subjectivity is atypical, it also allows for an interrogation of the positions assumed by the predominantly male speakers of the form’s past, which until Millay is reworked by women poets through either the abrogation of physical desire (Wroth; Robinson; Rossetti) or its obfuscation (Newmarch) or the recuperation of the body’s sexuality into the realm of socially sanctioned and specifically Christian marriage (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).

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Notes 195

196 Notes

A very queer, composite being… Imaginatively she is of highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history… Some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband. It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards – a worm winged like an eagle… But these monsters, however amusing to the imagination, have no existence in fact.

Conclusion: Petrarchism Today 1 Hip hop’s potential to function as a language of protest, and its ongoing production of resistant youth subcultural identities is not in question, as Adam Haupt’s work on South African hip hop demonstrates in this regard. Rather, I am concerned to explore the genre of music which is dominating AngloAmerican charts, and from there, exerting an influence over pop charts across the globe. 2 This gendered performance of self can in part trace its roots back to ‘personality DJs’, ‘motormouths’ on ‘black radio’ in the 1950s, and the attendant street culture of verbal dueling, which took particularly misogynist forms (Morley 1992: xvi). 3 For all Eminem lyrics see www.eminemonline.com.

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10 As Millay’s contemporary Virginia Woolf (1993: 40) wryly notes, the figure of ‘woman’ as recorded in the poetic and historical texts of men, is:

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Index

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 9n3 A Study in Modern Ethics 137n4 Abelove, Henry ‘Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans’ (1986) 15 Abrams, M. H. & Greenblatt, S. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (2000) 156 Alexander the Great 49 Alighieri, Dante 22, 39, 123, 125, 126, 126n25, 127, 130 Beatrice 22, 126n25 Vita Nuova 22 Alkalay-Gut, Karen ‘Poetry by Women in America: Esthetics in Evolution’ (1983) 154, 155 Allen, Don Cameron Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions (1960) 72n30 Amoretti 69n29 anamorphosis 34 anatomical differences 7 Andreadis, Harriet Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics (2001) 106 antagonism 37 anti-social (evil) behaviour 37 Apollo and Daphne 47 Appignanesi, Lisa & Forrester, John Freud’s Women (1993) 31 Ariosto 21 Aristotle 6 Armstrong, Philip Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (2000) 21n2 Askew, Anne 23 Astrophil and Stella 46n4, 54n16, 62, 63, 77n36, 132n26 Fifth Song 54n16

sonnet 21 83n4 sonnet 28 49 sonnet 35 49 Aughterson, Kate The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources (1998) 7, 25 Augustine (Saint) 38, 39, 41 theory of good and evil 38 Augustinian schema 39

6,

Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 19, 99, 113, 115, 116, 117n19, 121n20, 125, 134, 153, 157, 165n9, 171 additional sonnet 117n19 Sonnets from the Portuguese 19, 115 ff, 117n19 use of Renaissance tropes in sonnet 37 116n18 Bates, Catherine The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (1992) 42, 48, 51 Beecher, Donald ‘Concerning Sex Changes: The Cultural Significance of a Renaissance Medical Polemic’ 6, 7n1, 8 Beilin, Elaine V. Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (1987) 6, 80n1 Bell, Ilona Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (1998) 28, 29n9, 45, 45n2, 55, 60n22 ‘Women in the Lyric Dialogue of Courtship’ (1997) 28, 55 211

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Note: Some titles have been abbreviated in the interests of economy. See pages 197–210 for comprehensive details of cited publications and articles.

Belsey, Catherine Culture and the Real (2005) 10 Benjamin, Jessica 32, 38, 45, 78 The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (1988) 30, 32, 96, 97, 97n10, 173, 181 Berry, Philippa Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (1989) 22, 60n22 bodily sex 6 Boos, Florence S. ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poetic Daughters (2004) 136 Boose, Lynda E. ‘Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member’ (1991) 24, 84 Booth, Stephen Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2000) 47n6 Bowie, Malcolm Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (1987) 21, 157, 158 Braden, Gordon ‘Beyond Frustration: Petrarchan Laurels in the Seventeenth Century’ (1986b) 176 ‘Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism’ (1996) 49 ‘Love and Fame: The Petrarchan Career’ (1986a) 22, 39n15, 47, 48 Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999) 52 ‘Unspeakable Love: Petrarch to Herbert’ (1990) 90 Brathwaite, Richard The English Gentlewoman (1631) 26 Britten, Norman A. Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967) 154n2, 163n6 Brooks, Peter ‘The body in the field of vision’ (1991) 71, 72

Brooks, Peter & Woloch, Alex Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (2000) 32 Brontë, Emily 135 Browning, Robert ‘Love among the Ruins’ 142, 142n10 Burke, Peter ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’ (1997) 46 Butler, Judith 13, 41, 47, 78 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993) 29 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1999) 3, 10, 11, 29 The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (1997) 28n7 ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault’ (1987) 12n4, 17, 18 Butler Holm, Janice ‘Vives’s Preface to The Instruction of a Christen Woman’ (1991) 25 Caldwell, Ellen C. ‘Recent Studies in Sir Thomas Wyatt’ (1989) 52n13 Callaghan, Dympna ‘Introduction’. The Duchess of Malfi (2000) 23 Cary, Elizabeth 24 The Tragedy of Mariam (1994 [1613]) 24 Herod 24 Mariam 24 Castiglione 62, 67 Bembo, Pietro 50, 50n9 The Book of the Courtier (1561, trans. 1976) 48, 48n7, 49, 50 Phoenix 49 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 79n40 Chaucer, Geoffrey 51, 52 Troylus and Criseyde 51–2

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212 Index

Chauncey, George Jr. ‘From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality’ (1982–1983) 9 Cixous, Hélène 16, 87 ‘Sorties’ (1981 [1975]) 17n7 Clarke, Danielle ‘“Lover’s Songs Shall Turne to Holy Psalmes”’ (1997) 61, 96 Translation, Interpretation and Gender: Women’s Writing (n.d.) 23 Cobbold, Elizabeth ‘Sonnets of Laura’ (1825) 113, 115 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 100n8 Collecott, Diana ‘What Is Not Said: A Study in Textual Inversion’ (1992) 141 Constable, Henry Diana sonnet I 54n16 courtier 22, 23, 26, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 82 courtiership 51, 60, 62 courtship 51, 55, 60 Crewe, Jonathon Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction (1990) 28n8, 57, 58 Crooke, Helkiah Mikrokosmographia (1615) 6, 7 Curran, Stuart Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986) 98, 98nn2 & 4, 100, 100n8, 106n15 da Lentino, Giacomo 22 da Vinci, Leonardo 21 Daalder, Joost Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (1975) 52n13 Daley, Naomi McLean ‘It Takes More’ (2000) 179 Dante see Alighieri, Dante das Ding (‘the Thing’) 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40 David, Deirdre Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (1987) 117

de Beauvoir, Simone 12, 12n4 The Second Sex 9 de Grazia, Margreta, Quilligan, Maureen & Stallybrass, Peter ‘Introduction’ (1996) 43 de Lauretis, Teresa 78 The Technology of Gender (1987) 2, 12, 47 de Pizan, Christine The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) 27 deer 57, 58, 59, 70, 71, 72, 72n30, 73 Delphy, Christine ‘The Invention of French Feminism: An Essential Move’ (1995) 16n6 ‘Rethinking Sex and Gender’ (1993) 9, 10 desiring subject gendered male 1 Desportes 44 Diana (Selene) 163n6, 164, 165, 165n9 Distiller, Natasha ‘A Gendered Petrarchanism: Gazing with Will, and Pamphilia’s averted I’ (2001b) 81 ‘“Philip’s Phoenix?”: Mary Sidney Herbert and the Identity of Author’ (2001a) 23 Dollimore, Jonathon 13 ‘Desire is Death’ (1996) 30, 30n11 Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (1991) 13, 15, 15n5, 30n10, 38, 43, 135 transgressive re-inscription 13–14 dominant Symbolic 1 heteronormative nature 1 patriarchal nature 1 domination 97n10 Donne, John 19, 163 ‘Elegy 16. On His Mistress’ 156 Drayton, Michael 48, 50 DuBellay 44 Dubrow, Heather Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (1995) 16, 28, 28n7, 81, 82n3, 142, 177

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Index 213

Duncan-Jones, Katherine Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works (1989) 49, 62 Durham, Aisha ‘Rep’n the Real: Reading the African through a Double Door’ (n.d.) 177 Early Modern England Petrarchism in 43 ff Eisaman Maus, Katharine Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (1995) 46 Elizabeth I 23, 41, 51 iconographies 52 Elizabethan sex/gender system 9n3 Ellis, Havelock 140, 141 Man and Woman (1934) 139 Psychology of Sex (1948) 138 Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1930) 137, 138, 138nn5, 6&7 Eminem 178n3 Endymion 165n9 English nationalism 4 English Petrarchists 39 Erickson, Peter Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (1991) 60 ‘Ester Sowerman’ 27 Estrin, Barbara ‘Becoming the Other/the Other Becoming in Wyatt’s Poetry (1984) 28n7, 59 Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (1994) 28n7 Evans, Michael Elizabethan Sonnets (2003) 48, 69n29 Ezell, Margaret J. M. Writing Women’s Literary History (1993) 23, 46 Father all powerful 37 Febvre, Lucien & Martin, Henri-Jean The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing (1979) 23

Feinberg, Nona ‘Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity’ (1991) 80, 80n1, 88n7 ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self’ (2002) 80n1 Feldman, Paula R. & Robinson, Daniel A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival (1999) 19, 101, 106, 113, 117n19 female modesty 27 victim 1 Ferguson, Margaret ‘Renaissance Concepts of the “Woman Writer”’ (1996) 23 Ferry, Anne The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (1983) 44, 44n1, 46, 53n15 Ficke, Arthur Davidson ‘Interview De Luxe with Edna St. Vincent Millay’ (1993) 159 Fineman, Joel 75, 82, 96 ‘Shakespeare’s Ear’ (1989) 74n35 Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (1986) 18, 30n11, 35, 74, 75, 76, 77 ‘The Sound of O in Othello: The Real of the Tragedy of Desire’ (1994) 33 Finucci, Valeria The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation (1992) 49, 50 Finucci, Valeria & Schwartz, Regina ‘Worlds Within and Without’ (1994) 21 Fletcher, Giles To Licia (1593) 48, 50 Fontanus, Nicholas The Complete Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (1656) 7 The Woman’s Doctor (1652) 7 Forster, Leonard The Icy Fire: Five Studies on European Petrarchism (1969) 22, 45, 60, 60nn19 & 21

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214 Index

Foucault, Michel History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction (1980) 28n7 ‘What is an Author?’ (1977) 2 Freccero, Carla ‘Ovidian Subjectivities in Early Modern Lyric’ (2001) 14 Freccero, John ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’ (1975) 28n8, 38, 39n15, 44 Frederick II 22 Freud, Sigmund 15, 15n5, 21, 22n3, 30, 31, 32, 33, 40 Civilization and its Discontents (1946a) 21, 21n1, 35 concept of sublimation 35n13 incest taboo 35n13 libido as masculine 39 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1973) 21n2 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1946b) 9, 31 penis 15 phallocentric assumptions 17 ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ (1991) 9, 31 ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’ (1955) 9, 32, 33 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (1953) 9, 31 theory of perversion 38, 39 Freudian development of psychoanalysis 41 elements 38 model 78 narcissistic construction 14 narrative 173 terms 15 Fried, Debra ‘Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay’s Sonnets’ (1986) 153n1, 160, 162, 163n5 fundamental essentialism 12

Galen 6 model of human anatomy 6 On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 6 theory of body heat and sexual sameness 6, 7, 8n2 homology 7 Garber, Marjorie Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1995) 135, 135n1 Gatens, Moira Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (1996 [1983]) 10, 12 gender constructed nature of 5, 11, 12 discursive nature of 11 equality 17 female 5 constructed nature of 5 function of heterosexuality 11 identity 10 ideology 9 male 5 perpetuation of 4 roles 6, 9, 10 and sex history of 6 relationship between 5 gendered behaviour 8, 32, 107 body 14 desire 3, 39, 114, 171 difference 13, 78n39, 139 socially constructed 6 discourse 18, 42, 60, 79, 171 domination 30, 96 female 6, 11, 23, 94, 95, 96, 169, 171 formations 103 framework 139 identity 3, 5, 142, 146 language 1 limitations 80 literary production 23 male 28, 29, 32, 39, 43, 45, 46, 77, 95

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gendered – continued meaning 4, 16 nature of authority 23 subjectivity 15 Petrarchism 42, 78, 80–1 poetic rules 5 (see also under ‘rules’, below) position(s) 4, 15, 16, 18, 27, 28, 28n7, 62, 94, 142, 146, 152, 171 power 2, 87, 165 public realm 112 in relation to norms 13 relations 43 response 4 right to speak in public 24, 51, 174 rules 5, 19, 41, 84, 103, 113, 114, 154, 171 self 18 sexual difference 13 sexuality 155 situation 28 speaking subject 1, 16, 36, 42, 136, 169 strategies 30 subject 18, 19, 28, 29–30, 42, 46, 81, 173, 180 of psychoanalysis 21 subjectivity 1, 11, 22, 39, 95, 174 system 16 voice 82 gendering implicit 1 importance 1 genitals 14 men’s 6 women’s 6 Glassgold, J. M. & Iasenza, S. Lesbians and Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Theory and Practice (1995) 15 Goethe 21n1 Going, William T. Scanty Plot of Ground: Studies in the Victorian Sonnet Sequence (1976) 98

Goldberg, Jonathan Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1992) 3, 52n14 Gould, Jean ‘Edna St. Vincent Millay – Saint of the Modern Sonnet’ (1988) 153n1, 163 Grady, Hugh Shakespeare, Machievelli, & Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (2002) 174, 181 Gray, James Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967) 153n1, 163, 163n7 Greenblatt, Stephen Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1984) 30n11, 35n12, 51n11, 52, 59 Greene, Roland Post Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (1991) 28, 44, 45 Griffith, Benjamin ‘Edna St Vincent Millay: A Literary Phenomenon’ (2003) 153, 153n1, 155 Grosz, Elizabeth Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (1990) 78 ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire’ (1998) 15 Hall, Kim Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (1995) 96n9 Hall, Stuart Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 79n40 Halley, Janet E. ‘Textual Intercourse: Anne Donne, John Donne, and the Sexual Politics of Textual Exchange’ (1989) 57 Halpern, Richard Shakespeare’s Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in The Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan (2002) 151

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216 Index

Hamlet 21, 21n2, 46 Hannay, Margaret Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1990) 6, 23 Harris, William O. ‘Early Elizabethan Sonnets in Sequence’ (1971) 62n25 Haupt, Adam ‘Hip-Hop, Gender and Agency in the Age of Empire’ (2003) 176, 176n1 Hayter, Alethea Mrs Browning: A Poet’s Work and its Setting (1962) 115, 116 Heale, Elizabeth Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (1998) 49, 52n13, 55, 56, 62n24 Hegel 30 Heine 21n1 Henderson, Diana E. Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance (1995) 28, 49, 60n19, 62n23 Henry VIII 22, 24, 51 ff Herbert, Mary Sidney 23 Hermes/Mercury 163, 163n7 heterosexual 18, 42, 58, 105 desire 64, 76 economy 97 framework 139 informed concepts 138 love affair 153 lust 73, 76 male subject 96 matrix 3, 10, 12 relation(s) 14, 34, 36, 39, 40 reliance 69 value system 14 Wyatt 52n14 heterosexualisation 162 heterosexualised sexual difference 19 heterosexuality 13, 14, 36, 37, 62, 69, 135, 138, 140, 151, 156 function of 11 normalisation 15 hierarchy of relations 6

Hiller, Geoffrey G. Poems of the Elizabethan Age: An Anthology (1990) 53, 56 Hippocrates 6 Holahan, Michael ‘Wyatt, the Heart’s Forest, and the Ancient Savings’ (1993) 51n11 Holbein, Thomas 34 Holmes, John 143n11 Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Late Victorian Sonnet Sequence (2005) 98n3, 136, 141n9, 142, 142n10, 143, 151 ‘Indeterminacy and Identity: The Lesbian Poetics of Rosa Newmarch’ 141, 142 ‘The Victorian Genetics of Astrophel and Stella’ (1999) 44, 106n15 Homer, Sean Jacques Lacan (2005) 9, 36 homosexual 15, 105, 174 affairs 167 definition 135 identity 135, 137 other 13, 171 sexual activity 136 homosexuality 14, 135, 136 ff female 32, 33 Honigmann, E. A. J. Milton’s Sonnets (1966) 98n1 Houston, Natalie M. ‘Towards a New History: Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet’ (2003) 98, 98n5 Howard, Henry (Earl of Surrey) 52, 60, 61, 62 Hulse, Clark ‘Stella’s Wit: Penelope Rich as Reader of Sidney’s Sonnets’ (1986) 29, 62n23, 77n36, 83 human subjectivity 39 Huntington, John Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England (2001) 49, 69

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Index 217

Hutson, Lorna ‘On Not Being Deceived: Rhetoric and the Body in Twelfth Night’ (1999) 7n1, 8n2 Hyrde, Richard 25 Irigaray, Luce 3, 4, 16, 17, 38, 78, 81, 141 notion of female subject’s speech 159 ‘The Question of the Other’ (1995) 17, 18 ‘Sexual Difference’. French Feminist Thought: A Reader (1987) 31 ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ (1981) 17 This Sex Which is Not One (1985) 17, 41 women’s non-representation as subjects 3–4 Irigarayan celebration of female difference 97 female doubleness 75 not one 88 recognition of multiplicity of desire 97 subject 28n7 Italian rhyme scheme 98nn1 & 4 ‘Jane Anger’ 27 Jardine, Lisa ‘Cultural Confusion and Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines’ (1987) 6 Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983) 23 ‘Women Humanists: Education for What?’ (1999) 6 Jones, Ann Rosalind The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe (1990) 6, 26, 78, 79, 79n40, 80n1, 81n2, 88n7 ‘Surprising Fame: Renaissance Gender Ideologies and Women’s Lyric’ (1986) 24, 25, 27

Jones, Ann Rosalind & Stallybrass, Peter ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’ (1984) 22, 51n10, 143 Jones, Phyllis M. ‘Amatory Sonnet Sequences and the Female Perspective’ (1983) 19, 153n1, 155, 163n6, 165n9, 170, 171 Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green ‘Displaced Modernism: Millay and the Triumph of Sentimentality’ (1995) 153n1 Kelly-Gadol, Joan ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ (1987) 6, 49 Kennedy, William J. Authorizing Petrarch (1994) 22, 180, 181 The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment (2003) 22, 47, 82 King Lear 21 Klein, Lisa M. The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (1998) 60, 60n21, 63 ‘The Petrarchanism of Sir Thomas Wyatt Reconsidered’ (1992) 52n13, 54, 56, 62 Klemans, Patricia A. ‘“Being Born a Woman”: A New Look at Edna St. Vincent Millay’ (1993) 153n1, 165n9 Knox, John The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558) 27n6 Kristeva, Julia 16 Krontiris, Tina Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators (1992) 6, 80n1, 84n5 Kuin, Roger ‘More I Still Undoe: Louise Labé, Mary Wroth, and the

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218 Index

Petrarchan Discourse’ (1999) 45n3, 77n37, 78 ‘Sir Philip Sidney: The Courtier and the Text’ (1989) 46 Labé, Louise 77n38 Lacan, Jacques 9, 15, 18, 21, 21n2, 30, 33, 34, 35, 35nn12 & 13, 36, 40, 71, 74, 74n35, 172 desire 39 Ecrits: a selection (‘The Subversion of the Subject’) (1989) 157, 157n4, 158, 159 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1992) 36, 37, 37n14, 39, 40 heterosexual relation of power 40 human subjectivity 39 ‘Introduction to the Thing’ 39 men’s psychic horizon 40 ‘On the moral law’ 39 phallus 15 poetic subject 33, 38 power of the Other 40 subjectivity of the human (male) 40 Lacanian 38 formulation 157n3 framework 2 model 78 narrative 173 phallus 79 postfeminist 4 framework 4 proto-, formulation 39 psychoanalytical subjectivity 76 reading 18 schema 39 sense of nature of desire 157 sensibility 159 structure 74, 75 subject 1, 38, 74, 74n35, 91 subjectivity 159, 169 Symbolic 96 terms 3, 11, 40, 94, 163 Lamb, Mary Ellen Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1991) 80n1 Lanyer, Amelia 23

Laqueur, Thomas Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1992) 6–7, 8, 10 Lee, Sidney Elizabethan Sonnets (1904) 48, 50, 54n16 Leighton, Angela ‘Stirring a Dust of Figures: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Love’ (1988) 115n17, 116n18, 121n20 Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992) 115 Levi-Strauss 9 Levine, Laura Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization (1994) 7 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993) 6, 80n1 Light, Alan ‘About a Salary or Reality?: Rap’s Recurrent Conflict’ (2004) 175, 180 Lodge, Thomas 50 Low, Anthony The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton (1993) 46, 51, 63, 82–3 Lusane, Clarence ‘Rap, Race, and Politics’ (2004) 175 male oppressor 1 Manichaean structure 39 Marotti, Arthur John Donne: Coterie Poet (1986) 29n9 ‘“Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’ (1982) 22, 29n9, 51n10, 60n21, 62, 176 Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995) 23, 51 ‘The Transmission of Lyric Poetry’ (1991) 23

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Marsh, Jan Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (1994) 123n21 Martinez, Michele ‘Christina Rossetti’s Petrarca’ (2003) 124 Marx, Karl 30 Masten, Jeffrey ‘“Shall I turne blabb?”: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’ (1991) 80n1, 81, 90, 95 Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (1997) 3 May, Steven The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (1991) 60, 60n19, 63 Mayberry, Katherine J. Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery (1989) 123, 125n23 Mazzotta, Guiseppe The Worlds Of Petrarch (1993) 44 McGann, Jerome ‘Mary Robinson and the Myth of Sappho’ (1995) 104n10, 106n14, 107 McGrath, Lynette Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England (2002) 46 Mead, Margaret 9 Merchant of Venice 21 mercurial nature of identity 3 Mercury/Hermes 163, 163n7 Meredith, George Modern Love 142n10 Mermin, Dorothy ‘The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader’ (1981) 116, 117, 121n20 Michailidou, Artemis ‘Love Poetry, Women’s Bonding and Feminist Consciousness’ (2006) 165n9, 167 Michelangelo 21 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 9n3

Milford, Nancy Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2002) 153, 154n2 Millay, Edna St Vincent 19, 20, 81, 152, 153 ff, 153n1, 154n2, 157n3, 163n7, 165n9, 171 Collected Sonnets of Edna St.Vincent Millay (1988) 161, 172 emblematic quality 154n2 Fatal Interview (1931) 20, 153, 154, 155, 163, 171 homosexual affairs 167 inversion of traditional form 162 invocation of ideal women 168 reception history 153, 153n1 Renascence and other poems (1991 [1917]) 160 Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree (1942) 153, 154 Millay’s poetics 155, 157, 160, 163, 169, 178 Miller, Naomi Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender (1996) 28n7, 30n10, 80, 80n1, 81, 84n5, 96 Milton, John 19, 98nn1 & 2, 98n6 Moi, Toril 10–11, 12n4 post-structuralist position 11 Sex, Gender, and the Body: What is a Woman? (2005) 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 Sexual/Textual Politics (2003) 10, 11 Monna Innominata 19, 123, 124, 124n22, 125, 136, 141n9 Montaigne 7n1 Montefiore, Jan Feminism and Poetry (1994) 32 Montrose, Louis Adrian ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’ (1986) 60n22 ‘“Shaping Fantasies”: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture’ 9n3

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220 Index

Moore, Mary B. Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (2000) 2, 28, 81, 84n5, 162, 163, 164n8, 165n9 Morley, Jefferson ‘Rap Music as American History’ (1992) 177n2, 180 Morlier, Margaret M. ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese and the Politics of Rhyme’ (1999) 115, 116n18 Much Ado about Nothing Hero 24 Muir, Kenneth Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1963) 52n13 Musa, Mark 126n25 Musical Times, The 136n2 neo-Platonism 22 Newcomb, John Timberman ‘The Woman as Political Poet’ (1995) 153 Newmarch, Rosa 19, 99, 134, 135 ff, 136n2, 143n11, 156, 157, 165n9, 171 Horae Amoris (1903) 19, 142 ff queer poetics 19 Nichols, J. G. 126n25 octave-sestet (Petrarchan) rhyme pattern 98n4 Oedipal phase 15n5 Oedipus 31 Orgel, Stephen ‘Gendering the Crown’ (1996b) 60n20 Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1996a) 7, 8, 9n3 overheating of body systems 6, 7 Ovid 26 Metamorphoses 22, 26, 47 ‘Sappho to Phaon’ 104, 104n10, 105, 106, 108, 111, 113 translation by Pope 104n11 Ovidian transformation 65

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 19, 80, 84, 84n5, 91, 95 Paul (Saint) ban on women speaking in church 27, 27n6 Paulissen, May Nelson The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth: A Critical Introduction (1982) 80n1 Paynell, Thomas 25 penis 14, 15, 31, 71 Peppe, Holly 155 ‘Rewriting the Myth of the Woman in Love’ (1995) 155, 163n6, 165n9, 167 Petrarch, Francesco 14, 16, 22, 22n4, 28, 28n7, 39, 39n15, 41, 44, 44n1, 59n18, 98n6, 126n25 Canzoniere (1470) 22, 47 debt to Dante 22n4 flawed human nature 39 idolatrous love 39 Laura 14, 28n7, 29, 47n5, 48, 66, 68, 77, 87, 113, 114, 115, 124, 125, 132 love poems 22 lyrics 22 octave-sestet rhyme pattern 98n4 phoenix 49n8 poetic strategy 49n8 Rime Sparse (1470) 22, 51 shifting subject positions 28n7 speaking subject 28, 42, 43 thinking 38 vacillation 28n7 writing 39 Wyatt’s alterations to translations 53n15, 59n18 Petrarchan desire 15, 20, 42, 47 discourse 41, 60n21 gendered subject 42, 46 language 53 love poetry 29, 51n10 lover 27, 33 lyricism 36 mistresses 29 poet 45, 47, 48

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Petrarchan – continued poetry 4, 21, 36, 47, 49, 51 technology of class 47 technology of gender 47 technology of nationalism 47 positions 1, 2, 22 schema 39 sonnet 3, 4, 17, 27, 28, 42, 44, 53 speaker 30, 36, 46 subject 22–30, 31, 40, 42, 45, 46, 135 ff, 153 ff Symbolic economy 97 tradition 26 Petrarchans English 54n16 Petrarchism 1, 2, 5, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21 ff, 43 ff, 45, 45nn2 & 3, 77n37, 80 ff, 173 ff conventions 16 in Early Modern England 29, 43 ff gendered positions 18 (see also gendered: positions) gendered strategies 30 gendered subject 19, 36, 42 generic constraints 5 literary history 42 of Mary Wroth 80 ff Neoplatonic elements 50n9 positions 1 and psychoanalysis 21 ff Renaissance psychoanalysis 45n2 subject 1 subjectivity 20 Symbolic, the 19, 20, 43 today 173 ff use of gender 2 phallic presence 94 realm 36, 96 structure 97n10 Symbolic economy 97 phallocentric assumptions 17 economy of meaning 171 language 81 subjectivity 83 Symbolic 159

phallus 15, 89, 97, 159, 173 Phelan, Joseph The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (2005) 98, 98nn2 & 5 phoenix 49, 49n8 Plato Symposium 30 Pléiade 44 Pope, Alexander translation of Ovid’s ‘Sappho to Phaon’ 104, 104nn11 & 12 (see also Ovid: ‘Sappho to Phaon’) post-Lacanian framework 4 post-structuralism 45 post-structuralist position 11 Powell, Neil Fulke Greville: Selected Poems (1990) 63, 64, 64n28 Powell, Thomas The Art of Thriving, or the plaine path-way to preferement (1635) 26 Prescott, Anne Lake 71 ‘The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life’ (1985) 71 psychoanalysis 5, 9, 21 ff, 30, 41 relationship between Petrarchism and 5, 21 ff psychoanalytic view of subjectivity 42 psychoanalytic subject 30 ff Queen Mary 25 queer theory 13, 14 Quilligan, Maureen ‘Staging Gender: Shakespeare and Cary’ (1995) 8n2 Rebholz, R. A. Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (1988) 52n13 Renaissance 46 courtly behaviour 48 deceitful women 67 English 32 gender ideology 80 Italian, tradition 123 literature 5, 21, 36 love poetry 71, 90

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222 Index

medicine 6 monarchs 49 Petrarchan tradition 143 poetry 71 sampling 179 self-fashioning 52 sonnet 107, 159 subject 36 women writers 78 Reynolds, Margaret The Sappho Companion (2000) 104 rhetoric for men 25 Rich, Adrienne ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience’ (1987) 167 Rich, Penelope 83 Rigolot, François ‘Gender vs. Sex Difference in Louise Labé’s Grammar of Love’ (1986) 28n8, 77n38 Riviere, Joan 62 ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ (2000 [1929]) 9 Robb, Graham Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (2003) 137n3 Roberts, Josephine A. ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Sonnets: A Labyrinth of the Mind’ (1979) 80n1 The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (1983) 82n3, 84n5, 85 Robinson, Daniel ‘Reviving the Sonnet: Women Romantic Poets and the Sonnet Claim’ (1995) 98n6, 100, 100n8, 107 Robinson, Mary 100n8, 106n14, 134, 157, 165n9, 171 Preface 100, 101n9 Sappho and Phaon: In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796) 19, 98, 99, 100, 101–4, 104n11, 105–8, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119 Roche, Thomas P. Jr. Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (1989) 22, 45

Ronsard 44 Rose, Jacqueline ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’ (2000) 71 Rossetti, Christina 99, 113, 120, 124, 125, 134, 144, 153, 157, 165n9, 171 ‘Francesco Petrarca’ (1863) 124 Monna Innominata (1881) 19, 123, 124, 124n22, 125, 136, 141n9 The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1914) 123, 124, 124nn22 & 23, 126n24 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 44, 98, 98n6, 136 ‘Bridal Birth’ 142n10 House of Life (1870/1881) 44, 98n3 Rossetti, William Michael 123 Rousseau 21n1 Rubin, Gayle ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes of the “Political Economy” of Sex’ (1975) 9 Sackville-West, Vita 135 Saguaro, Shelley ‘Psychoanalysis and Woman’ (2000) 41, 62, 71 Salter, Thomas 26 A Mirhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones and Maidens (1579) 26 San Juan, Rose Marie ‘The Queen’s Body and Its Slipping Mask’ (1993) 41 Sappho poetry 45n3 tribadism 106n13 Saunders, J. W. ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’ (1951) 23 Schalkwyk, David Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (2002) 28, 29n9, 46n4, 51, 55, 74, 77, 97n10, 143

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Index 223

Schiesari, Juliana ‘Petrarch’s “Ladies” and Sappho’s “Sirens”: Fetishism and Mourning’ (2001) 78n39 Scott, Hardimann Sir Thomas Wyatt: Selected Poems (2003) 53, 54, 55 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) 30n10, 57 Epistemology of the Closet (1994) 10, 13, 135, 136 Selene (Diana) 163n6, 164, 165, 165n9 Seward, Anna 98n5 sex 1 ff and gender, relationship between 5, 11 ‘one sex’ model 6, 8 sexual acts 6 difference 1 ff hierarchy 8 identities 6 Shakespeare, William 18, 19, 21n1, 33, 46, 47, 55, 74, 98n6, 99, 100, 122 dark lady 77 ideal beloved 77 Petrarchism 74 poet 73, 74, 75, 77, 90, 96, 156 poetic subject 33, 74n35, 76 sonnets 18, 30n11, 46, 46n4, 47n6, 51, 55, 73 ff, 143, 149, 160 Shepherd, Simon ‘Shakespeare’s Private Drawer: Shakespeare and Homosexuality’ (1988) 46 Sidney, Mary 23 Sidney, Philip 46, 46n4 The Defence of Poesy 49 sonnets 46 Sinfield, Alan ‘Sidney and Astrophil’ (1980) 46n4, 62, 132n26 Smith, Bruce R. ‘L[o]cating the sexual subject’ (1996) 30n10, 74n34

Smith, Charlotte 98n5, 100n8 Smith, Rosalind ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ (2000) 81, 82, 85n6, 86, 88n8 Smith, Will ‘Lost and Found’ (2005) 179 Smulders, Sharon ‘Sincere Doubt, Doubtful Sincerity, and Sonnets from the Portuguese 37’ (1995) 116n18 sonnet sequence 2, 20, 27, 39, 44, 62, 82, 91, 97, 98, 134, 136, 153, 154, 171 Sonnets from the Portuguese 117n19, 141n9 speaking subject 4, 28, 29, 36, 38, 42, 43, 47, 62, 96, 118, 172, 173, 174, 176 Spearing, A. C. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (1985) 52, 52n13, 53, 54, 56, 59n18, 60n19 Spenser, Edmund 47n6 Spiller, Michael The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (1992) 22n3, 52n13, 178 split between public and private 97n11 Sproxton, Judy The Idiom of Love: Love Poetry from the Early Sonnets (2000) 22n3 Stampa, Gaspara 81n2 Stanbrough, Jane ‘Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability’ (1979) 155 Stephenson, Glennis Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love (1989) 115n16 Stevenson The Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism 139n8 Stoller, Robert Sex and Gender: The Development of Masculinity and Femininity (1984 [1968]) 9

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224 Index

Stone, Marjorie Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995) 115 Study in Modern Ethics, A 137n4 Sturm-Maddox, Sarah Petrarch’s Laurels (1992) 47n5 ‘Transformations of Courtly Love Poetry: Vita Nuova and Canzoniere’ (1981) 22n4 sublimation 34 Symbolic, the 1, 4, 34, 36, 39, 40, 43, 74, 76, 83, 91, 95, 107, 151, 155, 159 achievement 75 dominant 1 economy 88, 95 Petrarchan 97 phallic 97 heteronormative nature 1 heterosexist 151 Lacanian 96 language 33 non-existence of women 36 order 4, 76, 96 patriarchal nature 1 Petrarchan 19, 20, 81, 91, 94, 98, 99, 100, 113, 117, 119, 130, 134, 142, 144, 151, 152, 155, 157, 158, 171 female subjects in the 40 phallic realm 36 phallocentric 159 language 81 progression from the Imaginary to 75 realm 17, 83, 158 of the Unconscious 158 register 91 social 117, 141, 154 structural relation between self and situation 4 Symonds, John Addington 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141 Problem in Modern Ethics (1928) 137n4 Studies in Sexual Inversion (1928) 147

Taggard, Genevieve ‘Edna St. Vincent Millay’ (1993) 153 Tasso 21 Tate, Allen ‘Fatal Interview: Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay’ (1993) 154n2 testicles 7 female 7 The Musical Times 136n2 Thesing, W. B. Critical Essays on Edna St. Vincent Millay (1993) 154, 154n2, 159 ‘the Thing’ (das Ding) 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40 Thomson, Patricia Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background (1964) 52, 52nn12 &13, 59, 59n18 Tottel, Richard Tottel’s Miscellany 62, 62n24, 64 transgressive re-inscription 13–14 Trapnel, Anna 23 Trill, Suzanne et al Lay by Your Needles, Ladies, Take the Pen: Writing Women in England (1997) 24, 25, 26, 27, 27n6 troubadour poetry 22 Tudor period 80 court of Henry VIII 22 courts 42, 43, 47, 83 England 46, 49 poetry 42, 43 tendency to create new gentry 63 Twain, Mark 21n1 Twelfth Night 8n2 vagina 14 Vickers, Nancy ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’ (1981) 2, 29, 73, 87, 177 ‘Vital Signs: Petrarch and Popular Culture’ (1988) 173 Viswanathan, Gauri Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989) 98

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Index 225

Vives, Juan Luis 24, 26, 27, 27n6 De Tradendis Disciplinis (1516) 25 The Instruction of a Christen Woman (1529) 25 The Office and Duty of an Husband (1553) 25 Voltaire 21n1 Wagner, Jennifer Ann A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics (1996) 98n2 Walker, Cheryl Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (1991) 155, 157n3, 163 Wall, Wendy The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (1993) 23, 80n1, 84 Waller, Gary English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century (1986) 47 Waller, Marguerite ‘Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference it Makes’ (1987) 58, 59, 59n17 Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (1980) 22n4 Warley, Christopher. Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (2005) 44, 47, 49, 51n10, 82, 83 Warner, J. Christopher ‘The Frying Pan and the Phoenix: Petrarch’s Poetics Revisited’ (1996) 49n8 Watts, Eric ‘An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity’ (2004) 175, 176 Wharton, H. T. Sappho (1895) 104

Whigham, Frank Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (1984) 48n7, 49 White, Chris Nineteenth-Century Writings on Homosexuality (1999) 136, 139, 140, 141 Whitla, William ‘Questioning the Convention: Christina Rossetti’s Sonnet Sequence “Monna Innominata”’ (1987) 123n21, 125, 125n24 Wilde, Oscar 135, 137 Winterson, Jeannette Written on the Body (1993) 151 Wiseman, Sue ‘Unsilent Instruments and the Devil’s Cushions’ (1992) 23, 24 Wittgenstein 12 Wittig, Monique 16 women’s genitals Galen’s view 6 Woolf, Virginia 135 A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (1993) 100n7, 142, 168n10 Wordsworth 98, 98n2, 100n8 Wroth, Mary 19, 20, 27, 33, 54, 77, 77n38, 78, 79, 80 ff, 81n2, 165n9 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) 19, 80, 84, 84n5, 91, 95 poetry 18 Wyatt, Thomas 39, 52 ff and Ann Boleyn 56 Caelica 64n28, 67 deer 70, 71 ‘If waker care’ 54 imprisonment in the Tower 53 lyrics 54 mistress 52, 53, 54, 66, 67 poet 57 poetry 51, 52, 52nn14 & 15, 53, 54, 58 ‘Whoso list to hunt’ 56, 59 Yorke, Liz ‘Constructing a Lesbian Poetic for Survival’ (1992) 141

10.1057/9780230583832 - Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition, Natasha Distiller

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226 Index