Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Marea Mitchell and Dianne Osland

Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

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Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Marea Mitchell and Dianne Osland

© Marea Mitchell and Dianne Osland 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4331–6 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4331–1 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mitchell, Marea, 1959– Representing women and female desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre / Marea Mitchell and Dianne Osland p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4331–1 1. English literature–History and criticism. 2. Women in literature. 3. Austen, Jane, 1775–1817–Characters–Women. 4. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586. Arcadia. 5. Women and literature–Great Britain. 6. Desire in literature. I. Osland, Dianne, 1950– II. Title. PR151.W6M57 2005 820.9′ 3522–dc22

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

for our mothers Marjorie and Lorna

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

25

2

‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating Desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania

52

3

Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How to Avoid Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’

75

4

‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’: Governing the Self in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (1656), The History of the Nun (1689), Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in Excess (1720)

96

5

Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s Pamela

117

6

Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to Earth in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote

141

7

‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

158

8

Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All the Way with Jane Eyre?

175

Notes

194

Bibliography

232

Index

243

vii

Acknowledgements We are pleased to acknowledge the assistance of all the people and institutions who have helped us with this book. First, we thank Macquarie University and The University of Newcastle for research grants and study leave that have enabled extensive periods of study. In particular we thank the Department of English and the Literature and Cultural History Group at Macquarie, and the Department of English and the School of Language and Media at Newcastle. Students and staff at various seminars in Newcastle, Sydney, Kalamazoo, Leeds, and Macquarie have provided helpful stimulation and provoked further thought in a number of areas. Libraries in London, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle, and Oxford have provided various kinds of support, as have document supply centres, particularly at Newcastle and Macquarie universities. Brigid Rooney provided much needed research assistance at the beginning of this project. In particular we thank colleagues and friends who have helped and encouraged us, including Virginia Blain, A. D. Cousins, Hugh Craig, Peter Goodall, Wayne McKenna, Ros Smith, and John Stephens. We are also especially indebted to the readers at Palgrave Macmillan who persisted in pushing us to work through our ideas more rigorously – this book is better for their persistence and we thank them for it. Thanks to Emily Rosser for starting off with this book and to Paula Kennedy for seeing it through. Beyond all other help we acknowledge the love and support of our families, for their patience, their interest, for being there, and sometimes for not being there, for giving us the space to get together and get on with it. Thanks and love to the Mitchell tribe and to Robert Mackie, and to Grant, Luke and Anna Osland.

viii

Introduction

Representing women and female desire A miller had wooed abundance of girls, and did lie with them, upon which he refused to marry them. But one girl he did solicit very much, but all would not do. Then he married her, and told her on the marriage-night, if she would have let him do as the rest did he would never have had her. ‘By my troth, I thought so’, says she, ‘for I was served so by half a dozen before.’1 This seventeenth-century jest calls into play common assumptions about the conventions of sexual relations between men and women. These conventions, with which we are all familiar, dictate that it is men’s role in courtship to solicit and women’s to resist, but the jest also shows that there is still ample room to manoeuvre, and ample opportunity for women in particular to intervene in order, as Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford observe, ‘to influence the courtship process and promote their own interests.’2 The jest illustrates the way in which female desire can take advantage of the constraints against it: chastity, for example, is not just a moral imperative but a renewable resource that can be strategically deployed. Overtly acknowledged in the plebeian world of the jest, this understanding of the uses of the feminine code covertly informs many of the representations of literary heroines with which we deal in this investigation of the representation of women and female desire from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593) to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). In exploring this broad range of material, our intention is to make a series of local and strategic engagements with texts that focus on 1

2 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

female desire and agency.3 Through these engagements our hope is to contribute to the debates concerning women’s agency from the late sixteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century, specifically as they relate to the representation of female desire not simply as a predatory instinct that the ‘good woman’ ought to suppress but as an inevitable complication of an interest in female subjectivity. Jonathan Goldberg usefully argues that the description of female desire in ‘stigmatized ways’ resulted in scholarship that, in defending women against such imputations, asserted the decorum and propriety of women in ways that were ultimately constraining.4 Our focus is on women who directly and indirectly articulate their own desires and tackle the problems of stigmatization associated with achieving those desires, who demonstrate complex understandings of what is at stake in the risky business of female agency. From Sidney’s Pamela to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, we are interested in the continuing fascination with women who are more than passive ideal types or demonized sexual aggressors. One of our interests, then, is in exploring the ways that selected texts demonstrate an awareness of the difficulties for women in expressing their desires. Far from being ‘natural’, essential or unproblematically given, the experience of being female is ‘constituted’, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘through discursively constrained performative acts.’5 The performance of gender, Butler argues, ‘must be understood not as a singular or deliberative “act”, but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.’6 What has often been seen as an ‘origin and cause’ of identity categories should in fact be seen as ‘the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with multiple and diffuse points of origin’.7 In seeking to identify the ways that writers have presented the tensions between what women might want and how they are supposed to behave we have an interest in exposing ‘the contingent acts that create the appearance of a naturalistic necessity’ that Butler identifies with Marxism.8 From another perspective we are also interested in beginning to explore, as Louis Montrose argues, how fictional texts are ‘inextricably though complexly linked to other social discourses, practices and institutions’, and are ‘engaged in shaping the modalities of social reality and in accommodating their writers, performers, readers, and audiences to multiple and shifting positions within the world that they themselves both constitute and inhabit.’9 While conduct books, for example, have advocated codes of behaviour for women that are prescriptive and constraining, the effectiveness of these prescriptions is questioned by the

Introduction 3

representation of women in fiction and the practice of real women, including women writers. We are interested in the stories that women tell about themselves in fictional texts, and the emphasis that they give to the work required to be a successful female protagonist. As Dennis Kay argues, the boundaries between fiction and actuality are less stable and clear-cut than either fiction or didactic material might suggest. Throughout this book we explore the ‘consequences of the permeability of literary discourse to other modes of discursive practice’10 and connect particular literary texts with some of the circumstances of their production. In part we are also engaging with recent debates that challenge received notions of female behaviour from the late sixteenth century onwards. While Suzanne W. Hull’s Chaste, Silent and Obedient was very important in focussing attention on the kinds of books being written for women and in identifying the concern with, or anxiety about, female behaviour in terms that valued the ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ ideal, challenges to this stereotype have come from two directions.11 First, recent work has questioned the pervasiveness and meaning of certain stereotypes associated with women, such as silence and passivity, arguing that these characteristics are less uniformly understood and applied than has been assumed. Rather than inevitably denoting passive obedience, for example, silence could also operate as a powerful rhetoric in itself. So Christine Luckyj provides suggestive readings of early modern texts that emphasize women’s use of dominant norms for their own purposes, assuming silence for specific ends, not as passive self-effacement, but as an assertion of a non-compliant will.12 Second, a number of critics have suggested that, rather than reading the increase in the number of conduct books written for women (predominantly by men) as evidence of escalating attempts to control and constrain female behaviour, it is also possible to read them as evidence of the recognition of the significance of women’s roles and abilities. As Michael R. Best argues, texts like Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615) demonstrated that ‘the housewife’s role is far from being passive and subservient’, and that the ‘importance of the wife in the domestic economy can scarcely be exaggerated.’13 Markham’s own literary career suggests a further interest that we have in questioning the sharp distinctions often made between conduct books and fictional or recreational writing.14 While Markham wrote manuals of advice on a wide variety of issues, his continuation of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1607–13), as we explore in Chapter 3, offers compelling examples of an interest in the ways that

4 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

women might act upon their own initiatives without incurring social condemnation. The interest in female agency that can be inferred from the plethora of conduct books can also be seen in the number of romances that, far from assuming ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ heroines, portray women with minds of their own positively engaging with circumstances less than propitious. We can see here the development of what Frank Whigham describes as ‘the rise to theoretical consciousness of the reification of the subject insofar as such behaviour involved “the effacement of the traces of production on the [subject].”’15 By focusing on female characters who clearly have designs and wills of their own we are also telling the story of how female subjectivity is constructed or made, or, in Whigham’s terms, how female identity is built on ‘achieved rather than ascribed characteristics’.16 From this perspective our study suggests that a longitudinal analysis such as we attempt here reveals the way that female behaviour, often idealized as natural or essential, or at the very least artless, has nevertheless long been understood as carefully and sometimes painfully worked at. Again, as Whigham suggests, following Kenneth Burke, what can be seen here is ‘the character of the ordinary lived human experience of performance, by noting the obverse of the heroic potential – the performative life as predicament’.17 Femininity that seems to consist of certain inherent and natural characteristics can be seen, then, as the product of labour and conflict, particularly in relation to the ideological constraints that govern gendered behaviour.

Ideologies of womanhood The period with which we are dealing witnessed what Thomas Laqueur describes in Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud as the change from a one-sex to a two-sex model of female physiology, and with this change the relocation of the explanatory model of gender difference from scripture to nature. In the one-sex model – developed from the humoral theories of Aristotle and Galen but still influential through to the seventeenth century – the difference between men and women was understood, as Robert Shoemaker notes, as essentially hierarchical rather than oppositional: women were a less perfect version of men, their reproductive organs having failed to emerge externally because, according to humoral theory, the cooler and moister composition of their bodies failed to generate enough dry heat and their genitalia remained inverted inside their bodies, resulting in ‘an innate desire to achieve perfection by coupling with men.’18 It

Introduction 5

was woman who was considered the more lustful of the two sexes: ‘because men had what women lacked, women were thought to have a fundamental desire to copulate with men and obtain their hot, dry semen’.19 Because of their cooler, moister constitution, women were also thought to lack the heat necessary to drive blood to the head, which resulted in them being governed, not by the brain but by the uterus, making them peculiarly susceptible to ‘hysteria, loquaciousness, lust, and irrational behaviour.’20 In any argument from this perspective, all roads led back to Eve. Between the seventeenth century and early nineteenth century, however, the one-sex model gradually gave way to the two-sex model, in which women’s bodies were seen as not so much inherently imperfect as different – no less prone, perhaps, to weaknesses of intellect and temper, but appropriately constituted for the role women were ordained to fulfil. But they were still prey, not now to the uterus, the ‘animal within’,21 but to their nerve endings, which made them vulnerable to sensation and less rational than men, though also, increasingly throughout the eighteenth century, more delicately attuned to the softer promptings of the moral sensibility. As Shoemaker observes, they were also, increasingly, understood to be ‘sexually passive, even passionless’, and a woman’s sexual pleasure was no longer deemed essential to conception. By the mid-eighteenth century conduct books no longer dwelt on the dangers of female lust,22 and by the end of the century, as Anthony Fletcher notes, ‘the traditional defence in rape cases, that if pregnancy followed the woman must have enjoyed the sexual act, was no longer seen as valid.’23 Mid-century, in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Lovelace could still allow himself to exalt in the possibility that Clarissa might be pregnant after he has raped her, with all that might imply about the spuriousness of her virtuous resistance; by the beginning of the nineteenth century a woman’s ‘nerves’ had already become, for Mr Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice at least, comic familiars: ‘Mr. Bennet … You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves’. ‘You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least’.24 Parallel to the change in the understanding of women’s biological makeup was a change in the understanding of gender difference

6 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

reflected in the advice literature directed at regulating female behaviour. While women were regarded as inherently sexually voracious, driven by bodily desires that their inferior rational powers struggled to control, advice literature emphasized, as Fletcher argues, prohibitions that would establish a system of behavioural defences, chief amongst these being ‘the scriptural case for obedience which men saw as the basic solution to women’s wiles and weakness.’ From the Restoration onwards, however, Fletcher identifies a more positive ideology of womanhood, and with it a steadily growing stream of advice literature that assumed women could be educated to ‘internalise the prescriptions which men seek to impose’, rather than simply subordinating themselves to patriarchal control.25 Fletcher suggests that initial signs of this more positive attitude – and of systematic attempts at modern gender construction – can be seen in 1631 with the publication of Richard Brathwait’s English Gentlewoman (discussed here in Chapter 3), which, although still founded on the ‘bedrock’ of scripture, is also ‘tinged with the secular ideological emphasis’ that was to characterize the new generation of conduct books directed specifically at women, most notably from Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673) and the Marquis of Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1688) to James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774).26 The virtue informing the construction of womanhood in all these works is modesty – a modesty that in its broadest sense is no different from the moderation earlier enjoined on women in subjugating themselves to masculine authority as a ‘due measure’ of their inferior status, but increasingly understood, or at least increasingly discussed, more narrowly as a personal delicacy that prompts a woman to shrink from notice or self-assertion. In the spread of advice literature over the 200 hundred years from 1650 to 1850, there is no steady progress from the misogynistic tradition to ‘the cult of womanhood’ that Mary LeGates argues had emerged by the end of the eighteenth century, though there are identifiable milestones that, in retrospect, allow us to see how it is possible to get from an image of woman as lustful, loquacious, and wilful to one that is naturally rather than prescriptively chaste, silent and obedient. From subjugation to external authority, to a capacity for self-discipline (where modesty rests on the moderation of self), to a natural reticence or ‘a certain agreeable fear in all [a woman] enters upon’,27 to a delicacy of thought and feeling deriving from the heightened sensitivity of finer nerves, to an instinctive recoil from sexuality – her own or others’ – are all small enough

Introduction 7

steps in the direction of the moral refinement and saintliness of the nineteenth century ideal of womanhood to be accounted for in generational change. But one notion of femininity was not simply replaced or modified by another; rather, in the social construction of womanhood, beliefs seem to have accumulated in layers, with faultlines never far below the surface that threaten to expose more misogynistic preconceptions.

‘A ticklish Foundation’ for virtue The major fault-lines in the more positive constructions of femininity can be found in contradictory accounts of a modesty that is understood as instinctive yet in need of vigilant supervision. As Ruth Yeazell observes in Fictions of Modesty, from the late seventeenth century onwards, It is a commonplace of the advice literature that women’s modesty is instinctive, but the very existence of the literature testifies to the belief that the ‘instinct’ must be elaborately codified and endlessly discussed: woman’s ‘natural’ modesty must be strenuously cultivated, the argument goes, lest both sexes fall victim to her ‘natural’ lust. So The Ladies Calling pronounced modesty at once ‘natural to the sex’ and ‘the most indispensible requisite of a woman’ – and then prescriptively declared that women who lacked the ‘instinct’ were not truly women at all. … In the centuries that followed, countless authors of printed advice for middle-class readers exhorted English-women to guard their modesty – even while insisting that true modesty is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of what might violate it.28 As a species of self-control, with the underlying meaning of moderation, modesty implies the discretion of temperate judgment – a virtue to be admired in men as well as women, though requiring a rational and measured way of thinking not traditionally (or even currently) associated with female stereotypes. But discretion, or at least the appearance of it, can also be achieved through the adoption of behavioural codes or customs that curb excess – in dress, deportment, conversation, and consumer lifestyle, all of which are targeted in the advice literature, and more specifically directed at women. The surest path to discretion in social situations, however, is a self-control that gives nothing at all away about a person’s opinions, regarding either

8 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

self or others, and that allows the self to intrude as little as possible on another’s attention.29 In this broad sense, without embracing distinctions of gender, a modesty that encompasses both self-effacing humility and public decorum is the cornerstone of social harmony, but for women modesty was more often understood as a sexual rather than a broadly social virtue, and as such more safely understood as a matter of instinct rather than policy. Where powers of judgement are considered weak or unreliable, and where the fear of a voracious sexuality still lingers, a modesty that is sustained by prescribed behaviours and the disguise of personal feelings can conceal a multitude of sins. As Yeazell observes, ‘if woman’s modesty is not instinctive, then her virtue is built, as Mandeville slyly remarks in his Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), “upon a very ticklish Foundation”.’30 But an instinctive modesty also has its drawbacks, particularly in sexual relations, since it requires that a woman be unconscious of precisely what it is from which she shrinks, which necessarily makes her all the more vulnerable to male offensives. A downright aversion to sexual advances would, of course, be highly inconvenient from the male perspective, and a natural modesty is usually understood more as a barrier that love can penetrate only with some violence to a woman’s sense of her personal integrity – the mental equivalent of the hymen, perhaps, an image brought to mind by Gregory’s description of the moment when a woman is forced to recognize an attachment, the existence of which she has instinctively suppressed: Though a woman has no reason to be ashamed of an attachment to a man of merit, yet nature, whose authority is superior to philosophy, has annexed a sense of shame to it. It is even long before a woman of delicacy dares avow to her own heart that she loves; and when all the subterfuges of ingenuity to conceal it from herself fail, she feels a violence done both to her pride and to her modesty. This, I should imagine, must always be the case where she is not sure of a return to her attachment.31 In earlier conceptualizations of modesty, such subterfuges – themselves problematic, as Yeazell points out, because of questions about ‘the origin of those ingenious “subterfuges” in a consciousness innocently unaware of the feelings they hide’32 – are avoided by a modesty that does not admit of love where a woman ‘is not sure of a return of her attachment.’ Early in the seventeenth century, the truly modest woman found in Brathwait’s English Gentlewoman is not so much inca-

Introduction 9

pable of intemperate or rash desires as diverted from them by a heart already ‘pre-occupied’ by religion: ‘the Sanctuary of her Heart is solely dedicated to her Maker; it can find no roome for an inordinate affection to lodge in’.33 In the later secular, naturalized modesty, however, there is not simply ‘no roome’ in the heart of a truly modest woman but no possibility of a love that develops prior to a man’s attachment to her, making any love that is not sure of a return ‘inordinate’ in the older sense of ‘disorderly’ or ‘unlawful’. That, at least, is the theory, though parallel to the ideal promulgated by the advice literature is a more pragmatic caution – and a custom widely assumed less natural than prudent – that is best served by a woman giving nothing away about the state of her heart before she is sure of her man.34 In the circumstances, with two competing explanations for a woman’s silence – one in which she says nothing about her feelings and the other in which she has nothing to say – the safest option would seem for a woman to remain sublimely unconscious of as much going on around her as possible, and as Yeazell observes, ‘the pattern young lady of the conduct books does tend to exhibit an increasing blankness of mind.’35 It is hard to imagine such ‘blankness of mind’ as a condition to which real young ladies might aspire, and we have no way of knowing, of course, what women of this period privately thought of the advice that had begun to flood the market: whether, for example, as with Lydia in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, conduct books were something from which to flee; whether, as with Henry Fielding’s Shamela, they were merely for show;36 or whether, as with Richardson’s Pamela in her response to Mr B’s 48 injunctions on how to be a good wife, they were the occasion of silent bristling. In recent decades the trend in social history has been to question the extent to which the advice literature provides an insight into the way in which women themselves understood what it was to be a woman. Fletcher, for example, acknowledges the impact of Lyndal Roper’s argument in Oedipus and the Devil that when we work from advice literature, mainly written by men, ‘gender history threatens to become a reinterpretation of the thought of powerful thinkers’ that ignores ‘individuals’ capacities to make their own meanings.’ Fletcher concedes that ‘women may have understood in their own consciousness and through their own feelings much about being a woman of which the male ideology took no account.’37 In examining court records for evidence of the workings of patriarchy, he continues: The problem, in considering how the female honour code worked to sustain early modern patriarchy, is that we can only work with

10 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

women’s recorded words and actions. We are deaf to what was really going on in their minds. What is clear is that we can find women corroborating male constructions of them in legal situations in a manner which was often more manipulative than passive. There was nothing women could do in this society to resist the way men insisted upon reading them, but there was much they could do about using those readings to their own advantage.38 Whatever the case in the society of this period, at least in the literature there was much that women could do to resist the way men read them. Writers consistently portrayed women who were prepared to take the initiative in the amatory adventures in which they were almost wholly engaged, but without descending into the voracious and predatory sexuality of the misogynistic tradition. The female characters with whom we are mainly concerned in this study are not prepared to sacrifice their virtue as conventionally defined, though neither do they unquestioningly conform to the prescriptive ideal. As Ingrid Tague argues, there were countless ways ‘in which women could ignore, accept, or even exploit ideals of feminine behavior depending on their particular circumstances, often in ways quite different from the intentions of the theorists who propagated those ideals.’39 But first, in fiction at least, they needed strategies for circumventing one aspect of the feminine ideal that severely limits their capacity to take part in a story at all: the erasure of will.

The feminine ideal and female agency: the case of Arcadia When Sidney in Arcadia describes the princess Philoclea as having ‘obediently lived under her parents’ behests, without framing out of her own will the forechoosing of any thing’,40 he is clearly describing an ideal – the exemplary daughter who is not simply obedient but essentially will-less because harbouring no unsatisfied desires – but he is also describing a state of affairs that cannot last if Philoclea is to have much of a part in this story. The ingenuity with which Sidney manages to cultivate unsatisfied desires in Philoclea without implicating a delinquent will (discussed later in this study) testifies both to the intransigence of the ideal and to the intractability of the obstacle that needs to be overcome before a heroine can take charge of a plot. A heroine needs to want something, and to be prepared to pursue it, or else the story will go nowhere. Yet, between being a daughter living obediently under her parents’ behests and becoming a wife whose desires are

Introduction 11

subject to her husband’s will,41 there is not much room to move unless the period in which the heroine is ‘between’ responsible sets of adults can be protracted. Hence the propensity for romance heroines to be orphaned, shipwrecked, abducted, or abandoned. On the one hand, as an unprotected female, she is exposed to adventure – as Deborah Ross notes, ‘“adventure” literally denotes events that come to one from without’42 – and, on the other hand, she is more or less obliged to exercise her will, even if only to find a safe haven. One of the significant differences noted by Charlotte Morgan between Arcadia and the early Greek ‘romances’ with which not only Arcadia but also much seventeenth-century romance has a good deal in common is ‘the shifting of the interest forward from the adventures ensuing on the elopement … to those concerned with the wooing of the heroine.’43 One effect of this is also to shift interest to the mind of the woman wooed, and this is one reason we start this study with Arcadia: for all that its heroes and heroines represent ideals, individual character matters, as the reason for action, while it tends not to matter in much other fiction of the period. 44 Another reason for beginning with Arcadia – and a more contentious one – is that it exemplifies a particular strain of romance in English fiction, and an accompanying set of conventions, that has persisted to the present day. In current discussions of romance, particularly in terms of its relation to the novel, Arcadia tends to be ignored, despite the fact that it is ‘often reckoned to have been the “best loved” or “most admired” work of English prose fiction in the seventeenth century’.45 Its aristocratic values, political allusiveness, and rhetorical exuberance certainly distance it from the early novel, though in this particular study we are more interested in conventions that persist despite generic discontinuities. Romance is, moreover, a term that can be so loosely defined as to include almost any fictional narrative or so tightly defined as to exclude any work not central to a particular argument.

Defining romance The most common problem in talking about romance, as Patricia Parker notes, ‘has always been the need to limit the way in which the term is applied.’ She herself uses the term neither as ‘fixed generic prescription nor as abstract transhistorical category’ but as ‘an organizing principle’ for the interpretation of a poetic form stretching from Ariosto to Mallarmé,46 another category that we could add to Ian

12 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Duncan’s list of recent usages in Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: In the last fifty years [romance] has signified a courtly or chivalric fiction of the late Middle Ages, a fanciful or erotic or sentimental enhancement of a situation or event, any unlikely story, a love affair, highly conventionalized mass-marketed novels read by women, a narrative with a quest in it, four of the last plays of Shakespeare, the American novels of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, and a super-genre containing all fictional forms and figures that is ultimately the form and figure of a transcendental human imagination. In the first half of the eighteenth century romance meant any prose fiction in the vernacular tongue, particularly those associated with ‘the last age’, and more particularly those French romans héroïques or romans à longue haleine, filled with dilemmas of love and honour and adorned with improbable exploits, written to amuse the salons of the age of Louis XIV.47 Going back beyond the eighteenth century, ‘romance’ originally distinguished works in the vernacular (the romance languages) from works in Latin, the language of scholarship, the term signalling the influence of a more ‘popular’, lay or courtly audience seeking entertainment or moral guidance rather than erudition, and to which the works of writers such as Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France were directed in twelfth-century France. In English narrative, romance has a long and distinguished history from the thirteenth through to the sixteenth century, but in the seventeenth century it began to be overshadowed by the popularity of French heroic romance, at least in the minds of the contemporary literary establishment (though it is difficult to tell how much of the impact of this dangerous French and predominately female folly was indeed in the mind of native English men of letters). Some general characteristics of romance remained the same between the thirteenth and the seventeenth century: romances addressed the courtly ideals of the audience to which they were largely directed; they focused on the exploits, chivalric and amorous, of well-born, idealized heroes and heroines; they were set in geographically remote locations in historically remote ages; and they indulged a taste for the marvellous. French heroic romance – most notably the works of Madeleine de Scudéry and La Calprenède – formalized some of the conventions of narrative style under the two rules of vraisemblance and bienséance, the former having more to do with historical consistency (loosely

Introduction 13

interpreted) than with probability (Madeleine de Scudéry’s Clelia, for example, manages a flood and an earthquake within the first two pages of its 30 volumes), 48 and the latter concerned with the moral and social decorum appropriate to the salon culture within which the romances were written. In debates about the origins of the English novel, French heroic romance and the rules by which it is governed figure prominently in arguments for rupture rather than continuity in the emergence of what eighteenth-century writers themselves understood as a new species of fiction, though it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the term ‘novel’ was consistently applied to the new form rather than to works that could be dismissed in the same breath with ‘romance’.49 There is good reason for singling out French heroic romance as, in Ros Ballaster’s words, the ‘hegemonic form’ that the novel displaced,50 since for eighteenth-century theorists it was what made ‘romance’ synonymous with wanton fancy and that came to represent everything the novel was not – though, in exploring the difference between novel and romance, the focus on heroic romance makes more sense from the eighteenth century looking back than from the sixteenth century looking forward. In exploring this difference, primarily through the contrast with heroic romance, Lennard Davis is the most uncompromising of the ‘rupture’ theorists, arguing in Factual Fictions that ‘the romance is not usefully seen as a forebear of, a relative of, or an influence on the novel’,51 and like J. Paul Hunter and Michael McKeon, he seeks causes for the emergence of a generically distinct form that, rather than simply growing out of romance, has its roots in the multiplicity of uses – non-literary more so than literary – to which narrative could be put in the early eighteenth century and in the social changes such narratives reflected and served.52 This distinction – or, as Lennard Davis would have it, the ‘discursive chasm’ – between novel and romance is the keystone of much recent criticism that has rightly challenged simplistic post hoc arguments about continuities and influences, though the extent of the ‘chasm’ very much depends on the way romance is defined and the distance from which the critic is coming. The gap that opens up between romance and novel is nowhere wider, for example, than between French heroic romance and the novels of Daniel Defoe; in some respects, however, it is less imposing between Arcadia and the novels of Richardson or even Fielding, particularly when we take into account the gap that already exists between Arcadia and other works over a period of 500 years that we are also prepared to call romance.

14 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

This is not to argue that generic distinctions are irrelevant or can be ignored – even if, as critics such as Margaret Doody and Philip Stewart argue, the concern to separate novel from romance is a conspicuously English affair, most other European languages not even distinguishing them by name53 (a fact acknowledged by Davis when he comments that ‘the French word roman can be translated as either “romance” or “novel” – a confusing inconvenience given our interest in distinguishing the two’54). A study such as the one in which we are engaged, spanning material from the sixteenth through to the mid-nineteenth century, will inevitably be seen to be participating in the debate about the origins of the novel and its relation to romance, simply by virtue of the assumption that it makes sense to talk about this 250 years of fiction as if the conventions of romance and novel addressed comparable social and ideological issues in the representation of women. This is not, however, an argument about the origins of the novel or the validity of generic boundaries, and we acknowledge that generic expectations profoundly affect an understanding of the parameters of acceptable and unacceptable conduct. But our argument does assume that the dynamics of narrative also impose certain kinds of demands on characters and enable certain kinds of strategies that are no respecters of genre. A degree of permeability in generic boundaries is also inevitable if the genres are defined broadly enough. Stewart, for example, defines romance primarily in terms of its tendency towards idealization, which is a characteristic, he suggests, of all fiction, though more obvious in some forms than in others: Any reader anticipating a story encounters an intrinsic measure of idealization conferred upon characters and action by the medium itself; it is reinforced by the necessary selectivity of representation. Incapable of enacting all the motions of a living creature, a character is always to some extent a schematic creation, in which only a finite number of attributes can be stressed. In this sense, fiction is always, however supposedly mimetic, bigger than life. … Some novels are more romantic than others, in that the degree of idealization is more conspicuous, and there are romantic fictions that are not novels; nonetheless, it may be misleading to set up the two terms as evident antonyms.55 The idealization of the heroes and heroines of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romance is certainly more conspicuous than the ideal-

Introduction 15

ization of the heroes and heroines of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, though, in the selection of character traits that the latter exhibit, an ideal of sorts certainly emerges, and in the case of Jane Eyre the fact that she is not a beauty only reinforces the difference in the criteria that support that ideal, as does Richardson’s Pamela’s humble origins. The idealization of both types of heroine needs to be understood, moreover, in the context of a more generalized tendency towards idealization in romantic fictions that elevates certain kinds of desires to a realm of experience that transcends common reality, and that ‘prove’ themselves against the conventional values that they defy (usually in the form of duty to a husband or wife, or a father, or a king, or a nation). Most often, such desire takes the form of love, though not exclusively, despite the tendency in common usage today to equate romance with a love story.56 This kind of idealization also underlies the wish-fulfilment so often disparaged in romance, but is arguably inherent in what Duncan calls ‘the essential principle of fiction: its difference from a record of “reality”, of “everyday life”.’ In this ‘rhetorical’ definition of romance, fiction ‘is the effect above all of plot, conspicuous as a grammar of formal conventions, that is, a shared cultural order distinct from material and historical contingency. To read a plot – to take part in its work of recognition – is to imagine a transformation of life and its conditions, and not their mere reproduction.’57

Selecting the texts If the term is defined broadly enough, most of the texts we deal with here could be called ‘romances’ (though some of them we would not want to stop also calling ‘novels’). Avid readers of modern popular romance of the Harlequin or Mills and Boon variety, for example, are often pointed in the direction of Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice in histories of the genre, and at least one directs unsuspecting readers to Pamela.58 Our interest, however, is not in identifying generic continuities, but in exploring the shared ‘grammar of formal conventions’ that establishes courtship plots as ‘sites of contest’,59 areas where contradictory expectations about female behaviour are played out. Confronted with a variety of obstacles, the female protagonists discussed here all try to pursue their interests and desires without tarnishing their reputations. These conflicts and confrontations emerge in the focus on interiority or self-exploration that has been associated with the rise of Protestantism,60 and Sidney’s Arcadia is one of the early texts, we argue, to provide women characters with emotions and

16 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

insights equal to or superior to male counterparts. When Mary Beth Rose argues for the redefinition of heroism from the late sixteenth century such that it privileged ‘the capacity to endure [danger] … to resist it and suffer with patience and fortitude’,61 she emphasizes the opportunities this provided for reconsidering female virtue. An emphasis on the private, interior and internal potentially provides women with greater authority than codes that valorise physical courage, strength and public endeavour. Like Rose, Lorna Hutson also suggests that the increased significance of women ‘as addressees and subjects’ is directly linked to the ‘humanistic disparagement’ of values associated with chivalric romances and the shift to civil rather than martial forms of social agency.62 It is also part of our argument here, though, that there are many occasions when women in fiction do more than simply resist danger or temptation but rather actively seek out ways of attaining their ends, and that in this process we see ‘the intersection of the female with problematic agency, or agency beset by contradictions and compromise.’63 In focusing on texts that raise significant issues about female agency and women’s pursuit of their own desires, we have elected to consider texts by men and women writers, though on the understanding that the ‘early-modern organisation of sex and gender boundaries’, as Alan Sinfield argues, ‘was different from ours.’64 To explore the issue of designing women without considering some of the men who designed female characters (particularly such influential designers as Sidney and Richardson) risks constructing a tradition that isolates women as much as it reifies them, and abstracts them from their cultural and literary contexts. Gender is certainly a factor to be considered in the production of Wroth’s Urania, as are her class and family, as critics have argued, 65 but gender issues also intersect with social issues in ways that complicate simple binary oppositions between male and female writers. Sidney’s position as a male writer, for example, is also inflected by having to negotiate the difficult social and political terrain of life as an ambitious courtier under Elizabeth I. If agency is generally problematic for women, fraught with contradiction and compromise, then this is arguably true for a number of men in Elizabethan England, caught between their status as part of an educated and political elite, and subservient to a female monarch. In acknowledging the ‘articulation of women’s power’66 that is a focus of the texts that we have selected, it is also important to us to keep gender in a dynamic with other factors that influence how men and women write about desire in fiction and the stories that they tell. Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, has long been

Introduction 17

seen as having particular sympathy for female representation,67 perhaps partly because of the audience of educated women readers like his sister the Countess of Pembroke, for whom it initially seems to have been intended. It is also likely that the thwarting of his political and social ambitions might have given him a particular interest in the merits of patience and stoic resistance to threatening forces, and in seeing how far a hierarchy ‘can be manipulated from below.’68 The redefinitions of heroism that arose from humanist and Protestant discourses had particular implications for the development of the female protagonist that can be most clearly seen in texts and incidents that deal explicitly with designing women. We mean by this phrase a particular concern with women who plot or scheme to develop and pursue their desires rather than simply wait for fate to deal them their hand. The scenes we discuss foreground a woman’s conscious awareness of her position and the ways that she engages with the possibilities and constraints of that position, as that awareness interacts with shifts in narrative dynamics that can be best understood by exploring works across a broad historical period. Peter Brooks’s discussion of ‘the female plot’ demonstrates one way in which women’s designs can be accommodated by narrative. ‘The female plot,’ he argues, ‘takes a more complex stance towards ambition, the formation of an inner drive toward the assertion of selfhood in resistance to the overt and violating male plots of ambition, a counter-dynamic which, from the prototype of Clarissa on to Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse, is only superficially passive’ and, we suggest, is one that has its origins prior to the nineteenth-century novel that is his main focus.69 As Hutson argues, however, narrative can also be used ‘as a method for the emplotment or reinterpretation of circumstances in the interests of a fortunate end’ (p. 96). In this sense, women’s designs and plotting can be related to a specific form of prudential activity: ‘that is, the constant and unceasing emplotment of present circumstance to prevent future disaster and ensure good fortune.’70 Reading romance in the broad sense that we mean here, and across generic boundaries, enables an understanding of how plot and character combine in the body of the designing woman. The material here has been structured so that the texts in the first three chapters grow out of Arcadia, while the texts in the last three chapters could all be seen to grow out of Pamela, providing us with a broadly chronological structure. While the interests of the study are consistent across the material, the differences between the texts necessarily invite different kinds of treatment, particularly where the earlier

18 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

texts draw on specific political and social correspondences of their times. By bringing together a diversity of texts across what is often seen as a romance/novel divide we hope to illuminate many connections and divergences surrounding the representation of women and female desire across 250 years but without claiming to provide a definitive set of references. Our main aim is to draw attention to the number of female characters who negotiate the injunctions against pursuing female desire in different social and narrative circumstances. As an introduction to how some of the constraints on, and possibilities of, female agency were understood, we begin by examining some significant shifts in the use of one long-lasting metaphor of sexual desire: the image of fishing.

Birds, bees – and fish For thee, thou need’st no such deceit, For thou thyself art thine own bait, That fish, that is not catched thereby, Alas, is wiser far than I. (John Donne, ‘The Bait’) In examining the representations of women and sexual desire in the texts considered here, one image in particular, the image of fishing, reflects the shifting dynamics of men and women in courtship and romance, and stands as an indicator of women’s difficulties in expressing their own desires, and the ways that women with designs of their own are interpreted. As women take on the writing of romance themselves they make a bid for co-ownership of the trope and in so doing provide better understandings of the perils as well as the satisfactions of agency. From Arcadia to Pamela the erotic possibilities of the image of fishing are played out, where women move between being the fishers, the bait, and the fish in an image that is every bit as flexible and slippery as romance itself. In New Arcadia two princesses are engaged in an innocent and sisterly competition, unaware that they have been brought to the riverbank so that they can be seen by their suitors. As A. J. Smith suggests, Donne in ‘The Bait’ and Sidney here are indulging in a common enough ‘conceit in the erotic poetry of the time’.71 What this link between Donne and Sidney suggests, however, is how much this conceit is part of a particular kind of masculine rhetoric. Donne’s poem, addressed to a potential lover, is part of a group of poems

Introduction 19

addressed to supposedly reluctant lovers that are in themselves part of an elaborate literary competition.72 Linking back to Marlowe and Raleigh, Donne’s reprise of familiar images is as much a light-hearted gesture to fellow poets as anything else. The fishing incident in Arcadia shares with Donne’s poem a strong interest in male agency and creativity. The passage in Arcadia allows the suitors to make analogies between themselves and the fish in the conventional courtly rhetoric that sees the women as the catchers of male hearts. While the princesses make ‘pretty wagers … which could soonest beguile silly fishes’, the male observer protests ‘that the fit prey for them was hearts of princes’ (NA, p. 152). But it is the male persona in ‘The Bait’ and the princes in Arcadia who are in control of and in a superior position to the women they observe and address, however much they might stress their dependence on, or vulnerability to, the women. In Gervase Markham’s hands, in his continuation of Sidney’s Arcadia, the image takes on different connotations. When the princess Melidora fishes here, the sight produces an outburst of passion from her suitor that initially repeats the convention of woman as fisher, man as prey: lovely Maide tryumph over me, whome you have already taken, even mee that like this simple frye delight in my perishing, and if you doe (as your fayre eyes are witnesses) bemone the fish which hath swallowed down your hooke, whose lingring torment is a signe of certaine death; then pittye me your slaue, the merryt of whose affection shall farre exceed the compassion due to any unreasonable creature.73 A few pages later, however, the princess raises the fishing image herself to ask him if he is the one who has made those curious hokes and baites with which her-selfe and the other Nymphs had so oft taken so manie fish … if it were not he that had made the curious Nets, wherewith himselfe and the Shepheards had taken so manie birdes? (Markham, I: 91) At this point Melidora turns the fishing image against her suitor and banishes him because she may ‘bee likewise taken by’ him. His protestations that he could not take captive someone to whom he himself is prisoner fall on deaf ears and he is banished on the seemingly virtuous grounds that she fears the ‘effects of frenzie’ (I: 91). At this point the

20 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

image has been turned on its head. We have moved from the acute agony of male empathy with the fish, and his masochistic desire to be hooked as they are, to female anxiety about the instability of a shepherd sent into frenzies of passion by the sight of a woman fishing. One might sympathize with Melidora at this point and agree that this kind of courtly excess is precisely what she fled to the countryside to escape. Markham, however, does not let Melidora off the hook, and reveals that what looks like virtuous indignation and self-protection actually conceals the fact that she has been exercised by some passions of her own, for another shepherd, and that this shepherd ‘she did not disdain to call her servant’ (Markham, I: 93). Sidney’s use of the image conforms to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conventions of erotic play, and focuses on the perceptions of the male lover in response to the activities of his beloved. Markham begins there, but then shows how the image can be deployed by a perceptive woman to undercut pastoral rhetoric, and to insert a pragmatic sense of the dangers attendant on women’s exposure to male frenzy.74 The adoption of outraged sensibility is in itself a strategy designed to cover her own desires, and what happens to her as a result of her intentions to pursue her own course is something we explore more fully in Chapter 3. By the time we get to the otherwise anonymous ‘fishing maid’ in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621), the fishing trope is taking on a life of its own and becoming increasingly unstable, as Wroth’s use of it ‘emphasizes the self-consciousness of the lady who makes the comparisons.’75 Indeed, the exercise of fishing has become nearly beside the point. While she has the ‘Angle in her hand, and lay as if fishing’, the activity itself has become an excuse, and her mind is ‘plac’d on a higher pleasure’: she little regarded the byting of the fish, beeing her selfe deceived with a cunninger baite, the hooke of love having caught her so fast, as nothing could release her, and as she sate, she would make pretty, and neate comparisons, between her betraying the poore silly fish, and her owne being betrayed by the craft of love, which some times she commended; and yet againe would condemne. (U, I: 288) The image here is used by the fishing maid to deliberate on her own position, caught, as she explains to her audience, in a marriage to someone she does not love, in a relationship with someone she does love. In one of the most striking episodes in Urania, the fishing maid

Introduction 21

unravels the means by which she finds herself in a ménage à trois envied by others as an example of virtuous and unconstrained love.76 Wroth’s fishing maid deliberately explores the conceit of fishing as a way of pondering her own feelings. When the cork on her line bobs, she reflects: ‘So … doth Love with me, play with me, shew mee pleasures, but lets me enjoy nothing but the touch of them, and the smart of the hooke that hurts me without gaine, and only gives as light a good to me, as this floting corke did give me of the fishes prison’ (U, I: 289). In Urania the fishing maid’s explicit articulation of the connections between herself and the fish is part of a complex patterning of female desires that do not necessarily fit within the constraints of marriage, or conform to expectations of parents and guardians about choice of marriage partner, or meet satisfaction from their chosen objects. The fishing maid, having settled her affections on one man, is pursued by many suitors and refuses them all, defending her actions on the grounds of her reputation, arguing that she should not be ‘yeelded to every great match, but that the businesse might be carried more to my honour and content’ (U, I: 293). The protection of honour is a strategy that the fishing maid deploys to buy time in pursuit of her love as she contrives various plots to achieve her end. While she is like a fisher fishing, she also invokes other images to demonstrate her reliance on herself, the only hope that she has: ‘then was I to worke my end, having no meanes, save mine own industrie, and strength of mind busied like a Spider, which being to crosse from one beam to another, must worke by waies, and goe farre about, making more webs to catch herselfe into her own purpose, then if she were to goe an ordinary straight course: and so did I, out of my wit weave a web to deceive all, but mine own desires.’ (U, I: 293) As she describes it, ‘never were Bees so busie in a Swarme, as my thoughts were how to set my mind, and ends aright’ (p. 294) in image after image that exposes a female mind actively working to achieve desires that she cannot approach directly by speaking of them to their object. The wit, the will, and the desires are evident and explored at length, here and elsewhere in the long texts that form the first and second parts of Urania. But at the same time as these examples attest to a concern with women getting what they want, so too does the fishing maid’s compromised position, married yet enjoying the company of her lover, suggest an acute awareness of the real difficulties of women

22 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

with minds of their own in situations that demand compliance to male authority.77 In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela the fishing metaphor has become so ambiguous, so loaded with innuendo, that it has become a touchstone of how to interpret Pamela’s behaviour in general, and a crux of critical interpretation of the book as a whole. Withdrawn from the riverbank, confined within a domestic garden under the watchful eyes of her gaoler, Mrs Jewkes, Pamela’s fishing exercise is represented with a level of self-consciousness that endangers her character in so far as it opens her to the allegations of interestedness and hypocrisy. Richardson’s Pamela has been abducted and imprisoned by her master, and though angling is first suggested as a pastime by Mrs Jewkes, it is Pamela who seizes upon it as a pretext for fomenting her escape plans and who provides the exegesis. She writes in her journal: She [Mrs Jewkes] baited the hook, and I held it, and soon hooked a noble carp. ‘Play it, play it’, said she. I did, and brought it to the bank. A sad thought just then came into my head; and I took it gently off the hook, and threw it in again; and O the pleasure it seemed to have, on flouncing in, when at liberty! ‘Why this?’ says she. ‘O Mrs Jewkes! I was thinking this poor carp was the unhappy Pamela. I was comparing myself to my naughty master. As we deceived and hooked the poor carp, so was I betrayed by false baits; and when you said, play it, play it, it went to my heart, to think I should sport with the destruction of the fish I had betrayed: I could not but fling it in again; and did you not see the joy with which it flounced from us? O that some good merciful person would procure me my liberty in like manner; for I cannot but think my danger equal!’78 The identification of the woman with the fish rather than, as in the Arcadia example, with the angler is not unprecedented as we saw in Wroth’s Urania where the fishing maid compares the fish betrayed by baits with her own betrayal by ‘the craft of love’ (U, I: 288). But in Pamela’s case, any suggestion that she is employing a rhetorical figure – consciously revising the traditional metaphor to recast the woman as fish rather than angler – inevitably compromises her innocence. On the one hand her identification with the poor carp ‘betrayed by false baits’ asserts her innocence; on the other hand her conscious employment of a trope betrays a level of knowingness that undermines that innocence.

Introduction 23

Pamela’s integrity in this instance relies on her not recognizing the wider figurative potential of the fishing image, a rhetorical innocence that reaches its hilarious apotheosis in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). Here again we are removed from the wider landscape of the pastoral setting and find ourselves in a country house garden, near a pond stocked with carp, presumably as part of the domestic economy of the household. Arabella, fed on romances, is convinced of the threats to her reputation and honour posed by men in all their shapes and forms, and is also aware of their trickiness and the lengths to which they will go to obtain their desires. If men can dress as shepherds and amazons to gain access to the objects of their affection, then so too, figures the ever-vigilant Arabella, can they disguise themselves as gardeners. When she sees the new gardener, Edward, she is immediately alert to the possibility that he is not who he seems. When she condescended to speak to him about any Business he was employed in, she took Notice, that his Answers were framed in a Language vastly superior to his Condition; and the Respect he paid her had quite another Air from that of the aukward Civility of the other Servants. Having discerned so many Marks of a Birth far from being mean, she easily passed from an Opinion that he was a Gentleman, to a Belief that he was something more; and every new Sight of him adding Strength to her Suspicions, she remained, in a little time, perfectly convinced that he was some Person of Quality, who, disguised in the Habit of a Gardener, had introduced himself into her Father’s Service, in order to have an Opportunity of declaring a Passion to her, which must certainly be very great, since it had forced him to assume an Appearance so unworthy of his noble Extraction.79 Devoid of any empirical evidence for her assumptions – ‘She often wondered, indeed, that she did not find her Name carved on the Trees, with some mysterious Expressions of Love; that he was never discovered lying along the Side of one of the little Rivulets, increasing the Stream with his Tears’ (p. 23) – Arabella nevertheless persists in her beliefs for another 70 pages, despite the fact that Edward’s intentions are revealed to be directed not at the lovely Arabella but at the carp themselves, ‘which the Rogue had caught, and intended’, says the head gardener, ‘to sell’ (p. 25).

24 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

While a figure such as Arabella who sees herself as besieged by male attention is comic, even women who revise the fishing image to deny the deviousness associated with entrapping male hearts risk convicting themselves of such deviousness by self-consciously manipulating a rhetorical figure. How can women express their desire and act on their own initiatives without being caught in such paradoxes? Yet, how can they not have desires and act on them if they are to be understood as the protagonists in their own stories? In the rest of this study we explore the question of how far a woman can and should go as the agent of her own desires. From Arcadia through to Jane Eyre the web that catches the self into its own purposes is ultimately woven by means of narrative strategies that, while protecting the heroine from imputations of design, must nevertheless revise the nature and consequence of feminine ideals such as passivity and submission. It is in these interconnections between narrative and social modes that we can see the changes and continuities in the representation of designing women.

1 Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

The politics of desire in Arcadia The whole of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia can be seen as an exercise in the description of human potential in difficult circumstances. As many critics have recognized, far from representing an escape from the world of politics and the court into a literary other world, Arcadia is probably best seen as an attempt on Sidney’s part to ‘keep faith’ with himself and others in fraught social and political contexts.1 Frustrated in his attempts to play a major role in an international Protestant league, frowned on by Elizabeth I for his attempts to offer advice on her proposed marriage to Duke d’Alencon, Sidney retires to Wilton to compose Arcadia as much in determination to continue his activities in a different form as in a gesture of defeat. Arcadia is both ‘an escape from recent disappointments and a way of obliquely commenting on them.’ As Katherine Duncan-Jones comments, ‘The whole story hinges on an ageing monarch who disregards advice given by a loyal courtier, and is unable to control his own undignified and inappropriate sexual passions’, yet the book is not simply a roman à clef and deals rather with correspondences than precise transcriptions.2 As Dennis Kay suggests, ‘the individual correspondences operate at a relatively simple level, and are part of Sidney’s habitual strategy of hinting at actualities behind his fiction, of implying that his romance is rooted in the circumstances of the world.’3 Our focus is on the representation of female characters and desire in Arcadia, and to establish some of the parameters of our study we begin by briefly considering the kinds of writing that Arcadia comes out of and where it departs from them in relation to women and desire. If we look, for example, at popular fiction of the mid-sixteenth century 25

26 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

such as William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566) we find there stories that focus on a female protagonist and the pursuit of her personal ambitions. Gileta of Narbana is a proactive woman who forces a man to marry her against his will, and then tricks him into consummating the marriage. The Countess of Salesbury withstands the king’s attempts on her chastity and is then rewarded with marriage to him in a tale that foreshadows Richardson’s Pamela. Yet neither of these stories is part of the pattern of narratives that is our focus. In the first tale we see the image of the destructive libidinous woman who stands as a negative example to others. In the second we see the idealized figure who stands as a positive example to others, particularly in the absence of any specific desires of the woman herself. Speaking of her marriage she says: ‘I never looked to be advanced to so honourable state as fortune nowe doth offer.’4 The women in these two stories stand at either extreme of a very familiar binary opposition: sexually proactive woman, chaste and sexually resisting woman. In ‘The King of England’s Daughter’ we meet a figure who is closer to our interests: a young ‘abbot’ who persuades Alexandro to get into bed with ‘him’ and then reveals that ‘he’ is a woman who declares her love for him as well as her intention to marry him. The behaviour of the King of England’s daughter is certainly bold but she is not simply demonized nor a negative stereotype. In this she does illustrate part of the trajectory that we are interested in identifying. Yet in Painter’s narratives, the interest is in the twists and turns that the narrative can take, not in the motivation of, or insights into, the character herself. We see a similar pattern in Barnabe Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession (1581), where we find another cross-dresser, Silla, who falls in love with Apollonius, struggles to overcome her fondness because he is a guest of her father and only passing through, but finds herself caught against her will: ‘like a fowl who is once limed, the more she striveth, the faster she tieth herself together.’ Pursuing him literally over land and sea, Silla (disguised as Silvio) is accused of making Juliana pregnant, provoking a sly aside from the narrator to a female audience that they should beware ‘when you be with child, how you swear who is the father before you have had good proof and knowledge of the party, for men be so subtil and full of sleights that, God knoweth, a woman may quickly be deceived.’5 Eventually, Silla can reveal her gender and receives the enthusiastic attentions of Apollonius. In Riche’s story the strong woman does get what she wants but it also carries strongly moralistic homilies about error, and the humorous interventions of the narrator undercut the attention paid to the female protagonist.

Women of Great Wit 27

The difference between these mid-sixteenth-century texts and the ones that we pick up here, beginning with Arcadia, lies in the construction of narrative that is more character-driven than incident-driven. While the popular novellae picked up by Painter, Riche and others are adventures in the sense that they rely for movement on the adventitious and the incidental, the texts that interest us here explore how female characters in particular seek to intervene in and shape the situations in which they are located. In this sense, as Charlotte Morgan observed long ago, Sidney’s narrative encourages a reflective and observant point-of-view rather than an immersion in events as they happen.6 Sidney’s stories do not come out of thin air, but they do begin to establish patterns and ideas that function in different ways from many of the works of his predecessors. Arcadia’s use of interconnected narratives has more in common with the complicated structure of Greek romances than with the collections of stories that were so popular in the middle to late sixteenth century and were derived from Italian, Spanish and Portuguese novellae. There has been much discussion about what kind of thing Arcadia actually is, not least because it crosses generic and modal boundaries in attaching itself to stories and styles that are traditional and classical as well as those that are new.7 Part of the mixed modal effect of Arcadia8 can be understood through Raymond Williams’ account of literary and cultural change as a product of the competing influences of residual, dominant and emergent ideas and styles, even if it is not always possible to categorize each set of influences in any precise fashion.9 In a sense Arcadia owes more to medieval ideas of entrelacement than it does to the then popular fashion for shorter, incident-based narratives. The differences between the interests and effects of Arcadia and some of its close contemporaries in prose fiction can also be understood through Donald Beecher’s account of Riche’s Farewell to Military Profession. As Beecher suggests, novellae such as this ‘rarely proceeded with sufficient leisure to permit a full development of the inner lives of the protagonists’, and any interest in dialogue lies in its ‘advancement of an action rather than the exploration either of ideas or of sentiment.’10 In Riche’s work we do see a concern with women, chastity and constancy: we see women under threat from voracious and dangerous men and the way that some women counter these threats, often gaining a moral victory over their male aggressors so that the politics of chastity in Riche’s stories is ultimately the politics of female domination.11 In most cases in Riche’s and Painter’s writing it is the sense of experimenting with the number of different ways that basic incidents can be re-run that is

28 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

the focus rather than the how or the why of the situation. Beecher nicely captures this in his description of the novellae as experimental laboratories: ‘the reader is encouraged to see each story as a laboratory in which values are tested according to the mediations of wit or fortune, and arbitrated by the order of closure.’12 Our argument, then, is not that the kind of female characters that we see in Arcadia are without antecedents, but that the kind of treatment that women in Arcadia receive represents a series of shifts in narrative and moral concerns that can be traced through to the nineteenth century. While Arcadia still operates through the telling of a number of complex (and sometimes unfinished) individual stories, what connects these stories is partly the roles they play in the lives and ambitions of the tellers. Musidorus and Pyrocles in particular, of course, use supposedly unconnected stories to establish their own credentials with the women they woo, Pamela and Philoclea. While many of these stories reprise central themes and are often variations on key tropes, their main importance is in the dialogue and relationships they enable between the central lovers. It is the passage to romantic fulfillment that is more important than the achievement of that fulfillment. More specifically, as Morgan noted, one of the significant things about Arcadia is its shift of interest from adventure to courtship.13 Aside from the specifically literary contexts of Arcadia, we include two other dimensions that relate to the construction of its female characters. The first of these takes in broad political and social contexts, while the second includes the specifically familial, and then we consider the subset that is the interaction between these two arenas as represented in Arcadia. Work by Richard Helgerson and others has outlined the complicated political environment that was the extended world of the Elizabethan courtier and politician.14 While there are many differences between the social status of Sir Philip Sidney and Barnabe Riche, there are also shared experiences that suggest some of the parameters of Elizabethan masculinity. Both enacted public, diplomatic and military roles for Elizabeth and both experienced mixed rewards for so doing. Both were involved in the complex negotiations between England and Ireland, and both were involved in military operations in Zutphen. Like many other men of the time, Riche in particular took up writing as a commercial enterprise, deliberately appealing to women readers, and directly engaging with them and what might be perceived to be their interests. He unashamedly followed fashionable trends in following and imitating Italian sources. Though the differences between Riche and Sidney might be great, in different ways both

Women of Great Wit 29

men turned their hands to writing in a time when it offered new commercial and intellectual possibilities facilitated by humanist interests in learning, and entrepreneurial interests in selling the products of intellectual labour to an expanding market, as did Gervase Markham and Richard Brathwait (whom we come to later) and many others. In relation to Sidney specifically, the significance of family structures cannot be ignored. As Katherine Duncan-Jones refreshingly comments, ‘the complex ways in which Elizabethan noble families interconnect make the detailed study of their family history extremely confusing.’15 In terms of the immediate production of Arcadia the most significant of these family relations is recognized to be with his sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, to whom the text is addressed, and who formed part of its first audience. Much has been written about Mary Herbert, both as patron, and as writer and translator, and the production of the first version of Arcadia at Wilton to amuse her and her immediate circle.16 Arcadia’s first audience, no less than Riche’s or Painter’s, can be expected to have exerted influence over the kind of text that Arcadia became, determined in its case by a coterie of highly educated aristocratic women rather than the more diverse market supplied by a commercial venture. There is also the political dimension of Arcadia and the arguments that it reflects or negotiates Sidney’s complex relationships with the most powerful woman in his life, Elizabeth I.17 While it is not always possible to identify precise connections between a character in the text and a historical figure, it is evident that Arcadia, like many other pastorals, does comment on the political world through a rural veil. As we suggested earlier, it is entirely plausible that Basilius as the misguided leader who abandons his political duty on a wilful personal interpretation of an oracle (despite the best advice of his clearly wiser subordinates) represents a version of the wilful and recalcitrant Elizabeth. As we shall go on to argue below, the main focus of the narrative is not on Basilius’s gender but on the office that he holds and his abrogation of the duties belonging to it. So Basilius can be read as suggesting some of the dimensions of Elizabeth’s position. Arcadia works with a series of equivalences that ‘figure forth’, as Sidney’s first biographer Fulke Greville wrote, particular ideas and issues, working through suggestion and shadowings rather than precise identifications. So the strength of the passages surrounding Philisides and the Iberian tournament in Arcadia establishes a connection, as Dennis Kay suggests, with Sidney and Elizabeth’s Accession Day tilts, and these textual events invite readers to understand Philisides as sometimes more successful than his historical counterpart. As

30 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Helgerson puts it, an author who encourages a reader to draw connections between a character and the author, as Sidney surely does in naming Philisides (Phili[p]sid[n]e[y]s), leads us to expect that ‘he wanted to be thought like him’,18 even if the similarities are vague. Kay also argues that just as in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene more than one character can be seen to shadow Elizabeth, so too in Arcadia Helen of Corinth might also be seen as a version of the English monarch, with particular interest for our argument later on. And again, there is the correlation between Sidney’s mother Mary Dudley and Arcadia’s Parthenia where Mary’s real life disfigurement from smallpox appears magically cured in her son’s text. A materially and emotionally devastating experience has its damage reversed and denied in a fictional transmogrification.19 As Maureen Quilligan suggests, ‘Parthenia’s magical healing may represent the son’s wish to erase his mother’s pain.’20 There are many connections to be drawn between particular and general patterns of events in Sidney’s life and background and his Arcadia, but we want to canvass just one more point of connection. Our interest in Arcadia begins with its depiction of women who resolve to follow their own desires against various kinds of odds, and who, as we suggested before, escape the kinds of stereotypes that dominate prose fiction of the sixteenth century. Sidney’s own romantic relationships have been rather less clearly connected with Arcadia than with Astrophil and Stella for the fairly obvious reason that Stella most clearly refers to Penelope Devereux,21 one of the women Sidney might have married. Prior to Sidney’s lack of success in a projected marriage to Devereux (who married Lord Rich in 1581), Sidney had also been unsuccessful in a proposed union with Ann Cecil who in 1572 married Edward De Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Duncan-Jones’s account of Sidney’s eventual marriage to Frances Walsingham, following her ‘rash contract’ with someone called John Wickerson, suggests how vulnerable and contingent noble marriages could be and how much a woman’s own personal preferences might form part of often volatile arrangements.22 If Penelope Devereux was married to Lord Rich against her will, she had methods of coping with this later, as we shall see, and her own sister precluded such a possibility for herself (including the Earl of Leicester’s plan to marry her to the hapless Philip Sidney) by marrying Thomas Perrot on her own initiative in 1583. In his own person, and from his own experience, as well as the experience of his circle and his family, Sidney must have been keenly aware of the fraught connections between financial and familial advantage

Women of Great Wit 31

and personal persuasions in the area of courtship and marriage. As we shall see in the next chapter, these connections are even more closely explored in fiction in the work of Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth. It is with all of these very complicated historical factors in mind that we begin our investigation of how Sidney’s Arcadia explores the representation of women and female desire.

Gynecia: limiting designs a woman of great wit, and in truth of more princely virtues than her husband; of most unspotted chastity, but of so working a mind and so vehement spirits as a man may say it was happy she took a good course, for otherwise it would have been terrible. (NA, p. 76) Kalander’s description of Gynecia in Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia outlines a personal and social problem that is never resolved within that text. It is a problem for Gynecia personally and it has broader social implications. Kalander, the wise elder statesman, here has the role of explaining simultaneously to the newcomers, Pyrocles and Musidorus, and to the reader the strange set of events that has led to the voluntary exile of Basilius, taking his wife and two daughters into the countryside of Arcadia. Kalander’s admiration for Gynecia is tinged with the sense that the same qualities that make Gynecia remarkable and admirable could lead to her downfall. That is, she is a woman of great wit, wise beyond her gender, and certainly superior to her husband. She is chaste, but passionate and intelligent. This combination of qualities is ‘terrible’, in the full sense of that word, when Gynecia’s vehement spirits get the better of her, and she acts on her desires for Prince Pyrocles. Gynecia, then, provides an appropriate starting point for a discussion of the designing woman – a woman who acts in her own interests and on her own desires – primarily because she does so without becoming simply a negative exemplum. In what follows we want to explore the tensions between Gynecia’s status as an interesting and complexly developed character, and as a character in error. Her position is unique in sixteenth-century fiction in the part she plays in the broader designs of a text. She provides a good starting point for the examination of women in romance and their negotiation of the diverse demands placed upon them, and for understanding the tensions between the demands of narrative interest and conventions of feminine decorum.

32 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Kalander’s analysis of Gynecia, beautiful young wife of an older and unwiser husband, suggests that Sidney’s descriptions and ideas of love are influenced by medieval traditions, and yet depart from them. Gynecia and Basilius’s relationship reprises the stock figures of the old husband and young wife of medieval fabliau: ‘He, being already well stricken in years, married a young princess named Gynecia … of notable beauty’ (NA, p. 76). Basilius, in particular, has connections back to Chaucer’s January, indicating his indebtedness to the emblem of clown and fool, both emotionally and physically,23 primarily in his fantastical courtship of the Amazon ‘Zelmane’, who is in fact the Prince Pyrocles disguised.24 Basilius can be seen partly as stock comic characterization but it is the comparison between Basilius and Gynecia that is Sidney’s invention and that significantly alters the tone of the characterization. What begins as comedy edges over into potential tragedy.25 When Gynecia sees through Pyrocles’s Amazonian disguise to the Prince beneath, the tenor of the episodes changes. Her great wit, working mind, and vehement spirits turn comedy into potential tragedy and in Arcadia she stands as one of the most ambiguous explorations of the designing woman. Unlike the absent ideal Urania, she actively pursues the object of her desire. Unlike Artaxia and Cecropia, two other women who take their destinies in their own hands, she is distinguished by a conscience through which she makes it clear to herself and to the audience that what she pursues is inappropriate and morally wrong. As Katherine J. Roberts points out, the reader is invited to understand Gynecia’s position through access to her thoughts and feelings, to the extent that we are given greater access to them than we are to those of either of the two princesses.26 In all manner of ways Gynecia damns herself, by her own mouth and by association with the book’s negative stereotypes, adulterous women and unnatural mothers who put themselves before their children, and with women who deliberately pursue their own desires. Yet this is not the whole story of Gynecia. The portrayal of Gynecia and Basilius is part of a broader humanist exploration of human potential and frailty, and an extension of Sidney’s courtly and political duties, denied more general political exercise,27 but comparison of husband and wife is also particularly telling in terms of literary hierarchies as outlined by Sidney himself. Basilius is comic, a fool incapable of government in times of difficulty, damned by Kalander with particularly faint praise as ‘a prince of sufficient skill to govern so quiet a country’ (NA , p. 75). Metonymically, neither can Basilius govern himself, neglecting his duties on his

Women of Great Wit 33

whimsical and wrong-headed interpretation of an oracle, against Philanax’s advice, thus endangering both country and family, and thoughtlessly giving in to his ill-conceived passion for a ‘woman’ who is actually a man. At a broad level Basilius represents the dangers of a political leader who fails to take advice from his counsellors – a situation familiar to Philip Sidney and many others like him. Gynecia similarly conceives a great passion, but her position is very differently marked within the patterns of the book. Her error is singular, not part of a theme of the character-based mistakes to which Basilius is heir. Apart from this transgression, Gynecia is worthy, indeed is ‘of more princely virtues than her husband’ (NA, p. 76). Furthermore, she sees through the false appearances of disguise, and most importantly, in terms of the ethics of the book, and in Sidney’s protestant schema, is distinguished from her husband in that she has a conscience, an ‘erected wit’, that at least attempts to work against her ‘infected will’.28 Basilius foolishly, unselfconsciously, and unthinkingly gives in to his lust for Zelmane, failing to recognize the prince beneath the disguise. Gynecia recognizes the masculine reality beneath the feminine disguise and quite self-consciously acknowledges the error of her desire. Gynecia’s is a ‘dark passion’,29 and she makes Basilius look even sillier by comparison in seeing through the disguise that is opaque to him. Her self-questioning also locates Gynecia within the frequently rehearsed debate between Reason and Passion.30 Or, to put it another way, this debate is one that we, as readers, see taking place within Gynecia herself. In a series of painful self-analyses and acknowledgments, Gynecia makes it clear that she knows what she is doing is wrong, and we see the strength of the desire that propels her onwards. The dilemma couched in abstract terms in the rhetoric of the eclogues is also directly played out in the character of Gynecia in a kind of psychomachia. With antecedents in medieval forms, she illustrates a movement towards psychologically plausible character development and is part of a shift away from symbolic or emblematic representational forms. ‘The notion that the real nature of things shines through their aesthetic representation, rather than being superimposed on them through the addition of symbolic devices’, as Lois Potter argues, ‘is potentially a programme for psychological realism.’31 ‘Clearly this text in no way advocates adultery’, as Mary Ellen Lamb puts it, but ‘its depiction of Gynecia’s tortured soul feelingly represents the agony of her situation.’32 Gynecia knows that in pursuing her adulterous desire for Pyrocles, who is in love with her own daughter, she violates her central roles as

34 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

wife and mother. Time after time she rehearses her dilemma and yet resolves to continue on her path. While Gynecia is part of a tradition of flawed but human figures, what is unique about Gynecia is her gender. It is made very clear in Arcadia, through the use of Gynecia in this way, that the problems that beset human beings in Sidney’s Protestant terms are human, not gender specific. In this context, while Gynecia is particularly interesting, from a modern feminist perspective, in articulating strong feelings, the significance of her gender here is complicated by her close approximation to what is properly princely, and therefore what is inherently masculine. In this sense Gynecia can also be seen to represent Elizabeth I who famously declared in the Tilbury speech of 1588 that if she had ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’ then she also had the ‘heart and stomach of a king.’ If Basilius represents the dangers of a leader who abdicates his political responsibilities, then Gynecia represents the dangers of a woman struggling with sexual responsibility, endangering her family as Basilius endangers both family and state. Both partners illustrate the follies and dangers of poor government and the correlation between self-government and political control. If Basilius’s fault is greater and entails the situation in which Gynecia finds herself, it is telling that it is Gynecia’s that is treated more seriously and commands greater narrative interest. At the level of narrative, however, the variations on a theme also testify to the literary invention and rhetorical skills of the gifted author. (‘Now watch me tell the story in a different mode’.) The lines between sexual and political responsibility criss-cross in late sixteenthcentury fiction, as do the didactic and the romantic.33 The inevitable and consistent comparisons of Gynecia’s and Basilius’s behaviour draw attention to the dangers of political leadership wilfully subjugated to personal preferences. They also mark Gynecia as a character to be taken seriously.34 ‘Sidney treats Basilius as comic character – the foolish old man in the throes of love –’, as Roberts suggests, ‘while Gynecia is always tragic.’35 This is particularly significant given Sidney’s own work on literary value and the distinctions he makes between comedy and tragedy. The comic, for Sidney, had its own purposes and was not to be denigrated: ‘comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life [represented] … in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be. So as it is impossible, that any beholder can be content to be such a one.’36 Here is Basilius – the fool who cannot tell that the Amazon is a prince, and has no sense of his own foolishness. He is marked as hubristic, and as unable to govern and understand his feelings and his country, unable to tell a hawk

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from a handsaw, whichever way the wind is blowing. Gynecia’s character, in contrast, is marked as tragic, and serves a different purpose from Basilius’s comedy. As Sidney argues in the ‘Apology’, it is ‘the high and excellent tragedy, that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers … that with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded.’37 A comparison of Old Arcadia and New Arcadia is instructive in illustrating how Gynecia’s character is developed by Sidney in his revisions of his original work and how she is associated with the tragic as understood by Sidney. While, as Helen Hackett argues, many of the central issues raised by Gynecia are present in Old Arcadia,38 there are two key changes made by Sidney that alter the tone, significance, and affect of Gynecia’s roles. First, while Kalander’s description in New Arcadia sounds a note of warning about what might happen to Gynecia, in Old Arcadia her character is announced with a much clearer sense of the end to which it will come, and with a much firmer tone of judgement from narrator to reader. So here Gynecia is a lady worthy enough to have had her name in continual remembrance if her latter time had not blotted her well governed youth, although the wound fell more to her own conscience than to the knowledge of the world, fortune something supplying her want of virtue.39 In this version the end of the story is foreknown. The narrator assesses, and finds Gynecia guilty, and includes the assertion that the situation would have been worse, and deservedly so, had luck or fortune not intervened to save Gynecia from public indignity. Gynecia’s fate is confidently predicted and the narrative moves on. In New Arcadia, in contrast, the tone of Kalander’s description of Gynecia, which we saw earlier, lacks the decisive judgemental tone characteristic of Old Arcadia. The predictive assurance of how events will unfold in Old Arcadia (‘the wound fell … fortune something supplying’) is replaced by the more speculative tone of New Arcadia (‘a man may say … otherwise it would have been’).40 The inevitability of Old Arcadia is replaced with a sense of contingency in New Arcadia, and perhaps this reflects a shift in Sidney’s own sense of what could or should happen in the years between 1577 and 1584. In the second significant change, while the scenes at the beginning of the second book are substantially the same in both versions of

36 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

Arcadia, the responses of Cleophila in Old Arcadia and Zelmane in New Arcadia to Gynecia’s confessions of interest are subtly different.41 In the first version Cleophila is surprised and horrified at Gynecia’s revelations. She marvels ‘what sudden sickness had thus possessed her’, marvels again ‘thinking some extreme pain did make her rave’, is ‘astonished’, and then is ‘stricken even dead … finding herself discovered’ (OA, p. 83). Initially New Arcadia’s Zelmane is astonished too, but much more quickly understands Gynecia’s drift, ‘knowing well at what mark she [Gynecia] shot, yet loth to enter into it’ (NA, p. 216). This mitigates the sense of Gynecia as predator that is the focus of the first text.42 In New Arcadia the manoeuvres between the knowing woman and the knowing man seem much more evenly balanced, and if anything the sincerity of Gynecia’s passions and the authenticity of her feelings highlight Zelmane’s own callous exploitation of those around her to get what ‘she’ wants. The sense of sympathy for Gynecia is particularly sharpened in the revision of Arcadia in the passage concerning Gynecia’s dream of the thicket of thorns. In Old Arcadia this dream and the following description of Gynecia’s state of mind are third person narrative, with again the voice of the judgemental narrator predominating: then indeed did her spirit suffer a right conflict betwixt the force of love and the rage of jealousy … Thus did Gynecia eat of her jealousy, pine in her love, and receive kindness nowhere but from the fountain of unkindness. (OA, p. 103, our italics) How much more pathetic and affective is the scene in New Arcadia where the ‘great and wretched Gynecia’ assesses her own situation, lamenting: ‘O jealousy … the frenzy of wise folks, the well-wishing spite and unkind carefulness; the self-punishment for other’s fault and selfmisery in other’s happiness; the cousin of envy, daughter of love, and mother of hate, how could’st thou so quietly get thee a seat in the unquiet heart of Gynecia – Gynecia’, said she sighing, ‘thought wise and once virtuous.’ (NA, p. 377) Furthermore, in the first version, the dream is immediately followed by an interchange between Cleophila and Philoclea where the former tells the latter that he is Prince Pyrocles, before returning to the account of Gynecia’s persistent wilfulness. Here, then, Gynecia’s illegitimate desire is directly contrasted with the declaration of the legitimacy of Pyrocles’s

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and Philoclea’s desire. In New Arcadia, Gynecia is much more sympathetically presented through her self-accusations, symbolically represented by the revolt of a ‘mutinous multitude’ (NA, pp. 378–89). The different forms the condemnation of Gynecia takes – from the narrator, and from the character herself – also illustrate the general point made by Susan Gubar: ‘the soliloquy in Tudor romance is invariably a formal debate in which the character is poised between two opposing passions, two antithetical social codes. The internal monologue is obviously meant to examine a mind confronting a “careful conflict – tossed with contrarie cogitations”’.43 Gynecia is dignified through the form in which her turmoil is expressed. It is Gynecia with whom the reader identifies; it is Basilius who is rejected. The ‘affects’, or feelings, are stirred by access to Gynecia’s thoughts, while we simply laugh at, and laugh off, Basilius.44 In so far as Gynecia is princely and tragic, the reader, while being shown the ulcers, is nevertheless encouraged to commiserate. The desiring woman is shown to be in error but not demonized. She uneasily negotiates anxieties about powerful sexual women.

Independent wills though virtue is a good guard [for women]: yet it doth not always protect their persons, without human assistance: for though virtue guards, yet youth and beauty betrays, and the treachery of the one, is more than the safety of the other. (Margaret Cavendish, ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’)45 In this section it is our argument that while some of the central characters, such as Basilius, Gynecia, and Helen of Corinth (whom we come to later) approximate Elizabeth I, other key figures such as Pamela and Philoclea can be seen to represent the position of women and female desire in more general terms. New Arcadia has rightly been described as challenging the stereotypical roles of women, and it does so through acknowledging the difficulties surrounding female action in a society marked by gender hierarchies. While the love between the princes and princesses is legitimate, mutual and sanctioned in terms of rank and worth, the vulnerabilities of the women are still often evident. Take, for example, this description of Pyrocles’s desire for Philoclea by Pyrocles himself: The table at which we sat was round, which being fast to the floor whereon we sat, and that divided from the rest of the buildings, with turning a vice … the table and we about the table did all turn

38 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

round by means of water which ran under and carried it about as a mill. But alas, what pleasure did it to me to make divers times the full circle round about, since Philoclea, being also set, was carried still in equal distance from me, and that only my eyes did overtake her, which (when the table was stayed and we began to feed) drank much more eagerly of her beauty than my mouth did of any other liquor. And so was my common sense deceived, being chiefly bent to her, that as I drank the wine and withal stole a look on her, me seemed I tasted her deliciousness. But alas, the one thirst was much more inflamed than the other quenched. (NA, pp. 148–9) This passage is one of a number in New Arcadia where female characters are presented as objects of consumption for male appetite. Another, often quoted, scene has Pyrocles/Zelmane standing at the door enjoying the sight of Philoclea’s near naked body, with the aid of a strategically placed ‘rich lamp’ (NA, p. 683). As William Craft suggests, this is part of the way that Sidney’s writing ‘compels its characters to live and move within the physical realm of bodily presence and desire’ and persuades its readers ‘to feel and think within’ these structures.46 So often, New Arcadia’s readers are encouraged, or even forced, as Gubar puts it, ‘to participate emotionally in the plot’,47 to experience the moment being described, and in these two cases we are aligned with the male perspective and appetite for the consumable female. Yet against these examples are the moments in the text where, far from being simply ‘potential victims who resist’ action rather than initiate it,48 women exercise independence of will, not only in a negative sense but in a positive sense. As critics have argued, New Arcadia involves a redefinition of what constitutes virtue and heroism. Mary Ellen Lamb suggests that the constancy exhibited by the princesses Pamela and Philoclea is more attractive than ‘the empty heroism of the battlefield’,49 and that this provides models for young women readers. Helen Hackett proposes that the princesses ‘invoke a language of secular martyrdom’ and that while there are troubling aspects of this in relation to the ‘resonances of sado-masochism’, they nevertheless open up a ‘space within an apparently orthodox virtue for women as a desiring subject.’50 Sidney’s princesses in the revised Arcadia are ‘much more active’51 than they were in the first version. New Arcadia does ‘offer women a version of themselves as far more independent, powerful and significant’ than they might have been elsewhere,52 or as Paul Salzman puts it, ‘Pamela and Philoclea achieve a type of heroism in the

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Captivity Episode, but it is a passive, stoical heroism, a resistance to Cecropia.’53 All of these formulations argue for changes in the presentation of female characters in New Arcadia, yet all in some way mark this presentation as limited, most clearly evidenced here in Salzman’s ‘but’. Underneath these accounts still lurks a sense of an active/passive model marked by gender and hierarchized as such.54 And indeed there is evidence of this in the treatment of the princesses in New Arcadia. They are the victims, at least physically, of another woman’s machinations. They are reduced, brought down, tricked and abused. Yet if we look at these two central female figures in New Arcadia we can see how they negotiate the minefields of male desire to pursue their own. If Gynecia’s predicament and its sympathetic treatment is unprecedented in English fiction then so too is the direct articulation of the predicament in which Philoclea finds herself in her growing attraction to the person she thinks is a woman. There is a striking passage where Philoclea, innocent, sweet and (initially) totally guileless, catalogues and lays bare the feelings that she is developing for the Amazon Zelmane. The candid and unassuming way in which she gently works through her feelings and the possibilities they raise testifies to her total lack of any secret intentions. She herself does not know what she is experiencing. Throughout the early part of New Arcadia Philoclea is consistently presented as innocent, ‘like a young fawn who, coming in the wind of the hunters, doth not know whether it be a thing or no to be eschewed’ (NA, p. 238). She is so far incapable of determining or choosing to love anyone in particular that the imagery in which she discusses her situation repeatedly includes the sense of being overcome, invaded, and conquered. Sidney’s Arcadia very carefully ensures that Philoclea is free from any taint of wilfulness in the early stages of her relationship with Zelmane. In a lengthy sentence that mimics the gradual development of Philoclea’s feelings, readers see how Philoclea comes to feel love for Zelmane. For after that Zelmane had a while lived in the lodge with her and that her only being a noble stranger had bred a kind of heedful attention; her coming to that lonely place where she had nobody but her parents, a willingness of conversation, her wit and behaviour, a liking and silent admiration, at length the excellency of her natural gifts joined with the extreme shows she made of most devout honouring Philoclea (carrying thus, in one person, the only two bands of goodwill, loveliness and lovingness) brought forth in

40 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

her heart a yielding to a most friendly affection; which when it had gotten so full possession of the keys of her mind that it would receive no messages from her senses without that affection were the interpreter, then straight grew an exceeding delight still to be with her, with an unmeasurable liking of all that Zelmane did: matters being so turned in her that where at first, liking her manners did breed goodwill, now goodwill became the chief cause of liking her manners, so that within a while Zelmane was not prized for her demeanour but the demeanour was prized because it was Zelmane’s. (NA, p. 238) What this passage patiently establishes is the path by which Philoclea comes to love Zelmane. Clause by clause Sidney builds the sense that Philoclea is following no whim but rather an inexorably logical path founded on the observation and understanding of Zelmane’s admirable qualities, and ‘her’ attention to Philoclea herself. If observation and respect lead to admiration for Zelmane to the extent that Philoclea begins to imitate her, then this has been achieved not only ‘by the commonalty of passions … agreed unto by her most noble thoughts’ but also by that faculty for which Sidney had the highest regard: ‘reason itself (not yet experienced in the issues of such matters) had granted his royal assent’ (NA, p. 238). Yet it is important to note that at this stage it is still friendship that best describes the relationship between the two ‘women’. It is only once this ‘diligent officer’ has been established that Philoclea is described as experiencing something else, chiefly categorized by nameless longings and wishes. So step by careful step Sidney makes it clear that the process of falling in love is one over which Philoclea has had no control: ‘at the last, poor soul, ere she were aware, she accepted not only the badge but the service, not only the sign but the passion signified’ (NA, p. 239). In a couple of pages Sidney very carefully distinguishes Philoclea’s position from that of Gynecia and all the other women in the text who know what they want and go after it. In Philoclea Sidney has designed a woman who is completely innocent of any designs of her own to the extent that she does not even know what is happening to her, as she directly reveals to the reader. She summons up and dismisses a number of scenarios that might now suit the way she feels for Zelmane. Being nymphs together is inadequate because it would not provide her with the singularity of relationship that she wishes – other nymphs would share the company. Zelmane being her sister would be insufficient if Zelmane were to marry. The third option canvassed is that either she or

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Zelmane become a man.55 While Philoclea may be an innocent abroad in terms of not seeming to understand the implications of this third option, it is likely that the less innocent, more experienced reader would be aware that the possibility of marriage also entails the likelihood and necessity of a sexual relationship. Philoclea might only perceive a sense of this through ‘whole squadrons of longings’ whose meaning she does not understand, but it is unlikely that a reader would be in the same position. What is unclear to the young princess is highly suggestive to the reader, and it even begins to dawn on Philoclea herself through what we would now term her unconscious: ‘[t]hen dreams by night began to bring more unto her than she durst wish by day, whereout waking did make her know herself the better by the image of those fancies’ (NA, p. 240). So it is that finally Philoclea gives in to feelings that she does not comprehend for an outcome she cannot imagine: ‘Away then all vain examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, excellent Zelmane, and I love thee.’ And with that, embracing the very ground whereon she lay, she said to herself (for even to herself she was ashamed to speak it out in words) ‘O my Zelmane, govern and direct me, for I am wholly given over unto thee.’ (NA, p. 244) What is important to us in this section of New Arcadia is the trouble Sidney takes to ensure that Philoclea is free from any intention or self-assertion in love. Love is something that happens to Philoclea, based on friendship, appreciative of noble virtues, dependent on reciprocity and the realization that she is loved, and governed by reason. Philoclea’s implicit ability to countenance, albeit indirectly, a relationship with another woman that goes beyond friendship is momentarily startling in the context of the story as a whole. It is, of course, in the tradition of all those moments of ambiguity in renaissance drama where a character falls for the cross-dresser, and it is similarly restricted and sanitized by the audience’s knowledge of the cross-dresser’s ‘real’ sex. Yet here it is important to distinguish between what the reader knows and the knowledge of the character, particularly as it goes to the issue of the nature of the character. We may know that Zelmane is Prince Pyrocles, that a match between these two is not only acceptable but desirable, appropriate in terms of gender and class, but this is a dimension not available to Philoclea but that attests to her disinterestedness. The integrity or sincerity of her emotions for Zelmane cannot include a materialistic account of how felicitous and advantageous this

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match would be because she simply does not know who Zelmane is. She is cleared of any aspersions of self-interest before any can be made. The revelation that Zelmane is Pyrocles Prince of Macedon then effects two different gender transformations. First and most obviously, female Zelmane is revealed to be masculine Pyrocles. Second, at that same moment female Philoclea is temporarily aligned with male Pygmalion: The joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind, while he found his beloved image was softer and warmer in his folded arms till at length it accomplished his gladness with a perfect woman’s shape (still beautified with the former perfections) was even so such as, by each degree of Zelmane’s words, creepingly entered into Philoclea, till her pleasure was fully made up with the manifesting of his being, which was such as in hope did overcome hope. (NA, p. 329) The statue or representation of desire that Zelmane embodies for Philoclea comes to life with the understanding that as a man and a prince Pyrocles can fulfill the longings consuming Philoclea. The impossible has become possible. The gender transformation of Zelmane produces a momentary gender re-alignment in Philoclea, but this immediately arouses the fear that as Pygmalion Philoclea has created a situation that her femininity should have prevented. So joy passes to fear that she has transgressed female virtue: ‘I fear me, my behaviour, ill governed, gave you the first comfort: I fear me, my affection, ill hid, hath given you this last assurance. I fear, indeed, the weakness of my government before, made you think such a mask would be grateful unto me and my weaker government since, makes you to pull off the visor. What shall I do then? Shall I seek far-fetched inventions? Shall I labour to lay marble colours over my ruinous thoughts? Or rather, though the pureness of my virgin-mind be stained, let me keep the true simplicity of my word?’ (NA, p. 330) In this passage Philoclea demonstrates the fear that taxes most romance heroines – the anxiety that they will be deemed to have invited sexual advances through their own behaviour. Tinged with Philoclea’s joy is the fear and anger that she has been tricked into staining her own honour despite herself. In this moment Philoclea voices the problem that essentially has no solution, and for which there is no ultimate safeguard.56 She is emphatically aware that emotional exposure strips her of

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respectability and esteem in societies where women’s worth depends upon chastity as the guarantee of honour. She operates in a society in which the accusation of immorality is ever imminent, and acknowledges that its counterpart is unauthenticity. For Philoclea the question is how will she now behave? Given that she has demonstrated her affection for Zelmane, how can she now deny it for Pyrocles without appearing false and insincere, without laying ‘marble colours over my ruinous thoughts’ (NA, p. 330)? In the end Philoclea has to throw herself on the mercy and virtue of Pyrocles: ‘Dost thou love me? Keep me then still worthy to be loved’ (NA, p. 330). Philoclea’s need continually to protect her virtue is never far from the reader’s consciousness. Having agreed to marry Pyrocles, Philoclea’s battle for her honour continues: ‘they passed the promise of marriage, which fain Pyrocles would have sealed with the chief arms of his desire, but Philoclea commanded the contrary’ (NA, p. 331); ‘[Philoclea] would needs drink a kiss from those [Pyrocles’s] eyes, and he suck another from her lips; whereat she blushed, and yet kissed him again to hide her blushing: which had almost brought Pyrocles into another discourse, but that she with so sweet a rigour forbade him that he durst not rebel’ (NA, p. 357). If the rigorous defence of female honour is softened by the sweetness of Philoclea’s nature, and is part of the complex business of her convoluted wooing by Zelmane/Pyrocles, the rigour takes a different form in her more majestic sister, Pamela. While Musidorus and Pyrocles, for their parts, succumb instantaneously to romantic love, it is precisely this kind of unreasoning and precipitate love that neither of the princesses can afford to indulge. As we have seen with Philoclea, the process of falling in love is gradual and entirely without the kind of knowing recognition that so transforms Pyrocles and Musidorus. It is also absolutely telling that the first indication the reader gets of any kind of response by Pamela to Musidorus is presented by Musidorus himself. While Pamela has been grateful for having been saved from the ‘foul, horrible bear’ (NA, p. 179), particularly given her guardian Dametas’s craven grovelling in the shrubbery, she nevertheless asserts in no uncertain terms her sense of what is due to someone in Musidorus’s position (since he, too, is in disguise, as a servant). Striving to show his affection to her at every possible opportunity, Musidorus’s help is acknowledged according to his status as servant. ‘But too well, alas, I found that a shepherd’s service was but considered of as from a shepherd, and the acceptation limited to no further proportion than of a good servant. And when my countenance had once given notice that there lay affection under it, I saw, straight,

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Majesty (sitting in the throne of beauty) draw forth such a sword of disdain that I remained as a man thunderstricken, not daring – no not able – to behold that power.’ (NA, p. 221) So it is that, sharply reminded that Pamela is a respecter of persons, and finding his service ‘lightly regarded, my affection despised, and myself unknown’ (NA, p. 222), Musidorus is despondent until he comes up with the plan of proving his worthiness by wooing Pamela by proxy, through her attendant, Mopsa. Thus begins the comedy through which Pamela comes to learn of Musidorus’s history and identity, and through which she suffers him to make his case. Throughout this process Pamela also explains, once again, the dangers that women face. As she says, ‘she is not worthy to be loved that hath not some feeling of her own worthiness’ (NA, p. 225), and then again: ‘since the judgement of the world stands upon matter of fortune, and … the sex of womankind of all other is most bound to have regardful eye to men’s judgements, it is not for us to play the philosophers in seeking out your hidden virtues, since that which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light grounded affection: so is not one thing one, done by divers persons.’ (NA, p. 226) Yet it is precisely in this speech that Pamela reveals that, while having the sex of a woman, she also approximates the wisdom of a prince. Perhaps here again we see a reprise of Elizabeth I, exercising a careful concern about allocating her preferences to an ambitious suitor. At the same moment that she reminds Musidorus of the constraints upon her as a woman, she also provides him with the mechanism to earn her approval. While stating that Mopsa cannot openly acknowledge his virtues, Pamela encourages the strategy that will eventually allow Pamela herself to do so. Pamela has to exercise consistent self-restraint in Musidorus’s presence, and the impact of this is emphasized because it is reported by Musidorus himself, given that no one could be more interested in or sensitive to any indication of favour from Pamela than he is. The narrator states that Pamela’s questions to Musidorus about his antecedents are delivered ‘with a settled countenance not accusing any kind of inward motion’ (NA, p. 232),57 and with a ‘calm carelessness’ (NA, p. 233), which is starkly contrasted with Mopsa’s ecstatic reaction. Faced with such ‘cruel quietness’ (NA, p. 234), Musidorus threatens to

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slump into despair, and he comes up with a dramatically evocative picture of his failure to achieve the desired response from her: ‘howsoever I show I am no base body, all I do is but to beat a rock and get foam’ (NA, p. 234). Musidorus’s despondency is a measure of Pamela’s success in selfprotection, and in guarding her public reputation. Privately, however, Pamela reveals the extent to which this represents a significant effort of will. Far from being an effortless or automatic and technical exercise, Pamela’s resolve is revealed, when she is alone or with her sister, to be maintained only through intelligence and tenacity, and with some uncertainty. Pamela might be able to hide her blushes in the dark, but her speech gives her away to her younger sister. ‘The constancy of your wit’, as Philoclea puts it to Pamela, ‘was not wont to bring forth such disjointed speeches’ (NA, p. 246). If the difference between the sisters is marked – in relation to romantic love here, Philoclea’s experience has certainly lacked the careful and self-aware analysis that marks Pamela’s – in both cases the narrative makes clear and beyond doubt that each princess is morally blameless. While lack of guile or self-determination is the hallmark of Philoclea’s immersion in love, in Pamela’s case it is the rational and careful analysis of the rightness of the love-object. Can she, she asks, ‘without the detestable stain of ungratefulness abstain from loving him who (far exceeding the beautifulness of his shape with the beautifulness of his mind, and the greatness of his estate with the greatness of his acts) is content so to abase himself as to become Dametas’ servant for my sake?’ (NA, p. 247). Posing and answering rhetorical questions, Pamela reveals to her sister and the reader that she has weighed up the evidence presented to her regarding Musidorus’s true identity and found it compelling and irrefutable, and that this need to make judgements on her own behalf is further necessitated by her parents’ complete lack of care: ‘since my parents deal so cruelly with me, it is time for me to trust something to my own judgement’ (NA, p. 249). Like Philoclea’s battle to retain her virtue, Pamela’s scrutiny of the evidence before her and her own reactions to it is ongoing. While she reveals to her sister and the reader the extent of her commitment to Musidorus’s case, this is still not revealed to the prince himself, as is indicated in her response to the first of two letters that he sends her. The first one she accepts without any sign of kindness – an action that is only undertaken with great difficulty, as is evident by the fact that as soon as the prince walks out of the door again, the kindness that she could not allow herself to convey to the prince is bestowed upon the

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door itself (NA, p. 251). Later on, Musidorus presumes to move from narrative and history to personal pleading, and forgets what is due to Pamela so far as to try to kiss her, which forces her again to withdraw. Pamela, like Philoclea, keeps having to reassert a distance that is vital to the preservation of female reputation, and that the princes repeatedly transgress: ‘“Away”, said she, “unworthy man to love or to be loved! Assure thyself, I hate myself for being so deceived: judge then what I do thee for deceiving me. Let me see thee no more, the only fall of my judgement and stain of my conscience.”’ (NA, p. 436). Musidorus’s response to this is appropriately distraught as he lurches off into the woods for two days, without food or comfort. The second letter that he then comes to write to Pamela is a long poem that rehearses the injustices of his position, reminds her that her beauty is the cause of his ruin, and rebukes her for her inconstancy. Pamela’s difficulty is evocatively portrayed in her indecision as to whether she should read the letter. Convinced now, as she is, of Musidorus’s worthiness and of her own duty to and affection for him, she nevertheless fears the effects of his presumption. Grasping the letter, she realizes its provenance, yet in the same instant fears what it might contain, ‘therefore clapping it to again she went away from it as if it had been a contagious garment of an infected person’ (NA, p. 438). It is only through a marvellous piece of equivocation (which presages the moral dilemmas and the ambiguous responses to them that were to become characteristic of the debates about Sidney’s Pamela’s later namesake, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela) that she allows herself to do what she wants to do, and reads the letter: ‘Shall I’, said she, ‘second his boldness so far as to read his presumptous letters? And yet’, said she, ‘he sees me not now, to grow the bolder thereby: and how can I tell whether they be presumptuous?’ The paper came from him, and therefore not worthy to be received; and yet the paper, she thought, was not guilty. At last, she concluded it were not much amiss to look it over, that she might out of his words pick some further quarrel against him. Then she opened it, and threw it away, and took it up again, till (ere she were aware) her eyes would needs read it. (NA, p. 438). This kind of dilemma suggests that critics have rightly identified the moral fortitude demonstrated by Philoclea and Pamela in their captivity under Cecropia, but there has been less focus on the princesses’ conduct with their lovers, which can be seen to pose different and

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equally important challenges. Neither princess is tempted to love or to marry Cecropia’s son Amphialus – their affections and love have been bestowed elsewhere. It is in dealing with their lovers that the two princesses are most severely tested and come closest to crossing moral lines that threaten their reputations. Pamela’s uncertainty as to how to respond to Musidorus’s reproaches in his letter-poem is considerable – ‘What this would have wrought in her she herself could not tell’ (NA, p. 441) – and it is only the intervention of Cecropia’s machinations that saves Pamela from herself at this point.58 She has to be saved again by an external force, once she has agreed to leave Arcadia with Musidorus. Now reliant on his protection alone, she is again vulnerable as she sleeps, unaware that Musidorus hangs over her. What might have happened next is forestalled as the ‘clownish villains’ (NA, p. 654) come upon them and take them back to trial. What seems evident to us is that among many other things, New Arcadia demonstrates a clear narrative concern with how women (even women as innocent or as majestic as Philoclea and Pamela) are severely taxed in their endeavours to love wisely and virtuously. There are numerous and varied forces against them, parental, political, and accidental. At some points in New Arcadia, indeed, the sense of the difficulties facing the princesses becomes almost farcical in its extent. Delivered from the cruelties of Cecropia by her death, and released from Amphialus by his self-harm, Pamela and Philoclea are next embarrassed by the unwanted attentions of the grim brothers, Anaxius and Lycurgus, whose only redeeming feature is that they are not quite as imperceptive as their younger brother Zoilus, who makes the Basilian mistake of attempting ‘Zelmane’. Yet if the repeated attempts on the princesses become increasingly excessive and immoderate, this nonetheless works to emphasize how perilous the princesses’ position is. Time and time again, Pamela and Philoclea are required to take action for themselves, and to defend their decisions. While the two princesses are, of course, central characters in New Arcadia’s narrative, an examination of two final examples will further illustrate how dominant is the theme of delineating desiring women in Sidney’s revised Arcadia, and suggest also how this theme spoke to and was recognized by later readers and writers.

Unfinished business The stories of Parthenia and Helen of Corinth are linked when they are first introduced by Palladius, early in New Arcadia, in book one, and

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they provide fascinating suggestions that Sidney here is rewriting the relationships between his mother and Queen Elizabeth. Philip Sidney’s own mother was seriously scarred by smallpox, and subsequently left Elizabeth’s court as a result of that affliction. In Arcadia Parthenia is damaged by a poison thrown in her face but the damage is reversed by the ministrations of Helen of Corinth. In representing Parthenia as the damaged then cured ideal figure of womanhood, with Helen of Corinth as the troubled but generous female monarch, Sidney’s account repays the service of a loyal lady and courtier with courtesy and renewal, rather than years of ‘seclusion, illness, and humiliation’ that were the fate of Lady Sidney, and, to some extent, her son.59 Again we see how particular fictional incidents manifest both specific and general associations. Parthenia is the epitome of female virtue, forced, like the princesses, to deal with unwise parental decisions. Parthenia’s mother decides that she should accept the attentions of Demagoras in a decision that clearly reflects dynastic and worldly interests rather than those of romantic love. Demagoras is her mother’s rich and powerful neighbour.60 The indictment of him is that he loves no-one except himself, and ‘for his own delight’s sake, Parthenia’ (NA, p. 88), where Parthenia’s attractions lie in her beauty and in her value as a possession. She is not valued for herself and her own happiness is not a consideration. Parthenia initially obeys her mother, not because she agreed with the choice but because ‘her obedient mind had not yet taken upon it to make choice’ (NA, p. 88). But when Parthenia meets Argalus, ‘the mutual affection’ between them teaches Parthenia the need to demonstrate her judgement and refuse to marry Demagoras. Perhaps this is the first instance in Sidney’s New Arcadia of the conjunction of Protestant and humanist values so dear to Sidney, of right-thinking wit and will, of the tenet that ‘men’s actions do not always cross with reason’, though they often might.61 Parthenia’s resolute refusal of Demagoras is underwritten by her own good judgement and by external assessments of Argalus’s own qualities. The stark contrast between good daughter and bad mother is evident in an observer’s reluctance to name the mother’s error: The change was no more strange than unpleasant to the mother who, being determinately (lest I should say of a great lady, wilfully) bent to marry her to Demagoras, tried all ways which a witty and hard-hearted mother could use upon so humble a daughter in whom the only resisting power was love. (NA, p. 89, our emphasis)

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The mother’s self-destructive anger at her daughter’s persistence and Demagoras’s spiteful willingness to destroy what he himself cannot have by throwing poison into Parthenia’s face then lead into the painful self-sacrifice that Parthenia undergoes. Unwilling to allow Argalus to commit himself to someone whose beauty has been so badly marred, Parthenia’s absence and subsequent healing by Helen’s surgeons once again link these two women whose beauty can be compared only with the princesses. Argalus’s later refusal to love someone who simply looks like Parthenia, arguing that it was ‘Parthenia’s self I loved and love, which no likeness can make one, no commandment dissolve, no foulness defile, nor no death finish’ (NA, p. 105), illustrates the combined labours that this couple undertake, and the temptations and tests that they complete to reach their successful union. The reciprocity of their relationship is further marked when we next see the married lovers, many pages later. Argalus reads to Parthenia tales of Hercules, while Parthenia listens, as absorbed in Argalus as she is in the stories he reads. The messenger who interrupts this idyllic scene to seek Argalus’s encounter with Amphialus then leads to what Argalus protests is ‘the first time that ever you resisted my will’ (NA, p. 503), a protest that leaves Parthenia in a speechless swoon. That it is Amphialus who is responsible for the end of this perfect relationship, in the deaths of both Parthenia and Argalus, is also a corollary of his own mother’s, Cecropia’s, malicious self-serving. The mothers of both Parthenia and Amphialus contribute to the destruction of their children through the exercise of their will enabled by their active wit and powerful circumstances. New Arcadia represents a range of intelligent women with designs or interests of their own. Of all of these, apart from Gynecia’s, perhaps Helen of Corinth’s story is most equivocal. While Parthenia’s story concerns a justified resistance to tyrannous parental authority, Helen’s story has no such clear justification, and is complicated by being told (largely) by herself to others, again linking her back to Gynecia. Helen’s self-accusations indicate both her errors and her awareness of her errors, providing another complex portrait of female will. If Helen is a shadowing of Elizabeth I, then it is an Elizabeth self-conscious enough to reflect on her own wilfulness, and an Elizabeth grateful for the advice of others. As Helen tells it, her problem arises from being pursued by Philoxenus when her interest is in Amphialus. She, like various other characters in Arcadia, tries to use one man to come at another, but it is Amphialus’s indignation at being so actively pursued at the expense of his friend that is the focus. Convinced that

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Amphialus will never see the situation for himself, Helen, ‘grown bolder, or madder, or bold with madness’ as she puts it, ‘discovered my affection unto him’ (NA, p. 124). The quandary in which this active desire by a woman puts a good man is vividly described by Helen: ‘But lord, I shall never forget how anger and courtesy at one instant appeared in his eyes when he heard that motion; how with his blush he taught me shame’ (NA, p. 124). Caught between anger at the unseemly behaviour of this active woman, and at the treatment of his friend Philoxenus, and a distaste at behaving discourteously to someone of Helen’s rank and fame, Amphialus demonstrates to Helen the discrimination that she herself has abandoned. That Amphialus then becomes the unwilling murderer of a friend who is incensed at what he perceives to be his betrayal indicates once again the dangers that desiring women represent. They destroy male friendships, and cause the death of good men.62 But, just as readers can understand the errors in Gynecia’s behaviour and condemn them without completely condemning Gynecia herself, observers both within and outside New Arcadia can have empathy for Helen. Taking up the story of Helen in book two, Pyrocles’s estimation of her is complex. He is at pains, for example, to shield Helen from contumely: For never, I think, was there any woman that with more unremovable determination gave herself to the counsel of love after she had once set before her mind the worthiness of your cousin Amphialus, and yet is neither her wisdom doubted of, nor honour blemished. For O God, what doth better become wisdom than to discern what is worthy the loving? What more agreeable to goodness than to love it, so discerned, and what to greatness of heart, than to be constant in it once loved? (NA, p. 352). Pyrocles provides justification of a kind for Helen’s actions. Her constancy in a good cause absolves her from recrimination. It is partly Amphialus’s error in loving where he is not loved in return and partly his mother’s malicious pursuit of her own ends that force Helen to take up her own cause. It is Amphialus’s judgement that is faulty, as Pyrocles insists in his references to the extensive reputation of Helen’s beauty and judgement. The poignancy of Helen’s pursuit of Amphialus even unto the brink of death is palpable in the descriptions of book three, where even the misogynist Anaxius provides Helen with access to Amphialus and an escort for her safe return with his body to Corinth.

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By finishing with Helen here we hope to have illustrated how ambiguously positioned good desiring women are in New Arcadia, where neither Gynecia nor Helen are unequivocally condemned, even if their errors are evident. Part of the complications surrounding these figures lies in their uneasy relationship to a living monarch, but Arcadia’s representation of intelligent and witty women, capable of determining their own actions, with desires and designs of their own, also has a wider resonance. Sidney also speaks both specifically and generally to his audience in that so many of the dilemmas that his female figures face relate to problems confronting aristocratic woman of the period. The tensions between concepts of romantic love and companionate marriage, issues of strategic and political alliances, dissatisfaction and incompatibilities within marriage, and male and female inconstancy were factors facing many men and women of the time, as Sidney himself well knew. In subsequent chapters we explore how the kinds of ambiguous representations that we have seen in New Arcadia recur in later texts, and how these ambiguities in designing women with desires of their own are increasingly resolved in favour of female characters who escape from the condemnatory axis that positions the good woman as passive and the active woman as bad. In particular, we take up work by later women writers who, it seems, were sufficiently perturbed by the poignancy of a story like Helen’s to rewrite it to give Helen a happy ending – to finish some unfinished business. First, however, we turn to a relative of Sidney’s, Lady Mary Wroth, who in her own life and work explored what it meant to be ambiguously positioned.

2 ‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating Desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania

Making Urania There are obvious connections between Mary Wroth’s Urania (1621) and Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1593), not least of which are established through their direct family relationship, with Wroth being the daughter of Barbara (née Gamage) and Sidney’s brother Robert. Influenced by both her uncle Sidney and aunt Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Wroth’s two volume Urania has only in the last 20 years received much criticism. The mammoth task of writing Urania clearly took some of its impetus from a redirection of her uncle’s interests. Where Urania is the absent idealized and Platonic means by which Sidney’s Arcadian shepherds Claius and Strephon are raised above their pastoral capacities, in Wroth’s text she occupies a much more central role, and begins by searching out her own identity rather than enhancing the identity of others. Wroth’s text both conspicuously links back to Sidney’s and begins a trajectory of its own. That Wroth should find in Sidney’s work material that was congenial but marked by limitations is understandable. No more than Sidney himself could Wroth begin to imagine worlds outside the references that were available to her, yet in identifying with a celebrated relative Wroth also invokes those familial connections to gain herself some new ground. That her essay into the literary field met with a very different response from her uncle’s testifies both to the vulnerabilities of a woman who chose to write fiction rather than translate the work of others and to the different interests that a woman like Wroth inevitably brought to her work. It is no overstatement to say that if female characters in Arcadia threaten to dominate their male counterparts, often asserting their 52

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moral superiority, then in Urania this potential has become a reality. Where Sidney’s princesses certainly strive to escape being only the sexual objects of male desire, in Urania the tables are almost entirely turned, limiting the space allocated to the expression of male desire and demonstrating intense interest in how women understand and come to terms with their own desires. Urania is most certainly a text focused on women, and one that demonstrates quite different values from those seen in Arcadia. In considering the representation of female desire as it is played out in Urania it is once again impossible to ignore how the relationship between autobiography and text is affected by gender. It is fair to say that Sidney’s reputation considerably improved after his death, and it is also true that Wroth encountered significant notoriety in her own lifetime. The story of the attacks on Urania by Lord Denny, who saw himself in it, attests to the differences between topical references in Arcadia and in Urania. If various figures in the former recall Elizabeth I, then this is a safer kind of reference to make given that Sidney could be reasonably sure that she was not likely to see the manuscript. The publication of Urania takes it into a less predictable arena, and the kind of correspondences identified in it also seems to have a more local and personal focus. Josephine A. Roberts outlines Denny’s identification of himself in Urania, shadowed under the character of Sirelius in an episode that symbolizes the text’s critique of patriarchal structures. When a husband becomes jealous of his wife’s relationship with another man – which she refuses to end ‘more out of her spirit, that disdaind to be curbd, than extraordinary liking of him’ (U, I: 515–6) – it is her father who threatens to kill her and eggs on his son-in-law to violence. Denny’s irate self-identification and outburst in a poem ‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Sirelius’ testifies to the effectiveness of Wroth’s criticism even as it identifies her as Pamphilia. As Wroth’s verse in reply puts it: ‘Your spitefull words against a harmless booke / Show that an ass much like the sire doth looke.’1 Denny’s strong reaction suggests that if pastoral veiling is a courtly game it is one whose rules can be violated on either side – by a writer who goes beyond general and political observation, by a reader who rips down the veil intended to mask the writer. While Sidney as writer explores self-representation as an educated shepherd courtier in Arcadia, it is significant that the representation of Wroth in Urania is multiple rather than single. Roberts suggests that Pamphilia, Bellamira and Lindamira can be seen as the most prominent self-portraits (U, I: lxxi), all of which deal with secret love and the

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struggle to reconcile the personal and the public. Wroth’s less than happy marriage to Robert Wroth, her well-known affair with her cousin William Herbert, and the birth of their two children resulted in the retirement of another member of the Sidney family to compose a work (probably between 1618 and 1620) that once again came at public events in a different guise. Yet Wroth’s use of pastoral and romance iterates an understanding of the gender inequalities of the seventeenth century that reflect much more closely her lived experience as wife, lover, and mother. Throughout Urania Wroth employs satire and humour to canvass the constraints on women and the options available to them, and in over 300 female characters demonstrates some of the contradictions surrounding women in this period. Her use of romance also exceeds Sidney’s in its employment of magical contrivances and fantastical scenarios, highlighting the difficulties of imagining circumstances that might be more propitious for the expression of female desire. It has also been said that Urania’s treatment of women and gender is inconsistent ‘for the narrator occasionally includes asides that imply an acceptance of male superiority’ (U, I: lvii). To acknowledge these two points is to remember that the road from Arcadia to Jane Eyre is not a smooth path of evolution. Just as formally and stylistically Urania curves back to the extravagances of earlier Spanish romances, so it includes the spectacles of contemporary court masques, and again sweeps forward in its focus on female characters and the imagination of worlds not circumscribed by marriage and male domination. Urania rehearses and tries to find ways to resist specific ideological constraints against the expression of female desire. In its overall structure and narrative impasses it also acknowledges the difficulties of a woman writing in a fictional form that was nevertheless clearly recognized as alluding to specific and general concerns of the time.

How far should a woman go? Wroth’s Urania illustrates at great (and sometimes bewildering) length Lysander’s statement in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that ‘the course of true love never did run smooth’.2 The obstacles that he lists as hindering the course of true love are specific: differences in class, incompatibility in age, the involvement of friends, or interventions through war, sickness or death. To these must be added in Lysander and Hermia’s case the specific circumstances of parental control. All these obstacles, and more, are present in Urania, and in this

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chapter we begin to map out the range of ways in which women deal with their own desires in inauspicious circumstances, and against specific social and ideological constraints in the long complex texts that make up Urania.3 There are, for example, a series of minor characters who actively pursue their love. Nereana’s pursuit of Steriamus, for example, invites condemnation not only from him but also from the protagonist Pamphilia, and throughout Urania Nereana is dubbed the ‘amorous lady’ (U, I: 193), ‘the strange princesse’ (U, I: 195), ‘an adventurous lover’ (U, I: 196), and ‘a poore, imagined distracted creature’ (U, I: 495). She finally runs off with a married prince, serving as a negative example to others. No one more explicitly demonstrates the ‘chastity-silence equation’,4 though, than the naughty Lady who lives within the marvellously named ‘Forrest Gulfe’ where ‘doe all delight to ride, and yet none but are swallowed up when past that plaine, and arrived heere within this devouring throat’ (U, I: 401). The connection between sealed female bodies and silence has become a critical orthodoxy, and this is surely a good example of how those connections very often were made and understood.5 The Lady, who ‘maintaines her selfe and her pleasures’ (U, I: 401), dresses with ‘her necke all bare as low as her brests could give her leave for too much immodestie to shew’ (U, I: 403), and is the paradigm of promiscuity and assertive female sexuality: She had her hair curled, and dress’d up with Jewels, and Rings, and many pritty devices, as wantonly, and phantastically placed as her eyes, which laboured in twinckling to moistnesse, giving occasion for beliefe, that that humour was most ruling in her. Unsteady she was in her fashion, her head set upon so slight a necke, as it turnd like a weather-cocke to any vaine conceit that blew her braines about: or like a staulke of Oates, the eare being waighty: her feete neuer but mooving, as not willing to stand, or sit still; her gate wagling and wanton. (U, I: 403)6 There is also the female monster in part two, much of whose monstrousness depends on her assertive female sexuality: ‘This thing, monstrous and fauning, came towards mee [Clavarindo], wagling her head like a light wanton, licking her lips for treacherous kisses, and bowing, as idolators doe to Images, courting as farr as beastlines can doe’ (U, II: 69).7 In part one there is the aptly named Lycencia who plays off against each other the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Urania, the Dukes of Wirtenberg and Brunswick. Having toyed with their passions and fled, Lycencia

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meets an appropriate death with a ‘man equall to her’ (U, I: 625), who throws her off a craggy cliff: ‘but as she fell loving all mankind, she held him so fast as he went unwillingly with her, breaking their necks, and so past the same way of unfortunate end, yet fittest for ill so to go together’ (U, I: 625). In these examples, Wroth’s depictions of immodest and sexually aggressive women reflect the extreme cultural associations of women with flesh, sin, and seduction, but in each case this is undercut by the sheer excessiveness of the descriptions and the sense that the monstrous threatens to become caricature. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, ‘where the modern structuralist understanding of the world tends to sharpen its sense of individuation by meditating upon the normative, the Renaissance tended to sharpen its sense of the normative by meditating upon the prodigious’,8 and this is a tendency that still exists residually in Urania. Yet while these three examples can be seen as part of the monstrous regiment of women characterized by their licentiousness, other incidents in Urania present more complex and contradictory pictures of desiring women and include a reworking of the notion of the monstrous sexual female in a way that mocks male vulnerability.9 One particularly amusing scene involves Philarchos, happily married to Orilena,10 who meets the beautiful princess Claribella. Confronted with the sight of her beauty in a verdant arbour, Philarchos remembers past pleasures as a lover. His uncertainties in the face of evident temptation are described in a lengthy passage that smacks of self-justification, with the end result that he resolves to ‘bee a while a taster, if nott possesso[r] of sum pleasure. Lett Varietie a little come in place instead of teadiousness to one course’ (U, II: 123). Philarchos’s actions, his deviation from the path of married fidelity, are marked out spatially. In his eagerness to get downstairs to the princess in the arbour he finds a door behind a hanging in his room that leads not downstairs but into a bedroom, wherein lies, centre stage, ‘a most rich bed standing in the midst of the roome’, in which lies ‘a lady of admirable beautie’ (U, II: 124) marred only by her sadness, which, as it turns out, is caused by her unrequited love for him. Overhearing her declaration of love for him, ‘fearing I might heere bee wrought to the full height of libertie’ (U, II: 124), Philarchos realizes that he should save himself from temptation and leave immediately. That he knows this and does not do so comically implicates him as the victim of his own desires. Again justifying his actions, this time through a sense of his own ability to withstand temptation based on his bravery in the field, as well as the wish to avoid the charge of ‘insivilitie’ (U, II: 125), Philarchos steels himself

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to address the beautiful lady and console her in her grief. Her response is a parody of the vulnerable lady, articulating as it does all the grounds of her vulnerability. The lady was, says Philarchos (as one might imagine) ‘infinitely amased to see her self thus surprised, att such a time of night, and in such a place, her chamber, all alone in bed, and wholy att my mercy, as she caled itt’ (U, II: 125). The archness of tone here is emphasized, given that this account of adulation for Poliarchos is one re-told by Poliarchos himself to two women, Veralinda and Pamphilia. His extensive account includes specific details that make it hard to take the scene seriously, as we hear how he ‘satt upon the bed (a little more then sitting), bending towards her and discorsing of many matters, yett all of love, wee passed till day breake the time away’ (U, II: 126), and ripples with erotic desire, as he throws himself on to the bed and holds her trembling hand as she tells how they met before. Her praise of him provokes sharp criticism of her lack of honour and modesty, and he reminds her that he is a married man and ‘nott in any way fitt for you to thinke of in that kinde’ (U, II: 128). He declares himself amazed at her behaviour as he realizes that the trembling he thought arose from fear that he might take advantage of her really ‘proceeded from over-much plenty of desire and … inward flames, which grew to that heigth which made modesty to strongly move’ (U, II: 129). His subsequent lecture to her is a masterpiece of high-mindedness, telling her to go home to her father, to purge herself of ‘this swelling Vapour of fond and unworthy (though aspiring love)’, repent, abolish ‘loose and wanton love’, purge her soul of Cupid, Venus and blasphemies, and to ‘wrap your self up as in your winding sheete in the truthe of chastity and modest love’ (U, II: 130). Stricken by conscience, and shamed by his words, the lady vows to obey his commands and go home. The final comic element of the scene is added when, in recalling his lather of self-righteousness, Philarchos admits to Pamphilia how close a call this was: ‘butt deerest Sister, beeleeve mee, I never was soe neere by temptation like to breake my faith to my faithfull Orilena’ (U, II: 130). It is hard to see this extended account as anything other than a wry satire on male pretensions, particularly given that this dangerous situation could have been avoided had he left the room as soon as he realized it was a lady’s bedroom, and given that he stumbled upon it on his way to visit Claribella with intentions at least dubious. While Philarchos’s target is the lascivious attentions of a woman who speaks immodestly of her desire, the text’s is surely masculine egotism, lack of self-awareness and restraint, and the tendency to blame women for

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male vulnerabilities. A more briefly told story involves Selarinus who is magicked into sin, succumbing to a beautiful lady who lures him into staying with her and having two children before he is rescued by Melissea. In incidents like these we see hapless men seduced by mysterious and magical women intent on destroying their honour and constancy in ways that emphasize the men’s feeble will power as much as the wickedness of the women. An incident that similarly represents conventional tropes about positive and negative femininities occurs again in part two, focused this time on the female perspective, and taking the form of an allegory concerning Fancy and Love. Just as Philarchos’s words in their extravagance and intensity undermine his credibility, so too Fancy’s description of her attitude to marriage and love resonates beyond its overt and ostensible context. While what she says fits convention, the way that she says it undermines the convention, producing more sympathy for Fancy’s position. The story, in brief, is this. Amphilanthus, Steriamus, Parselius, Urania, Pamphilia and others come across a lad and lass by a riverside in a typically pastoral setting, and overhear their conversation. The lad accuses the lass of cooling in her affections to him, and asks why. Conventional enough so far. Her reply starts to move away from conventions by effectively accusing him of becoming dull, of being complacent about her attentions, of giving up the courting that she enjoyed, such as presenting her ‘with fruite, with flowers, with girlands, with poesies, with pretty taulke, with songs, with riddles, with any thing that hath pleasure, profitt, or witt in it.’ In short he has become dull: ‘thy dullnes, I hate; thy slobring abhorr; thy silly twatling dispise’ (U, II: 36). Presented with such a compelling list of his shortcomings, the lad offers to learn from his mistakes and to change, only to be met with the reply that he would need to have wit before he goes to learn. That the lad learns from this to go and seek a kinder maid is explicitly presented in the text as punishment for the lass’s pride and fickleness. The narrator makes the listeners’ contempt clear. Her poetry is damned with faint praise as ‘truly nott contemptable’, and Parselius reminds her of the danger she runs: ‘your scorne must have a fall, as your pride must be abated when your groves a wither branch of an once flourishing tree, and learne to weare willow as your last ornament.’ (U, II: 40). At this level the tale is clearly a warning about female pride and its likely results. Yet the lass’s own story and the way she tells it set up strong emotional waves that run against the overt moral. Initially she laments that while she had many suitors, very few of them spoke of marriage,

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that the lad was one who did and the one she liked best. It seems perverse that it is precisely his honourable intentions towards her that inspire her dismissal of him. Yet this speech graphically portrays the limited options of the single woman in the seventeenth century, caught between choosing a certain kind of liberty and freedom, and the comfort and security of a good marriage. Marriage itself would involve unattractive aspects, Fancy argues in a description redolent of the realities of a working woman’s domestic life: ‘mee thought a little mirthe was better than ties att home, bawling of bratts, monthes keepings-in, houswyfery, and daries, and a pudder of all home-made troubles.’ Yet against this she acknowledges the attractions of ‘A fin house, a good fire, a soft bed in winter, noe wants, good clothes for all seasons, hansome discourse with a reasonable husband, children to pass away the time withall: thes are speciall good, and all thes a happy wyfe hath to comfort her in her yeers’ (U, II: 38). The text, in the form of its central aristocratic figures, condemns the unhappy lass, but the words that she speaks, and the vivid way that she describes the options she sees, strike a jarring note that refuses any easy condemnation.11 If Philarchos’s story is a parody of male vulnerability to female sexual desire, the story of Fancy and Love illustrates the stark choices that confront a woman with agendas of her own. Two final examples illustrate our sense that Urania is explicitly concerned with anatomizing different forms of female desire. First there is the Brittany Lady, a widow ‘brave, and confident … sweet, and grave … mild and discreet’.12 While initially she enjoys the attentions of the myriad suitors who pursue her, affected by none of them, ‘free, and bold’ in her freedom, glorying ‘like a Marygold in the Sun’ (U, I: 322), she comes to love a man with ‘a noble mind, a free disposition, a brave, and manly countenance, excellent discourse, wit beyond compare, all these joyned with a sweete, and yet not Courtier-like dainty Courtship’ (U, I: 268). He indicates his interest in her but does not ask her directly: ‘He shewed enough to make me see he would rather aske than deny, yet did not, scorning refusall as well he might; free gift was what he wished, and welcom’d, daintynes had lost him, for none cold winne or hold him, that came not halfe way at the least to meete his love, I came much more …’ (U, I: 323). The Brittany widow’s story is an illustration of the problems that women face in determining how far to go in the pursuit of love in

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romances that see love as a gift freely given, not passively endured or reciprocated. The problems confronting the fishing maid are different. She is pursued by suitors, and her father wishes her to marry his choice of suitor. Furthermore, she loves but is kept by her modesty from indicating her affection to one who, unlike the Brittany Lady’s suitor, hated a forward woman, and could love none but such an one, who he must win by suite and love, and who would love him so, as though most earnestly, yet pretily to make him thinke, neglect did governe her, which would be like Cordials to his heart, or a diet to increase the stomack of his love’ (U, I: 294). Her task is to avoid the marriage advocated by her father without losing her reputation and she reviews the options using the image of a spider weaving its web, discussed in our introduction: then was I to worke my end, having no meanes, save mine owne industrie, and strength of mind busied like a Spider, which being to crosse from one beame to another, must worke by waies, and goe farre about, making more webs to catch her selfe into her own purpose, then if she were to goe a ordinary straight course: and so did I, out of my wit weave a web to deceive all, but mine own desires. (U, I: 293). Having avoided one suitor through his death, she sees the only bar to her love as ‘a little nice, and childish modesty, which would a vertue prove in shewing modest love’ (U, I: 294), only to find that the object of her love, unaware of her affection, has married elsewhere. The tangle of the web and the necessity of taking only indirect action have left her short of her target. Her own marriage follows when ‘all was lost, and hope of joy quite dead’ (U, I: 294). The final part of the story, however, is taken by the listening princes, Amphilanthus and Ollorandus, to be happiness beyond compare. Her original lover she now meets again and shares with him ‘all pleasures we can wish, content, and love, and happines in that’ (U, I: 294), her husband learning not to be jealous and that ‘more innocency lyes under a fayre Canope, then in a close chest, which lock’t, the inward part may be what it will’ (U, I: 295). Unable to marry as she chooses, the fishing maid nevertheless negotiates her way to a position that affords her ‘affection discovered at the height, and as true love would wish, freely

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given and taken’ (U, I: 295). While her stratagems, her web making, her thoughts busy as bees in a swarm to set her ‘mind, and ends aright’ (U, I: 294), have not entirely worked out as she intended, the happy resolution to her situation is a compelling contrast to more conventionally described relationships. She has negotiated the demands of obedience to patriarchal authority (represented by father and husband here) and the social expectations of female modesty within and outside marriage in a situation characterized by reciprocity, and lauded by observers as an example of felicities they do not yet enjoy. In doing so she redefines the parameters of virtue and signals possibilities beyond the assumption that marriage is the ultimate and only repository of female desire, however much her position is marked by its singularity and the difficulty of its attainment. The image of the wife, her husband, and her lover co-existing in amiable and loving contentment is an unconventional and arresting tableau among the plethora of images within Urania, particularly in so far as it shows life beyond marriage. Where Sidney’s Gynecia struggles to accommodate her sexual desires in an unsatisfactory marriage, Wroth’s fishing lady finds a way beyond the impasse. In the next section we explore how these images of unconventional relationships sit alongside and are related to the central relationship between the lovers Amphilanthus and Pamphilia as part of the register of desire that the text explores.

Virtues and necessities In the second part of Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, Pamphilia places herself under a vow of silence in relation to Amphilanthus whom she has long loved. Faced with the knowledge of his marriage to the princess of Slovenia she decides to protect herself with a vow of silence towards him: ‘I must nott’, she says, ‘abase my self-felt wrongs soe farr as to converce with my ruin’ (U, II: 199). At one level Pamphilia’s decision seems entirely consistent with conduct book advice concerning female silence, retreating to a position of ‘womanly propriety’.13 What is invoked is so much part of our understandings of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century assumptions about female behaviour that it hardly needs referencing – the notion that women should be chaste, silent, and obedient. As Christina Luckyj points out, since the publication of Suzanne W. Hull’s 1982 book, the notion of the ideal renaissance woman as ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ has become a cliché, and feminine silence has been taken to be the adoption of ‘a simple and monolithic patriarchal injunction’ – an

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internalization of the discourse of the oppressor.14 Yet silence as a category, as a description, and as a state of being, has for too long been assumed to be monovalent in its meanings and significances. Silence can be seen as a powerful rhetoric in itself, even if it is not without its contradictions and inherent dangers: ‘On the one hand feminine silence appears to offer no meaningful point of entry into literary history. On the other hand, as soon as woman uses language, she can be defined and controlled’ (Luckyj, p. 6). Maureen Quilligan rethinks the relationship between silence and passivity in describing Pamphilia’s refusal to respond as ‘an active desire that looks like paralysed stasis.’15 In this sense she can be linked back to the heroic fortitude of her antecedent, Sidney’s Pamela, and the notion of ‘withstanding’ as a positive and Christian virtue, rather than a negative and passive obedience.16 Yet a closer examination of Pamphilia’s vow reveals the complexities of this discussion of acting on female desire and brings into debate not only how a female protagonist is seen but how she sees her own position. The interpretation by others of a woman’s actions becomes increasingly important as Richardson’s Pamela is to find out. Urania itself focuses on the representation of female desire and the contradictory assessments to which it was, and still often is, susceptible.17 The conditions under which Pamphilia’s vow is undertaken and the conditions under which the vow is finally ended are anything but consistent with the association between silence and passivity or obedience to patriarchal structures that the invocation of silence traditionally assumes. Far from suggesting a capitulation to masculinist assumptions that women should be seen and not heard,18 refusing to speak to Amphilanthus becomes the means by which Pamphilia seeks to assert some control over a situation that threatens her reputation. As Amphilanthus is now out of her reach as a marriage partner, her relationship with him can no longer even potentially be sanctioned through marriage. In this sense Pamphilia tries to use silence, making the necessity of this particular virtue work for her own ends.19 By examining the circumstances of the vow of silence we can draw out interconnections between a literary text and the social and ideological terrain that it negotiates, again emphasizing the strategies that female characters devised to deal with specific situations. As other critics have remarked, while the text takes its name and starting point from Urania, the resolution of her romantic situation occurs within the first part of Urania whereas the second part ends abruptly with Pamphilia and Amphilanthus still ambiguously posi-

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tioned in relation to each other.20 The obstacles to Pamphilia’s and Amphilanthus’s love become the mechanisms that sustain the narrative of both parts of Urania but the beginning of their story raises its own questions. None of the obstacles that Lysander identifies as standard problems in the pursuit of love seem to be involved here. Pamphilia and Amphilanthus seem compatible in rank, age, and circumstances, and parental choices do not seem to be an issue. The awkwardness of the narrative here in the absence of an obvious obstacle perhaps suggests a dimension of Wroth’s own position that she chose not to confront in print – that the list of impediments might include marriage to someone else. In fiction, the initial stumbling block is Amphilanthus’s failure to realize what is good for him (which again could shadow Herbert’s failure to marry Wroth after the death of her husband). From the beginning readers are given insight into the feelings of Amphilanthus and Pamphilia. The narrator makes it clear that Amphilanthus is misguided from the outset in his affection for another woman, Antissia, not least because she has made her interest in him so obvious. It is Antissia’s ‘shewing’ of her love for Amphilanthus that results in his ‘receiving’ it, and that results in their mutual folly, according to the narrator, so that ‘they were content to think they loved’ (U, I: 61). In this sense Amphilanthus is hoist with the petard of his chivalric obligations.21 Put another way, he is caught up in the rhetoric and expectations about courteous or ‘civile’ behaviour, to the detriment of both of them, suggesting some of the problems associated with the representation of masculinity and its responsibilities.22 From a different perspective again, Wroth describes the competing claims on her lover William Herbert by Mary Fitton, in the guise of Antissia. Confronted with Amphilanthus’s praise for Antissia, Pamphilia is betrayed, in these early stages of her emotions, by words that suggest her feminine weakness, and earn her criticism from Amphilanthus. His praise of Antissia’s beauty provokes Pamphilia’s rebuke that ‘hee had spoke sufficiently in her praise’, followed by some derogatory comments concerning Antissia’s ‘extreame whitenesse’. Just as the narrator has indicated that these comments arise from a feelings ‘betweene dislike, and a modest affection’ (U, I: 61), Amphilanthus replies: ‘That hee till then had neuer seene so much Womanish disposition in her, as to have so much prettie enuie in her’ (U, I: 62–3). Pamphilia’s hasty remarks may indicate a lack of the caution that she is subsequently to develop but Amphilanthus goes on to indicate that

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his mistake is not to take seriously what he knows even at this stage – that Pamphilia is superior to every other women he knows or is yet to meet: ‘in his opinion (except her selfe) he had not seene any fairer [than Antissia]’ (U, I: 62). Pamphilia’s retreat to solitude allows her to explore her own feelings without criticism and to begin to practise that self-restraint that becomes a hallmark of her character and the guarantee of her virtue. If the lesson that Amphilanthus has to learn concerns his lack of constancy, and his poor judgement, then Pamphilia’s is the necessity of measuring her actions and words against their public and private perception. By this means may she avoid the kind of censure visited upon her here by Amphilanthus himself. So, very early on in Urania, the narrator illustrates the difficulties besetting the desiring woman. Expressing her feelings, even as indirectly as Pamphilia does here, is likely to earn condemnation, even if the obtuse Amphilanthus does not understand their origins. One lesson that Pamphilia learns here is that silence can help her maintain her integrity while exploring her own emotions and feelings, though silence may also be misinterpreted, for example as dullness or pride.23 Pamphilia’s use of silence is explained in the first part of Urania in terms that are compatible with the general injunctions upon women not to be the first to speak of their love. What happens in part two of Urania, however, moves away from this ‘silence-chastity equation’, and illustrates the argument that silence is more variably used and understood than the equation suggests. The obstacle to Pamphilia’s and Amphilanthus’s relationship in part one could generally be said to be Amphilanthus’s inconstancy, and his tendency to be diverted by other women who demonstrate their interest in him. This is partly explained as driven by his uncertainty regarding Pamphilia’s feelings for him that she cannot express because he is unreliable and inconsistent in his conduct towards her. The couple are caught in a loop caused by expectations of gendered behaviour. Pamphilia cannot indicate her feelings for Amphilanthus until he has declared himself to her, and he is reluctant to force his attentions on her without indications that they would be received sympathetically.24 Amphilanthus seems to undergo a course of self-revelation in part one as he comes to understand his fickleness through a series of adventures and in discussions with other knights and with Urania and with Pamphilia herself, but early on in part two an understanding seems to have been reached to the extent that the lovers undergo a verba de praesenti marriage ceremony, witnessed by others (U, II: 45).25 While

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this ceremony arises as a result of Amphilanthus’s jealousy that Pamphilia is giving her attention to Rodomondro, the harmony is short-lived as Amphilanthus is summoned overseas. From this point, Amphilanthus’s inconstancy becomes different in kind from his previous dalliances, and is related to his inability to trust that Pamphilia has not transferred her affections elsewhere. While in Crete, ‘lulled in the sweet delights of an infectious Queene’ (U, II: 131), Amphilanthus again falls victim to a desiring woman’s assertions, and is then cast off by her. Not content to leave him to Pamphilia, however, the Queen exercises female spite against another woman to push his marriage to the princess of Slovenia – a move he does not make until he is persuaded that Pamphilia is married to Rodomondro, the King of Tartaria, jealousy of whom triggered the marriage ceremony between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus in the first place. Whatever obstacles there were to the lovers’ relationship before, this formal and public wedding, assisted by ‘the Queene of lust and mischiefe’ (U, II: 133), significantly alters the nature of Pamphilia’s and Amphilianthus’s relationship. This is an event that Pamphilia has feared and dreamed of (U, II: 108), and from this point on Pamphilia vows not to speak to Amphilanthus, driven by two different kinds of determinations. On the one hand, it is now inappropriate for her to act in his company as she did when there was an understanding of their commitment, witnessed by others. On the other hand, there is also the matter of Pamphilia’s self-respect, ‘cast of’ (U, II: 199) as she has been by Amphilanthus while she herself ‘inviolably kept [her] love and hart pure’ (U, II: 198). Their public positions make it likely that they will still have to meet, and her vow of silence will ensure that there can be no words spoken by her that will suggest any change of feeling. The dilemma is this: she cannot speak to him as she would have done once because he is now married, but to speak to him differently would indicate that her feelings towards him have changed and suggest her inconstancy. The vow of silence avoids public misperception of her as either immodest or inconstant. Having lost him, she has ‘lost all hapiness’, but she will ‘nott bee thought in this world, this changing world to inconstancie’ (U, II: 199). Amphilanthus’s marriage directly alters Pamphilia’s course of action. As a princess and then queen Pamphilia has obligations and responsibilities symbolized by her bearing the same name as the country that she comes to rule. Pamphilia’s marriage and the disposition of her body are a more than personal matter, and have considerable implications for the welfare of the Pamphilians. While an unmarried woman, Pamphilia was both sought after and vulnerable to alien advances from

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the likes of the Sophy of Persia and the King of Lycia that threaten not only Pamphilia the person but also Pamphilia the country. Believing that Amphilanthus might yet become her husband Pamphilia refused to marry, but his marriage removes that possibility and at the same time removes the impediment of her marrying elsewhere. In this context her marriage to Rodomondro is highly problematic, as is the character of Rodomondro himself. On the other hand, as King of Tartaria and the great Cham, Rodomondro is at many levels a worthy companion of Pamphilia. He comes to protect her from unwelcome sexual and political advances, and his characteristics are suggestive of loyalty, constancy, and bravery. On the other hand, he quite simply is not the object of Pamphilia’s affection, and Urania draws attention to the importance of this by making him otherwise acceptable. Dressing in black, with her hair up rather than down, Pamphilia publicly attributes her behaviour to her sorrow for the death of her brother, Poliarchos. But what might wash as an excuse with other characters in the text will not wash with the reader who knows quite well that Poliarchos is an excuse to mask her own lack of enthusiasm for her marriage. Pamphilia’s vow of silence observes certain public proprieties that we outlined before, but it is also clear that there is more than one way of communicating feeling. While the courtiers are told of Pamphilia’s mourning, readers are informed of a different set of motivations: With thos words, her eyes hapened (itt may bee) by chance, butt I thinke rather truly ment, on Amphilanthus, who blusht, then wept bitterly, turning him self to a window close by, as desiring non should be wittness of his loss and shame. (U, II: 275). The narrator refuses to let the reader be in any uncertainty that Pamphilia speaks differently from what she means on more than one occasion. A little after her marriage to Rodomondro, Pamphilia is consoled by the Queen of Naples, Amphilanthus’s mother, for Rodomondro’s absence, and she responds: ‘“Indeed, Madame,” sayd Pamphilia, “if hee showld stay too longe away, it might much more molest mee, butt I ame” (with that she sighed) “assured the Tartarian can nott bee longe from hence, since his and my occasions call us both speedily home”’ (U, II: 280). Again the narrator refuses to allow any uncertainty about what is happening here: ‘Amphilanthus had with infinite content marked her words, and knowing her hart, perfectly understood them’ (U, II: 280).

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What these events signal is the complex tension between narrative development and moral integrity. Whereas, as we argued in the previous chapter, Sidney is at pains to absolve the princesses of any moral turpitude, and even Gynecia is right as well as wrong, the nature of Pamphilia’s behaviour here falters. While her reasons for the vow of silence are consistent with social proprieties and maintain her modesty at a public level, this is an illusion that cannot be sustained in terms of the narrative itself.26 Pamphilia is caught between competing discourses. The injunctions concerning female decorum and propriety suggest that she terminate her relationship with Amphilanthus, given their marriages to other people. The chaste heroine ought not to be conducting adulterous affairs, even in the heart, but Pamphilia’s constancy to Amphilanthus is never in doubt and he is seen as inherently worthy of her in spite of his male weaknesses and his capacity to be tricked by others. The predicament is that Pamphilia is caught between personal and public interest, between constancy and propriety. It is also important here to acknowledge that class and social rank play an important role in trying to understand Pamphilia’s dilemma. As a princess and then queen she also figures forth the circumstances of people like Wroth herself – that group of aristocratic women who married for political and social reasons as much as for love. Wroth’s own case has been extensively discussed – her marriage, the jealousy of her husband, their alleged incompatibility, her relationship and two children with her cousin William Herbert.27 There are also the examples of Anne Clifford and Penelope Rich, to whom Wroth had connections. Rich of course was known to Wroth through her uncle Philip Sidney, while Clifford married Philip Herbert whose first wife was the Countess of Montgomery to whom Wroth dedicated Urania. Clifford refused to agree to financial arrangements her first husband intended to make, and enjoyed a degree of autonomy with her second husband until widowhood and financial independence gave her greater freedom,28 and Penelope Rich, the star of Sidney’s sonnet sequence ‘Astrophil and Stella’, had a well-known extra-marital relationship with Charles Blount before she married him. Lawrence Stone estimates that ‘something like one third of the older peers were estranged from or actually separated from their wives.’29 Clearly for some members of the higher social ranks there were alternatives to the stark choice between independence and marriage identified by Fancy. It is, however, worth making a different kind of a point here. If adulterous relationships were not uncommon or necessarily stigmatized then moving beyond them often was. Critics have made the interesting point that Rich’s

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adultery with Blount caused fewer disturbances than her marriage to him after her divorce from her husband in 1605. As Ringler put it, ‘their adultery could be countenanced, but not their illegal marriage,’ – illegal because of her divorce and because she did not have specific permission. In Qulligan’s terms it is not the sexual relationship that is the issue but the sacraments of marriage and the institutions of the state.30 Adultery by definition occurs beyond the laws while remarriage involves redefining the laws and could threaten the apparatus and structures of the state. While these situations can be seen to represent some pragmatic realities of a certain group of aristocratic men and women’s lives, at the level of narrative and reader response, they raise particular problems of interpretation. The reader becomes involved in what might be described as ‘difficult knowledge’, knowing that Pamphilia means more than she says for reasons that have merit and authority but nevertheless involve her in various kinds of duplicity – not least of all with Rodomondro and her father. Earlier, when Amphilanthus accused her of dissembling and pretending that she was not married to the Tartarian, Pamphilia responded by addressing her father. 31 In so doing she maintained her silence towards Amphilanthus, truthfully refuting Amphilanthus’s claim, and implicitly restating her constancy to him. When her father indicated that she would have his permission for marriage to Rodomondro, Pamphilia used the conventions of female modesty: ‘How unlikely is itt then that I showld be contracted ore promised when the man never asked’ (U, II: 260). Yet, in invoking the trope of modesty, Pamphilia’s actions clearly run counter to her words: ‘With that, and a looke full of disdainfull pitty, she looked as if by chance her eyes (against her will) had cast them selves that way butt as passengers, nott to rest’ (U, II: 260–1). The clear presumption is that this is a piece of non-verbal communication with Amphilanthus and part of their ongoing coded conversation. While Pamphilia’s actions and behaviour might be understandable, products of the constraints that she is under, there is nevertheless a disjunction between words and actions here that endangers her reliability in terms of the qualities that she is supposed to represent – predominantly in relation to modesty. A heroine becomes a morally unreliable figure. How one judges the situation (as justifiable given the constraints, or as devious and slippery) becomes a matter of interpretation. It is a significant admission of the intractability of the situation, of the horns of the narrative and moral dilemma, that such resolution as

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there is in this incomplete text comes from external sources. The nymph Leutissia appears to Pamphilia and advises her not to torment herself, reminding her that she has ‘a brave Kinge to your husband’, who is so much hers as she ‘can nott please him better then to commaunde him’, and that she should ‘co[nte]ntedly and chastely’ enjoy the company of Amphilanthus unless she does not trust her ‘owne power in having absolute commaundness’ (U, II: 378) of her self. Pamphilia’s resolution is then to be ‘an new woeman, yett the same constant lover still’, retaining the vow of silence until she can see how Amphilanthus will react. A cognate kind of resolution takes place in Amphilanthus only a few pages later as a result of his developing self-awareness when he resolves (albeit with some uncertainty as to the outcome) to seek Pamphilia’s pardon and to ‘bee a new man as new borne, new fram’d, and noe thing as I was beefore; and yett the Very same in deere affection as when wee first loved.’32 While this decision results in the threat of suicide (‘End like thy self, like Amphilanthus self’) the passage concludes with an admonishing ‘hasty voice’ that warns him to ‘End like a Christian and nott otherways’ (U, II: 384). It seems that only external forces can break the impasse, and provide Amphilanthus with the reassurance about his reception from Pamphilia that he needs to end his self-destructive impulses. Forsandarus appears, twists his ankle, goes into a terminal decline and produces a deathbed confession that acquits Amphilanthus of some parts of his inconstancy, given that Forsandarus led him to believe that Pamphilia was married to Rodomondro before she was (precipitating Amphilanthus’s marriage) and failed to deliver letters from Amphilanthus to Pamphilia that might have clarified the situation. 33 Amphilanthus is thus partially exonerated, allowing Pamphilia to indicate her forgiveness by sending for him, thus ending her vow of silence. Pamphilia ‘wowld noe more bee so strange, her Vowe beeing now safely concluded without breach. Butt she wowld speake, and bee as others in all civile manner’ (U, II: 389). So it is that reconciliation of a sort is achieved through a combination or mesh of selfanalysis and external forces – incorporeal voices and narrative twists – that suggests the intractability of the real life social dilemmas. Wroth is here exploring in fiction the difficulties facing a woman whose affections are widely known but cannot be directly or openly discussed, and an extract from the seventeenth-century memoir by Lady Anne Halkett provides a parallel example of a knowing contrivance to avoid censure. Having promised her mother that she would

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not see her suitor Thomas Howard again, Anne comes up with a strategy to be with him without directly disobeying her parent. In the midst of this dispute with my selfe what I should do, my hand being still upon my eyes, itt presently came into my mind that if I blindfolded my eyes that would secure mee from seeing him, and so I did not transgresse against my mother.34 That Anne realizes her moral precariousness is evident in an exchange between herself and her mother that implicates her precocious selfawareness. When she declares to her mother ‘that noe child shee had had greater love and respect to her, or more obedience,’ her mother replies ‘Itt seemes you have a good opinion of yourselfe.’35 That Wroth was experimenting in this second part of Urania with solutions to real problems is also suggested by an inconsistency concerning what happens to Rodomondro and how that relates to earlier repeated patterns. In the first part of Urania there are various examples of happy endings to marriages unhappily begun. Perissus and Limena, after some considerable and violent events, are encouraged to marry by Limena’s errant husband, Philargus (U, I: 86).36 Later on, as we have seen, there is also the story of the fishing maid. In cases like this, husbands conveniently die (liberating their wives) or come to see the error of their jealous ways and condone their wives’ relationships with their lovers. At the end of part two, however, it seems that Wroth was uncertain how to treat her two central characters and their relationship. While she first has Rodomondro die, as well as their son (U, II: 406), Rodomondro is alive and amiably chatting on the next page, thus bringing together the two alternative solutions to the problem of Pamphilia being married – widowhood, and an implied amicable sharing of Pamphilia with both husband and lover. While it is of course possible to read too much into an inconsistency that at some level reflects the incomplete nature of this section of the text, the alternatives are suggestive and repeat other incidents in the text. It is perhaps also possible to suggest that what was narratively feasible in relation to relatively minor and lower-ranked characters represents more of a problem in relation to more central characters. The notion of the King of Tartaria sharing, in whatever kind of way, the attentions of his wife with the King of the Romans, presents some problems at the level of masculine dignity, not to mention international relations. The text contains both the threat of deceit and resistance to masculine control, and the fantasy of a non-proprietorial masculine investment

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in female companionship. That Wroth was uncertain which path to take for her central characters suggests the problems attendant on either solution.37

Controlling fortunes: Melissea and Lady Mary Wroth At many levels Urania can be seen as exploring and underlining the difficulties of female self-determination. While the female figures here are predominantly queens and princesses, and therefore possess a high degree of power, status, and privilege, in their relationships with men they consistently struggle with the necessities of pursuing their interests both against specific threats (such as men who threaten their chastity, or are simply not their choice of partner) and more generally against negative interpretations of their actions. The exception to this is the deus ex machina, Melissea, the other-worldly, providential figure who oversees, prophesies, and generally controls or advises characters and actions. Melissea introduces herself to Amphilanthus as ‘having skill in the Art of Astrologie’, and as having ‘found much concerning you, and as much desire to do you service’ (U, I: 139), thus beginning the thread running through Urania of overseeing and intervening to help out the princes and princesses. Consistently described as ‘grave’, ‘sage’, and ‘wise’, Melissea is also frequently associated with women, including her nieces Saphalina and Denia (U, II: 2–4; 61) and her sister, another grave lady (U, II: 224). These women in turn are associated with Delos and Lesbos, and with caring for the lost princes and princesses.38 Melissea is associated with foretelling the future, and she warns Amphilanthus not to trust a servant in a strand of the story that is not unravelled until much later in part two, where he learns that Forsandarus lied about Pamphilia’s marriage and failed to deliver a letter to her.39 Melissea’s role throughout the text is one of guiding, advising, and comforting the central characters. Whereas in part one she is most often a resource that others travel to, in part two her role seems to be more directly interventionary.40 She cures Antissia of her madness, and thoughtfully provides her husband Dolorindus with a potion to cause forgetfulness so that he will not be discomforted by memories of her eccentricity (U, II: 52). Her aid is material and practical – providing a horse for Amphilanthus (U, II: 193), a viol of water, milk and a goat for Selarinus (U, II: 39) – and consolatory (U, II: 182). Yet while Melissea’s power surges through the text, it is also part of her characterization that she is neither infallible nor omniscient. While she knows ‘most things’ (U, II: 159), she explains to Amphilanthus at the

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beginning that the enchantment must be undone by him as that ‘darken[s] some part of my knowledge of you’ (U, I: 140). In some ways Melissea represents a personification of the narrative drive, intervening at the right moment to move the plot along, providing the boat that is necessary to move a character from one place to another, or the information that someone needs to understand events. She brings together the magical elements of romance, making things appear out of thin air, at the same time as inhabiting her own gynocentric world. She is independent, powerful, nurturing and distanced – qualities wittily combined in the passage where she helps out Selarinus. Seduced into sin with a lady by whom he has two children, Selarinus has then been thrown out ‘soe weake, soe tottered, soe torne, as certainly hee was nott able to have lived’ (U, II: 397), until he is saved by Melissea’s provision of the phial of water, a goat whose milk he drinks, and a kid that is then slaughtered to provide food. The tone of this scene is delightfully self-conscious. The ‘Violl’ appears carried by an arm, and accompanied by a voice with otherwise disembodied greetings from Melissea. The house at which he quickly arrives provides a young woman who is a paragon of hospitality: The kid she tooke, and gave order for part of that and other more rare provisions to bee made reddy for him, which was dunn in sivile, orderly, and quiett a way without noise ore boisterousnes, as was and indeed is the true essence and quintessence of true entertainment; the other butt Inn-like. (U, II: 398) Yet the care with which all things now seem to be ordained for Selarinus’s benefit is undercut by its fortuitousness, given that it was only ‘by chance’ that Melissea ‘looking over her bookes, found his infinite and neere-approaching miseries’ (U, II: 397), prompting her to send hand, viol, goat and kid. At one level this suggests that Melissea has a life of her own, beyond the needs of the characters, who are, nevertheless, of concern to her. She seems not to be determined solely by her connections with them, however little we see of anything else. It could also suggest that not even Melissea can control everything. The association of Melissea with providential interventions, wise advice (particularly of a consolatory kind for the central female figures), and an overall view of how events will turn out, has suggested to critics the real person of Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Wroth’s aunt.41 By including members of her own family and prominent women writers and patrons in her work, as she also does by

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figuring the Countess of Pembroke as the Queen of Naples, Wroth provides a space for the idea of a woman writer that she can identify with herself. Melissea can be taken as a self-conscious and light-hearted representation of the controlling author in a series of representations that foreground performativity. Apart from providing the aid for Selarinus, one of the most striking incidents is Melissea’s appearance in a fiery chariot in a scene that signals both its literary antecedents in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and its indebtedness to masques and studiedly spectacular representations.42 Melissea also makes her own masque, contrived specifically for Pamphilia, which stages an exchange between a love-struck ‘sea-faring lad’ and an ‘aged sheapheard’ (U, II: 113). The exchange is conventional enough, rehearsing the laments of the overwhelmed and desperate lover against the cynicism of the older man in terms that are generic. Yet it is also possible to draw a specific link back to Philip Sidney and Arcadia, given that a similar kind of debate staged in his texts involves Geron as the generic old man, and Philisides as the romantic youth. If Phillisides represents Sidney, then in this reworking here it is possible to see Wroth as both Pamphilia and Melissea, where Pamphilia represents the possibility of a position beyond young lover or aged cynic, providing a ‘more steddy place and throne of abiding’ for love that ‘never must ore ever shall have remove, butt firme and safe possession’(U, II: 115). If Pamphilia is the acme of constancy throughout Urania then Melissea is the guiding spirit, consistently seeking to bring all the characters to safe and happy havens. This kind of reading is also revealing of the problems of the woman writer in the early seventeenth century, and the contradictions faced by women in general. It is also extremely telling that of all the characters in the book, male and female, Melissea seems not to be concerned with her own sexual desire. Melissea can be seen as a fantasy of the powerful author benevolently intervening and helping, devoid of any personal emotional investment save the disinterested one of helping others. The myriad female characters that Urania presents, it seems to us, compellingly lay out the complex and contradictory issues facing women of a certain social class in the early seventeenth century. While arguments have been made for the specific connections between events and characters in Urania and Wroth’s own life, it is also true that these adventures ‘are articulated within the narrative forms and ideological contradictions produced by their culture.’43 Nowhere is this clearer than in the intricate and compelling presentation of Melissea, who has a controlling effect in a

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narrative characterized by many critics as being vitally interested in female desire,44 while being detached from it herself. She is the benign genius of the text, ostentatiously powerful and commanding,45 and guiding spirit to the troubled Pamphilia, absolved from any stigmatization attached to female desire herself, and ultimately unable to bring about the ending that Pamphilia would like. In this sense it is highly ironic that in being one of the first women writers to go about representing women as subjects ‘able to think, to desire, to produce meanings in their minds and bodies sometimes at variance with patriarchal objectives’,46 Lady Mary Wroth created a character like Melissea – a figure with narrative power but one that is limited, and a figure without sexual concerns of her own – who stands as a fantasy of the author herself, powerful but not omnipotent, without desire and therefore free of the aspersions (but also denied the joys) that occupy her more materially situated sisters, within the narrative and beyond.

3 Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How to Avoid Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’

Useful effort can be expended, if it is hidden. (Whigham) The injunction not only to be chaste but also to appear chaste taxes many romance protagonists, as we have been exploring in the previous two chapters. When Richard Brathwait’s Bellingeria writes to Clarentio forbidding him her presence, she does so ‘holding it not sufficient to be innocent; that she might decline all occasion of aspersion, apt to traduce the purest and refinedst tempers’.1 Yet Katherine J. Roberts also identifies the problems, at the level of narrative, of creating female characters – of designing women – capable not simply of sustaining narrative interest but also of generating the narrative itself. As she argues, many of the precursors to Sidney’s Pamela and Philoclea ‘tend to be boring in their virtuous maidenhood’.2 Seen from a functional perspective of creating narratives likely to engage male and female readers, the issue is one of designing women who are more than two dimensional ideals but who are also virtuous heroines – of designing women capable of acting for themselves, of having designs of their own, without falling into negative stereotypes. In this chapter we explore how some female protagonists act upon their own desires without endangering their reputations, and related to this, how a woman who has once rejected a suitor can indicate a change of heart without seeming to becoming an active wooer. We also begin to explore the ways that these ‘strategies of indirection’3 feed suspicions that women’s speech is unreliable, and specifically that ‘“No” is no negative in a woman’s mouth’ (NA, p. 533). Linking back to the stratagems of deception that Pamphilia flirted with in Urania, we also analyze some of the ways that writers in the early to mid-seventeenth century negotiated the need for female characters to assert their own 75

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autonomous wills without compromising their modesty. In other words we are looking at the ways that writers tried to create virtuous characters capable of sustaining narrative interest. Our second purpose here is to explore the way that the qualities so often associated with feminine virtue are revealed to be arduously acquired rather than natural or inherent – a critical commonplace today, perhaps, but not always understood as a consideration informing the behaviour of characters themselves in earlier fiction. Strategies of indirection also illustrate the idea that ‘useful effort can be expended, if it is hidden’,4 or in other words that those values and attributes considered socially desirable in women are achieved through ‘the most tedious discipline’ that appears at the same time to be effortless. 5 What Frank Whigham calls ‘the practice of being an individual’, based on ‘achieved rather than ascribed characteristics’, is particularly complex in relation to feminine virtue. This calls to mind the image of the duck on the pond, where the serenity of her gliding across the water belies the rapid paddling of the feet underneath. The frontispiece to Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman (1631) wonderfully encapsulates the sheer hard work involved in being a gentlewoman. Ten separate cells illustrate the qualities she needs to embody, and this complex visual representation is then followed by a page that describes each image. The full title of the book gives some indication of the magnitude of the task to be undertaken: The English Gentlewoman drawne out to the full Body: Expressing, What Habilliments doe best attire her, What Ornaments doe best adorne her, What Complements doe best accomplish her. These characteristics are then repeated in the specific address to the Right Honourable the Lady Arabella Wentworth, again in the address to the general reader, and again summarized in some detail in the ‘Abstract or Summarie of all such principal points’, before reaching the text itself. What this energetic repetition reveals is how much effort is required to live up to the expectations of an English gentlewoman. The proliferation of guide or conduct books for women from the late fifteenth century on has generally been taken as an indication of the constraints and restrictions placed on women, and as representative of an anxiety about controlling their behaviour. Between 1475 and 1640 at least 163 books in 500 editions were directed at women readers.6 Yet such books also provide strategies and guides that women might actually use in developing patterns of behaviour that were socially acceptable and individually enabling. As Suzanne W. Hull argues, what the conduct books suggest are the many demands and responsibilities placed on upper middle-class

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women’s lives, and they not only proscribed behaviour but also took into account the many demands on these women. While it is true that most of these roles are firmly located in the domestic rather than the public or political domain, writers like Richard Brathwait and Gervase Markham both acknowledge that ‘the housewife’s role is far from being passive and subservient’.7 What we are interested in exploring here, then, is how the multiple responsibilities and duties of woman proclaimed in conduct books have their parallel in fictional texts that represent active female agents who at the same time must disguise or minimize their efforts to maintain their honour. While conduct books were often seen in opposition to frivolous and potentially dangerous romances, both kinds of literature reveal the discipline underpinning feminine modesty or what Ruth Yeazall calls ‘the fictions of modesty’.8 From this perspective it should come as no surprise that two of the authors of popular conduct books, Richard Brathwait and Gervase Markham, also wrote romances that acknowledged the lengths to which women might have to go in pursuit of virtuous love but without revealing the extent of their effort. In The English Housewife (1615) Markham, for example, presents a typical sense of the tightrope that the English housewife must tread: To conclude, our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighbourhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skilful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.9 Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman is similarly critical of the extremes of female behaviour, specifically in relation to love or affection, anatomizing the problems of women overcome by love, such that ‘their discourse is semi-brev’d with sighes, their talke with teares’, and who ‘walke desperately forlorne’, as well as those who ‘will not deigne to cast a looke upon their beloved: but stand so punctually upon their termes, as if they stood indifferent of their choyce.’10 The problems associated with either extreme are clearly articulated, and the position of a golden mean advocated, but the pathway to such perfection is littered with contradictions: In briefe, let such as are too hot in the quest of their desires, attemperate that heat with intermissions: such violence is best rebated by

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absence. Contrariwise, such as are too coole, let them quicken that easinesse with their more frequent conference, and assiduate presence.11 The rest of this chapter analyzes some examples in fiction of the difficulties of negotiating these often contradictory demands. As a final point we also suggest that female figures who are independent, intelligent and active in the pursuit of their own desires also threaten to destabilize narratives that position them as still in need of assistance in the resolution of difficulties. While there is a trajectory of female independence, there is also a countervailing persistence of narrative structures that provide resolution for women through superior male counterparts or authorial control. The tensions between these two get stronger as the focus on female protagonists gets sharper.

‘Censorious suspicions’: Anna Weamys’s Continuation (1651)12 Anna Weamys’s text is one of three seventeenth-century texts that directly attempts to pick up where Sidney’s Arcadia left off. Gervase Markam’s The English Arcadia, alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending (1607 and 1613), and Richard Bellings’s A Sixth Booke to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624)13 are two others. Weamys’s continuation most explicitly focusses on three stories left incomplete in Sidney’s Arcadia as the title page declares: ‘Wherein is Handled the Loves of Amphialus and Helen Queen of Corinth, Prince Plangus and Erona: With the History of the Loves of Old Claius and young Strephon to Urania’. And in each of these three stories Weamys brings her female characters to a happy and successful conclusion. Having said this, the resolutions that she brings about are not the perfunctory happy endings that Bellings visits upon his characters. While Sidney declines to comment on Basilius and Gynecia after the faux adultery with any suggestion of how married life might continue thereafter, Bellings blithely leaves them ‘in the happie quiet of their after life’ (p. 108). So too, like Weamys, he brings Helen and Amphialus to marriage and harmony, yet far more of his narrative is spent on Amphialus describing his adventures (like the Arcadian princes) en route to reunion with Helen once their wedding day has been arranged than is spent on the process by which that marriage is achieved. A year after that marriage, Helen ‘makes him the happie father of a much-promising sonne, whom they named Haleamphilus’

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(p. 107), where the son’s name has the perfunctory ring of a tidy narrative neatly rounded off with the reproduction of the political and social status quo. Weamys’s text, on the other hand, focusses on marriage as a celebratory ritual (with considerable detail on the ceremonies themselves) and as an affirmation of female agency made possible in a romance narrative, in the process displaying greater concern with the mechanisms by which that can be achieved. If we take, for example, the character of Urania we can see how specific changes Weamys makes alter the narrative dynamics of the text. As we argued in the first chapter, Sidney’s Urania is one of the most dependent on stereotypes, and one of the least developed.14 In Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, she becomes part of the exploration of ‘interior selfhood’,15 and of the possibilities for female action, however fragmentarily represented. In a third manifestation, in Weamys’s Continuation, Urania seems, at a surface level, to be the epitome of the passive heroine. Pursued left, right, and centre by ardent admirers (including Claius, Strephon, Antaxius, and Lacemon), Urania declares it contrary to her disposition ‘to accept of the least motion concerning a married life’ (p. 75), as befits the representative of celestial or virtuous love, and by the end of Weamys’s text she still seems sufficiently disinterested in her own affairs to hand over the decision of choice of husband to Pyrocles and Musidorus. It would be hard on a simple summary of her case to find a more straightforward example of a heroine not deciding her own fate, but Urania’s circumstances can be seen to be rather more complex in two different ways. First, Urania’s actions consistently demonstrate a keen sense of pragmatism, rather than passivity or inaction – resistance to something rather than apathy towards everything – and second, the princes’ choice for Urania is over-determined – that is, it can be seen to address more than one textual and moral concern. It is determined by a sense of what Urania deserves, by narrative expectations, and by readerly anticipation, so the choice is hardly arbitrary or indifferent to Urania’s best interest. What remains in question is how much Urania can be said to be conscious of this, an issue we come to later. From the outset Urania is beset by admirers, and by familiar obligations. Her parents would have her marry the rich herdsman Antaxius, a prospect that Urania sees as ‘Too great a burden for me to bear … Antaxius is too officious in his love, I wish he were more calm; my parents’ rigor is too too intolerable, unless my disobedience had been palpable’ (p. 88). What Urania discloses here is less indifference than an acknowledgement of the dilemma. She does not reciprocate

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Antaxius’s love, but cannot directly gainsay parental authority. Under these circumstances she casts herself on God’s mercy to support her in tumultuous times. Kidnapped by Antaxius, pursued by Lacemon, Urania is very much a kind of ‘assaulted and pursued chastity’, envisaged in 1656 by Margaret Cavendish. Two kinds of aid come to her. First, Strephon and Claius rescue her and dispatch her abductors, and second, her parents die, ensuring her the ‘liberty to dispose of her self’ (p. 103). Urania’s disposition to live alone, however, brings only shortlived peace, acknowledging the precariousness of an unattached woman without male guardians. Urania will always be susceptible to passing male admirers, and it is this realization that brings her out of confinement to seek the judgement of the princes. Specifically, Urania wants to end the rivalry between one-time friends Claius and Strephon, without being seen to exercise any choice in the matter herself – without, in her terms, ‘derogating from my honour by censorious suspicions’ (p. 80). The rivalry between Claius and Strephon is compounded by personal antagonism, incited by jealousy of a third suitor, who is in Strephon’s words ‘presumed to gaze upon Urania’. Claius’s response is more recriminatory and proprietorial: the unnamed stranger, ‘a haughty youth’, ‘did so amorously seal his eyes upon her that sundry times he made her paint her cheeks with harmless blushes: and my jealous fancy comprehending no other reason than that as he obtained free access with his eyes, so he might with his person’ (p. 81, our emphasis). This is all along what Urania has feared: here are the ‘censorious suspicions’ that her plan to marry will remove. Seen in this light, Urania has pragmatically weighed up the situation and resolved that, even free from her parents’ misguided intentions, she will not be safe from unwanted attentions, and subsequently from the unwarranted perceptions of her behaviour by other people. Given the circumstances of virtue under constant, annoying, and malevolent pursuit, redress to the wisdom of princes seems less an act of passivity or apathy than a shrewd and worldly-wise resort. Now there are only two possible ends for Urania, marriage to Claius or marriage to Strephon. Throughout the text, in what the title page calls ‘the Historie of the Loves of Old Claius and Young Strephon to Urania’, far more of the narrative has been given to Strephon, aligning him more consistently with the story-telling powers of the princes. Exceptions to this only provide Claius with space to exhibit his inappropriateness, such as in the example given above that incriminates him in voicing the ‘censorious suspicions’ feared and anticipated by Urania from strangers. This outburst doubly condemns Claius. First, it

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reveals him as jealous, and jealousy has been associated with selfish, rather than disinterested love, as attested in Antaxius’s fury against Urania’s confidant, the sparrow, which results in him murdering it. And second, suspicions from someone as well versed in Urania’s virtues as Claius is understood to be are unacceptable, irrational, and unjust. Furthermore, from the outset, signalled on the title page, one of Claius’s main disadvantages is clear: his age. While youth is not necessarily a sufficient characteristic of an appropriate lover, age is nevertheless far from an advantage. At various points Claius’s actions recall the buffoon, in associating age with physical incompetence, and are accompanied by direct narrative comment: ‘At this Claius, as if he had been revived, ventured to jump, but his heels served him a trick, teaching him to kiss his mother Earth, as more suitable to his ancient years than a young shepherdess was’ (p. 83). This recalls the behaviour of another aged lover, Basilius, and the connection is compounded in the text by Basilius’s direct endorsement of Claius – the kiss of death, if ever there were one. Basilius’s support for Claius resonates with language and imagery likely to have an adverse effect on readers and princes alike: ‘Despise not Claius his complaints though he be afflicted with the infirmities of old age; youthful Strephon may seem more real and pleasing to the eye, yet Claius’s heart, I am confident, is the firmest settled; youth is wavering, age is constant; youth admires novelties, age antiquities. Claius hath learned experience by age to delight Urania with such fancies as may be suitable to her disposition; Strephon’s tender years cannot attain to any knowledge but as his own genius leads him. Wherefore consider before you denounce your sentence, whether Urania may not be Claius’s spouse better than Strephon’s.’ (p. 77) While Prince Pyrocles’s polite reply preserves decorum and the understanding of what is due to Basilius from a subject, he clearly understands ‘that Basilius’s aim was to plead in defence of dotage’ (p. 77). Lest readers have forgotten, or do not know of Basilius’s prior history in Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles is there to remind them that Basilius’s current advocacy of Claius is related to his guilt in the earlier story: ‘he hath not’, says Pyrocles, ‘unburdened his conscience yet of his amorousness of me in my Amazon’s metamorphosis’ (p. 78). Compounding all this are reminders of Claius’s physical infirmity, and shortly afterwards Claius falls down, faints, and ‘ghastfully lay foaming

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on the ground’ (p. 79). Claius is clearly not an appropriate husband for Urania, and this point is made throughout the text. Readers other than those with vested interests of their own such as Basilius’s could come to no other conclusion. For our purposes, the significance of this lies in the suggestion that far from passively giving up control of her future to others, Urania has sensibly entrusted herself to those who will choose appropriately. Claius dies – breathing Urania’s name – even before the multiple nuptials that end Weamys’s story can take place. That same morning the dead body of Philisides is found similarly expired, ‘yet not by any other practices than a deep melancholy that overpressed his heart’ (p. 104). It is this conjunction that is most suggestive of the broad shifts and subtle changes that are taking place within romance. Philisides is understood to figure forth the person of Sidney himself16 and the act of bringing him in, dead, at the end of the story is particularly ambiguous, as Patrick Cullen remarks. It can ‘be read in terms of an agonistic literary relation: the strong poet is murdered by the belated one, her triumph over his incompleteness asserted by the emphatic completeness of her own multiple endings’; it may be an act ‘memorial and celebratory’;17 it may also be ‘romantic’ (p. lv). Yet if it is romantic rather than heroic, as Cullen suggests, then it also stands slightly at odds with the rest of the story and the way it works, and it is hard to see how the death of Philisides is not in some way tarnished through contact with the demise of Claius. Both are interred in the same tomb, specifically at Philisides’s request: ‘My ambition is to have the tears of the Arcadian beauties shed at my funeral and sprinkled on my hearse; and when my body is so magnificently embalmed, let it be interred with Claius’s: two lovers, both finishing their lives for their mistresses’ sake’ (p. 104). The tone of the ending, while ostensibly reverent and regretful, nevertheless jars with the otherwise pragmatic understandings that dominate the previous representations of Urania’s situation. These two figures who die, if not directly from love, then at least from melancholy, seem part of an older scheme, out of keeping with the kinds of political understandings demonstrated by Musidorus and Pyrocles, Wroth’s Pamphilia, and, we would argue, by Weamys’s Urania herself. From this perspective it is possible to see Urania as far from passively accepting what happens to her, or as tossed on the waves of arbitrary fate. She understands the importance of finding ways of escaping her situation ‘without blemishing [her] owne reputation’, of achieving marriage ‘without derogating from [her] honor by censorious suspi-

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cions’ (p. 80), and of avoiding situations that ‘might redound to her prejudice’ (p. 103). That these awarenesses are often phrased in the negative – ‘without blemishing’, ‘without derogating’ – suggests active resistance rather than inaction or passivity. In this sense Urania can be seen as exercising a kind of minimum level of activity to achieve a result that, while not necessarily reflecting any directly stated desire of her own, nevertheless accords with fundamental narrative and readerly expectations. Two further examples from Weamys’s text, discussed rather more briefly, illustrate our argument that Weamys is deliberately revisiting Sidney’s text to reposition her female characters in happier positions yet still aware of the necessity of maintaining women’s complementarity to men rather than independence from them. As well as alluding to the loves of Claius, Strephon and Urania on the title page, Weamys also singles out the stories of two sets of lovers left stranded in Sidney’s Arcadia: Plangus and Erona, and Helena and Amphialus. The story of Plangus and Erona is complex. Erona, as her name suggests, mistakenly settles her affections on Antiphilus, and marries him, only to be a victim of his deceitful machinations to apprise himself of Artaxia, a woman who schemes for both her sexual and political desires. Weamys’s text redeems Erona, however, and rewards the long term loyalty of her suitor Plangus by bringing them together. To avoid any active desire on Erona’s part – she has, after all, made the monumental error of choosing Antiphilus for herself – Erona is advised, again by the princes, to take up with Plangus. They recommend ‘him to her for her husband as soon as the greatest monarch in the world’, a recommendation she not surprisingly accepts, acknowledging herself ‘bound by so many obligations to [them] that I cannot suffer my requital to be a refusal’ (p. 63). Here it is worth observing that Weamys has altered the story from its basis in Sidney’s Arcadia. Erona’s ‘erotic past’ is sanitized, and in Weamys’s version Plangus is the constant suitor to a woman abused by her husband and the wilful woman, Artaxia.18 Her initial refusal to countenance Plangus’s revival of his suit is based on her sense that he failed to help her before and may betray her again. His explanation of events of which she was unaware seems about to soften her resolve when the princes break into the discussion, thus avoiding the necessity of her accepting him without external authority and encouragement. Again, a situation devoutly to be wished is achieved through seeming acquiescence rather than specific activity on the part of the female character. A final example from Weamys’s Continuation takes us into slightly different territory in terms of how a satisfactory ending is achieved, but

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continues the exploration of women’s desire and constraints upon it. Helena’s love for Amphialus is an example in Sidney’s text of constant and continued (though unrequited) devotion against the odds, and is complicated by her shadowing of Queen Elizabeth I. Amphialus is fatally smitten with his cousin Philoclea and unwittingly the cause of her torture at the hands of his mother, the scheming Cecropia. In Sidney’s text Helena’s situation is hopeless. Weamys, however, quite literally revives the possibilities for a happy ending by having Helena take the body of Amphialus to her surgeons. While Helena’s love for Amphialus is well understood, it is not a case that she can actually plead for herself, except over his unconscious body. ‘[A]s if he could mind her what she said’ (p. 28), Helena at this stage can voice her feelings. ‘Tell me, dear Amphialus’, said she, ‘what occasion have I given you to make you hate me? have I not ever honoured and loved you far above my self? O yes! and if I had a thousand lives to lose, I would venture them all for your sake … yet let me counsel you as a faithful friend not to engage your affections to one that is so negligent of it [Philoclea], but rather bestow it upon me that will accept of it. Oh hear me, and have pity on me, O Amphialus, Amphialus!’ (p.28) As Amphialus begins to recover, such direct statements are no longer possible for Helena, and she is even advised to absent herself from him lest her sadness inhibit his recovery. ‘In this golden mean of Patience’ (p. 29), Helena then abides until news arrives of the princesses’ escape from Cecropia’s imprisonment, aided by the princes Pyrocles and Musidorus. Helena’s response to the news that the rival to her love, Philoclea, is betrothed to Pyrocles, is significant. Rather than plead her own case with Amphialus directly (an indignity for the Queen of Corinth), Helena throws herself on the mercy of her fellow woman, Philoclea, beseeching her for compassion for Amphialus and for a particular kind of punishment for him: ‘let me therefore entreat you’, she writes, ‘to shew your compassion to him by mildness, and suffer his punishment may be sincere affection to me’ (p. 36). The difficulties of writing this letter to Philoclea are evident, and Philoclea’s reply to Amphialus diplomatically leaves out the important fact that Helena has directly intervened in the situation. So Philoclea writes to Amphialus forgiving him for what has happened, and invoking him to obey her petition: ‘as a petitioner I humbly crave of you not to refuse Beauty and Honour when it is so virtuously presented to you by

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the famous Queen Helena, whose lovelines surpasses all others. Therefore if you esteem of me, prove it by entirely loving of her, who, I am sure, will endow you with all such blessings as may enrich your contentment’ (p. 46). Where Pyrocles and Musidorus intervene for Urania and Plangus, Philoclea directly promotes Helena’s interests. How fraught this enterprise is, however, is revealed in one last exchange between Helena and the rather recalcitrant Amphialus, who seems unable to understand the depth of Helena’s feelings. Offering his love to her, Amphialus receives what should be understood as an unequivocal reply: ‘My Lord … there is no cause given here to induce you to renew your grief, if my yielding my self to your noble disposal may be valued as a sufficient argument to ease you’ (pp. 46–7). Yet Amphialus fails to get the point: ‘if you please to revenge your wrong upon me the instrument, you cannot stab me with a sharper spear than your denial.’ Helena’s pained response expresses the depth of her feelings, and the difficulties of finding paths through which to pursue it without endangering her reputation: ‘Why’, said Helena, ‘do you force me to repeat my real affections to you so often? is it your jealousy of my constancy? if it be that, with thanks to my Goddess Diana, I avouch that I never harbored the least unchaste thought to scandalize or blemish my purity’ (p. 47). Safe now within a relationship that Amphialus has declared, Helena can openly state the extent of her devotion, but the difficulties of reaching this point are evident in the indirect means she has had to employ to achieve it (the request to Philoclea to sue on her behalf) and her distress at having to repeat what a more perceptive lover should have understood – ‘Why … do you force me to repeat my real affections to you so often?’ In returning to stories Sidney left unresolved, Weamys indicates her interest in supplying strong and intelligent women with happy endings, and describes the fraught circumstances of independent female desire in contexts where the ability to express that desire is circumscribed. Furthermore, the stories that Weamys continues from Sidney’s Arcadia demonstrate keen interest in how female characters ‘might navigate the straits of female behaviour in a judgemental and partisan society’, as do continuations and adaptations by other writers.19

Strategies of indirection: Gervase Markham’s Arcadia Gervase Markham’s The English Arcadia, Alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending (1607–13), also turns the attention of the

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reader to the difficulties of designing women who have minds and interests of their own in worlds that position them ambivalently. Melidora is, of course, the daughter of Musidorus and Pamela and Markham’s Arcadia is a kind of second generation Arcadian adventure. Melidora, devastated by the death of her father, forsakes the commonwealth and crown. Rebuked by the Senate, she cedes government to them, and retires to Tempe, thus re-enacting movements traced by both Basilius and Sidney in electing some pastoral retreat. 20 What Melidora discovers, like many before her, is that retreats are also likely to contain unforeseen challenges. Melidora lives ‘Nymphlike’ (Markham, I: 75), forbids the presence of any prince or nobleman, and seems to have made a nun-like decision to abjure the things of the world.21 However, into this pastoral reclusivity comes what can best be described as a kind of entrepreneurial shepherd, Thirsis. If pastoral is conventionally uninterested in the world of commerce and money, then there are signs in Markham’s Arcadia that the times might be changing. Here be no idealistic shepherds more interested in poetry than fleeces, and Markham amusingly deflates the pretensions of aristocratic shepherds who would not have had a clue how to deal with their four-legged charges in a real world. Thirsis’s acquisition of a flock is specifically attributed, not to some unquestioned divine or natural order, but to his own ability and the failures of others. Through wit and money, we are told, he buys his flock from ‘a silly block-headed swain called Coridon’ (Markham, I: 76), thus suggesting both his own financial nous and the foppishness of the pastoral tradition. In many incidents surrounding the relationship between Thirsis and Melidora, the pastoral and romance forms are invoked only to be gently mocked or rewritten. Thirsis’s first sighting of Melidora, as he describes it to fellow shepherd Silvagio, is a stereotypical one, as she sits re-ordering her hair by a fountain. Her reaction to being thus observed when she thought herself alone is again typical. She runs away when she realizes that someone is present.22 By degrees, however, Thirsis establishes a relationship with Melidora that is premised on his being no threat to her, as she has excluded from her company anyone who might, by reason of birth or background, prove to be a viable suitor. She is happy for him to help her to pick fruit, and to fish, but then takes exception to his unexpected declaration of love. As so often in pastoral romance, and as we have seen before, it is the activity of fishing that is loaded with resonance. Previously stirred by the sight of damsons (which he has shaken from the tree) falling into her lap, it is the sight of a fish

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making off with her hook just as she thought to land it that provokes the ill-fated passionate declaration: at which sight my passion quickning my blood, and my blood reuiuing the spirrit of my wordes: I could not forbeare to say, behold thou all conquering Empresse of mens hearts, the glorious blaze which this angling beautye layes to catch mens soules, shall euen in this manner bee gnawne and taken away by the Yron teeth of consuming tyme; and where shall then be the future power of killing? yet louely Maide tryumph ouer me, whome you have already taken, euen mee that like this simple frye delight in my perishing, and if you doe (as your fayre eyes are witnesses) bemone the fish which hath swallowed downe your hooke, whose lingring torment is a signe of certaine death; then pittye me your slaue, the merryt of whose affection shall farre exceed the compassion due to any unreasonable creature. (Markham, I: 83) Melidora’s sudden, angry, but silent departure tells Thirsis that he has overstepped the mark. Later, we, along with Silvagio, see Thirsis’s second encounter with Melidora. Silvagio has offered the advice that Thirsis find someone else on whom to bestow his attention, but Thirsis, the constant, denies this possibility.23 In this next incident Melidora picks up on the fishing metaphor and uses it in her own way. In the story that Thirsis tells to Silvagio, Melidora is the one who laid the baits to catch others but Melidora reverses the image to indicate the dangers that she sees for herself, presaging the trap she will fall into, though not with Thirsis but with an inconstant lover, Diatassan. So she asks Thirsis if he has been the shepherd responsible for the baits and traps made ready for her and her nymphs to use. he made her answere, it was hee; why then said Melidora, Shepheard farewell, I will no longer stay with thee, lest I bee taken likewise by thee; but hee staying her againe, said; Excellent Ladie, how can you be made captiue by your prisoner, or howe can your subject alter anye of your determinations (Markham, I: 90). In reversing the image of who is at risk and who is in control, Melidora directly attacks the dynamics of courtly love that Thirsis tries to reinstate in his image of himself as her captive. Banishing him, she is, she says, fearful of the effects of his frenzy, if she allows him to remain. Yet

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Melidora’s insertion of some kind of Realpolitik into the rhetoric of courtly love would be rather more persuasive if the narrator did not go on to divulge the reason behind Melidora’s adamant stance, which is that Diatassan has already ‘so won the heart of the excellent Princesse Melidora, that shee did not disdain to call him her servant’ (Markham, I: 92). Diatassan, however, proves unreliable and when his inconstancy is demonstrated to her in ways that cannot be denied, Melidora realizes that she has indeed been trapped, and that Thirsis (as the narrator has consistently told the reader) is indeed the ‘most rare’ (Markham, I: 92). Here, though, comes the dilemma. When her servant Ethera praises the skills and virtues of Thirsis, Melidora displays an acute sense of what is at stake in terms of her reputation. ‘my former scornes have setled so much dispaire in the heart of Thirsis, that except I should grow neerely familiar with impudence, and my selfe discover what my selfe would have closest conceal’d; it is impossible that he should, once more, dare to attempt mee with the tender of his service.’ (Markham, II: 26) It is a wise servant who knows her own mistress and also clearly understands her predicament. Like many a wily confidante before and after her, Ethera has a cunning ‘strategeme’, by which, she tells Melidora, ‘you shall, by the hand of fate, be freed from the opportunities of Diatassan without any publicke shew of your own distemperance, and enjoy the service of Thirsis by a seeming constraint, against any desire or wish of your creation’ (Markham, II: 26–7). Ethera proposes that Melidora announce a tiger hunt, and that if anyone can outrun her or hit the tiger before she does they should ‘enioy [her] for his perpetuall Mistresse’ (p. 27). The cunningness of this plan lies in its being based on the knowledge that no-one is as fast as Melidora – except Thirsis. This plan may bring about what she wants without it looking as if she has taken direct action to achieve it, thus absolving her of any wilfulness, or any sense that she has made herself available. This might be a useful, if somewhat fantastical solution, but the difficulties are compounded by another shrewd observation from Melidora about the problems of being a heroine in a romance. It is a measure of shifts within the romance genre that the objection Melidora comes up with is of a quite different nature. This ploy would suggest, she feels, that ‘I care not whom I have, so one I have’, and that her election is ‘grounded neither upon wisdome,

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love, nor vertue, but upon the nimblenesse of a deliuer foot’ (p. 28). She recalls the Lady in Urania who reminds a suitor that she is not ‘Marchandise, nor to be gaind that way’ (Urania, I: 407). Part of her problem is wanting to avoid criticism for being wilful, and another part is that she does not want to look will-less either. She does not want to be the trophy wife, or as she puts is, a ‘sommer-games prize, a horses Race-bell, or a Grey-hounds collar’ (pp. 28–9). The problem the narrative presents is how she can get what she wants without looking on the one hand assertive and unfeminine, or, on the other hand, worthless and undiscriminating. Neither Melidora nor Ethera can come up with a better solution, so the tiger hunt goes ahead, though predictably it does not work out as anticipated, and after many unforeseen intrigues, Diatassan is the winner and due the prize of Melidora. Other complicated narrative strategies are then put in place to extricate Melidora, in danger of losing on all counts, from being given as a trophy to the person she was trying to avoid. Through a whole series of disguises, and mistaken and revealed identities, Melidora does end up with Thirsis as the reader has long hoped and expected, without any direct intervention by Melidora in the resolution of these events. The most significant thing about this, from our perspective, is that while Melidora and Ethera can analyze quite astutely the constraints on female behaviour in the realms of romantic love, they are much less successful at coming up with solutions. This is left to the author. Melidora knows what the problems are, though cannot resolve them, but if she could, she would still be compromised, if not in relation to the other characters in the romance, then with the reader. If the tiger hunt had worked, Melidora would have been a prize, given away to the successful combatant, as far as other characters were concerned. But to the reader she would have been a scheming planner who exercised considerable cunning to achieve her ends, with the added problem that she covered this duplicity. She might have fooled the other characters, but she cannot fool the reader, precisely because we have an insight into her thoughts and feelings. The problems then must be solved by the narrator and the author, not by the character herself. The tension evident in Markham’s English Housewife between virtuous activity and avoidance of any ‘violence of spirit’, between demonstrations of agency, on the one hand, and denial of autonomy, on the other, is replicated at the level of narrative. Melidora is quite capable of analyzing the problems but cannot provide their narrative resolutions. Melidora is caught between the imperatives of practical competence

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and the injunctions against autonomous authority. The English housewife was designed to be a useful partner and a complementary manager but had to stop short of independence, and at the level of narrative fiction she still needs the assistance of the narrator. Yet in giving an insight into Melidora’s thinking, her understanding of her own desires, and the perception of her behaviour by others, Markham’s text has ventured into potentially difficult terrain. It was not for want of intention on Melidora’s part that the plans did not work out. Someone else may make the judgement ‘that Thirsis should enjoy the free gift of the Princesse’ (Markham, II: 123), but it does not alter the fact that readers know the lengths to which Melidora was prepared to go to achieve her ends. Nor does it alter the sense that conduct books and narrative that encourage a high degree of female ability and intelligence struggle to put the lid back on the box that Melidora is nudging open.

Equivocating in the Temple: Barclay’s Argenis (1625) and Brathwait’s Panthalia (1659) Weamys’s Urania and Erona get what the reader might expect them to want. Weamys’s Helena and Markham’s Melidora get what the reader knows they want, but in doing so open up an arena of dangerous knowledge by giving the reader an insight into the designs and intentions of the female protagonist. Exactly how dangerous this knowledge has the potential to be is indicated in John Barclay’s Argenis (1625),24 where the discussion of how far a woman (who is the protagonist and not a negative exemplum) is prepared to go to achieve her desires reaches another level. Barclay’s Argenis shares similarities with Sidney’s Old Arcadia in its direct discussion of politics and good government, and is in that sense a pastoral romance. It is also a roman à clef, a narrative function also attributed to Wroth’s Urania. One of its central concerns is also how a woman who has made a personal choice in favour of a lover can remain true to that choice in the face of parental opposition. Like many romances it begins in medias res, which is particularly intriguing in that readers have to work out as they go how and why Argenis decided on Poliarchos, and what exactly is the state of their relationship. We learn fairly early in this lengthy narrative that Argenis’s affections are engaged with Poliarchos, and significantly this occurs at a moment when she is trying to hide that information from those around her. Argenis’s love is an endangered secret, and she dares not reveal her grief at the news of his supposed death ‘because she would

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not give her Maids occasion of suspecting anything.’ When she can ‘no longer dissemble her sorrow, she runnes hastily into her priuate Closet’ (p. 28).25 Like Pamphilia, Argenis uses solitude to avoid revealing her emotions to others. Yet Pamphilia uses these private spaces to contemplate or lament her situation, generally resolving on patience and constancy, while Argenis’s quiet times are more often times of deliberative planning. Barclay’s text is part of an emerging tradition that develops the connection between reader and female protagonist through giving the former insight into the latter, and in this respect it is significant that the title bears the name of the protagonist. As we saw in Markham’s text, our knowledge of Melidora’s intentions to try and regain Thirsis, whom she has previously rejected, is softened by the fantastical nature of Ethera’s stratagem of the tiger hunt. The problem might be real, but the solution is fantastic, and in any case does not work. How then do we feel about the methods that Argenis employs to keep at bay the suitors her father has in mind for her? The difference may lie in the fact that Melidora’s and Ethera’s stratagems come from the world of romance, Argenis’s from the world of Realpolitik. While Melidora and Ethera are out of their depths, and not in control of the situation, Argenis displays keen abilities and shrewd understandings. Argenis, like Gynecia, knows more and better than those around her, though unlike Gynecia, the object of her love is appropriate and sanctioned by the norms of virtue and class. Yet Argenis’s actions raise the issue as to whether the ends justify the means. An early example of this occurs when Argenis tries to disguise Poliarchos’s presence in Pallas’s temple from her father, invoking the custom of encouraging ‘as many of the Plebeians as will’ (p. 63) to worship Pallas. While sympathy is with Argenis, her deliberate manipulation of the people, and the direct lie to her father (seeming to care for the people, while she uses them in schemes of her own) takes the notion of the active woman into difficult territory. Later again, Argenis has it pointed out to her by her father that she is not a private person but a king’s daughter and that her refusal to marry has public consequences. Argenis agrees that she ought to give a reason ‘if she desireth to chuse her own Husband’, but then equivocates by suggesting that her real reason for not wanting to marry her current suitor, Radirobanes, is not a matter of her preference, but of his attitude. She might, she says, ‘not have hated this Radirobanes if hee had rather loved mee, than beleeued that I was a duetie owing him’ (p. 218). Having fudged her way out of having to accept two suitors, Argenis is then confronted with a third suitor, Archombrotus, the choice that

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her father comes up with as a solution to the problems these two initial suitors have caused as powerful foreign interests whose disappointments have led to foreign wars. Archombrotus is a noble kinsman, and was introduced to the reader right at the beginning of the story, as a helper and friend to Poliarchos himself. At this point Argenis relies on time-wasting strategies, hoping to buy time until Poliarchos returns. What seems to redeem Argenis, and to account for her actions, her prevarications, and downright lies is that she remains true to her word. Argenis loves Poliarchos partly for his constancy and that ‘rare thing in men, [his] modesty’. So it is, as she tells him, ‘long since, that I haue called thee Husband, not disposing my Fathers command but not asking it’ (p. 205). John Barclay’s Argenis is of a piece here with moves in Wroth’s Urania to redefine female virtue as more than simply chaste, silent, and obedient. Given that Argenis’s father believes that Poliarchos is a traitor and enemy, she cannot tell him that she loves Poliarchos, and is forced into subterfuge. Later again, to resist her father’s attempts to promote Archombrotus as suitor, Argenis actually considers fleeing to France, and raising a faction at home, creating a civil war, exploiting her popularity ‘to keepe her selfe from the marriage that he would inforce her to’ (p. 346). When the final obstacle to her marriage to Poliarchos is removed, with the revelation that Archombrotus is her brother, Argenis blushes and ‘now remembered she was a Virgin’ (p. 396) in a rhetorical sleight of hand that tries to reassert an innocence that previous events have questioned.26 Brathwait’s romance Panthalia (1659) presents a similarly troubling heroine. While her story takes up less space in a book bearing her name than one might have expected, it is concerned with how to obtain a particular outcome without seeming to try, and once again the reader is privy to the protagonist’s machinations. Acolasto and Panthalia are privately contracted, and his extended absence leads to her pursuit of him, despite being warned that the trip is ‘full of danger, and prejudicall to her honour’. Disguised first as a female pedlar in ‘her perilous Progress’, Panthalia then takes on male disguise, afraid of the soldiers’ attention in the garrison in which Acolasto is serving.27 Like so many heroines before her, in drama and prose, Panthalia here also acknowledges that that the armour of virtue and chastity is not necessarily sufficient protection against male attention. Moral virtues might also require material support. To support her disguise she encourages the attentions of another woman in the first of a number of deliberately deceptive actions. Presenting herself at a convent, Panthalia next writes a letter to Acolasto that directly addresses the possibility of inter-

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preting her actions as designing while revealing them (to the reader) to be precisely that. ‘As for this tedious addres which I lately undertook; have not the least thought, that it was any intentionall designe in me, to make this inquiry as a relative Object of Fancy: in conceipting otherwise, you infinitly delude yourself. This taske was to divorce us, not unite us.’ (p. 181) Declaring her intention to join the convent ‘the second day after your receipt of these’ (p.182), Panthalia deceives the nuns, anticipating that Alocasto will save her in the nick of time: though She could not be confident of the issue, whereto her intendments were addressed; her Care accompanied with much Secrecy, so fitly prepared; as the grounds of her designe promised faire, howsoever the event might second it. (p. 194) Brathwait’s narrative is ambivalent about the morality of Panthalia’s actions, and the successful conclusion relies, once again, less on Panthalia’s devious conceits than on ‘divine Fate’ (p. 215). On the verge of being accepted into the convent, Panthalia is asked by the Agent of Ceremonies a question intended to be rhetorical: ‘To whom are you pleased that I shall give you’ (p. 217). Panthalia sidesteps the response expected of her, as she turns to Alocasto and says ‘To this Gentleman … for He has the greatest interest in me.’ This is an astonishing move by Panthalia. The convent is extremely annoyed at the ‘gross deluding’, and Panthalia’s argument that only her prior commitment to Alocasto prevented her ‘resolution to religion’ (p. 217) is only partially convincing to her audience. As the narrator wryly remarks: ‘This ingenuous acknowledgement might seem to allay, but not wholly to cure this indignity’ (p. 218). Readers’ judgements might be even more sceptical, given the superior knowledge they have, yet the text has established the difficulties of women in pursuit of love. While Panthalia in male disguise asserts: ‘That wench for me, and none but shee, / That’s neither froward nor too free (p. 157), this rhetorical convention is undercut by another woman’s sense of the impossibility of these contradictory behests: ‘How pittifully are we weak woman tax’d, to be forward, froward, coy, or what not? Whereas you subtile men be those Coy-duckes that lure us’ (p. 158). The irony of one woman lamenting the constraints on female behaviour to another (disguised as

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a man) who is elaborately involved in bypassing those constraints would surely not be lost on readers. These portraits of intelligent and resourceful women also indicate the fault lines that occur between conflicting pressures, between the imperatives of narrative interest and the social injunctions not to step beyond the lines of feminine decorum so often represented by a failure of strategies to work out as their inventor intended. The tangles that female characters get into illustrates how difficult it is to determine just how far a woman can or should go without endangering her reputation or her narrative credibility. If an early modern female protagonist does not want to be obedient to the will of her father regarding her marriage, or, as is so often the case in Urania, changes her affections from her husband to another, then she is often forced into or chooses elaborate stratagems, as we have seen, to further her ends without public censure. This necessarily results in engaging in false seeming. That is, time after time, the female protagonist says something not entirely accurate about the state of her feelings or her intentions. Cecropia, the arch enemy of love and good government in Arcadia, advises her son to take Philoclea by force, arguing that ‘“No” is no negative in a woman’s mouth’ (NA, p. 533), and at least partly bases her argument on the constraints placed on women about speaking their feelings. Selenissa, in Barclay’s Argenis, uses a similarly sinister logic. Taken into Radirobanes’s confidence, she offers him this advice: [Radirobanes] is a King, hath an Army, and a Navy, and by rape the gods also have taken to themselves Wiues: loue excuseth rash enterprizes, and the sacred name of Husband blotteth out inuries: neyther am I cruell against my Nurse-childe, Argenis desires to be forced and for this reason, that she may keepe her word with Poliarchos, to whom she promised never willingly to be married to another. (p. 220) The significance here is, as the narrator points out, not only that ‘by the fraud and treason of Selenissa, there was a deadly rape intended upon Argenis’, but also that, ‘which was more lamentable’, this is presented ‘as if she had desired it’ (p. 221). Cecropia and Selenissa reveal the invidious logic that lurks beneath the speciousness of their arguments. Readers of a number of seventeenth-century texts know that female characters may not always be telling the truth, and may be indulging in devious stratagems, manipulating events and other characters to achieve ends that may be very desirable. How are male

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characters to respond to these female protagonists and how do they know when to believe what the heroine says, given that they do not have the insights afforded the privileged reader? How are female characters to pursue their own ends, preserve their chastity, and avoid censorious suspicions, while at the same time avoiding accusations of duplicity and of not saying what they mean? How dangerous are these strategies of indirection? The next chapter takes up these issues of female self-governance and its perceptions in the amatory novel.

4 ‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’: Governing the Self in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (1656), The History of the Nun (1689), Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in Excess (1720)

The politics of amatory fiction The term ‘amatory fiction’, or sometimes ‘the amatory novel’, is now loosely applied to a diverse range of texts written by women in the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the first few decades of the eighteenth century in which a heady mix of sentimental love and sexual intrigue is let loose in narratives that confront with a new explicitness the predicament of not simply the wooed but also the wooing woman. It is a term that, as David Oakleaf suggests, captures, albeit unintentionally, a certain ambivalence towards the nature of the narrative project in which these writers are engaged. It suggests, for example, that these works, while not synonymous with romance, at least bear a family resemblance – ‘romantic’ and ‘amatory’ both signifying to the modern reader that a love affair is at hand – though at the same time distancing the frankly sexual passion of these works from the fey otherworldliness associated with ‘romance’. For Oakleaf, the widespread use of the Latinate term can be explained by its ‘safely donnish’ dignity that still acknowledges a preoccupation with sexual love,1 though for others it is not dignified enough, the ‘amatory’ label trivializing narratives that allowed women, not simply to tell love stories, but also to ‘enter public discourse and, through narrative enact96

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ment and projection in fictional characters, publish their opinions on the most absorbing topics of the day: the intersections of religion and politics, the family and marriage, the nature of woman and female sexuality, the limits and abuse of authority, and the rights and obligations of monarchs’.2 In critical analyses of amatory fiction in recent years, it has been the broadly political dimension that has received most attention, particularly the ‘intersections of religion and politics’ in the works of Aphra Behn, Delarivie`re Manley, and Eliza Haywood. 3 Ros Ballaster has been the most forceful advocate for reading this fiction as a direct party political engagement by women writers in the public life otherwise denied them by their gender, and she makes a persuasive case for understanding ‘the female plot’ of ‘embattled virginity, virtue rewarded or ravished’, as a means ‘to reflect and refract male plotting, in other words, the party, dynastic, and ideological conflicts’ of public life.4 In this study, however, our main interest is in that other absorbing topic of the day, ‘the nature of woman and female sexuality’, and the ‘politics’ with which we are chiefly concerned involves the strategies for governing the self to which the heroine of Jane Barker’s Love Intrigues refers in her ‘Scheme of virtuous Politics’.5 In the fiction of this period, alongside the wider social and party political concerns, ‘this little Microcosm’, the self (LI, p. 89), is also under scrutiny, as prose fiction sought to depict, as John Richetti argues, ‘an interiorized equivalent of that life of public honor peculiar to the elites of antiquity’.6 In the works under discussion in this chapter, then, it is the microcosm rather than the macrocosm that interests us: not so much the opportunity provided by fiction for women to engage with public issues, as the ongoing struggle to find ways of accommodating a specifically female subjectivity within the constraints of the feminine code. The ‘Model of Perfection’ that Barker’s Galesia recommends lies firmly within those constraints: ‘Deny thy self’, the older, wiser Galesia enjoins, ‘not only in Deeds, but in the most secret Intentions’. But ‘a Scheme of virtuous Politics’ that acknowledges ‘secret intentions’, even if only to restrain them, sends some worrying signals. In a scheme of virtuous politics, intentions are everything (and in Love Intrigues, as we will discuss later, Galesia is particularly severe on herself for having done the right things for the wrong reasons). But intentions are also necessarily, if not secret, at least encrypted in a behavioural code premised on the assumption that good intentions are not enough.7 ‘A scheme of virtuous Politics’ need not imply a virtue more politic

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than principled, but it does suggest a self in need of governance – a self that is known by its desires and presumably conscious of its own best interests. There is in the fiction of this period a dual movement: a movement away from idealized female characters whose virtue speaks for itself towards characters whose virtue is often contingent upon their ability to plead the force of circumstances; and a movement away from performance-based notions of honour towards an honour based on the integrity of the self. The interiorized equivalent of the life of public honour that Richetti attributes to female characters in amatory fiction takes the form of an authenticity and integrity founded on an intensity of emotional response that enables them ‘to emerge from the remote world of courtly romance where women are idealized, decorous, and reticent and to point by their innocence, vulnerability, and intense emotional involvements to an interiority that claims to be universal rather than class specific’. In this version of the democratization of fiction, interiority is a leveller: even though the heroines still come from the leisured elite, ‘their emotional and sexual intensities’, Richetti argues, ‘embody a naturalized and universalized humanity’, in contrast to the posturing and ‘inauthentic’ representatives of the privileged hierarchy who attempt to seduce them.8 However remote these works might seem from the material and social conditions of the period, they speak ‘in broad ideological terms’, he suggests, to emerging social and class tensions. There are numerous variants of this account of the eruption of female desire into the decorum of prose fiction, each with an explanatory power that derives from the plotting of generic change against the coordinates of shifting social, economic, and ideological power bases. And there is much to explain: the entry, in numbers, of women into the literary market-place; the popular success of their works; the erosion of prohibitions on the expression of female desire. The heroines of amatory fiction give voice to their feelings with a rare candour, although irresistible desire, forgivable as a force not to be reckoned with, is nonetheless culpable, and generally punishable. True agency, in the sense of a licensed intervention in a state of affairs in order to achieve change, is still far from common. The real subversiveness of these fictions lies, in fact, less in the voice they give to passions silenced by masculine constructions of women as chaste and reserved, than in the opening they provide for a reassessment of what precisely is at stake in the behavioural codes that police such constructions. As we have seen, we do not have to wait until amatory fiction for female

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characters to begin to make their move away from being idealized, decorous, and reticent; it is more or less incumbent upon them to do so once they assume a role in narrative that amounts to being more than a ‘sommer-games prize, a horses Race-bell, or a Greyhounds collar’ (Markham, pp. 28–9). The problem has always been to do it safely, and what is new in amatory fiction is that female characters have become shrewder – or more openly calculating – in their assessment of where the real dangers lie.

Unconscious attraction in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ An early casualty of the more pragmatic assessment of options seems to have been confidence in the convention that a woman ought not to love first, a notion that also becomes increasingly more difficult to support alongside a developing transparency of consciousness. In earlier fiction, there is the sense that the less said about this convention the better, possibly because the practicalities of such a love do not bear close scrutiny. And in fact narrative strategies have so effectively protected the heroine from suspicion of having initiated a romance, or of loving before she herself is honourably beloved, that more often the puzzle is not so much when she began to love as how she could ever have loved at all. Scenarios such as we find in Sidney’s Arcadia, where the lover’s disguise as a lowly servant or Amazon princess effectively precludes consciousness of even the existence of a worthy suitor, are time-honoured strategies – Chrétien’s Ywain, for example, can be confident of loving first when he sets his sights on the wife of the knight he has just slain, and, thanks to a magic ring, is invisible to boot. The threat of sexual violence is an equally powerful preventative – at least of the possibility of a consciously reciprocated passion – though the suitor who introduces himself as a potential rapist is not easily recuperated.9 We do not have to wait until Richardson’s Pamela, however, to discover that the potential rapist is not totally and permanently incapacitated as a suitor. Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, a novella published in 1656 as part of Nature’s Pictures (a motley collection of poetry and prose, fable and treatise, memoir and romance somewhat kindly described as a ‘generic experiment’10), could not be further from the social and economic realities in which Richardson’s novel is embedded. But there are interesting similarities in the plot that remind the reader how close to fantasy Richardson’s vaunted realism is sometimes sailing. Cavendish was a political

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conservative, aligned with the royalists, but in her literary ambition apparently bound by no known laws of tradition or kind, publishing (prolifically) on philosophical and scientific topics as well as prose fiction and memoir. In ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ Cavendish commandeers the romance genre as a vehicle of lawless excess that functions also as social commentary with a utopian bent. Cavendish’s heroine, Miseria (aka Travellia and Affectionata), is impeccably virtuous, highly articulate, and fiercely uncompromising in her sexual integrity. After being cast ashore by a storm in a foreign land, she finds herself sold to a bawd who prepares her for the pleasure of her most valuable customer, a Prince with a reputation as ‘a grand monopolizer of young virgins’ (p. 50). Miseria appeals to the noble mind that usually dwells in honourable persons such as he appears to be, insisting (as Richardson’s Pamela later does) on the ownership of her own body and the injustice of taking ‘the goods [that is, her virginity] from the right owners without their consent’ (p. 52).11 But Miseria’s tears only fuel the Prince’s passion, and determined not to be put off by rhetoric, he attempts to seize his prize. So Miseria shoots him. It is not, however, a fatal wound, and while he prepares the ground for a second assault, the attentions of ‘so personable and well favoured’ a young man begin to make an impression, insomuch that at the last she did not dislike his company; and grew to that pass, as to be melancholy when he was gone, blush when he was named, start at his approaching, sigh, weep, grew pale and distempered, yet perceived not, nor knew her disease; besides, she would look often in the glass, curl her hair finely, wash her face cleanly, set her clothes handsomely, mask herself from the sun, not considering why she did so. (p. 59) The Prince recognizes the tell-tale symptoms of an awakened passion, and decides to take his chance before it wanes, but when he grows intemperate, Miseria takes poison (though it, too, does not prove fatal). Miseria is clearly ignorant of her burgeoning affections, however transparent the symptoms to a watchful lover who construes, presumably correctly, her attentions to herself as interest in him.12 It is an assumption that is commonly made, though not always correctly – Cecropia’s interpretation of Pamela’s attention to her appearance as ‘a sign of an unrefusing harbour’ (NA, p. 484) is clearly mistaken – but even modern critics are quick to infer the desire to attract another’s attention from a woman’s attentions to herself.13 Contemporary

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conduct books continually warn, moreover, of how slight the evidence of encouragement a man needs to overcome his scruples. In Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1699), for example, women are warned that ‘Mankind, from the double temptation of Vanity and Desire, is apt to turn every thing a Woman doth to the hopeful side; and there are few who dare make an impudent Application, till they discern something which they are willing to take for an Encouragement’.14 The onus is on the woman, therefore, to keep men at a distance, but without driving them away through rudeness, simpering bashfulness, or oppressive reserve. It is a fine line that is being drawn, and one that can be safely negotiated only by a woman who has nothing to hide, either consciously or unconsciously, since it is the eyes that give most away. As Halifax observes, men’s capacity to discern encouragement is ‘so very nice, that it must engage you to have a perpetual Watch upon your Eyes, and to remember, that one careless Glance giveth more advantage than a hundred Words not enough considered; the Language of the Eyes being very much the most significant, and the most observed’.15 Miseria is unable to protect herself, however, when she is not only unaware of the symptoms but also ignorant of the disease. The unconscious attraction that Miseria displays is understandable given that the Prince is, in everything other than his monopolizing of virgins, a man of uncommon parts, his ‘noble disposition and affable behaviour’ (p. 78) as capable of softening the hearts of pirates as they are of softening the heart of a young and tender girl. His power to charm her affections, even as his assaults on her virtue harden her resolve to die honourably rather than live in guilt, provides, moreover, the reassurance of a disinterested love once circumstances permit an honourable resolution. Without that initial involuntary responsiveness her subsequent acquiescence might seem more expedient than ardently desired (a consideration that might also be of compelling interest to Richardson’s Mr B). But if that unconscious attraction is not to provoke a premature and violent conclusion, something more than the heroism of passive resistance is required to prevent the disinterestedness of her love becoming rapidly beside the point, and not all women have a pistol at hand, or the gumption to use one, or the autonomy to take their fate in their own hands. One of Miseria’s objections to the romances that the Prince’s aunt offers for her amusement is that they set a standard of perfection that incites only envy in those unable to attain it. But the remoteness of earlier romances, not only from the society and times of their readers, but also from the practicalities of mundane reality,

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permits solutions that ordinary women, with family and friends looking over their shoulders, could never attempt. And like the romance heroine, conveniently deprived of family and friends, and blessed with a character that all and sundry can identify as virtuous, Miseria can perform feats that ought never to be tried at home. Miseria’s virtue is never an issue in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’. Like her romance predecessors, she is virtuous, and instantly identifiable as such,16 even though she offends against a basic tenet of the feminine code. She may not have been aware of love – or, as Richardson’s Pamela later puts it, she ‘did not know, it was love’ that she was feeling (Pamela, p. 472) – but according to the strictest interpretation of the female moral code, she ought not even to feel love until the suitor’s honourable intentions have been unequivocally declared (and the Prince’s intentions are anything but honourable since not only has he already offered violence but he also already has a wife). It could be argued, of course, that the little flame he has kindled hardly deserves to be termed ‘love’, but, whatever we call it, the damage is done simply by giving the Prince reason to hope, which is encouragement enough. The proscription on a woman loving independently of a suitor’s declaration of honourable intent is framed, within the female moral code as it became defined during the seventeenth century, as the ‘natural’ condition of will-less womanhood, a reflection of an appropriately passive and submissive disposition. But there are also strong pragmatic considerations that suggest this particular virtue might owe more to necessity than to a woman’s natural character, and, at the very least, there is certainly room for confusion between what is and what ought to be a woman’s role in affairs of the heart. Dorothy Osborne, for example, writing to William Temple in 1654 about the merits of Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (1654–5), finds only one character who takes her fancy: ‘she [who] was in a besieged Towne, and perswaded all those of her Sexe to goe out with her to the Enemy (which were a barbarous People) and dye by theire swords, that the provision of the Towne might last the longer for such as were able to doe service in deffending it.’ Osborne admires this self-sacrifice as a ‘handsome thinge’ to do, but declares herself outraged when it is revealed that ‘this woman left behinde her [a letter] for the Governour of the Towne, where she discovers a passion for him and makes that the reason why she did it.’ Osborne’s scorn is directed at the woman’s impudence: ‘I confesse I have noe patience for our faiseurs de Romance, when they make women court. It will never enter into my head that tis possible any

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woman can Love where she is not first Loved, & much lesse that if they should doe that, they could have the face to owne it.’17 This is the conduct-book orthodoxy: a woman should not love, let alone speak, before she is bespoken. But Osborne’s complaint also reveals a telling slippage from what is possible to what is politic – from what a woman, as a woman, can do, to what she should do, to preserve dignity, or save face. She herself seems in two minds whether the fault represents a breach of plausibility or a breach of decorum, and it is an uncertainty that becomes even more pronounced in the amatory fiction of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Taking secret charge in The History of the Nun In Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), the heroine, Isabella – the nun of the title – certainly understands the force of decorum when she falls in love with Henault, the noble, handsome, and charming brother of Sister Katteriena, her friend and fellow nun at a monastery in Ipers [Ypres]. The History of the Nun is typical of much of Behn’s fiction – most of it written in the years immediately prior to her death in 1689, following a successful career as a dramatist – in its depiction of passions that are often defended as essentially amoral in their overwhelming intensity. At one stage Isabella, for example, claims that she gives in to a passion that she is convinced is the will of Heaven since it is so little in her power to conquer – this despite the fact that she is initially established as another model of virtue. The sincerity of her belief, despite its apparent expediency, is attested to by the narrator, who glosses the argument that ‘it was resisting even Divine Providence to struggle any longer with her heart’ with the observation that ‘this being her real belief, she the more patiently gave way to all the thoughts that pleased her.’18 Sincerely persuaded though Isabella may be of the inevitability of the sin she is about to commit, her vow-breaking is with some difficulty subsumed under the kind of political double-speak that Ros Ballaster attributes to amatory fiction. ‘The plot convention of a heroine torn between vows … takes on a newly political light’, Ballaster argues, in the context of a Catholicism under threat of persecution and the necessary expedient of disavowing the church as a means to its own survival. ‘The contingencies of political and social survival’ might, by inference, be seen to mitigate Isabella’s vow-breaking, even on a personal level, since it is clear that she was not entirely free in her original choice of vocation.19 But what is unnerving – and

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unsettling to a party political reading – is the speed with which Isabella acquires the arts of equivocation and deceit even before she breaks her vows. Isabella is protected from the worst excesses of shamelessly desiring women by the expedient of falling in love before she knows what is happening to her. When she is first importuned by Villenoys, a nobly born young man who, alone of all her admirers, dares speak his love, her defences are impenetrable, and her standard of conduct impeccable. She even blames herself for perhaps having inadvertently encouraged him: she is impervious to his entreaties, but she is not blind, and fears mischief has been done by what Halifax calls the ‘Language of the eyes’ – ‘she fears she might, by something in her looks, have enticed his heart, for she owned she saw him with wonder at his beauty’ (p. 10) – and she fears also that she might have ‘given him hope by answering his letters’ (p. 10), though even when he is gravely ill she is unrelenting. Isabella is immune to Villenoys’s appeals, but she is defenceless before an enemy she is unable to recognize. When she falls in love with Henault, she does not even recognize it as love until Katteriena describes her own experience with the page Arnaldo, though she is conscious of disturbing feelings that she can guard against if warned of their approach. Henault, for his part, does not realize that the pleasure he finds in Isabella’s presence is also love, for ‘love very rarely takes birth without hope’ (p. 11) and Isabella’s young life was already ‘a proverb, and a precedent’, for the holiest of women. Yet for all Isabella’s reputation for piety, once love strikes she acquires in an instant the ability to dissemble and manipulate, and ‘with her woman’s skill begins to practice an art she never before understood’ (p. 17). The transformation is disturbing, suggesting a capacity for feigning virtue that suddenly makes sense, for later readers, of Mr B’s distrust of Pamela’s innocence. One moment Isabella’s name is synonymous with devout living, such that when people wanted to ‘express a very holy woman indeed, they would say, ‘She was a very “Isabella”’ (p. 11); the next moment this woman who ‘in the whole course of her life … never could be charged with an untruth, or an equivocation’ (p. 18), is scheming to ‘dissemble her own passion and make him the first aggressor; the first that loved, or at least, that should seem to do so’ (17). Seemingly effortlessly, she manipulates Katteriena until, worried by Katteriena’s confidence that her brother has subdued his passion, she deems it ‘time to retrieve the flying lover’ (21).

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Behn claims at the beginning of the story that, while women are ‘by nature more constant and just than men’ (p. 4), they learn from men’s example until long habit takes the place of nature, and it is now only modesty, she insists, and not inclination that sets women apart. But modesty, in Isabella’s case, relates only to appearance, and her impropriety is ultimately exposed in sensational fashion: having survived the shame of running off with Henault, she eventually marries Villenoys after believing Henault killed in battle, but when Henault returns from the dead, she resolves to protect herself from the infamy of a bigamous marriage by becoming ‘the murderess of two husbands (both beloved) in one night’ (p. 42). It seems a long way from the Isabella of proverb and precedent, though she quickly recovers respect sufficient to deliver a half-hour warning against vow-breaking before her execution, departing the world ‘generally lamented and honorably buried’ (p. 42). There is throughout Behn’s work a trust in the efficacy of confession and penance that is at odds with consistency or even coherence of characterization – issues that are also largely irrelevant to the moral essentialism of earlier concepts of character. (Another striking instance of penitential redemption is the career of Matilda in Behn’s The Fair Jilt. A so-called ‘Galloping Nun’ – that is, a woman who enters an Order on a short-term contract rather than vowing perpetual chastity – Matilda has an innocent man convicted of attempted rape, purloins her sister’s fortune, and twice attempts to have her sister murdered, yet the penitent is allowed to live more or less happily ever after, in ‘as perfect a state of happiness, as this troublesome world can afford’.20) But the speed and ease with which Isabella becomes an accomplished dissembler, the price she is prepared to pay to avoid the loss of reputation or even her husband’s reproaches,21 the coolness with which she is able to manipulate both Henault and Katteriena while in the throes of an ungovernable passion, all raise questions about what is going on beneath an exterior that is – in Isabella’s case, definitively – chaste, silent, and obedient. The dangers were already stirring in a character such as Markham’s Melidora, who in the elaborate stratagem of the tiger hunt was attempting to save herself the embarrassment of admitting she was wrong in rejecting Thirsis’s suit. But her clear-sighted analysis of the pragmatic implications of her actions and her willingness to contrive a face-saving deception point to the ways in which a developing self-consciousness can compromise female subjectivity. The modesty that Behn suggests ‘makes the difference’ between men and women also becomes equivocal in the context of an active intelligence, always in danger of tipping over from something a woman ‘is’

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to something that she ‘does’. While she is a paragon of piety, Isabella’s modesty defends her from the attentions of the hordes of young men who aspire to her hand: they find her reserve so off-putting that they do not dare speak to her of love. The reserve is not ‘natural’, to the extent that, when she is ‘at perfect peace and tranquility’ (p. 10) with herself, and safe within the enclosed world of the nunnery, she relaxes into a more outgoing and animated demeanour, but when her tranquillity is once again disturbed by the intrusion of worldly interests – this time in the form of her awakening regard for Henault – she deliberately withdraws into herself and resumes the cloak of modest retirement. From a modesty that is the expression of diffidence in relation to worldly affairs to a modesty that controls and subdues an unseemly personal interest requires no great leap of faith in Isabella’s virtue. But it is such a tiny step from there to a modesty that controls and subdues an unseemly personal interest for the purpose of surreptitiously promoting it that it is no wonder that modesty became such a suspect virtue. True modesty is in a sense incompatible with a fully functional subjectivity, since it derives from a humility that is ignorant of the claims of the self. Consciously modest behaviour, in contrast, implies a knowledge of something to be modest about, either one’s own merits or what lies beyond the limits of the decorum that words or behaviour may infringe. Consciously modest behaviour also acts as a screen behind which a woman’s desires, innocent or otherwise, are known only to herself, so that, as Ruth Yeazell observes, ‘under the cover of modesty … a woman who knows her own desires always threatens to take secret charge of the scene’. The interests of prospective husbands, therefore, are best served by women remaining ‘modestly unaware that they love until they are asked to marry, their desires [remaining] … safely in the keeping of their husbands’.22 But, of course, if women remain modestly unaware of their love, they also risk, as Miseria does, betraying evidence of that love. Moreover, symptoms of a preference, accompanied by a steadfast negative, might also imply not modesty but, as Yeazell suggests, a capacity for manipulation ‘all the more dangerous for being concealed’.23

The exact rules of virtue and modesty in Love Intrigues The ‘Scheme of virtuous Politics’ that Galesia recommends in Love Intrigues would seem, in the circumstances, an essential safeguard, but it is also a tall order for a 15-year-old embarking on her first amours.

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Barker’s novel (a term she herself uses, though perhaps in the sense of ‘novella’) is generally assumed to be semi-autobiographical, and possibly not originally intended for general consumption, the political intentions of its author (a staunch royalist who converted to Catholicism after fleeing to France in 1688 after the Glorious Revolution) confined, Kathryn King argues, to the strengthening of community bonds effected through manuscript circulation within a select circle of sympathizers.24 The story Galesia tells her friend Lucasia concerns her first love, Bosvil, who courts her while she is staying with an aunt in London. They apparently reach an understanding – at least Galesia seems to thinks so – but when she returns home to the country he blows hot and cold in a seemingly unaccountable fashion, until he eventually marries another. Even if only loosely based on personal experience, it is an extraordinary social document, remarkable for its psychological acuity yet ultimately inconclusive, with neither Galesia nor Bosvil allowed an unambiguous insight into the other’s feelings. Each blames the other for obscuring his or her intentions, but Galesia also blames herself, though she has done all that a woman ought to do when importuned by a suitor, never once betraying an affection that might be interpreted as encouragement. But as Galesia sets out the case against herself, she acted on suspect motives, allowing a secret pride, disguised as modesty, to govern her actions. That is, she was modest because she was too proud to be indiscreet, her behaviour driven not by the love of that virtue with which she should honour her Maker, but by an effort to look good: How far my Looks, or Gestures, might betray my Thoughts, I know not; but I kept my Words close Prisoners, till they should be set at Liberty by the Desire of his Father or the command of mine or at least conveyed into the Mouth of my prudent Mother. Thus I thought I planted my Actions in a good Soil, in the Ground of Virtue; and watered them with the Stream of Discretion: But the worm of Pride, and Self-esteem was at the bottom and gnawed the Root. (p. 96) Galesia offers her story to her friend as an object lesson in the dangers of pride, but as with all the works discussed in this chapter, the moral seems oddly tangential to the story, which in this case demonstrates, more than anything else, how little room in the social world there is for the ‘truth and sincerity’ that Galesia laments has been supplanted by modesty and pride. When she had first met Bosvil – a kinsman who

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had visited the family home – the inadequacy of the stricture on not loving first is immediately apparent. Her thoughts are already prudently armed ‘with a thousand Resolutions against Love’, but she succumbs instantly and, it seems, genuinely: ‘the first Moment I saw this Man [Bosvil] I loved him; though he had nothing extraordinary in Person or Parts, to excite such an Affection’ (p. 84). In London, where Bosvil is a student at the Inns of Court, he makes his intentions clear, the language of looks and gestures transparent enough to prompt Galesia’s aunt to exercise, in the interests of discretion rather than harassment, her custodial obligations, though he is still allowed opportunity to snatch a few moments in which to declare everlasting love and to seek the same affirmation from Galesia. But Galesia knows the ropes: she dismisses his protestations as youthful gallantry, which he, as expected, construes as the modesty demanded of a young woman who must wait upon parental consent – though Galesia also admits that she wanted a courtship with all the frills, disdaining ‘to be courted thus in hugger mugger’ (p. 86). It is, however regrettably, the way of the world to mix ‘Pride with Honour, Dissimulation with Modesty’, and ‘as the World now rolls, we are under a kind of Constraint to follow its Bias’ (p. 86). In the events that follow, Galesia is apparently undone by pride – though it is also possible that pride might in fact have saved Galesia from an even sorrier fate, for Bosvil’s intentions are as puzzling to the reader as they are to Galesia. When he eventually visits her home, his behaviour is coolly respectful but no more, and he speaks to her father, not about marriage to his daughter but seeking his advice on another woman who had been proposed as a suitable marriage prospect. With considerable effort Galesia maintains her mask of indifference, but just as she is regaining her equanimity Bosvil’s manner changes and she is able to read in his behaviour the ‘Declaration of a violent Passion’: ‘though he made no formal or direct Address … his Eyes darted Love, his Lips smiled Love, his Heart sighed Love’ (p. 90). But while his tongue remains silent she cannot appear even to notice his failure to speak, without risking ridicule as an ignorant country girl who has mistaken an idle town flirtation for a genuine declaration of love. Her hopes are revived when she learns he has warned off a rival, but then he tells someone else that he has fixed on a neighbour’s daughter. She does not hear from him for weeks, but he returns more assiduous than ever, addressing her in the language of the romantic lover, begging a speedy marriage or else he will die, and brandishing a marriage licence. She remains outwardly reserved, affecting not to take him seriously

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and resorting to that old standby, a preference for the single life. But when he once again retreats from courtship into mere civility, she cannot turn around and quarrel with him for not courting her without ‘making [herself] the Lover, instead of the Person beloved; which was not only contradictory to [her] haughty Humour, but seemed in a manner to invert Nature’ (p. 99). Part of the problem is, on the one hand, a society that speaks in code and acts in masks and, on the other hand, a young girl who foolishly presumes to have conquered the code and who is absurdly confident her lover will be able to decipher the signals she sends him, however esoteric their meaning. She believes not simply that ‘the merest Freshman in Love’s Academy’ would be able to read and understand the language of her own ‘broken Words, stolen Sighs, [and] suppressed Tears’ (p. 95) but, more particularly, that Bosvil will be able to interpret a letter telling him to go away and leave her in peace as an invitation to renew his suit in earnest.25 Galesia has obviously been reading too many books, her expectations of a lover’s powers of penetration based on the intuitive grasp of the romance hero, who routinely performs feats of deductive brilliance. When thwarted in love, Galesia also resorts to other romance expedients, turning to the single life of poet, scholar and ‘Arcadian shepherdess’.26 These too, in romance, form part of the language of love – less lifestyle alternatives than statements of silent suffering – but Galesia seems to take them seriously as career options, and in fact proves so adept in rural affairs that her father hands over to her the management of the farm. A romance heroine would no doubt find it galling to have her pastoral inclinations taken so literally,27 and at least some of Galesia’s difficulties stem from a too-ready application of the assumptions of fiction to common life. Drawing on the autobiographical element in Barker’s works, some critics suggest that her fiction rehearses an alternative identity for the single woman,28 but there is also something farcical in the way Galesia plunges into a new vocation each time Bosvil fails to fulfil his promise and then promptly abandons it the moment he beckons. (Deep in the study of Latin in her vocation of scholar, for example, she is speedily convinced of Bosvil’s sincerity by information she receives third-hand, at which point grammar rules become ‘harsh Impertinences’, and ‘the only syntax I studied, was how to make suitable Answers … when the longed-for Question should be proposed’ [p. 91].) The romance conventions upon which Galesia relies – the language of eyes, smiles, and sighs and the traditional device of pastoral retreat – seem to be understood, by her at least, as practical solutions to the

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social conventions constraining women in her own world. She is governed by a code of behaviour that requires a young woman to appear neither to be trying to win a man nor to be incapable of or averse to returning love should it be offered, and Galesia thinks that she has performed this balancing act consummately, avoiding both a ‘too ready Compliance’ and a ‘too rigid Opposition’ (p. 91), neither encouraging Bosvil nor being uncivil towards him. But the danger lies, not simply in overbalancing, but also in too zealously guarding against an embarrassing tumble, and Bosvil in the end claims that Galesia’s studied indifference – assumed, she tells her friend, in accordance with ‘the exact Rules of Virtue and Modesty’ (p. 98) – finally convinced him that her heart was as cold as her behaviour towards him. Galesia questions the sincerity of his explanation, arguing that he was simply blaming her for his own inconstancy, and remarking that men are more apt to make the opposite mistake, believing women to be ‘forwarder than they really are, taking even Complaisance and Civilities for Affection’ (p. 110). But Bosvil conceivably finds her behaviour quite as frustratingly indecisive as she finds his. Love Intrigues provides a host of good practical reasons, aside from the more idealistic dictates of virtue and modesty, why it is safer for a woman not to love, and certainly not to be aware that she loves, until the man has made public his intentions. It is not simply that, as Jane Spencer suggests, ‘an admission of love [is] tantamount to a loss of chastity’;29 an admission of love, even if only to herself, commits a woman to a dissimulation that carries with it the threat of disaster if her mask of indifference is so hard and cold that the potential lover is driven prematurely to despair. The ‘supreme adventure’ of courtship is, as Amanda Vickery describes it, ‘a tightrope of romantic excitement’, and a ‘fastidious decorum’ could prove quite as disastrous as ‘imprudent encouragement’.30 Vickery is speaking as a social historian, describing the constraints on courtship in eighteenth-century England. It is not a feminine ideal that she identifies as constraining courtship behaviour but a family dynamic in which the major concern is over who has the right and the power to dispose of a woman in marriage. In this context, the prohibition on loving first acquires an even more pragmatic rationale, serving to eliminate what is assumed to be the one impediment to a daughter’s trouble-free disposability: a preference for someone other than the family’s preferred suitor.31 In Love Intrigues the issue of a prior affection is also raised by Bosvil as an explanation of his readiness to interpret Galesia’s modesty as indifference (claiming that Galesia’s persistent

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reserve led him to believe that all her amorous inclinations had been laid to rest with an earlier suitor who had died before he could press his claim). A prior claim on the woman’s heart is, if nothing else, a reassuring alternative to the mortification of outright rejection. For all the passionate intensity of these heroines – even Galesia’s decorum and circumspection are not proof against her fury when Bosvil proposes his friend as a potential husband, and she starts out for his house fantasizing murder – the convention that a woman ought not to love first still exerts a powerful influence, even if it extends only to outward appearances. In many respects the feminine code has changed very little from the English romances of the preceding 200 years, though, if amatory fiction is any guide, the assumptions on which it is based are increasingly being understood as more notional than real, and more expedient than ideal, at the same time as the advice literature is formulating the feminine virtues as natural and normative. It is not until much later that conduct books seem prepared to acknowledge the force of circumstance rather than ‘nature’ in models of female perfection, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, John Gregory’s advice on courtship is informed as much by the practical realities of social life as by the nature of being female. He observes that ‘it is a maxim laid down among you, and a very prudent one it is, That love is not to begin on your part, but is entirely to be the consequence of our attachment to you’, and he is confident that such prudence is well within a woman’s keeping, if only because of the odds against happening upon a half-decent prospect within the limited circle of a woman’s acquaintances: ‘supposing a woman to have sense and taste, she will not find many men to whom she can possibly be supposed to bear any considerable share of esteem. Among these few, it is a very great chance if any of them distinguishes her particularly’.32 At least, such is the case, Gregory suggests, in England, where women are endowed with a more modest share of that sensibility that disposes towards tender attachments. But even in fiction that takes advantage of warmer climes and warmer dispositions to flout behavioural constraints, the cultural authority of the feminine ideal still exerts itself.

Sexual politics in Love in Excess In Eliza Haywood’s fiction, there are numerous admirable women who love first – or at least love independently of firm evidence that their feelings are already reciprocated – and by the end of the first decade of

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her highly prolific career (stretching from 1719 to 1756) her name had become synonymous with ‘the profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers’ who were prepared to defy the rules of decency and decorum in their portrayal of illicit female desire.33 Yet, even in a novel such as Love in Excess (published in 1719/1720, in three parts), which portrays sympathetically a number of women who love with a passionate integrity that defies the constraints of decorum and even chastity, there is still, for all their spirit and good faith, an implicit hierarchy of justifiable forwardness within this cohort of intrepid women. And at the pinnacle can be found the ‘matchless Melliora’, who alone does not love first – even if there are only milliseconds in it. Melliora does not appear until Part 2 of Love in Excess, establishing herself immediately as of a different order to the throng of women who yearn for Count D’Elmont the moment they set eyes on him. Convent educated and unacquainted with fashionable society, Melliora is called to the deathbed of her father, who had also been D’Elmont’s guardian and who had earlier asked D’Elmont to perform the same role for his daughter. But the moment Melliora’s eyes meet D’Elmont’s, ‘their admiration of each others perfections was mutual, and tho’ he had got the start in love, as being touched with that almighty dart, before her affliction [her grief] had given her leave to regard him, yet the softness of her soul, made up for that little loss of time, and it was hard to say whose passion was the strongest’.34 Melliora’s distraction – initially grief-stricken and with eyes only for her dying father until consoled by D’Elmont – allows her to claim the delicacy of a truly virtuous woman, and allows Haywood, too, the advantage of having it both ways: a heroine whose sensibility is both passionate enough to support love at first sight and modest enough not to betray inflammatory symptoms (symptoms that might be accused of actually precipitating desire in the other party). Melliora’s virtue is also protected by having misheard her father’s dying words, so that she at first thinks D’Elmont is being recommended to her as a husband rather than as a guardian, a misunderstanding that can be credited with putting the idea of love into her head, thus avoiding the imputation of prior amorous inclinations. When we consider how far Haywood is prepared to go in giving women the initiative in affairs of the heart, it may seem surprising that such protection should be necessary. Love in Excess is a morass of love intrigues, beginning, prior to Melliora’s arrival on the scene, with the rivalry of Alovisa and Amena for the love of D’Elmont – Amena having been brought to D’Elmont’s attention by his misinterpretation of an

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overture from Alovysa (in the form of an anonymous letter advising him of an admirer). Alovysa dispatches her rival and marries D’Elmont (who is more attracted by Alovysa’s fortune than her person), but her subsequent jealousy when she detects another, though unidentified, rival complicates a second intrigue, the affair of Ansellina (Alovysa’s sister) and Brillian (D’Elmont’s brother), which was already complicated enough due to the jealousy of Bellpine (Brillian’s rival for the hand of Ansellina). The couple are further harassed by the interference of Alovysa seeking to revenge herself on D’Elmont through his brother. The unidentified rival is Melliora, but D’Elmont’s designs on her, hampered by his marriage to Alovysa, are further complicated by the amorous schemes of Malantha, daughter of his friend Baron D’Espernay (who also has designs on Alovysa), and are complicated yet again by the mayhem that climaxes this series of intrigues, when an evening of thwarted assignations culminates in D’Elmont’s accidental killing of Alovysa (do not run in the dark with an unsheathed sword) and Melliora’s mortified retreat to a convent. The first half of this story (comprising Parts One and Two) takes place in France, where, a new admirer writes to D’Elmont at the beginning of Part Three, for women ‘it would be a crime unpardonable to modesty, to make the first advances’ (p. 166). There has so far been little evidence of such strict modesty, but in Italy, where D’Elmont repairs after Melliora’s renunciation of the world, women are even more audacious, prompting a new series of entangled intrigues. First there is Ciamara (the letter writer) and her increasingly brazen and shameless lust for D’Elmont. His endeavours to extricate himself from her scheming are complicated by involvement in another intrigue involving Frankville (Melliora’s brother) and his love for Camilla, stepdaughter to Ciamara and intended for Ciamara’s brother, Cittolini, who is also Frankville’s friend and benefactor and who has promised him the hand of his daughter, Violetta (who in turn suffers a chaste and unrequited passion for D’Elmont). In the meantime, the final entanglement has been provided by Sanguillier, who has spirited Melliora away from the convent and holds her captive until she submits to returning his love. The disentangling of this intrigue also ties up the various threads of the story when D’Elmont, Frankville, Camilla, and Violetta (disguised as the page Fidelio) just happen to take refuge in Sanguillier’s house in a storm. For all the book’s celebration of a love that is, for women as for men, an uncontrollable, all-encompassing tyrant, there is nevertheless a scale of virtue discernible here, closely parallelling the boldness of

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a woman’s initiatives.35 Apart from the matchless Melliora, all the major female characters love first, though not all make the first advances. In order of merit, after Melliora comes Violetta, who loves first, but selflessly, even when there is no hope of return, and who does not speak her love until her deathbed. Ansellina also loves first, though she does not speak until she knows her love is returned (and at first speaks anonymously in lines added to a poem Brillian writes on the pedestal of a statue). Camilla also loves first, or at least loves independently of Frankville, and has to resort to a stratagem to determine the state of his heart. Amena loves first, and lets it be seen in her eyes, though by a D’Elmont already primed (by a misdirected stratagem) to search out the signs. Alovisa loves first, and speaks her love and, though anonymously, in a fashion that promises satisfaction. And then there are Ciamara and Malantha, who not only love first, and speak first, but are also prepared, shamelessly, to make all the running. There is clearly a standard that determines degrees of culpability among these women who are all prepared to love in excess of the limits of propriety, though propriety is not the only measure of a woman’s honour. Perhaps the most sympathetic and moving account, amongst all the fiction of this period, of a woman’s justification in taking the initiative in love is a letter of extraordinary sensitivity and composure that Camilla writes to Frankville after he has rejected her, persuaded of her inconstancy by a ruse of Ciamara’s. Frankville and Camilla had already consummated their passion, and Frankville does not explain why he has turned against her, preferring to seem simply inconstant himself rather than have her think he is jealous and take satisfaction from it. Camilla’s reply is achingly candid, and unusual in its suggestion of a moral life outside the proprieties society demands of a woman: in spight of your inconstancy, I never shall deny that I have loved you – loved you even to dotage; my passion took birth long before I knew you had a thought of feigning one for me, which frees me from that imputation women too frequently deserve, of loving for no other reason than because they are beloved, for if you ne’er had seemed to love, I should have continued to do so in reality. (pp. 220–1) It is a remarkable defence, flying in the face of the convention that a delicate woman would never love at all were it not for gratitude at being beloved,36 and remarkable also for accepting without regret or

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resentment the reciprocation of a passion that has proven, she thinks, unfounded: I shall always esteem your virtues, and while I pardon, pity your infirmities; shall praise your flowing wit, without an indignant remembrance how oft it has been employed for my undoing; shall acknowledge the brightness of your eyes, and not in secret curse the borrowed softness of their glances, shall think on all your past endearments, your sighs, your vows, your melting kisses, and the warm fury of your fierce embraces, but as a pleasing dream, while reason slept, and wish not to renew at such a price. (pp. 221–2) From the very beginning of Love in Excess it is ‘custom’, not reason or nature, that silences women’s desires and forces them to resort to stratagems designed to provoke men to speak first – the custom that ‘forbids women to make a declaration of their thoughts’ (p. 37), and that teaches them ‘to deny what most they covet, and to seem angry when they are best pleased’ (pp. 113–4). However much men may scoff at a modesty that conforms to decorum rather than inclination, it is nevertheless a custom that bows to the male prerogative. When D’Elmont, for example, finds his sleep rudely disturbed by a woman who is about ‘to make him a present of her heart’, he churlishly retorts that ‘I can esteem the love of a woman, only when ‘tis granted, and think it little worth acceptance, proffered’ (p. 249). There may be an element of payback involved here (at least on Haywood’s part), since the importunate maid is in fact none other than D’Elmont’s beloved Melliora, whose sleep he has in the past had no compunction about rudely disturbing – so much so that at one point she begins to think ‘she should lye in quiet no where’ (p. 144). But the assumption that it is not a woman’s role to be proactive in affairs of the heart – not her role to offer love, or ‘make a present of her heart’, but simply to grant (or not grant) the petition of the soliciting male – becomes, in these terms, a matter of sexual politics rather than sexual difference. What is ‘natural’, D’Elmont elsewhere argues, is for men to grow backward when women grow forward, but they are driven as much by the logic of the chase as by gender ideology. As he informs another importunate woman who thinks she deserves ‘a thousand fine things in return’ for offering her love: All naturally fly, what does pursue ‘Tis fit men should be coy, when women woe. (p. 126)

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When it is the politics, rather than the nature, of being female that is it stake, then all sorts of strategic initiatives are licensed, but only, it seems, in the interests of establishing whether the chase is on, since it still matters that a woman not appear as if she is trying too hard – and preferably not appear as if she is trying at all.37 Melliora may retain only a technical innocence, and even that thanks largely to an amazing sequence of interruptions to D’Elmont’s nightly forays. But she retains her virtue by dint of doing nothing on her own initiative to win him – a proviso that applies also to Violetta, Ansellina, and Camilla, all of whom take measures to discover whether their passion is reciprocated, but do nothing to entice or encourage. The secret intentions that are the corollary of a custom that dictates that women disguise their desires imply an active intellect that creates as many problems as it solves. It is much safer for a woman not to love at all until she is assured of a love to reciprocate, though there are dangers, too, in seeming impregnable to love’s darts. But once the belief becomes widespread that it is only custom that teaches women to deny what they most desire, it is a short (albeit falsely syllogistic) step to the assumption that what women most desire is that which they deny – an assumption that gives an even more dangerous edge to the ‘No’ that is ‘no negative in a woman’s mouth’ (NA, p. 533). When silence is assumed to be more politic than virtuous, moreover, it becomes even more difficult to protect a heroine from the suspicion of secret intentions since she can neither speak nor effectually deny desire. In histories of the novel, the development of the modern concept of character – and, indeed, of the fictional ‘character’ as a vehicle of a unique and inherently interesting subjectivity – is seen as one of the defining features of the ‘new species of fiction’, and often, implicitly, as an improvement on earlier narrative techniques. But there were also drawbacks to the portrayal of these unique individual selves, especially when they engaged in a sexual dynamic predicated on a desire that the woman is not prepared to voice.

5 Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s Pamela

Writing to Sophia Westcomb in 1746, Samuel Richardson observed that ‘the Pen is almost the only Means a very modest and diffident Lady (who in Company will not attempt to glare) has to shew herself, and that she has a Mind. … By this means she can assert and vindicate her Claim to Sense and Meaning’.1 The heroine of Richardson’s Pamela, a young maidservant whose letters detailing her ordeals at the hands of her rapacious master constitute the substance of the novel, is able not only ‘to shew herself, and that she has a Mind’, but also to show herself through her mind, exercising a level of control over her experience that amounts to a surrogate agency – no substitute, to be sure, for the power to act on an autonomous will, but sufficient, it proves, for a servant to keep what is rightfully hers (including, though not confined to, her virginity) until she chooses, on proper terms, to surrender it. From the time it was first published, Richardson’s novel was celebrated for its probing of the ‘inmost Recesses’ of Pamela’s mind,2 but the letters also allow Richardson’s heroine to assert a proprietary interest beyond her body and to contest the space of representation. The collection of Familiar Letters out of which Pamela grew was initially intended by the booksellers who recommended the project to Richardson as ‘a little Volume of Letters, in a common Style, on such Subjects as might be of Use to those Country Readers who were unable to indite for themselves.’ Richardson extended the project to include instruction on ‘how they should think & act in common Cases, as well as indite’, and Pamela evolved from two of those letters instructing girls in service on how to deal with ‘Snares that might be laid against their Virtue’.3 But the power of inditing, or putting familiar concerns into words, is perhaps the greatest service that either Familiar Letters or Pamela performs for the common reader, though 117

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the ensuing controversy over the authority of those words divided readers into Pamelist supporters who embraced her saintly self-representation and anti-Pamelist detractors who detected more in her version of events than makes the page. In subsequent revisions to almost every page of the novel – in nine editions over 20 years – Richardson attempted to bolster Pamela’s authority by distancing her voice from the ‘common Style’, removing colloquialisms, formalizing the dialogue and setting it off with quotation marks, in general polishing her style and making her seem more genteel (as well as better able to defend herself against resisting readers because ‘pre-emptively’ armed against their criticisms by Richardson’s emendations and additions). The two most widely available editions of Pamela today – the Oxford and the Penguin – embrace the first edition of 1740 and the last revised edition of 1801 respectively. The first edition, with all its textual crudities and ‘low’ expression, reminds us, as John Mullan argues, just how ‘unprecedented’ Richardson’s book was understood to be by his contemporaries,4 even if subsequent revisions possibly take us, as T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel argue, further and further away from ‘the Pamela whom Richardson actually imagined’ to ‘the Pamela he thought he should have imagined.’5 For the purposes of the present study, the Pamela that Richardson might have thought he should have imagined is the more interesting case, at least to the extent that the revisions highlight the difficulty of negotiating constraints on female behaviour – though the final revised edition used here does help disguise another dimension to the gap between self and representation that Sidney’s Pamela never has to negotiate.6

Richardson’s Pamela and Sidney’s Arcadia The question of whether Richardson had read Sidney’s Arcadia and was consciously or unconsciously alluding to it in Pamela is difficult to ignore, given the texts on which we have chosen to focus this discussion of designing women, though this is not a study of influence but rather of the tensions between social and narrative conventions that underlie representations of female desire across a broad range of texts. Many of these conventions – such as the prohibition on a woman loving first, which can be understood as a strategic manoeuvre addressing both social and narratological concerns – have become so deeply embedded in narrative practice that they have been absorbed into the mythology of love and naturalized in fiction as experiential truths even

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when no longer officially supported by gender ideology. (There are very few fictional heroines even today, for example, who can love first, and let it be known, and still retain their dignity.) The persistence of conventions is arguably all the more telling where the question of literary influence is not an issue, but, in the case of Pamela, by rehearsing the arguments about Richardson’s connection to Sidney we can better understand how, and why, the crucial question of Pamela’s ‘knowingness’ – of whether she has an ‘open, frank, and generous’ mind or is a ‘subtle, artful little gypsey’ (p. 63) – has been invested with such significance and has been so difficult to resolve. For most critics, the extent of Richardson’s indebtedness to Sidney warrants no more than a cursory glance, since it seems simply a curiosity that Richardson’s heroine – a humble serving maid who is subjected to the importunate attentions of her master, caressed, kissed, molested, imprisoned, and finally wedded – should bear the same name as Sidney’s princess. Richardson might have read Arcadia, and taken his heroine’s name from it, but nothing more. He might not have read it,7 but used allusions that were part of common currency.8 Or Richardson might not only have read Sidney’s Arcadia but also have absorbed it so thoroughly that it insinuates itself, bidden or unbidden, into the very texture of his narrative, resulting in what have variously been described as parallels, allusions, analogues, congruities, correspondences, and accords. At one sceptical extreme, Walter Allen is not even prepared to attribute Pamela’s name to Sidney;9 at the other extreme (though no one is prepared to tie Pamela too tightly to Sidney) Jacob Leed has compiled an extensive account of allusions to Arcadia, chiefly for the purpose of drawing attention to those characteristics of Richardson’s humble heroine that she shares with her aristocratic precursor,10 while Gillian Beer has adopted a somewhat more guarded approach to Richardson’s ‘rethinking the after-world of Sidney’s Arcadia’.11 Given that by the end of the eighteenth century Mrs Barbauld could confidently assert that Sidney’s Arcadia ‘is a book that all have heard of, that some few possess, but that nobody reads’,12 the question of Richardson’s familiarity with the primary text is clearly not settled by his choice of his heroine’s name – even though the name, as Beer points out, was ‘apparently invented by Philip Sidney himself’, and common ‘as an ordinary Christian name … only after the appearance of Richardson’s Pamela’.13 The name is, moreover, in some respects a curiously unfortunate choice for this 16-year-old heroine of low birth who manages to outwit and out-manoeuvre the designs of a master

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who has anything but marriage in mind, since the name evokes not simply an Arcadian princess renowned for her beauty, virtue, and spirit, but also Alexander Pope’s ‘designing arriviste’,14 who acquires coach, robes, jewels, and ‘to complete her bliss, a fool for mate’.15 Similarly unfortunate for a heroine who is accused of harbouring romantic fantasies is the association with Biddy Tipkins in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband, who is bewitched by romantic names and by the precocious exploits of a Pamela and her Musidorus, who provide a precedent for under-age adventures.16 Whether or not Richardson meant anything by his heroine’s name, by the time he turned to the continuation of the story in Pamela 2, Pamela herself is certainly conscious of the literary burden she is made to bear, and the number of allusions to Arcadia, after the silence of the earlier volumes, suggests that Richardson might have been making a particular effort to suggest that he knew what he was getting into when he named his heroine. There are good reasons, of course, for the earlier silence, since Pamela cannot safely invite comparison – or even be conscious of the pertinence of a comparison – between herself and Sidney’s princess while she is under suspicion of manufacturing a ‘pretty story for a romance’ (p. 63) and of nurturing aspirations above her station (points we will return to later). But there are also dangers in appearing to affect ignorance of a comparison that a serving-maid might deem personally flattering, and by the masquerade in Pamela 2, Pamela’s namesake in Arcadia earns a matter-of-fact acknowledgement from Richardson’s heroine: when the ‘presbyterian parson’ warns her to ‘look after [her] Musidorus’, she concludes that ‘it must be somebody who knew my name to be Pamela’.17 In Pamela 2, however, there are also other, more troubling, references that suggest that Sidney’s princess is proving more than just an interesting parallel to ‘the humble cottager’ (P2, III: 72). Sir Jacob Swynford highlights one, probably unintended, nuance: ‘Pamela’ is not, in fact, a ‘Christian’ name, deriving, if not from a ‘heathen’ text, as John Milton would have it, at least from a fictional world that is not overtly Christian.18 Sir Jacob thinks it ‘A queer sort of name! I’ve heard of it somewhere! – Is it a Christian or a Pagan name? – Linseywolsey – half one, half t’other – like thy girl’, he taunts Mr B (P2, III: 319). But more worrying still is the relationship of the name ‘Pamela’ with the kind of amorous intrigue associated with romance fiction that prompts Miss Stapylton, one of a number of errant neighbouring Misses whom Pamela is enlisted to tame, to style herself ‘Philoclea’ in a letter that makes ‘indiscreet advances’ to a gentleman considered

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unworthy of her (P2, IV: 403). Richardson might have meant nothing by Pamela’s name – or nothing more than a cocky assertion of his heroine’s true nobility – but in Pamela 2 he seems to think it wiser not to ignore other meanings that can be read into it. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but as Sir Simon Darnford observes, some names are capable of ‘double-damasking’ the rose, implying immodest associations that will bring a blush to a delicate woman’s cheek – and ‘Pamela’, he decides, will serve such a purpose well enough: I love, I own it, to make a pretty woman blush; it is double-damasking a fine rose, as it were; and till I saw your – [Do, let me call her some free name or other! I always loved to be free with pretty women! – Till I saw your – Methinks I like her Arcadian name, though I’m so old a swain, as not to merit any thing but rebuke at her hands – Well then, till I saw your] – Pamela – I thought all ladies, in their hearts, loved a little squib of that kind. For why should they not, when it adds so much grace to their features, and improves their native charms? (P2, III: 143). ‘Free’ name or not, the irony for Pamela is that devoted swains in the Arcadian mould have been in short supply, and her own courtship has only emphasized the disparity in rank that her name might be seen implicitly to dissolve. Writing to Miss Darnford, she asks her to describe the experience of ‘polite courtship’: For, alas! your poor friend knows nothing of this. All her courtship was sometimes a hasty snatch of the hand, a black and blue gripe of the arm, and, Whither now? – Come to me, when I bid you! – And saucy-face, and creature, and such like, on his part – with fear and trembling on mine; and – I will, I will! – Good sir, have mercy! At other times a scream, and nobody to hear or mind me; and with uplifted hands, bent knees, and tearful eyes – For God’s sake, pity your poor servant! This … was the hard treatment that attended my courtship – Pray, then, let me know how gentlemen court their equals in degree; how they look when they address you, with their knees bent, sighing, supplicating, and all that, as Sir Simon says, with the words slave, servant, admirer, continually at their tongues’ ends. (P2, III: 162–3) Pamela is astute enough to recognize that, obsequious or tyrannical, the language of courtship means the same, the ‘plain English’ of even

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the ‘politest address’ translating as ‘I am now, dear madam, your humble servant: Pray be so good as to let me be your master’ (P2, III: 163). The ‘married state’, Pamela observes elsewhere, ‘is a kind of state of humiliation for a lady’ (P2, IV: 446), so that the lowborn cottager may in fact be better equipped for married life – particularly with a husband mindful of his prerogatives – and Richardson is unusually candid on the advantages to a husband in marrying a servant who already knows her place.19 But the low-born heroine suffers other, potentially more dangerous, hazards than a rough courtship – hazards that her name only exacerbates.

Betrayed by false baits If, as Beer argues, Pamela’s name is meant to be allusive, 20 the consciously rhetorical purpose that such an allusion implies needs to go unrecognized by Pamela herself. The novel consists of a series of letters ostensibly written by a young maidservant to her parents about her valiant attempts to resist her master’s attempts on her virtue, and any pronounced literariness implying a referentiality to art rather than life will threaten the text’s status as a supposedly authentic record of the maidservant’s trials. That is, the more Richardson’s Pamela resembles a story that has been told before, the less credible it will appear as the unique record of this particular individual’s experience. In terms of plot and subject-matter, Pamela does not, in fact, much resemble Sidney’s Arcadia. There are some interesting parallels, once we look for them, between Richardson’s and Sidney’s account of a virtuous young woman who ‘is persecuted, abducted and imprisoned’ and who ‘emerges from oppression to be rewarded with happiness and to live as a paragon for her sex’. But, as Leed continues, we do not have to look specifically to Sidney’s Pamela to find such parallels: ‘many other romance heroines … might have served as well’.21 The particular personality traits that Leed highlights in Sidney’s Pamela and Richardson’s – their independence and spirit, their sense of their own worth, and their willingness to assert their rights – make somewhat stronger claims as strategic parallels, but more especially as this congruence is asserted against the grain of Sidney’s aristocratic sympathies. This is the context in which Beer argues that Pamela’s name ‘sets up disturbances in the hierarchies represented in the older text: hierarchies of class and of language, of social and material power’.22 Such ‘disturbances’ do not have to be superintended by Richardson – the name is enough to stir

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things up – but the name also has the power, in Murray L. Brown’s words, to place the heroine in ‘grave rhetorical danger’.23 Brown draws attention to the kind of problems that arise when the ‘Arcadian precursor threatens to manifest mimetically’.24 The episode on which he focuses is the angling scene (also discussed here in the Introduction), where Pamela, imprisoned by Mr B and under the supervision of the wicked and unwomanly Mrs Jewkes, is invited to fish in the carp pond. It is a scene also analyzed by Margaret Doody in terms of its emblematic qualities, though Doody simply notes that Sidney’s Pamela also goes fishing, discussing the Sidnean example of ‘the erotic meaning of the angling theme, popular in seventeenthcentury poetry’, in the context of ‘several traditional meanings with which Richardson plays’.25 Brown goes further, arguing that ‘Richardson casts Pamela in the role – in the very activity – of her namesake in Sidney’s Arcadia. He constructs this analogue and then pointedly makes his heroine oblivious to it’, in order to insulate her from the erotic meaning.26 The danger that Brown argues Richardson is seeking to deflect has certainly been realized in criticism of Pamela from its first publication. As one early commentator aptly puts it: ‘Some look upon this young Virgin as an Exemplar for Ladies to follow … Others, on the contrary, discover in it, the Behaviour of an hypocritical, crafty Girl, in her Courtship; who understands the Act of bringing a Man to her Lure’.27 In Sidney’s Arcadia, the metaphor informing the fishing motif is made explicit, though significantly the erotic meaning is provided by Pyrocles, disguised as the Amazon Zelmane, and not by the princesses, who are conceivably as oblivious to it as Brown argues Richardson’s Pamela is. In Arcadia, angling is Zelmane’s idea, one of several excursions undertaken with the intention of escaping the claustrophobic frustrations of Basilius’s lodge and of showing off the princesses Pamela and Philoclea to Musidorus. In Richardson’s Pamela, angling is Mrs Jewkes’s idea, but Pamela seizes the opportunity to compare her own plight to that of the hooked carp: ‘“O Mrs Jewkes! I was thinking this poor carp was the unhappy Pamela. I was comparing myself to my naughty master. As we deceived and hooked the poor carp, so was I betrayed by false baits; and when you said, play it, play it, it went to my heart, to think I should sport with the destruction of the fish I had betrayed”.’ (p. 168) It is not entirely clear whether Pamela is here attempting, as Browne suggests, to placate Mrs Jewkes’s suspicions, whether she is simply devising an excuse to stop fishing so that she can further her escape

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plans, or whether she is genuinely pained by the comparison, ‘which just then came into [her] head’, between her own situation, ‘betrayed by false baits’, and the hooked carp. But whatever is the case, she cannot retain her ‘rhetorical innocence’, as Brown puts it, if she is conscious of the traditional meaning of the angling metaphor expounded in Zelmane’s reading of the princesses beguiling ‘silly fishes’ and ‘hearts of princes’ (NA, p. 152) – and which is perilously close to the surface in Mrs Jewkes’s cry of ‘play it, play it’. Brown argues that Pamela ‘does not see the potential for ironic comment, and the Arcadian reading remains outside her experience’ – as it would not have done, he suggests, had she found a poem such as Donne’s ‘The baite’ among her mistress’s books or were she mindful of the exploits of her literary namesake.28 Pamela herself worries that she is venturing on dubious moral ground by the deceptions in which she engages in order to preserve her horde of letters and plot her escape, though she is ‘not a little proud of herself’ for her deception of Mrs Jewkes in the garden. But were she to be engaged in this clandestine correspondence (with a clergyman who is rapidly developing a personal rather than purely charitable interest in her welfare) while at the same time covering her tracks by means of a fable of betrayed innocence that she knows is capable of a quite different interpretation, one that would cast her as the angler dangling false baits, then her innocence, both moral and rhetorical, would be pretty well shattered.

Devices and desires The trope is a dangerous ploy for Pamela, but not simply because of its rhetorical instability. In the earlier examples we discussed in the Introduction, the angling metaphor does not so much express a particular individual’s personal response to experience as participate in a public discourse, the forms of which already have an agreed cultural authority. But Pamela is not simply ‘applying a topic’29 but is speaking for herself, and the trope raises troubling questions about how hard her ‘working mind’ might be working, and working with secret intent. In particular, it is troubling because of what it implies about the sophistication of the heroine’s reflective consciousness – a sophistication that includes a capacity for deliberation and the calculation of affect that Richardson seems to find thoroughly undesirable, at least in a fictional heroine whose artlessness is her only guarantee of her moral purity. Betty Rizzo has observed how, despite a wealth of evidence in earlier fiction that women are adept at devising stratagems to further

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their own interests, ‘one finds that, gradually, decent eighteenthcentury women … become incapable of contriving plots or counterplots even when their preservation is at stake and even when they are victims of other ingenious plotters. Others less virtuous or Providence itself must intervene to save them’.30 While even in earlier fiction, plotting women, and particularly the decent ones, have not often been adept at devising successful stratagems to further their own interests, they have at least been allowed the ingenuity to try to extricate themselves without automatically compromising their moral character. But by the eighteenth century the bar has been raised much higher, particularly for a character such as Pamela, for whom virtue is now a provisional, moment-by-moment affair, no longer unequivocally and permanently manifest in distinctions of birth, person, and address, but subject to continual testing and verification. And it is certainly the case in Richardson’s fiction that the heroine is immediately in danger of losing her footing on the moral high ground should she take any step to help herself. In the margins of Lady Bradshaigh’s copy of Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, for example, there is a curiously testy exchange between Lady Bradshaigh and Richardson that highlights the constraints under which the novelistic heroine must operate, at least until the novel developed techniques for portraying the illusion of an unmediated, transparent consciousness that could offset the epistemological uncertainties of character both inferred from and revealed through motive. Lady Bradshaigh had extensively annotated her copy of Clarissa; Richardson in turn had annotated her annotations, and, in Volume V, chapter iv, he takes exception to what seems an innocent enough remark. In the left-hand margin of the verso, Lady Bradshaigh questions the wisdom of Clarissa’s attempt, having escaped the dubious ‘protection’ of the rake, Lovelace, and taken refuge at Mrs Moore’s lodging house, to flee the house once Lovelace discovers her there, suggesting that it would have been safer for her to stay put: ‘This was a poor device’, Lady Bradshaigh observes, ‘for she must think he wou’d have follow’d her, and perhaps have forced her into a coach & carry’d her where he had a mind’. 31 Richardson immediately leaps to Clarissa’s defence, one word in Lady Bradshaigh’s commentary apparently provoking his ire:32 Device, does your Ladiship call it? Cl[arissa] was above all Devices! – In such a distressed Situation, and with a vile Fellow, who had

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convinced her of his Vileness, she had nothing in her Head or Heart but once more to get from him. She might be in hope to raise the Country upon him, as she once threaten’d. Such a lovely young Creature, pursued by so rakish a young Fellow, **** **Ever cast into the Protection of a sensible man, would not have been imposed upon so easily as the two foolish women were, whose Curiosity and Inquisitiveness was more than their Fellow-feeling for one of their own Sex; who was only running away from a handsome Rake, no hated Character with women in general, as Lovelace had often experienced: Device! I don’t love your Ladiship just here! Poor Clarissa! To be classed with a Lovelace as if – But no more – 33 Janine Barchas, in her edition of Lady Bradshaigh’s annotated Clarissa, suggests that Richardson fixes on the word ‘device’ because Clarissa herself uses the word on the next page to refer to Lovelace’s ‘plots and stratagems’.34 But this unfortunate coincidence hardly seems to warrant Richardson’s outburst, since all Lady Bradshaigh is attributing to Clarissa is foresight and planning, albeit, in her opinion, misdirected.35 And even if Clarissa’s use of a ‘device’ should class her with a Lovelace, there is an obvious defence – the one that Lady Bradshaigh herself makes when Clarissa later resorts, if not to a device, at least to some equally problematical strategic equivocation. In order to rid herself of Lovelace’s attentions when she is dying, she misleads him into thinking that she is seeking a reconciliation with her father by describing her spiritual preparations for death as ‘setting out with all diligence for [her] father’s house’, a step that she fears ‘is not strictly right, if allegory and metaphor be not allowable to one in her circumstances’.36 Lady Bradshaigh does not quarrel with Lovelace’s construal of the ‘father’s house’ metaphor as a wilful deception as duplicitous as his own, but insists in extenuation: ‘Their motives how different!’37 The question of motivation, however, provides a compelling reason for an embargo on any ‘device’ that implies a heroine’s words and actions might not be entirely transparent, and with good reason Richardson’s preferred mode of protecting his heroines, both from villains and from motive-mongering readers, is to wrap them up in innocence – however ineffectual it might prove. This is Clarissa’s defence against Lovelace, and she directly opposes it to his devices. When he catches up with her at Mrs Moore’s, she tells him, ‘I will, now that I have escaped from you, and that I am out of the reach of your mysterious devices, wrap myself up in my own innocence’, emphasizing her

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point (and the pathetic ineffectuality of such a defence) by ‘passionately fold[ing] her arms about herself’ as she speaks (underscored by Richardson in Lady Bradshaigh’s copy of the novel, and highlighted in the margin by a wavy line).38 It is a defence that Richardson’s Pamela also seems to be adopting in her angling fable, waiting for someone else to save her in the moral she draws – ‘O that some good merciful person would procure me my liberty in like manner; for I cannot but think my danger equal!’ (p. 168) – though given that she is in the midst of steps taken to procure her own liberty, by means of actions she herself variously describes as a ‘plot’ and a ‘trick’ and a ‘contrivance’ (that is, the horsebean planting to provide an excuse for digging in the garden to deposit her letters to Parson Williams), she is still on highly dangerous ground.39 And while she claims the moral she derives from fishing just comes into her head, the appeal for a protector to save her might be interpreted as a ruse to throw Mrs Jewkes off the scent. A gallant saviour is, moreover, highly unlikely to materialize (the only candidate at hand, Mr Williams, not even having the wherewithal to organize a horse). Sidney’s abducted and imprisoned princesses might lament the inadequacies of their father, Basilius, who proves himself handier with a shovel than a sword, ensconcing his army in trenches around Amphialus’s castle rather than risking open assault, but he is able to summon a respectable cohort of potential saviours to engage in single combat on the princesses’ behalf. But Richardson’s Pamela has no champions by right of her birth and station – as Sir Simon Darnford crudely puts it, Mr B ‘hurts no family by this’ (p. 172) – and her actions in defence of her honour are unprotected by appropriate precedents and consequently open to misinterpretation. The womanly virtue of patient waiting, with fingers kept busy and mind distracted by exquisite embroidery, makes sense for Sidney’s Pamela, but if Richardson’s Pamela simply waits, the question inevitably arises: for what?

The dressing of self Such questions arise, William B. Warner argues, because of suspicions about Pamela’s motives and desires that are prompted by the ‘reading lesson’ she receives from her parents and Lady Davers: they make her suspicious of what Mr B’s actions mean, and those suspicions, ‘once they take root, are like the conscious blush of modest virtue: they imply a knowledge of the immodest facts she hopes to ward off’, making us in turn suspicious of her. Why does she stay to finish

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embroidering Mr B’s waistcoat? Why does she get angry when Mr B proposes Parson Williams as a suitable match? There are good reasons for Pamela acting as she does, but, for Warner, they are not good enough once Pamela’s innocence has been compromised, so that ‘these episodes invite readers to suspect that Pamela harbors an unconscious love for Mr. B’.40 Warner’s argument is concerned with the way in which Pamela attempts to ‘overwrite’ the amatory novel of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century: Richardson creates, Warner argues, an ‘intertextual exchange’ in which ‘the earlier novel becomes both an intertextual support and that which is to be superseded, that which is repeated as well as revised, invoked as it is effaced’.41 His argument does not assume that Richardson has read these earlier novels or is explicitly alluding to them, but rather contends that the novels of amorous intrigue provide readers with a way of reading Pamela that is necessarily invoked by Richardson’s attempt to revise such reading practices. Thus a crucial scene in the novel, somewhat pre-emptively described by Warner as ‘the disguise scene’, in which Pamela appears ‘incognito in her country dress’, can be read as ‘at once similar to and the opposite of parallel scenes’ in Haywood’s novel, Fantomina, where the heroine ‘by changing her dress, hair color, accent, and manner … transforms herself into a series of erotic objects’ to revive her lover’s flagging interest.42 It is a provocative, often mischievous analysis that argues, with considerable élan, from effect to cause – from Mr B’s professed failure to recognize Pamela in her country clothes to its antecedent in disguise, from the renewed vigour of Mr B’s slap and tickle to an initiating, if unrecognized, desire to inflame. Warner’s identification of a congruity of means (change of dress) and end (re-kindling desire) between Pamela’s re-apparelling in country dress and Fantomina’s serial masquerade as ‘rude’ ‘country lass’, ‘charming widow in distress’, and ‘upper-class enchantress’43 manages to sidestep Lady Bradshaigh’s cautionary disclaimer (‘Their motives how different!’) by an appeal to unconscious desire on Pamela’s part, and in the process he manages also to lend authority to the suspicions of generations of readers, regardless of their familiarity with novels of amorous intrigue. But Warner’s argument is itself an instance of precisely the problem, apparently undiminished over the centuries, that the heroine faces: the ease with which anything might be construed as encouragement when it is in their sexual character that women are primarily understood – as Mary Wollestonecraft was later to put it, ‘considering females rather as women than human creatures’.44

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In Sidney’s Arcadia, Philoclea’s fear that, however inadvertently, she had encouraged Pyrocles by her ‘ill governed’ behaviour and her ‘ill hid’ affection for a person she had thought was a woman demonstrates how loosely encouragement could be defined and how severely condemned. Any change in behaviour can apparently be interpreted as an expression of interest – Cavendish’s Miseria betrays an unconscious attraction by, among things, protecting her skin from the sun – but in Pamela even the heroine’s distress can be considered provocative, and when she falls to her knees and prays, Mr B is ‘moved’, but to something other than pure benevolence. It is not surprising, then, that her comely country clothes should re-galvanize Mr B’s energies, though the assumption that, whatever she does, it must be being done in her sexual character as a woman is not a supposition that anyone other than Mr B might be expected, as a matter of course, to share. There is an illuminating parallel in Sidney’s Arcadia, where the princess Pamela, forced to suffer the indignity of being placed, along with Basilius’s cattle, in the care of the oafish Dametas, demonstrates her resignation to her father’s will by dressing in ‘shepherdish apparel’ (NA, p. 145). Pyrocles, in his disguise as an Amazon, is quickly learning that ‘it was against my womanhood to be forward in my own wishes’ (NA, p. 145), and he recounts how Pamela shows her submission to her father’s wishes: The fair Pamela, whose noble heart I find doth greatly disdain that the trust of her virtue is reposed in such a lout’s hands as Dametas, had yet, to show an obedience, taken on shepherdish apparel, which was but of russet-cloth cut after their fashion, with a straight body, open breasted, the nether part full of pleats, with long and wide sleeves: but believe me she did apparel her apparel, and with the preciousness of her body made it most sumptuous. Her hair at the full length wound about with gold lace, only by the comparison to show how far her hair doth excel in colour: betwixt her breasts, which sweetly rase up like two fair mountainets in the pleasantest vale of Tempe, there hung a very rich diamond set but in a black horn; the word I have since read is this: ‘Yet still myself’. (NA, pp. 145–6) True beauty, we have long been told, does not need adornment, and Pamela’s is in fact shown to advantage by her rustic apparel – as is Philoclea’s near-naked charm in her nymph-like attire, ‘so apparelled as did show she kept best store of her beauty to herself’ (NA, p. 146). So we should not be surprised that when Pamela kits herself out in

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country garb in preparation for her return to her humble origins, she never looked more beautiful – and knows it: when I had dined, up stairs I went, and locked myself into my little room. There I tricked myself up as well as I could in my new garb, and put on my round-eared ordinary cap; but with a green knot, however, and my home-spun gown and petticoat, and plain leather shoes; but yet they are what they call Spanish leather. A plain muslin tucker I put on, and my black silk necklace, instead of the French necklace my lady gave me; and put the earrings out of my ears, and when I was quite equipped, I took my straw hat in my hand, with its two green strings, and looked about me in the glass, as proud as any thing. To say truth, I never liked myself so well in my life. O the pleasure of descending with ease, innocence, and resignation! Indeed there is nothing like it! An humble mind, I plainly see, cannot meet with any very shocking disappointment, let fortune’s wheel turn round as it will. So I went down to look for Mrs Jervis, to see how she liked me. … I told her, I had no clothes suitable to my condition, when I returned to my father’s; and so it was better to begin here, as I was soon to go away, that all my fellow-servants might see I knew how to suit myself to the state I was returning to. (pp. 87–8) Like Sidney’s Pamela, Richardson’s Pamela also demonstrates virtuous resignation by adopting the clothes appropriate to the condition in which she has been placed (or is about to be placed),45 and like Sidney’s Pamela also, Richardson’s Pamela asserts her identity despite the change of appearance, the device on the princess’s necklace reading ‘Yet still myself’ echoing in Pamela’s protest to a rampaging Mr B (who affects not to know her in her change of clothes), ‘I am Pamela. Indeed I am Pamela, her own self!’ (p. 89).46 The rustic dress adopted as a sign of virtuous submission and the reassertion of identity despite the change of clothes make this one of the stronger parallels between Arcadia and Pamela – though the differences are as significant as the similarities. Even in her rustic dress, Sidney’s Pamela is never in danger of being mistaken for anyone else, and she is far from delighted by her humble home. But the crucial difference is that, when she first adopts the ‘shepherdish apparel’, there are no suitors on hand to admire, and to take personally, the display of her even more obvious charms. Given that Richardson’s Pamela has

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been hard pressed to keep her admirer at a respectable distance, she might be criticized for having adopted a ‘poor device’, but she insists that she has nothing in her head but consciousness of being able to ‘descend with ease’, and she has done nothing to invite suspicion that she intends the effect that her changed appearance has caused other than to admit that, in her humble clothes, she never liked herself better. She need not, perhaps, have exhibited them before Mrs Jervis (though it is an effective means of demonstrating that Pamela is both comfortable without her finery and serious about her intention to leave), but it is at Mrs Jervis’s insistence that Pamela is introduced to Mr B (‘“I tell you”, said she, “you shall come in”’ [p. 89]), and she is under her orders not to reveal her identity, which Pamela obeys only under protest. When we look at exactly what Pamela has done to earn these suspicions, her culpability, on the surface at least, seems to lie in knowing her simple country clothes become her. ‘Her pleasure in her new appearance is presented in a risky and morally equivocal light’, Warner argues, her pride as she gazes at herself in the mirror echoing the narcissism of Milton’s Eve and the vanity of Pope’s Belinda.47 Were she, of course, not to acknowledge how well she looked, she would also be open to criticism when she later confronted Mr B – criticism that she could not possibly have been oblivious to the effect it would have on him. And she needs to like herself even better in her country clothes in order to demonstrate that she has not been spoiled by luxury. But while the pleasure that Pamela takes in her appearance is, as Tassie Gwilliam argues, ‘clearly superfluous’ to her reasons for shedding her mistress’s clothes,48 it is not ‘morally equivocal’ except as it implies an undue consciousness of the claims of self. Beauty in a virtuous woman is invariably portrayed as unselfconscious – though without it being entirely clear whether such unselfconsciousness is inherently virtuous or whether simply expedient since it circumvents the question of what use a woman might be making of her beauty. But even unselfconsciousness does not mean that the virtuous woman need be blind to her beauty or negligent of it. Sidney’s Pamela, even in captivity, takes pains to keep up appearances, ‘for well one might perceive she had not rejected the counsel of a glass, and that her hands had pleased themselves in paying the tribute of undeceiving skill to so high perfections of nature’ (NA, p. 484). Like Warner apparently, Cecropia suspects that this attention to ‘the dainty dressing of her self’ (p. 484) betrays amorous susceptibilities – ‘thinking … that beauty carefully set forth would soon

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prove a sign of an unrefusing harbour’ (p. 484) – though the princess Pamela grandly dismisses beauty’s consequence as ‘a thing which not only beasts have, but even stones and trees’ (p. 485).

Unconscious love At the bottom of these suspicions about the real meaning of Pamela’s behaviour is the unconscious love that she is said to harbour for Mr B, deduced from her admiration of Mr B’s person, her failure to leave his household when there was apparently opportunity to do so, her ‘flaunting’ of her presence in her country clothes, and her inability to respond with appropriately eternal repugnance when Mr B attempts to rape her.49 Yet unconscious love is not only common among earlier romance heroines, but is also usually their most effective defence against the kind of imputations that are directed at Pamela. Unconscious love protects them, for example, from the imputation of design: if they are in love without knowing it, they can hardly be accused of manipulating a situation to their advantage, since their advantage, to their minds, lies elsewhere. If they are in love without knowing it, they are also relieved of the responsibility of choice, since love has taken them unawares. And if they are in love without knowing it, they preserve the purity of the passion, since unconscious love escapes the taint of self-interest, and, more importantly, the stigma of desire. And in Pamela’s case unconscious love is called upon to perform this customary function, shielding her from suspicion of behaviour calculated to attract Mr B’s interest, while at the same time protecting her from the suspicion that she allows material advantage to guide her heart. Loving unawares, however, while sanctioned by the convention of romantic love as a force independent of human will and beyond rational understanding, is potentially detrimental to a woman’s virtue when naturalized in a fashion that supports psychological realism. If Pamela is in love without knowing it, what else does she not know – or not want to know – about the impulses that drive her? In Sidney’s Arcadia, as we have already discussed, the device of being in love without knowing it is unusually transparent in its insistence on disinterestedness in the developing attachment between Philoclea and Pyrocles in his Amazonian disguise. Philoclea could hardly be expected to know she is in love with Pyrocles since he has so successfully disguised himself as a woman that Philoclea’s father, Basilius, is also smitten, and while her more canny mother, Gynecia, recognizes and

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succumbs to Pyrocles’s charms for what they are – those of an eminently desirable young man – the impeccably innocent Philoclea is simply baffled by emotions she cannot understand, surrendering in the end to a passion that ‘while she might prevent it, she did not feel it; now she felt it when it was past preventing’ (NA, p. 240). But what is particularly interesting about the representation of Philoclea’s love in Arcadia, and particularly instructive in relation to the problems of interpretation Pamela encounters, both within the novel and without, is the painstaking analysis of a love that develops independently of any volition on the woman’s part. The notion of unconscious love seldom bears close analysis because of the inevitable question of a trigger, which the semantics of ‘falling’ in love does not entirely overcome. But in this instance, Sidney is able to construct an almost mechanical procedure that transports Philoclea from curiosity, through friendly interest, to admiration, imitation, and finally love. However contrived the circumstances, there is a logic of sorts to Philoclea’s ignorance of her own feelings – though the ingenuity of Sidney’s account reminds us that this is a phenomenon that normally resists rational explanation. But, in theory anyway, Sidney is able to portray an unconscious love that develops independently of desire. Such a notion is, however, much more difficult to support when the hero and heroine are not incontrovertibly ‘made for each other’, and when the hero’s moral character does not proclaim him incontrovertibly worthy of the esteem that might inspire love. In Sidney’s aristocratic dreamworld, equality of rank, beauty, and goodness guarantees the ‘rightness’ of the union, and the lovers, in finding their way around the obstacles that beset them, fulfill the destiny implicit in their mirrored perfections. In Richardson’s Pamela, however, the rightness of the union has to be confirmed in defiance of the disparity in rank, and in defiance of behaviour on Mr B’s part that is hardly conducive to gratitude or esteem. Richardson’s Pamela in fact uses the disparity in rank to defend herself against the imputation that she had been in love with Mr B rather longer than she cares to admit, though her defence does not exclude a prior unconscious love. After Lady Davers has been reconciled to her brother’s marriage, she begins to interrogate Pamela as to precisely when she dates her love for Mr B: ‘… I believe [says Lady Davers after reading Pamela’s letters], if the truth were known, you loved the wretch not a little… ’. ‘While my trials lasted, madam’, answered I, ‘I had not a thought of any thing, but to preserve my innocence; I did not, I could not, think of love’.

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‘But tell me truly’, said she, ‘did you not love him all the time?’ ‘I had always, madam’, answered I, ‘a great reverence for my master, and thought highly of all his good actions; and, though I abhorred his attempts upon me, yet I could not hate him; and always wished him well; but I did not know, it was love. Indeed, I had not the presumption’. (pp. 471–2)50 ‘Prettily said’, Lady Davers observes, but as Mr B has earlier commented, ‘for equivocation … no Jesuit ever went beyond’ Pamela (p. 270). As we have already seen, the prohibition on loving first had come to be widely understood as a matter of policy or custom rather than virtue, and there are strong pragmatic reasons for Pamela to deny prior love51 – though prudence would also dictate that the possibility of her having loved Mr B all the time should not be made to seem entirely ludicrous. ‘Did you not love him all the time?’ in fact raises the crucial issue in the debate that accompanied the publication of Pamela, a debate that can be reduced to a question of timing: when does Pamela fall in love with Mr B (or, for the more virulent ‘Anti-Pamelists’, when does she conceive a passion for him or his fortune)? The question of timing is, as we have seen, one that previous romance writers have addressed, or circumvented, with sometimes stunning resourcefulness, but it has seldom before been quite so vital to the heroine’s moral well-being. Fictional heroines have in the past fallen in love above their station; fictional heroines have also in the past fallen in love with men who have offered them violence. But Pamela is unusual, if not unique, not so much in falling in love above her station, and with a man who has offered her violence, but rather in having to rely entirely upon her own word for the purity of her motives in doing so. Pamela’s defence against Lady Davers’s probing and cajoling amounts simply to the (quite reasonable) insistence that, while under siege from Mr B, love was the last thing on her mind. The real problem, however, is not that her ‘great reverence’ for her master, despite his abhorrent attempts on her, might have supported an unconscious love, but that his flattering attentions (and even, conceivably, his unwelcome attentions), together with his fine person, might also support an unconscious desire. And it is unconscious desire, rather than unconscious love, that provokes suspicion of Pamela’s intentions, since unconscious desire provides an unconscious motive. Writing to her parents, Pamela stakes her virtue on blameless ignorance and, more crucially, no prospects: ‘I must own to you, that I shall never be able to think of any body in the world but him! Presumption! you will say; and so it is: but

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love, I imagine, is not a voluntary thing – Love, did I say! But come, I hope not: at least it is not, I hope, gone so far, as to make me very uneasy: for I know not how it came, nor when it began; but it has crept, crept, like a thief, upon me; and before I knew what was the matter, it looked like love.’ (p. 283) Pamela makes it very clear that, if this is love, she expects nothing to come of it. What Sidney refers to as ‘love’s harbinger, wishing’ (p. 239), has played no part, she insists, in the development of her affection, and, by inference, has played no part in her behaviour: her heart might have betrayed her by letting love slip in without consultation, but, ‘wicked thing that it is, it has deceived nobody else’ (p. 285). Unconscious love untainted by desire thus performs an important function in Pamela: it provides Mr B with the reassurance of a preference that defies self-interest: Pamela’s love will allow her to think of no one else, but it will lead to nothing but a desultory disquiet. This is precisely what Mr B needs to know – that he is preferred above all men, and preferred only for his innate worth – and Pamela’s letters provide her with the opportunity for the kind of indirection in speaking her mind on the subject of love that earlier romance heroines pursue by rather more oblique means – by addressing the object of their affections when he is comatose, for example, or by sending a message through another. (Weamys’s Helena, for example, pleads for Amphialus’s love over his unconscious body, and later asks Philoclea to order him to love her, Helena, as punishment for offences against Philoclea.) In Pamela’s case, what might seem like a licence to reinterpret past behaviour as evidence of the heroine’s desire is in fact an assertion of a love that has no end in view – though only if we can believe that Pamela writes only for her parents. As Warner rightly points out, ‘to avoid the reality of virtue being contaminated by the rhetorically motivated performance of virtue written directly for Mr. B, Pamela must assume, or pretend to believe, that each packet of letters or journal entries she gives him is to be the last he will read’.52 From this point of view, it is significant that Pamela thinks twice about her admission of unconscious love, recording in her journal the memorandum to reconsider whether this ‘confession of … weakness’ should be torn out of her writing or not shown to her parents once she gets home (p. 284). This may be an effective ploy, on Richardson’s part, to emphasize the intended audience, but it is made at the expense of Pamela’s candour, emphasizing also the thin line that she must tread between prudence and calculation. The thinness of this line is most clearly apparent in the defining crisis of Pamela’s and Mr B’s relationship, which occurs, not when he

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attempts to rape her or when he frees her and then asks her to return, but when he asks her to tell him what to do – in effect asking her to come half way. The scene in question begins with Mr B praising Pamela’s uncommon discernment, and swearing that he cannot live without her – a phrase midway through its romantic evolution, no longer presaging a lover sighing his way into oblivion, nor in its current apotheosis, understood as just so many words, but here meaning, more ominously, that he will have her. But unable to persuade Pamela to be his mistress, and unable to bear the thought of marriage, even if it were with someone of superior degree, let alone with someone the world would judge so far beneath him, yet unable also to give Pamela up, he enlists her as his adviser. ‘What can I do?’ he asks – again and again: ‘tell me … what you think I ought to do, and what you would have me do’; ‘Speak out … and tell me, what you think I ought to do’; ‘But tell me still more explicitly, what you would advise me to do in the case’ (pp. 251–2). From his persistence in pursuing a candid response, it is clear that Mr B knows what he is asking Pamela to do: to declare her hand before he has unconditionally offered his. And it is also clear that Pamela understands what she has to do, especially in the face of his condescension, which requires all of her ‘poor discretion, to ward off the blow’ to her ‘most guarded thoughts’ (p. 252). Like Sidney’s Pamela she insists on the decorum of class hierarchy (though, of course, the relative ranking is inverted, and the servant must remind the master of the dignity he is abandoning); like Sidney’s Pamela also, she is hardest beset by gratitude (there are no bears at large, but, as with Musidorus, the woman is pursued at some expense of caste). But Pamela’s predicament is not going to be solved by the reassertion of the natural order, and her response is to retreat behind the very real disparity in rank (‘were I the first lady in the land … I could tell you’ [p. 252]) and to say what the policing of her desires has, throughout her ordeal, enabled her to say: ‘I know not the man breathing I would wish to marry’ (p. 228, our emphasis); ‘ I never yet saw the man to whom I wished to be married’ (p. 254, our emphasis); ‘I have not the least shadow of a wish or thought in favour of any man living’ (p. 254, our emphasis).

‘Love, true love, is my only motive’ ‘What is a wish’, Pamela later observes, ‘but the acknowledged want of power, and a demonstration of one’s poverty in everything but will’ (p. 368). Good girls do not wish for anything: their wills are not their own, and their choices are determined for them – as Pamela reminds

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Mr Williams, ‘while I have a father and mother, I am not my own mistress’ (p. 186). But as Mrs Jewkes sceptically retorts, ‘Such art, such caution, such cunning, for thy years’ (p.186), and it is true that prudence as much as goodness dictates that Pamela refrain from entertaining the possibility of a future with anyone, but more especially Mr B. ‘O sir … what do you bid me look up to?’ (p. 277), she shrewdly interjects when he talks of what he might be able to bring himself to do should she prove worthy. Consequently, until she is safe from misinterpretation, and in particular from the looseness with which ‘consent’ can be construed, Pamela’s wishes stay resolutely focused on the one thing for which she has a right to ask: to go home. Whenever she is backed into a corner, she falls back on this plea, because, until she returns after he has finally taken her at her word and allowed her to return home, Mr B has never made an unconditional offer – which alone would constitute a contract that he ought to honour.53 Thanks to the gypsy’s sham-marriage warning, Pamela does not have to presume on her equity in the relationship by openly questioning the nature of the commitment he offers; the need to protect herself from the possibility of another plot allows her to avoid appearing to claim a consideration she does not know she has earned. But a lady of Mr B’s rank would not be satisfied without a firm pledge of his intentions, and he would not be bound by a declaration that did not extend into the future: ‘at present I am sincere in what I say’ (p. 253, our emphasis), ‘Cannot you take me as I am at present? I have told you that I am now sincere and undesigning, whatever I may be hereafter’ (p. 256, our emphasis). When Pamela receives the gypsy’s warning, she fears that she has already gone too far, having ‘as good as confessed’ that she loved him (p. 262). Mr B’s subsequent anger suggests that he agrees: having declared (albeit still conditionally) that ‘if my mind hold … I will endeavour to defy the world’ (p.276, our emphasis), he is infuriated with Pamela’s obduracy when, mindful of the threat of a sham marriage, she again retreats behind the disparity in rank and asks to be returned home, dismissing marriage as too good for her and beneath him. Having seen her come so far, he is incensed when it appears that daintiness – a too nice respect for the protocols of virtue – rather than candour prevails. Pamela puzzles over why a rash half-word should turn kindness to hatred: ‘Sure I did not say so much!’ (p. 277); ‘I thought I did not say so much!’ (p. 278); ‘But did I say so much?’ (p. 278); ‘Surely I did not say so much, that he should be so very angry’ (p. 280). We have all done

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it – said the rash half-word, or persisted a fraction too long with an argument that evades the truth, or made ungenerous return for a concession magnanimously bestowed. But while this ‘perverse chiasmic pattern’ of approach and withdrawal, as Warner describes it, with its ‘nuanced but emotionally fraught exchanges’, has long been praised for its ‘insight into the psychology of love’, it is not really a love problem that is being worked out in these scenes.54 Basically it is a question of trust: Pamela’s honour resides in her chastity, which she must guard at all cost, but her caution actually increases her danger, since it means not trusting Mr B, whatever his assurances, thereby impugning his honour, and, as he sees it, forfeiting the safety that his ‘word’ would have ensured. As Mr B puts it, ‘your doubts will only beget cause of doubts’ (p. 257). To the extent that love is implicated in this strategic manoeuvring, it resides in his insistence on ‘a fervent and unquestionable love’, where there is not ‘the least shadow of reserve’ (p. 307), though such a love also serves much more pragmatic concerns, given the loss of face that Mr B has suffered, and will continue to suffer in loving beneath his station: ‘In the choice I have made, it is impossible I should have any view to my interest. Love, true love, is my only motive’ (p. 307). The disparity in rank is a common enough obstacle to love in romance, but the reality of that disparity is seldom a social problem that has to be lived with. Pamela’s matchless beauty and immaculate virtue may, like her romance predecessors’, testify to an innate gentility, but it is a gentility that will not be realized, as in earlier romances, in her pedigree. In Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), for example, when Dorastus, a prince, falls in love with a shepherdess, Fawnia, it is the occasion of euphuistic sentiment in both parties as they debate the wisdom of an unequal match: Dorastus tries to talk himself out of a shameful passion, yet wonders ‘how a countrey maide could affoord such courtly behaviour’; Fawnia is conscious that since ‘he is a Prince, respecting his honor’, it were far better ‘to dye with griefe, than to live with shame’, and far ‘seemlier … to whistle as a shepheard, than to sigh as a lover’.55 They are the same issues that trouble Pamela and Mr B, but they are always hypothetical rather than real, since the reader knows that Fawnia is indeed a princess, and the evidence is always at hand to prove it. Commenting on the ‘Pamelist’ (as opposed to ‘Anti-Pamelist’) sequels to and adaptations of Richardson’s novel, Richard Gooding observes that in these works, where ‘the romance conventions of hidden birth and natural hierarchy’ are reinstated, ‘one never senses … that a servant

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might find herself irreconcilably at odds with the demands of her position’.56 The kind of trials to which Mr B subjects Pamela – and his apparent insensitivity to the suffering he causes – bears certain similarities to the traditional romance motif identified by Winfried Schleiner as ‘female patience willfully tested’, often taking the form of ‘patient Griselda’ stories, where the disparity in rank licenses an arbitrary trial of obedience to the husband’s or lover’s will,57 but in Pamela the trial for much of the time focuses on Pamela’s resistance to Mr B’s will, and she insists (as the patient Griselda typically does not) that her ‘soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess’ (p. 197). Yet, even if virtue is the only true nobility (p. 83), the reality of domestic service means that to reject her master’s advances she must challenge his authority in drawing the line between appropriate and inappropriate behests. And even obedience to legitimate commands comes charged with erotic potential. When he insists that she wait on him after proving herself too refractory to share his table, her exemplary response, ‘Sir … I think it an honour to be allowed to wait upon you’ (p. 223), even as she is so cowed she can barely stand upright, acquires overtones of a salacious abjection that Mr B clearly relishes, ordering ‘saucy-face’ to pour him another glass, and complaining, ‘I suppose I shall have some of your tears in my wine’ (p. 225). Mr B’s need to establish that Pamela will not take ‘insolent advantage’ of his passion for her (p. 245) can only be satisfied by a compliance with every legitimate demand and a willingness to oblige in cases where his rights extend only to asking. But as Pamela well knows, a willingness to oblige on small matters can be construed as ‘indirect consent’ (p. 174) to the larger ‘vile’ design. Mr B’s concerns are understandable, given the risk he perceives in loving below his rank, but the disparity in rank gives an ugly edge to the submissive female will imaged in Wroth’s ‘sweet Corne’ bending ‘humbly that way … it is blowne’ (U, I: 422). In Wroth’s image, however, the woman is in no danger, as Pamela is, of being ‘torn up by the roots’ if she resist the tempest (p. 467), and when the master tells his servant, ‘when you are so good as to bend like the slender reed, to the hurricane, rather than, like the sturdy oak, to resist it, you will always stand firm in my kind opinion; while a contrary conduct would uproot you, with all your excellencies, from my soul’ (p. 462), the cruder implications of the metaphor, and of the gender roles embodied, are in danger of manifesting themselves in a literal threat. Much of the rhetorical force of Richardson’s novel derives from the fact that Pamela is no run-of-the-mill fictional heroine precisely

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because of the commonplace nature of her domestic circumstances as a young maidservant fending off the unwelcome attentions of her master. Yet Pamela hardly takes a step that has not been taken before her by romance heroines of more immaculate pedigree but no less immaculate virtue, and within the accustomed scenario of love overcoming all obstacles the problems she faces are different only to the extent that they are embodied within a single action, and a single male. But there is another dimension to her trials that requires modifications to the customary tactics of the fictional heroine if she is to accommodate her virtue to what Raymond Williams describes as ‘the standards which govern human behaviour in … real situations.’58 Opening up the heroine’s mind opens her also to a kind of scrutiny that imposes even greater constraints, and the next chapter explores in more detail the signs of strain that emerge when the conventions of romantic love are transported from the rarefied world of romance into the more mundane practical realities of domestic life.

6 Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to Earth in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote

Richardson’s continuation of Pamela in Pamela 2 and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote may seem an odd pairing – one so sober and earnest, the other so mischievous – but they are both explicitly addressing the question that Pamela herself asks in Pamela 2: ‘what is the instruction, that can be gathered’ from romance ‘for the conduct of common life?’ (P2, IV: 425). Lennox’s novel, in which a young woman almost destroys herself by believing rather too literally in the romances on which her imagination has fed, reminds us that the question is itself symptomatic of the disease it addresses, since it assumes that fiction does, and even should, provide models for life that readers can imitate. The dangers that novels might represent for young, and particularly for female, readers were perceived with an escalating anxiety in the eighteenth century, due in part to the fact that the format in which much fiction was now published – in volumes small enough to be carried around and read in private, and cheap enough to be purchased from a personal allowance – meant that it was much more difficult to control what was being read.1 The realism of novelistic techniques also fostered a literalism in reading strategies, on the part of both the novel’s critics and its supposed victims, that was extrapolated beyond the novel to fiction in general and romance in particular. Lennox’s novel, in the very act of ridiculing Arabella’s application of romance precepts to the conduct of common life, highlights the absurdity of, not so much the romances with which Arabella is infatuated, as a reading practice that admits of the possibility of such naive identification ever taking place. Pamela 2, in contrast, offers rather more instruction for the conduct of common life than is compatible with narrative interest, though, in taking Pamela and Mr B from the realms of romance into the domestic reality of marriage, Richardson’s 141

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novel also reinforces Arabella’s understanding of how little of a story remains once a woman ‘condescends to reward [her suitor] with her Hand; and all her Adventures are at an End for the future’ (FQ, p. 138). Consigning herself to the protection of a responsible male, she shelters herself from adventures that expose her to the hazards of chance.

Instruction for the conduct of common life In Markham’s English Arcadia, Melidora, daughter of Musidorus and Pamela, is intent on keeping Diatassan at arm’s length, not allowing him to tag along while she prepares for the next day’s hunt because, as she says, ‘the turret loue is the cottage hate’ (Markham, I: 97). She is affirming, perhaps, no more than the commonplace that familiarity breeds contempt. But it is also true that love – or more particularly romantic love – is a good deal easier to sustain in the turret than in the cottage, where the practical realities of lived experience can have difficulty accommodating the aspirations of romance. In Pamela 2, Richardson’s sequel to his first novel, marriage is described as coming as a nasty shock to young women courted in the turret, where they are encouraged to think themselves ‘above the gentlemen’, addressed with ‘reverence and respect’, and accorded the status of ‘angel among men’ (IV: 445). The married state, in contrast, ‘is a kind of state of humiliation for a young lady’ (IV: 446), since she must then consent to be subordinate to her husband, with no will of her own. Richardson’s heroine, the ‘low-born cottager’ raised by marriage to a more exalted condition, is somewhat better prepared by her humble upbringing for the deference and obedience that a husband might demand, and she concedes that it was ‘no small motive’ for Mr B that he could expect from her ‘more humility, more submission, than he thought he had reason to flatter himself would be paid him by a lady equally born and educated’ (P2, III: 73). But in this novel, the ‘low-born cottager’ is also expected to provide a more down-to-earth perspective on genteel society, and Lady Davers, for one, looks forward to a healthy dose of that ‘truth and nature … which we are generally so much lifted above by our conditions, that we hardly know what they are’ (III: 38–9). That the result is more conduct book than narrative should hardly come as a surprise, given that, as Eaves and Kimpel argue, ‘there was nothing which could happen’ in the sequel without undermining the basic premise of the first novel – that Pamela’s indubitable virtue has been rewarded by her marriage to Mr B.2 The exact nature of that reward might profitably be clarified (and Mrs Barbauld’s shrewd obser-

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vation that Richardson’s sequel is ‘less a continuation than the author’s defence of himself’ suggests one way of approaching such a clarification3), but Richardson’s Preface to the sequel (published as Volumes III and IV of Pamela) promises nothing out of the ordinary except ‘rules, equally new and practicable, inculcated, throughout the whole, for the general conduct of life’ (III: vii). Richardson’s Preface also advertises his reluctance even to publish the sequel, though he forgoes the opportunity to explain the role of other unauthorized sequels in provoking him into print (the Preface not being, perhaps, the safest place for the ostensible editor of Pamela’s letters to argue right of ownership of letters that the ending of prior editions of the first novel suggest do not exist4). His intention of providing ‘Instruction in a genteel and usual Married Life’, while not satisfying the appetite for narrative of some of the readers who corresponded with him,5 at least appeals to his heroine’s literary taste. Asked whether she was conversant with much in the way of novels, plays, and romances, Pamela acknowledges that ‘there were very few novels and romances that my lady would permit me to read; and those I did, gave me no great pleasure’ (IV: 424). Her objections are similar to those voiced by Richardson in his Preface, where he recommends his book as avoiding precisely those ‘romantic flights, improbable surprises, and irrational machinery’ (III: vi) that Pamela objects to in novels and romance: either they dealt so much in the marvellous and improbable, or were so unnaturally inflaming to the passions, and so full of love and intrigue, that hardly any of them but seemed calculated to fire the imagination, rather than to inform the judgment. Tilts and tournaments, breaking of spears in honour of a mistress, swimming over rivers, engaging with monsters, rambling in search of adventures, making unnatural difficulties, in order to shew the knight-errant’s prowess in overcoming them, is all that is required to constitute the hero in such pieces. And what principally distinguishes the character of the heroine, is, when she is taught to consider her father’s house as an enchanted castle, and her lover as the hero who is to dissolve the charm, and to set her at liberty from one confinement, in order to put her into another, and, too probably, a worse: to instruct her how to climb walls, drop from windows, leap precipices, and do twenty other extravagant things, in order to shew the mad strength of a passion she ought to be ashamed of; to make parents and guardians pass for tyrants, and the voice of reason to be drowned in that of indiscreet love, which exalts the other sex, and debases her

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own. And what is the instruction, that can be gathered from such pieces, for the conduct of common life?(IV: 424–5).6 The rhetorical force of the concluding question is not lost on Pamela’s own audience – one member of which (a Miss Stapylton) has already been taking instruction in ‘indiscreet love’ – though the question also appears to endorse a level of literalism in reading practices from which Pamela’s own story is not safe. That Pamela was not designed as an incitement to maids to aspire to marriage with their masters apparently needed reaffirming in Pamela 2, where Mr B makes clear that the conditions attaching to such an elevation must exclude all but his own dear Pamela.7 But the practice of reading novels for instruction in the conduct of common life, while not new, was certainly complicated by an ease of transference from fiction to reality that, as Samuel Johnson acknowledged, made the new species of writing potentially more of a social danger than the old. Like Lady Davers, Johnson could applaud in writing such as Pamela’s the wholesome corrective of ‘truth and nature’: The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. … Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder: it is therefore precluded from the machines and expedients of the heroic romance, and can neither employ giants to snatch away a lady from the nuptial rites, nor knights to bring her back from captivity; it can neither bewilder its personages in desarts, nor lodge them in imaginary castles.8 But while he could ridicule the implausibilities of the old-style romance, its very absurdity and remoteness from ordinary life at least meant that ‘the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself’: the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself. 9

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Problems arise, though, ‘when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man’; in such circumstances, all fiction is understood implicitly as providing, if not ‘rules … for the general conduct of life’, at least predictive models of behaviour for young people with similar hopes and desires who might one day ‘be engaged in the like part’.10 Anxiety about the harmful effects of fiction, particularly on young readers and even more so on young female readers, was not new – Michael McKeon observes, for example, that, certainly as far as romance fiction is concerned, ‘from Dante on, the fear that women’s morals will be corrupted by reading romances is quite conventional’11 – but by the eighteenth century this anxiety extended to so many aspects of the reading experience that no facet of a human life could be considered safe from contamination.12 To the modern reader, the list of ill effects of avid reading, and the often direful language accompanying it, can seem ludicrously sensationalist, though at least some of the dangers targeted would be familiar from media campaigns in recent decades decrying the perils of television, and then videos, and then the internet. In the eighteenth century, novels were accused, for example, of enfeebling the physical constitution and disrupting domestic routine;13 of encouraging mental laziness,14 inflaming the imagination, creating false expectations of life, and breeding discontent;15 and of corrupting morality16 and fostering antisocial tendencies.17 It is an alarming catalogue of sins, many of them deriving from the danger Johnson identifies in fiction that represents ordinary men and women in common life, thereby encouraging readers to apply the story to themselves,18 though the level of anxiety also testifies to the more particular dangers of a new kind of compulsive reading experience and its capacity to entangle readers emotionally in the fictional world.19 There is evidence that ordinary readers were themselves conscious of how easily fiction could merge with life when the passions were engaged – Mrs Heathcote, writing to Jemima, Marchioness of Grey, for example, while defending herself for ‘feeling the distresses of others though the object of ones compassion is only fictitious’, acknowledges her folly when she has ‘insensibly steped from Fiction to Reality’, for ‘les tendres attachmens nous mènent plus loin qu’ on ne pense.’20 But the most pressing danger was seen to lie in the seductiveness with which one book first engrosses the reader and then leads to another and another with what Thomas Gisborne described as an increasingly ‘indiscriminate and insatiable avidity’.21

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In Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, his readers are warned in melodramatic tones of the dangers of an ominously encroaching appetite: Thus a habit is formed, a habit at first, perhaps, of limited indulgence, but a habit that is continually found more formidable and more encroaching. The appetite becomes too keen to be denied; and in proportion as it is more urgent, grows less nice and select in its fare. What would formerly have given offence, now gives none. The palate is vitiated or made dull.22 Gisborne might be condemning the indulgence of any profligate desire, but the particular dissipation he targets here is the lust, not for food or flesh, but for reading fiction. It is an activity that he acknowledges has undoubted pleasures, and even, at first, unexceptionable moral tendencies if directed by a fastidious taste. But such is the seduction of fiction that one book speedily leads to another until the mind is ‘secretly corrupted’. Gisborne’s specific concerns are typical of eighteenth-century criticism of novels and romances: most are unfit ‘to be perused with the eye of delicacy’; they breed an ‘aversion to reading of a more improving nature’; and, preoccupied with ‘the vicissitudes and effects of a passion the most powerful of all those which agitate the human heart’, they create ‘a susceptibility of impression and a premature warmth of tender emotions’ that are bound to lead to grief.23 But what Gisborne also highlights with uncommon clarity is an important reason for the new urgency in these warnings. Fiction may always have been unsafe, but it had never before been so easy to enjoy. Only a reader accustomed to novelistic conventions of narrative (or not accustomed to reading very much at all) could confidently assert, as Gisborne does, that ‘that story must be uncommonly barren, or wretchedly told, of which, after having heard the beginning, we desire not to know the end’.24 By the time Gisborne was writing one of the defining features of novels had become, not so much their realistic as their dramatic format – but ‘dramatic’ in the sense of having the concentrated focus of a play, with a unified action centring on a single protagonist, with one more or less clearly defined end in view.25 The style of the narrative tended to be less prolix, its development more tightly directed, its progress less frequently checked by elaborate descriptive flourishes; and readers, if Elizabeth Montagu’s letters are any guide, were becoming increasingly intolerant of lavish diversion-

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ary tactics that did little to promote the action. Writing to the Reverend Mr Freind (1741), she confesses: I am reading Sir Philip Sidney, but am ashamed to own I do not relish him; not even the exceeding eloquence with which he describes the exceedingness of Philocleas’ beauty, the exceedingness of which exceeded all other beauty; for as much as the mind’s excellence did, as it were, shine through the excellent beauty of her person, insomuch that no one could determine whether that the eye in beholding, or the ear in hearing, did more receive the sound, or objects of delight; but together they wrought in the mind’s eye a goodly admiration: so beautiful was her voice, and so harmonious her person, as did strangely divide the affections; which after long doubting what to admire, at last consented to admire, without knowing what was admired, where every thing was admirable. Thus does Sir Philip, with expression of craftiness, or rather craftiness of expression, so entirely puzzle my brain, and so overcome me with battles (for, like Bayes, he prefers that one quality of fighting to all others in a hero), that I cannot keep my attention for half an hour.26 Pamela 2 lacks the strong narrative drive that, even by 1741, Elizabeth Montagu had come to associate with fiction; it is not simply lacking in incident but also in a propelling desire that would move the story toward a keenly anticipated conclusion. Betty Schellenberg points out that the novel, rather than concluding Pamela’s story, instead fragments itself ‘into an anthology of exemplary narratives’, supporting the critical claim ‘that a narrative without a unified plot and without a protagonist embodying individualistic desire is neither viable nor readable’.27 Pamela does have desires, most centring on the means of achieving a fulfilling marriage when there is still unfinished business to be settled (her family to be, politely, put in its proper place, Mrs Jewkes to be brought to reckoning, Mr B’s family to be won over, a husband’s prerogatives to be accommodated), but her desires are in the main subsumed under the all-encompassing virtue of complaisance, which directs her to seek her happiness in obliging others. Even desire itself is framed in terms of what is good for Mr B: ‘It is no compliment to him to be quite passive, and to have no will at all of one’s own’ (IV: 19). In Pamela 2, Margaret Doody observes, Richardson has ‘a case to prove, but no story’, 28 though not simply because he forgoes the opportunities for incident (limb-breaking and mansion-torching)

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recommended by well-meaning friends. 29 He has, in fact, Schellenberg argues, ‘gone to great lengths to arrive at unreadability’, 30 though the ‘unreadability’ of Pamela 2 is perhaps a measure of changing expectations of an explanatory plot that is read ‘in anticipation of retrospection’. 31 The principle of the plot of Pamela 2 is prospective rather than retrospective, a series of prudential interventions designed to forestall anticipated developments. The most notable is the ‘trial’ to which Pamela subjects herself in order to nullify Mr B’s notion of ‘polygamy’ that would see him married to Pamela but living in ‘open sin’ with the Countess (IV: 192): she takes on his guilt, holds herself to account for not being woman enough to keep him steady, and surrenders to a worthier rival (with the unsurprising but, theoretically, not anticipated result – a contrite Mr B restored to home and hearth). In terms of the representation of female desire, however, the most interesting intervention is Pamela’s contribution to the re-education of four neighbouring young women, each ‘dancing upon the edge of a precipice’ of indiscreet love (IV: 406). Pamela’s discourse at this stage resembles the ‘virtuoso emplotment’ of an earlier style of narrative, where ‘potentially unfortunate states [are] dexterously avoided by “woordes well placed”’, 32 and the argument comes replete with the stock military analogy. In defence of her over-familiarity with young men, which Pamela likens to fraternizing with the enemy in the ‘continual state of warfare between the two sexes’, one young woman cites the case of the ‘late czar’, who, she had read, took a better method with the Swedes, who had often beat him; when, after a great victory, he made his captives march in procession, through the streets of his principal city, to familiarize them to the Russes, and shew them they were but men. (IV. 411) But, as Pamela points out, the czar’s strategy was necessary only because the Russes had so often been defeated by the Swedes and consequently thought too highly of them, a weakness on which the Swedes were able to capitalize. It is an oddly incongruous foray into a male domain, even for a young woman who affects to be well read in ‘histories of kingdoms’, but Pamela wins the point, and goes on to strike at the heart of a female weakness on which men are only too eager to capitalize: that first-sight love that ‘exalts the other sex, and debases her own’.

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The dangerous notion of a first-sight love In her advice to these young women, all of whom are dancing on the edge of that precipice of indiscreet love, Pamela offers an extraordinarily comprehensive account of purely pragmatic reasons for adopting as strategic policy behavioural constraints that are perhaps more safely understood as innate, though in the process she manages to inject into the mystique of romantic love the rare voice of common sense. Her target is ‘first-sight love’, that ‘dangerous notion’ propagated by fiction – and particularly by the kind of fiction that prompts Miss Stapylton to style herself ‘Philoclea’ in her clandestine correspondence. Love at first sight would have been the undoing of Pamela in her battle with Mr B – and, for many readers, even today, it is still her undoing, despite her best efforts to deny it. Even sensible, savvy, streetwise adolescents will turn to love at first sight as the only ‘reasonable’ explanation, not simply for Pamela’s lingering in Mr B’s household, but for her ability to love him after all he has done to her. (It is harder, it seems, to believe in someone falling out of love after a kidnapping, imprisonment, and attempted rape than to believe in someone falling in love in the same circumstances.) In fiction, at least, love at first sight performs an indispensable function, averting potentially damaging speculation about what else, aside from love, might explain two people’s attraction to each other, though it remains unproblematic only while it is understood as a kind of magic engendered by the moral universe to endorse the rightness of a union made, implicitly, in heaven. Let loose in a contingent, adventitious universe – one that admits, for example, the statistical improbability of an eighteenthcentury English gentlewoman happening upon, among the limited number of people of her acquaintance, the only person in the world that can make her blissfully and permanently happy – love at first sight can be far too easily mistaken for sexual desire, and certainly implies, as Pamela observes, an amorous proclivity on both sides ‘which, however it may pass in a man, very little becomes the female delicacy’ (IV: 425). Pamela’s objections to this dangerous notion are overwhelmingly prudential, bringing commonsense and propriety to bear on a convention deeply embedded in narrative practice but already becoming naturalized, for these four young women in particular, as an experiential truth. The dangers are obvious. Love at first sight explicitly precludes conscious deliberation, committing both parties without opportunity ‘for caution, for inquiry, for the display of merit and sincerity, and

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even the assurance of a grateful return’ (IV: 426) – a ‘random shot’, therefore, that ‘three chances to one’ does not end happily. It also places the woman in the invidious position of declaring her hand prematurely, ‘giving up the negative voice, which belongs to the sex, even while she is not sure of meeting with the affirmative one’. And on the basis of what? of a heart that seems ‘too much in the power of her eye’ (IV: 426). There are clearly good prudential reasons for not loving at first sight, but the convention does not, of course, admit of choice: love is something into which one ‘falls’, helplessly and spontaneously, and, for equally good prudential reasons, the quicker the better if a first sight love is to protect a woman from an ulterior desire. In Pamela’s formulation, however, a first-sight love is simply a delusion fuelled by fancy, nothing more than a liking based on first impressions and brooded over and hatched into love by a mind randomly prepossessed. A liking, she argues, is conquerable by a woman prepared to ‘withdraw into herself’ and consider her duty, for ‘every man and woman has a black and a white side; and it is easy to set the imperfections of the person against the supposed perfections, while it is only a liking.’ The difficulty lies in first overcoming a susceptibility to flattery, and the not unnatural impulse to think well of a person’s judgement in finding you so attractive, and, in compliment to your own judgement, to search out reasons for confirming first impressions (IV: 426–7).33 Pamela’s advice makes good sense, but at a cost. Her analysis of the mechanics of love removes desire from the nuts and bolts of its operation, but it can also be seen to relegate female virtue to the level of instrumentality in the power play of sexual politics, for her chief objective seems to be to counteract the effects of that soft, and softening, passion that puts a woman too much in a man’s power. For men as for women, love can come at the expense of self-worth – Mr B certainly complains of it often enough – but the consequences are more devastating for women, who are physically and socially more vulnerable. As Pamela observes in the case of Miss Sally Godfrey, Mr B’s earlier conquest and whose child Pamela persuades him to take into his care: ‘tis another misfortune of people in love; they always think highly of the beloved object, and lowly of themselves: such a dismal mortifier is love!’ (III: 64).34 But if, as Pamela argues, liking is not allowed to hatch into love, imperfections are still capable of being set against perfections, and a woman is not only in a better position never to allow love to hatch should family and friends object, but she is also better equipped to maintain ‘a consciousness of merit, a true dignity, such as

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becomes virgin modesty, and untainted purity of mind and manners’ that will ensure she is addressed with ‘reverence and respect’ (IV: 445) and help maintain a position of power in the courtship. This is, of course, a specifically matronly account of courtship, and possibly only a woman in Pamela’s position – already safely wed, and having never herself been able to demand the reverence and respect she suggests a young woman ought to claim as her right – can afford to be quite so candid about the profit to be gained in the courtship stakes by being an ‘angel among men’ (IV: 445). It is a power that is conventionally attributed to women for the brief dominion of courtship, though it is a power more properly felt than exercised, and the effect of virtue rather than its occasion.

The sublimity of love and the quintessence of valour If marriage and a courtship the very reverse of polite allow Pamela to acknowledge the advantage that is surrendered by a first-sight love, then madness, according to Scott Paul Gordon, allows Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella to claim a similar position of power but without using it to promote her own best interests. Madness functions in The Female Quixote, Gordon argues, as ‘a fictional strategy that divides deliberate from unplanned, aware from unaware, individuals who act strategically from those who cannot.’35 The main symptom of Arabella’s madness is her answer to the question Pamela contemptuously asked of romance: what is the instruction that can be gathered from such pieces for the conduct of common life? For Arabella, it is from romance – and specifically from the French heroic romance of the seventeenth century – that ‘all useful Knowledge may be drawn’ (p. 48); she believes them ‘real Pictures of Life’ and from them ‘drew all her Notions and Expectations’ (p. 7). It is an absurd scenario, and might well seem madness, were it not for the activating premise: the seclusion of her upbringing that has shielded her from knowledge of a world in which the instruction offered by romance is useless. Arabella’s father had once been one of the most powerful men in England – he had ‘in a manner governed the whole Kingdom’ (p. 5) – until driven from office by his enemies. He then turned his back on the world and retired to grand and contemptuous isolation, taking with him his wife (who dies in childbirth), and compelling her daughter, Arabella, to grow up knowing nothing of the world, enclosed within the woods and gardens of her father’s estate – an ‘Epitome of Arcadia (FQ, p. 6) – with only her voluminous romances, a legacy from her dead mother,

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for company and leisure. The total seclusion of her upbringing (which mimics the limited experience of the world that, it is argued, makes women susceptible to romance fantasies) explains her belief in the authenticity of romances and their relevance to her own times, as well as her susceptibility to their influence. Romance has had 17 years uninterrupted reign in Arabella’s life, and the only influence of the outside world has been to confirm romance’s domain. For young girls are not the only ones susceptible to outlandish romantic gestures – in fact it is her father’s romantic gesture that has put her in a position in which romance is able to exercise absolute sway. Her father has done a Prospero: plotted against and ‘dethroned’, he makes his own world in enforced retirement, devoting himself to his daughter’s education so that her mind will be as beautiful as her person, and engineering her marriage to her cousin. Published in 1752, The Female Quixote satirizes a passion for French heroic romance that, according to Clara Reeve in The Progress of Romance (1785), was already well past its fashionable height. They were the books that ‘pleased our grandmothers’,36 though in Arabella’s sequestered time-warp they are all she knows of a world beyond her father’s estate, and no rival reality – and no rival fiction – has intruded to question them. For Arabella, the heroines of Scudéry and La Caprenède become models, not simply of virtue but also of social behaviour (including speech and dress), and their heroes and villains shape Arabella’s expectations of her own experience, in which all women worthy of her acquaintance are presumed inviolably virtuous, and all men are either languishing in helpless adoration or preparing to take violent measures to abduct her. Preoccupied, then, with imaginary plots against her, Arabella is oblivious to, and hence innocent of strategic intervention in, the actual plots in which she is involved. Read as instruction in the values governing virtuous behaviour, Arabella’s romances are not contemptible. As The Progress of Romance points out, while romance might encourage young women ‘to deport themselves too much like Queens and Princesses’, it also teaches young people ‘that virtue only could give lustre to every rank and degree. – It taught the young men to look upon themselves as the champions and protectors of the weaker sex; – to treat the object of their passion with the utmost respect; – to avoid all improper familiarities, and, in short, to expect from her the reward of their virtues’ .37 And this, of course, is precisely the result at which Pamela’s advice is directed. But, as Reeve observes elsewhere, any kind of fiction ‘may be abused, and become an instrument to corrupt the manners and morals of mankind; so may

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poetry, so may plays, so may every kind of composition; but that will prove nothing more than the old saying lately revived’ – “that every earthly thing has two handles.”’38 Romance might teach young people to esteem invincible valour, unbounded generosity, and inviolable fidelity, but if it is read as embodying, not values, but rules for the conduct of ordinary life, then it can be seen as harbouring an impossible and dangerous ideal, in which ‘the Sublimity of Love, and the Quintessence of Valour … if possessed in a superlative Degree, form a true and perfect Hero, as the Perfection of Beauty, Wit, and Virtue, make a Heroine worthy to be served by such an illustrious Personage’ (p. 151). It is an impossible ideal because it allows for no degree of worthiness other than the superlative, and it is dangerous because love and valour are a heady mix, encouraging women to seek distinction, not in a man’s estimation of her worth, but in the deeds performed in her honour. As part of Arabella’s eventual ‘cure’, she is forced to acknowledge that these books can ‘teach Women to exact Vengeance, and Men to execute it; teach Women to expect not only Worship, but the dreadful Worship of human Sacrifices. Every Page of these Volumes is filled with such extravagance of Praise, and expressions of Obedience as one human Being ought not to hear from another’ (pp. 380–1). This fantasy, not so much of power but of consequence, proves remarkably resilient, and Arabella relinquishes it at the crunch because it is safer to acknowledge the viciousness of an ambitious fantasy than to confront the shame of an erotic fantasy. The ‘worthy Divine’ who has been enlisted to bring Arabella to her senses (after she has nearly killed herself by leaping into the Thames to escape abduction and ravishment by some innocent bystanders) points out that all this bloodshed is committed in the name of love: ‘Love, Madam, is, you know, the Business, the sole Business of Ladies in Romances’ (p. 381). At this point his arguments ‘begin to be less agreeable to [her] Ladyship’s Delicacy’ (p. 381), and Arabella concedes the argument on the safer ground of the disgracefulness of encouraging unnecessary bloodshed. The point she does not want to confront is that the adventures in which she believes herself engaged are all about forestalling sexual conquest – which is a particularly dangerous erotic fantasy to entertain in ordinary life. According to Duncan Isles, Lennox’s original intention may have been to bring Arabella to her senses by being persuaded to set aside her romances and to read an exemplary novel – namely Richardson’s Clarissa.39 Clarissa would have provided Arabella with a portrait of a ‘real-life’ heroine who is everything she wishes to be, for Clarissa is

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indeed ‘the Perfection of Beauty, Wit, and Virtue’, beloved by everyone who has the honour to know her, but at the same time just a well-to-do, genteel young woman who is modest and retiring, who tries to live by the motto ‘Rather useful than glaring’, and who wishes nothing more than to please her friends and relatives, care for her chickens, and perform charitable works. But Clarissa would also have provided Arabella with a sickening lesson in the danger with which she flirts when she talks glibly of ‘ravishment’, telling the history of a young woman who is seized and carried off and imprisoned by a dashing young rake who, when he has her helpless and insensible, proceeds to rape her. Equipped only with her romance reading, Arabella seems not, in fact, to understand what ‘ravishment’ might entail – not only because the romance heroine is always providentially rescued from the danger, but also because the vagueness of the term was often exploited. As Jocelyn Catty argues in Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘rape’ and ‘ravishment’ were often conflated with abduction and elopement, with or without sexual activity, and with or without the woman’s consent. 40 Arabella’s naivety is, then, perhaps understandable when, on an earlier occasion, she falls into ‘a Swoon, or something she took for a Swoon’ (p. 300), after a young man intrudes into her chamber and she then insists that her maid relate the mischief done while she has been ‘unconscious’, since that is how it happens in romance. The equanimity with which she can entertain the possibility of ravishment may testify to her confidence that a heroine’s chastity will always be preserved, but it also suggests that she has little conception of what she might be asking her maid to relate. As repositories of ‘rules … for the general conduct of life’, Arabella’s romances almost prove fatal, though the problem lies as much with the literalism of Arabella’s reading practices as with the substance of the tales: she ‘could not separate her Ideas of Glory, Virtue, Courage, Generosity, and Honour, from the false Representations of them’ in the actions of her imaginary heroes (p. 329). Arabella tries to do everything by the book, not distinguishing between literary and social conventions, and insisting, for example, that her maid, Lucy, observe the romance custom of the servant’s recital of the heroine’s adventures, a task that leaves the maid justifiably baffled. Her literal-mindedness, however, does not simply extend to the faith she places in her romances as the source of all useful knowledge. She is also incapable of recognizing sarcasm, does not understand the point of hyperbole, and

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in general seems unable to recognize rhetorical figures. When Arabella assumes, for example, that Miss Grove’s writing master must have been a nobleman in disguise, Miss Glanville is unconvinced: Indeed, Lady Bella, said Miss Glanville, smileing, you may as well persuade me, the Moon is made of a Cream Cheese, as that any Nobleman turned himself into a Writing-master, to obtain Miss Groves – Is it possible, Miss, said Arabella, that you can offer such an affront to my Understanding, as to suppose, I would argue upon such a ridiculous System; and compare the Second glorious Luminary of the Heavens to so unworthy a Resemblance? I have taken some Pains to contemplate the Heavenly Bodies; and, by Reading and Observation, am able to comprehend some Part of their Excellence: Therefore it is not probable, I should descend to such trivial Comparisons; and liken a Planet, which, haply, is not much less than our Earth, to a thing so inconsiderable, as that you name – (p. 142) Arabella is no fool, and she is certainly much more learned than Miss Glanville, who has not studied astronomy, and trusts her own eyes to see that the moon is no bigger than the gardener’s face, just as she trusts the evidence of plain sense that says the writing master is a writing master and not a nobleman in disguise. Arabella, in contrast, is prepared to believe that things are not what they seem (whether it be the size of the moon or the identity of the writing master), but she expects language to mean what it says – so that when Glanville, for example, is so maddened by Arabella’s obtuseness that he resorts to hyperbole and threatens to hang himself, Arabella is disgusted: ‘Hang yourself, repeated Arabella, sure you know not what you say? – You meant, I suppose, that you’ll fall upon your Sword. What Hero ever threatned to give himself so vulgar a Death?’ (p. 318).

Loving with honour Glanville no more means to be taken at his word than Mr B, who in part one of Pamela four times tells Pamela that he cannot live without her but without showing any signs of anxiety about his own mortality.41 Even when Mr B takes to his sickbed after Pamela leaves for home, no one (surely?) expects him to die of unrequited love, though Pamela is allowed an apprehensive shudder at the thought of

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occasioning his death and to flatter herself that he may owe his life to her return. She is allowed, in fact, the conventional recourse of the romance heroines upon whom Arabella is modeling herself when she goes to Glanville’s sickbed, commands him to recover and permits him to love her ‘in order to make the Life [she] has bestowed on [him], worthy [his] Acceptance’ (FQ, p. 136) – a graciousness Mr B can cherish (‘Life is no life without you!’ [P, p. 291]) but that leaves Glanville speechless with chagrin. The different responses are entirely understandable: Pamela has not sailed into the sickroom unannounced, pulled open the curtains on the bed, orated her heartening commands, and hurried out again. Rather, Pamela has been invited in to raise Mr B’s spirits, and the extent of her graciousness is limited to acceding to a request that the master has given his servant the power to refuse. But the sickbed convention, even though Mr B’s illness is naturalized as a fit of vexation rather than originating in a broken heart, nevertheless lives on in the novel as a strategy designed to allow the heroine gracefully to negotiate ‘so great a Difficulty, as that of giving [a man] Permission to love her’ (FQ, p. 137). For all their differences in rank, upbringing, temperament, and, it must be said, lucidity, Pamela and Arabella are both seeking a solution to the problem of how a woman can love with honour. Their two contrasting models of female conduct – the shrewdly pragmatic model of feminine best practice that emerges in Pamela’s reflections on the management of courtship in Pamela 2 and the salon romance model of heroic womanhood to which Arabella is devoted in The Female Quixote – both defer to the precept that a woman’s will is not her own but also, paradoxically, ensure that a woman’s will remains within her keeping until the moment she chooses to surrender it. Arabella’s elaborate, precedent-bound display of disinterest in the attentions of even a worthy lover, like Pamela’s notion that a young lady should ‘withdraw into herself … to reflect upon what she owes to her parents, to her family, to her character, and to her sex’ (P2, IV. 426), assumes a strength of will that, in the modern romance, can alone ensure the integrity of a woman’s love. In a fictional world in which ‘truth and nature’ are expected to have the last say, the closest that a woman can come to a match made in Heaven is a match made without either effort or desire on her part, and this is precisely the safe haven that Pamela and Arabella attain. In Pamela’s case, it is perceived almost as a point of honour that her marriage to Mr B comes about without her having done anything except her level best to put him off. In the prefatory matter to Pamela, for example, a congratulatory letter

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applauds Pamela’s passivity within her own story, arguing that she finally marries Mr B without ever having entertain’d the least previous Design or Thought for that Purpose: No Art used to inflame him, no Coquetry practised to tempt or entice him, and no Prudery or Affectation to tamper with his Passions; but, on the contrary, artless and unpractised in the Wiles of the World, all her Endeavours, and even all her Wishes, tended only to render herself as un-amiable as she could in his Eyes.42 In Arabella’s case, her role in her own story is to be acted upon, to be as passive as the Countess in her relation of the ‘History of a Woman of Honour’: ‘I was born and christen’d, had a useful and proper Education, receiv’d the Addresses of my Lord – through the Recommendations of my Parents, and marry’d him with their Consents and my own Inclination’ (p. 327). With the exception of the ‘useful and proper Education’, this is essentially Arabella’s story, passives and all, despite her belief that she is actually engaged in another story, one in which she has more adventures in one day than a woman of honour ought to expect in a lifetime.

7 ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

There is an intriguing structural parallel between the plots of Sidney’s Arcadia and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, in which two sisters – one spirited, witty, and self-possessed and the other sweet, placid, and unassuming – are courted by two friends, one of whom tries to talk the other out of his love, before succumbing to the demeaning passion himself. In the background is a father who fails in his parental responsibilities and whose neglect endangers his daughters’ happiness; in the background also is an aunt with matrilineal ambitions bent on promoting the marriage of her own child. This particular abstraction of Arcadia in terms of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who fall in love with the two sisters, Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of the neglectful Basilius, and victims of their aunt Cecropia’s family ambitions, is obviously slanted towards a comparison with Pride and Prejudice’s two friends, Darcy and Bingley, who fall in love with two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, daughters of a neglectful Mr Bennet, and victim (at least in the case of Elizabeth) of Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine, and her championing of her family’s interests. The way in which the parallel has been drawn clearly ignores some pertinent differences: Bingley, for a start, hardly needs to disguise himself as an Amazon in order to insinuate himself into Jane’s household; Mr Bennet’s nemesis is not oracular prophecy but the custom of entail; neither he nor his wife is intent on secluding their daughters from potential suitors; and, despite Mr Bennet’s suggestion that Bingley might like his wife better than his daughters, since she is as handsome as any of her girls, Mrs Bennet is not accused of harbouring amorous desires, like Basilius’s wife Gynecia, for her daughter’s lover. A different slant on Pride and Prejudice might also draw profitable parallels elsewhere – with Cinderella, for example, or Fanny Burney’s Cecilia.1 There 158

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is, moreover, no evidence that Austen had read Arcadia,2 and it is certainly not our intention to argue that Austen is consciously or even unconsciously borrowing from Sidney. What interests us more is a shared narrative dynamic and the fictional solutions it continues to generate in different cultural and generic contexts. Looking at Pride and Prejudice through a lens already focused on Arcadia allows us to recognize aspects of Austen’s novel that are more thoroughly grounded in narrative conventions than its finely wrought social specificity might suggest. Notoriously delineated as ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ – ‘the very thing to work on’3 – Austen’s highly circumscribed and culturally specific settings are not a million miles away from the pastoral insularity of Arcadian ‘no-places’ that rely upon the intrusion of strangers to provide the motive force for things to happen. At the same time, however, Austen’s novel also takes seriously, as substantive issues, the gender and, more specifically, the class frictions that in Arcadia are for the most part artificially contrived. Class and gender hierarchies may be used in the same way, to measure the exchange value of love against transactions within the political and sexual economy, but the tensions they provoke are necessarily resolved differently when they cannot be simply wished away.

The more goodly and the more lovely In Sidney’s Arcadia, Pyrocles and Musidorus, like Bingley and Darcy, are the strangers in town, and they are contrasted to the extent that the masculine ideal permits. Pyrocles has fair auburn hair and ‘a pure complexion’, and is of ‘cheerful favour’, with a ‘look gentle and bashful’. Musidorus’s hair is black and curled, and he has the advantage in height; his face ‘was composed to a kind of manlike beauty … and the features of it such as they carried both delight and majesty’, ‘his countenance severe, and promising a mind much given to thinking.’ For the purposes of distinguishing their characteristic excellence, we are told that ‘though both had both, if there were any odds, Musidorus was the more goodly and Pyrocles the more lovely’ (NA, p. 809). As distinctions go, much the same could serve for Bingley and Darcy. Bingley is ‘good looking and gentlemanlike’, with ‘a pleasant countenance, and easy, unaffected manners’,4 which render him, if not ‘lovely’, at least perfectly amiable. Darcy, in contrast, is ‘a fine, tall person’ with ‘handsome features’ and ‘noble mien’ (p. 7), but his countenance is forbidding and disagreeable, his stern reserve impenetrable,

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and his mind can be assumed much given to thinking since he seems reluctant to distract it by social chat. That he is the more goodly of the two, as measured by honourable exertion, he is eventually given opportunity to demonstrate, though, as with Musidorus (but for very different reasons), his true nobility is disguised by appearances. The distinguishing features of Pyrocles and Musidorus establish the appropriateness of their choice of sister,5 Pyrocles drawn to the gentler and sweeter of the two, though, as with the brothers, ‘both had both’, the distinction between the sisters’ virtues only a matter of degree: there is ‘more sweetness in Philoclea but more majesty in Pamela’, though only if ‘such perfections may receive the word of more’ (NA, p. 76). Philoclea is bashful and generous, Pamela ‘of high thoughts’, confident of her own worth but devoid of pride. Maurice Evans suggests that Sidney conceived of Pamela and Philoclea ‘in terms of sense and sensibility, an Elizabethan Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood’,6 but the parallels with Elizabeth and Jane are just as striking.7 Elizabeth has Pamela’s courage and self-possession, as well as her ‘constant temper’ (though Elizabeth’s is an emotional resilience bred of natural cheerfulness and low expectations); Jane has Philoclea’s timidity and generous candour, though with a more placid exterior sheltering her easily bruised sensibility. For both sets of sisters, moreover, parents prove disastrous encumbrances, threatening the happiness of their children in pursuit of their own selfish ends. Both fathers neglect their responsibilities, Basilius looking after himself rather than his nation’s or his daughters’ interests by retiring in seclusion, and Mr Bennet retiring to his library rather than supervising his household. And both mothers threaten to ruin their daughters’ chances of happiness, Gynecia by pursuing her passion for her daughter’s lover, and Mrs Bennet by unashamedly pursuing husbands for her daughters. Both sets of daughters also turn to each other for friendship and solace – though, however seriously or mischievously modern critics might speculate on the intimacy of women’s friendships in Austen’s works, none of Austen’s women are quite so intimate as Philoclea and Pamela, who retire to bed to comfort each other, where they impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed which for that night might well scorn the shrine of Venus: and there, cherishing one another with dear though chaste embracements, with sweet though cold kisses, it might seem that love was come to play him there without a dart, or that, weary of his own fires, he was there to refresh himself between their sweet breathing lips. (NA, p. 245)

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The intimacy of the sisters reminds us also that the narrative structure supports continuity as well as opposition. Like many a fictional heroine before and after her, Elizabeth, with her fluent tongue and acerbic wit, participates in what Judith Lowder Newton has called the ‘fantasy of the power of intelligence, wit, and critical attitudes’,8 though without cutting her ties with the chaste, silent, and obedient model of womanhood embodied in her sister. Elizabeth’s attachment to Jane, her admiration for her unassuming, sweet-tempered goodness, and even her fond exasperation with her desire to think well of everyone, all vouch for Elizabeth’s own good-nature, as does Philoclea’s gentleness and innocence for Pamela’s, despite the formidable reserve enjoined on Pamela by her station. But in the absence of something of importance to do, it is more or less incumbent upon a heroine to shine through language – if not in company, at least, like Frances Burney’s Evelina, in the semi-privacy of personal correspondence.9 On the page, a heroine’s greatest assets are words, and if she loses them, and loses control over the way her own experience and that of others is represented, she is in serious danger of paling into insignificance.10 Both Pamela and Elizabeth are already hard-pressed to preserve their dignity, Pamela in the face of the guardianship of the ‘loutish clown’ Dametas, and Elizabeth in the face of her mother’s shameless husband-hunting on behalf of her daughters, and, for both, words become a measure of the control they are still able to exert over circumstances in which they are daily mortified. For Elizabeth especially it is a gallant performance, for her dignity is entirely a matter of strength of character, but when decorum forces her to surrender the floor to her mother, she is reduced to a ‘painful confusion’ for which ‘years of happiness’ could not make amends (p. 299).

Matters of fortune Everything in the world can look like everything else if the terms of comparison are ingeniously enough employed, and the similarities in the skeletons of these two works are interesting chiefly as they draw attention to the values that inform the structural oppositions they support. Musidorus and Pyrocles are social equals and, for all their occasional follies, so nearly approaching the perfection of manhood that distinguishing their virtues in terms of degree seems hardly to establish their individuality – though it helps, for the purposes of identification, that one of them spends the greater part of his time in a dress. There are some differences in temperament – Pyrocles the more

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hot-headed and impetuous of the two, a distinction he also shares with Bingley, who admits to Mrs Bennet that ‘whatever I do is done in a hurry’ (p. 36) – but Pyrocles and Musidorus represent the same core values (as might be expected of princely cousins who have been raised together). Bingley and Darcy, however, are different enough in terms of social position, personality, and force of character that Mary Waldron can describe Darcy’s choice of friend as ‘peculiar’.11 Both are prosperous and genteel, and despite Bingley’s wealth deriving from trade, comfortably at home in fashionable society, but their temperaments and tastes seem so unlike that even when Elizabeth is disposed to think well of Darcy she still attributes his closeness to the Bingleys to his desire to cultivate a husband for his sister. (When she is less charitably inclined, Darcy’s friendship with Bingley is attributed to the power he must enjoy exercising over such a malleable young man.) They are an incongruous pairing, not only socially and temperamentally but also psychologically, as Elizabeth’s analytical endeavours suggest, Darcy’s ‘deep, intricate’ character much harder to make out than Bingley’s, which is implicitly the opposite of deep and intricate though tactfully the negative is never spelled out. ‘It does not necessarily follow’, Elizabeth tells Bingley, ‘that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours’ (p. 36). It does not necessarily follow, either, that the difference in status between Darcy and Bingley makes one more estimable than the other, though the care that has to be taken to protect Elizabeth from being tainted, not only by her mother’s mercenary ambitions, but also by her own appreciation of what it would mean to be mistress of Pemberley, implicitly reinforces the value attached to Darcy’s superior wealth and social position. Bingley is a good catch but decidedly second-class, a point with which Mr Bennet rather shabbily taxes Elizabeth after Darcy has sought his consent to their marriage: Darcy ‘is rich, to be sure,’ so Elizabeth can expect ‘more fine clothes and fine carriages than Jane’ (p. 334). It is a low thrust, but needs to be said, because the distinctions of rank function not simply as a register of the historically specific classconsciousness of early nineteenth-century society but also as a narrative device that structures a hierarchy of gendered values. In Arcadia, the distinctions of rank are not even real, but they can cheapen Pamela as surely as they can Elizabeth, even though the heroines occupy different positions in the hierarchy. Elizabeth must show herself as capable of resisting the suit of a man whose station is so far above hers as Pamela in Arcadia must show herself capable of resisting Musidorus’s suit while he remains so far beneath her, disguised as the shepherd,

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Dorus. Pamela will not demean herself, or risk being disparaged as an easy catch, by an improvident match, and when Musidorus asks, through his pretended address to Mopsa, whether it is his mind or his estate that makes him unworthy, Pamela replies that estate is all a woman has to go on: ‘since the judgement of the world stands upon matter of fortune, and … the sex of womankind of all other is most bound to have regardful eye to men’s judgements, it is not for us to play the philosophers in seeking out your hidden virtues, since that which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light grounded affection’ (NA, p. 226). Elizabeth’s scruples need to work in the opposite direction. Darcy’s high ‘estate’ – material as well as social – is equally capable of cheapening Elizabeth’s affection while his virtues remain hidden (and with her father she is reduced to pleading, ‘you do not know what he really is’ [p. 335]), for his ‘estate’ is all the world will judge by as she acknowledges facetiously to Jane in dating her love from her ‘first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley’ p. 332).

‘I will not be wishing’ There is an oddly surreal moment during Elizabeth’s inspection of Pemberley that encapsulates the perspectival shift that has to take place before Elizabeth can love the man above her. As she walks through the portrait gallery, she is arrested by ‘a striking resemblance of Mr Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her’ (p. 220). She returns to the portrait before she leaves the gallery, to reassess, not simply the virtues, but also the consequence of a man in whose guardianship, ‘as a brother, a landlord, a master,’ lay the happiness of so many people (p. 220). And then, in her mind, she steps into his line of sight: ‘she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself’ (p. 220, our emphasis). Darcy’s eyes have been following Elizabeth for half the novel, and she has been wondering why ‘so great a man’ (p. 44) has been looking at her. Now she looks at herself with his eyes and feels his reflected value. She does not see herself as he sees her – that would be too patriarchal by half – but she does bask in the warmth of his (nicely ambiguous) ‘regard’, and comes as close as she ever will to actively seeking his attention.12 The responsibilities of ‘guardianship’ that she now identifies in the portrait that takes its place in the patricians’ gallery are an element of the distinction of rank that she has been inclined to

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ignore – and that her own society ignores in pronouncing Bingley ‘just what a young man ought to be’ (p. 11), stretching the standards that define the masculine ideal to accommodate a gentleman who, kindhearted and affable though he may be, contributes nothing to his community other than as a prospective husband.13 Elizabeth is now ready to regret the scorn with which she dismissed his regard, but fixing his eyes upon herself in the privacy of the portrait gallery is the extent of her endeavours to catch his eye. Her predicament is similar to Melidora’s in Markham’s English Arcadia after she realizes her affections have been misplaced: how does she indicate to a scorned suitor that his attentions might now be welcome? Melidora’s tiger hunt initiative was hardly foolproof, but in Pride and Prejudice the initiatives are all Darcy’s. There are few narratives that work as hard as Pride and Prejudice to exclude the possibility that the heroine has knowingly done anything to engage the hero’s interest or to encourage his suit, regardless of the fact that few heroines do more to provoke it, or take ‘greater liberties, with a pair of fine eyes’ (P2, IV. 403). In Pamela 2, it is the errant Miss Stapylton whose eyes are far too busy for her own good. She has ‘extraordinary notions of a firstsight love; and gives herself greater liberties, with a pair of fine eyes, (in hopes to make sudden conquests in pursuance of that notion,) than is pretty in her sex and age; which makes those who know her not, conclude her bold and forward’ (P2, IV. 403). The ‘pair of fine eyes’ that first attracts Darcy (P&P, p. 23) is not in the business of making a sudden conquest, but neither are the eyes discreetly lowered before a gentleman whose esteem Elizabeth might value, and the arch looks that signify her refusal to be intimidated, together with her animated conversation, keep the eyes raised and sparkling, even when they are not directed at the man who finds her face ‘rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes’ (p. 19). To ‘those who know her not’, or know her chiefly as the sister of the irrepressibly bumptious Lydia or the daughter of the impudently garrulous Mrs Bennet, she may appear ‘bold and forward’ – or, as Caroline Bingley proclaims, exhibiting ‘that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence’ (p. 45) – but she is unequivocally not on the hunt, at least as far as Darcy is concerned. A very simple and well-tried strategy initially protects Elizabeth from suspicion of covert plotting while still allowing her a degree of selfrealizing agency: as with Pamela and Arabella, Elizabeth is distracted from the real business of the novel by other, more pressing concerns, so that she is not aware of the love plot in which she is implicated. A

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first-sight hate might be putting it too strongly, but by the time Darcy overcomes his scruples enough to make his first, ungracious proposal, Elizabeth is beside herself with anger and contempt, though coolheaded enough to congratulate herself (and to remind the reader) that she had inspired ‘unconsciously so strong an affection’ (p. 172, our emphasis). Darcy later admits to believing Elizabeth ‘to be wishing, expecting [his] addresses’ (p. 328), and Elizabeth is again called on to defend her character: ‘My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally I assure you’ (p. 328). Generations of women readers have also found it gratifying that Elizabeth has inspired Darcy’s affection unconsciously, for it has happened without the man absorbing the best part of the woman’s attention, without her adapting her behaviour in any way to suit his tastes. Elizabeth herself is not above taking the effort to please a man – and on the evening of Bingley’s ball she dresses for Wickham ‘with more than usual care’ (p. 79) – but she can also wryly observe the way in which the attention of Bingley’s sisters is wholly engaged by men. After dinner, in the hour that passed before the men appeared, they are devoted to Jane and prove perfectly capable of entertaining themselves: ‘Their powers of conversation were considerable. They could describe an entertainment with accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at their acquaintance with spirit.’ But the moment the men appear their attention is immediately usurped: ‘Jane was no longer the first object. Miss Bingley’s eyes were instantly turned towards Darcy, and she had something to say to him before he had advanced many steps’ (p. 47). Elizabeth later challenges Darcy to attribute his admiration of her to the novelty of her impertinence: ‘you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone’ (p. 338). Darcy wisely deflects the challenge by identifying other things to admire, singling out her goodness to Jane when she was ill. (We would not want Elizabeth’s aversion to attention-seeking behaviour to become yet another attention-seeking device.) But Pride and Prejudice at least holds open the possibility that Elizabeth can beguile just by being herself. There is in Pride and Prejudice, then, a subtle shift in the strategic importance of doing nothing to encourage a man’s attentions: it is not just propriety or even dignity that is at stake, but also a personal identity independent of the relational self that, for a woman, is usually realized in marriage. Darcy’s singling out for admiration Elizabeth’s concern for Jane when she was ill, which prompted her to undertake

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the three-mile walk across dirty fields, and to arrive at Netherfield Park with a face glowing with exercise, is, in this respect, a nicely ambiguous identification of the nature of Elizabeth’s unselfconscious powers of attraction. In what has become known in some circles as the ‘erection scene’ (thanks to rumours that Andrew Davies’s script for the recent BBC production of Pride and Prejudice called for Darcy to be ‘particularly pleased’ to see Elizabeth when she arrives ‘all flushed and muddy’14), Elizabeth’s concern for her sister and her lack of concern for dirty stockings and blowsy hair are perhaps overshadowed – though Elizabeth is not to know it – by Darcy’s appreciation, possibly among other things, of fine eyes ‘brightened by the exercise’ (p. 31), but Elizabeth’s mind is on other things, and here as elsewhere men are not the defining point of her life. Feminist literary criticism often has problems with Austen’s novels, drawn to them by strong female characters with working minds and sometimes vehement spirits but who nevertheless surrender to a patriarchal sexual ideology in a marriage in which, as Mr Bennet winningly puts it, a woman looks up to a husband as her superior (p. 335).15 Elizabeth may rankle at the social and economic subordination of women that requires her to suffer in silence while a pompous fool like Mr Collins claims he is far better qualified ‘to decide on what is right than a young lady like [herself]’ (p. 88); she may daily chafe under the necessity of far more limiting constraints than the ‘self-denial and dependence’ of which Colonel Fitzwilliam, as the younger son of an Earl, complains; and she may regularly overstep the bounds of decorum in what Deborah Kaplan describes as her ‘verbal liberties’,16 criticizing men’s behaviour and characters and in general voicing stronger opinions than Lady Catherine, for one, thinks seemly in a young woman. But one boundary that Elizabeth does not overstep is the prohibition against acting on or even expressing desire. Her reaction to Lydia’s elopement, even given the standards of propriety to which her society subscribes, seems curiously naive when she questions ‘how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue’ (p. 276). But there is certainly not the slightest suggestion that passion, even unconsciously, endangers Elizabeth’s virtue. Until Darcy’s first proposal, her eyes may flash and her conversation sparkle with uninhibited bravado because she has no one to please but herself; after that proposal, however, she can no longer perform as if he were a ‘stranger’.

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‘We neither of us perform to strangers’ is Darcy’s cryptic defence of his social awkwardness when Elizabeth rebukes him for his lack of gallantry in refusing to dance with any but his own party at the ball at Meryton. She attacks him from the safety of the piano and an attentive companion in Colonel Fitzwilliam, refusing to be intimidated by his solemn approach, and refusing also to be honoured by his presence. He pleads ineptitude – he is ‘ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers’ – and she accuses him of not caring enough to take the trouble, which he, with a clumsiness that confirms his professed difficulty in catching the tone of a conversation, attempts to turn into a shared compliment to the private self that neither reveals in public: in his wooden reserve as in her playful archness, ‘we neither of us perform to strangers’ (p. 156). Whatever Elizabeth makes of this mystifying pronouncement – she is spared the effort of any response by Lady Catherine’s interruption – she is clearly on notice, and on the next occasion when he speaks with her (when he finds her alone at the Collins’s) her bantering tone is noticeably absent. In fact, it never returns until after his proposal has been renewed. Nothing that Elizabeth subsequently does can be accused of the design that Darcy early on professes to find so contemptible: ‘there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation’, he had pontificated for the benefit of Caroline Bingley; ‘Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable’ (p. 34). For Elizabeth, there is no throwing herself in his path as Charlotte had done with Mr Collins, ‘instantly set[ting] out to meet him accidentally in the lane’ when she sees him coming towards the house (p. 110). After Darcy’s first proposal, she deliberately takes her walks on paths she knows him not to frequent; she stays out walking, and reading his letter, so long that she misses the gentlemen’s farewell visit; and the visit to Pemberley, which sets the relationship back on track, is triply secured against the faintest of suspicions that it might have been undertaken even in the vague hope of seeing him again. The holiday with her aunt is organized long before Elizabeth has any idea of Darcy’s interest in her; it is originally intended to take in the Lake district and only foreshortened and redirected to Derbyshire well after Elizabeth’s acceptance of the invitation; and Pemberley is visited only after multiple reassurances that the master is absent: all of this to protect her from the unkind aspersion that Elizabeth dreads after Darcy’s untimely return finds her in his grounds: ‘It might seem as if she had purposely thrown herself in his way again!’ (p. 222).

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The relationship is barely rekindled when Lydia’s disgrace promptly drives all possibility of a rapprochement from Elizabeth’s mind, and it is only then that she begins to think seriously about an attachment that she can comprehend no likelihood of eventuating. In Northanger Abbey Austen mocks Richardson’s insistence that ‘no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared’;17 if this is the case, the narrator observes, ‘it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her’ (p. 27) – a comment that seizes on the central absurdity of the feminine code that imposes regulations on the unconscious.18 Nevertheless, in Pride and Prejudice considerable ingenuity is required, first to contrive a courtship in which there is no possibility of the young lady falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared, and then to devise a means of her love blossoming without her being seen to initiate the renewal of an address that is so clearly to her material advantage – and that she fancies she still has the power to bring on (p. 234). In this respect, it is important that Elizabeth, after the disgrace of Lydia’s elopement, is ‘convinced that she could have been happy with him … [only] when it was no longer likely they should meet’, when ‘no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was’ (pp. 275–6).19 Elizabeth dares to dream, and to entertain visions of an imaginary future, only when she is safe from the possibility of doing anything to realize them. When Lady Catherine later arrives on her doorstep and demands Elizabeth scotch rumours of her engagement to Darcy, Elizabeth stands upon her own dignity, even though she believes it will terminally alienate the family whose dignity Darcy so much values. And then when Darcy himself arrives on the scene, accompanying Bingley in his renewal of his addresses to Jane, we are again reassured that Elizabeth is so far from offering encouragement to Darcy’s suit that he might have despaired had not Lady Catherine’s intervention provided the unintended reassurance that Elizabeth was not ‘absolutely, irrevocably’ decided against him. But in case there is any doubt about Elizabeth’s innocence, he spells it out when she questions his silence and apparent indifference when accompanying Bingley to her home: What made you so shy of me, when you first called, and afterwards dined there? Why, especially, when you called, did you look as if you did not care about me?’ ‘Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement.’

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‘But I was embarrassed.’ ‘And so was I.’ ‘You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner.’ ‘A man who had felt less, might.’ (pp. 338–9, our emphasis) Even Elizabeth’s forwardness in finally speaking first, to thank him for rescuing Lydia from disgrace, is handsomely exonerated, even though Elizabeth fears it had a ‘great effect’ – ‘Too much, I am afraid’ – in prompting him to speak.20 It is only by accident that she breaks the silence on the first occasion they had been alone together since his return from London, where Lady Catherine’s ‘unjustifiable endeavours to separate’ them had unwittingly removed all his doubts and made him ‘determined at once to know every thing’ (p. 339). There is such a methodical efficiency in the pains taken to establish Elizabeth’s innocence of design that it raises the question of why she needs to be protected so assiduously. Mary Waldron reminds us just how unconventional a heroine Elizabeth is: she is ‘far from silent, frequently pert (at least by contemporary fictional standards), openly challenging to accepted authority, and contemptuous of current decorums’.21 With Wickham in particular she oversteps the bounds of strict propriety, making her preference so marked that she is ashamed to discover, after his attentions had been temporarily diverted to Miss King and her £10000, that he expects ‘her vanity would be gratified and her preference secured at any time by their renewal’ (p. 207). It is the kind of reproof that, in conversation with Charlotte Lucas, she can congratulate Jane on avoiding, for Jane’s feelings for Bingley are so imperceptible that she is in no danger of exposing herself to ‘the suspicions of the impertinent’ (p. 17). Waldron comments that ‘Jane is a Dr Gregory girl with this difference – though she can appear to have no thoughts of marrying Bingley, she cannot be expected to prevent herself from feeling, a distinction which the conduct-books rarely make.’22 But it is a distinction that Elizabeth is not prepared to make, either, and at the same time as she champions purely pragmatic reasons for a woman keeping her feelings to herself, she also defends Jane from the assumption that she knows her own heart. Jane, she insists, is not concealing her feelings: ‘she is not acting by design. As yet, she cannot even be certain of the degree of her own regard, nor of its reasonableness’ (p. 18). And it is from this design that Elizabeth also needs to be protected once her heart also is at risk. With Wickham, her behaviour may be bordering on the unseemly, but her heart is not in it – so that, as she can promise her aunt, ‘when I am in company with him, I will not be wishing’ (p. 129). With Darcy, however, from the moment she

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discerns her feelings, she becomes vulnerable to ‘wishing’, and all her actions, intentionally or not, become subject to imputations of design. ‘Women’s rights … to express desire and sensibility as well as independence’ may have been, as Janet Todd argues, ‘a more openly discussed problem’ than many modern critics, keen to defend Austen from charges of social or political conservatism, will allow,23 but the right to express desire (like the right to free speech or to bear arms) is quite a different matter from the advisability of exercising that right in a specific social environment. Deborah Kaplan emphasizes the ‘divided loyalties’ of Austen’s ‘cultural duality’, and her preparedness, in seeking publication, to accommodate the patriarchal values of gentry culture on which her own social status of ‘genteel femininity’ depended.24 But the problem with such an argument, based as it is on ‘historically specific and local influences’,25 is the persistence of narrative conventions across a broad range of social and political climates. Rather than simply understanding these conventions as ways of accommodating ‘historically specific and local influences’, it can also be useful to understand the way in which historically specific and local influences accommodate conventions that even today still continue to exert themselves.

The other, less interesting mode of attachment In The Female Quixote, Arabella asks some highly pertinent questions of her father when he chooses a husband for her. For a start, what has this man done to deserve either her father’s esteem or her own favour? ‘By what Services has he deserved the Distinction with which you honour him?’ she asks her father, and, more to the point: ‘Has he merited my Esteem, by his Sufferings, Fidelity, and Respect; or, by any great and generous Action, given me a Testimony of his Love, which should oblige me to reward him with my Affection?’ (FQ, pp. 41–2). These are good questions: what does merit a woman’s love? how does a man prove himself worthy of it? Arabella locates the foundations of a woman’s love in gratitude and esteem: in esteem for the personal attributes of the lover, and in gratitude for his disinterested service.26 Likewise, in Pride and Prejudice, the narrator explains the reversal of Elizabeth’s feelings for Darcy in similar terms – and explicitly discounts the reasonableness or naturalness of first-sight love: If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth’s change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor

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faulty. But if otherwise, if the regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method, in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill-success might perhaps authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment. (p. 246) Gratitude and esteem are, Fielding tells the reader in Tom Jones, the ‘proper motives to love’,27 even for a hot-blooded and high-spirited young man such as Tom. For a young woman such as Elizabeth, ‘proper motives’ would seem to be even more imperative, though the propriety of gratitude and esteem as foundations of affection has more pragmatic origins than is perhaps widely understood, for it is not simply a more ‘rational’ love that Austen is advocating but also a more prudent love. Esteem as a motive for love hardly needs justification, though, in particular cases – such as Pamela’s love for Mr B – it can sometimes seem unaccountable. Interestingly, though, when Mr Bennet warns his daughter against marrying a man she cannot esteem, it is her public respectability as much as her personal happiness for which he fears. He speaks from his own experience – ‘let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life’ (p. 335) – but he also recognizes that Elizabeth’s ‘lively talents’ place her in a more particular danger: she could be neither happy nor, significantly, ‘respectable’, and ‘could scarcely escape discredit and misery’ (p. 35). Mr Bennet’s own respectability is somewhat dented as a result of his marriage to a woman he cannot respect, though it is his choice to take his pleasure where he can find it and shrug off the rest of his responsibilities. The daily reality for Elizabeth, however, is the conversation she has with Mr Collins the evening of the Netherfield Ball, where custom dictates that she defer to the opinions of a man who insists he knows better than a woman what is right. Mr Bennet clearly fears her ‘lively talents’ would not be equal to the kind of compromises Charlotte Lucas is prepared to make for the sake of a comfortable home, and Elizabeth’s sharp tongue could do a lot of damage, both to her husband’s dignity and to her own reputation. As Judith Lowder Newton observes of the ‘unbounded licence’ of Mrs Selwyn’s tongue in Burney’s Evelina, ‘whatever its value in a novelist, a turn for satire was hardly a virtue in a bride’.28 Elizabeth has reason enough to esteem Darcy for his ‘Sufferings, Fidelity, and Respect’, and she has even more reason to feel grateful for

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his ‘great and generous Action, given … [her as] a testimony of his Love’ and which prompts her to break their uncomfortable silence. But even prior to his handsome generosity in rescuing Lydia, Elizabeth’s gratitude is excited by his unassuming willingness to change in order to please her: above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. – Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. … without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, [he] was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister. Such a change in a man of so much pride, excited not only astonishment but gratitude – for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed. (p. 234) Robert Polhemus locates the role of gratitude in the growth of affection in the ‘aphrodisiac effect of feeling beloved’: ‘How fundamentally wise and nice people are, after all, who fall in love with us!’29 But before gratitude can come into play, of course, the other party must already have fallen in love, and Polhemus suggests that what he describes as Austen’s uncharacteristically ‘lumbering prose’ (in the description of gratitude and esteem as the foundations of affection quoted earlier) can be attributed to her ‘unconscious resentment’ of the tendency, implicit in a love founded on gratitude and esteem, to ‘separate and genderize sexual desire … and love’.30 (Sexual desire, for example, is ‘natural and acceptable in men, but unseemly for women, who are its proper objects’.31) He identifies Fielding as the chief literary predecessor with whom Austen is engaging in her reluctant endorsement of gratitude and esteem, though this conception of love was far more common than Polhemus acknowledges. Austen, for example, had certainly read, and enjoyed, The Female Quixote,32 where Arabella’s expectations of gratitude and esteem are taken to such uncompromising lengths. It was also very much part of the no-nonsense approach of conduct-books, John Gregory’s account of the process of attachment the other extreme to Arabella’s inflated notions of what a man needs to do to merit love: Some agreeable qualities recommend a gentleman to your common good liking and friendship. In the course of his acquaintance, he

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contracts an attachment to you. When you perceive it, it excites your gratitude; this gratitude rises into a preference, and this preference perhaps at last advances to some degree of attachment, especially if it meets with crosses and difficulties; for these, and a state of suspense, are very great incitements to attachment, and are the food of love in both sexes.33 As Richard Handler and Daniel Segal argue, gratitude is ‘one of the most important civil exchange tokens … it is at once an acknowledgement of attentions received and a preliminary return that holds the promise of increasing returns in the future.’34 As such, it is an eminently respectable, even if not particularly thrilling, way for a young woman to find herself on the road to being in love, and it does so, almost as effectively as a first-sight love, without implicating the individual will. When Arabella in The Female Quixote talks of an admirer providing ‘a testimony of his Love, which should oblige me to reward him with my Affection’, the key word is ‘oblige’. When Darcy first proposes to Elizabeth, she acknowledges that ‘the established mode is to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed, however unequally they may be returned’ (p. 169) – or, as Handler and Segal put it, ‘in romantic matters, gratitude is the natural return for admiration, attentions, and affections’ and ‘even when those cannot be returned, they must be acknowledged with gratitude.’35 But Elizabeth cannot ‘feel gratitude’ for a good opinion that she has never desired and that has been bestowed, Darcy has implied, ‘most unwillingly’ (p. 169). Later in the story, however, he is in danger of giving her too much cause for gratitude, his financial assistance in expediting Lydia’s marriage placing Elizabeth under an obligation of which a gentleman might not wish to take advantage.36 Hence his insistence that it be kept secret. But between these two extremes lies the sense of gratitude that ‘obliges’ a woman to take the step that, as we saw in the previous chapter, Pamela and Arabella have to negotiate so carefully, that of ‘giving [a man] Permission to love her’ (FQ p. 137). In loving Darcy in gratitude for the testimony of his love, Elizabeth may be responding to the particular social pressures of her class and age, but she is doing nothing new; she takes the same path, in fact, that Sidney’s Pamela takes in Arcadia, where gratitude and esteem are also the foundations of her love for Musidorus. Once convinced that Musidorus is possessed of a nobility fit for a princess to esteem, Sidney’s Pamela allows gratitude to do the rest, arguing that it is her duty to return Musidorus’s love because of the sacrifice of dignity he is prepared to make by courting her in the

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guise of a humble servant: ‘can I without the detestable stain of ungratefulness’, Pamela insists, ‘abstain from loving him who (far exceeding the beautifulness of his shape with the beautifulness of his mind, and the greatness of his estate with the greatness of his acts) is content so to abase himself … for my sake?’ (NA, p. 247). It is not clear whether Pamela is here meant to be as disingenuous as she sounds – a little earlier she is certainly fulsome, even a little feverish (and, as Philoclea observes, tellingly ‘disjointed’) in her praise of Musidorus’s many excellencies – but it is an important reminder of how little the constraints on women’s behaviour have changed between Arcadia and Pride and Prejudice, and of how thoroughly conventional the strategies of negotiating them remain. It is a very old story that all these writers are telling, propelled by a dynamic that has less to do with the endorsement of patriarchal marriage than with the tactics of strategic surrender.

8 Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All the Way with Jane Eyre?

A central paradox of Jane Eyre is its enlistment in two antithetical traditions, as progenitor of the modern romance and ringleader of the feminist revolt against its stifling conventions. Jane Eyre always figures prominently in any genealogy of the modern romance, sometimes as the culmination of a process of feminization (and, implicitly, of trivialization) in which, as Barbara Milech observes, ‘the generic term “romance” has shifted from meaning a courtly tale of masculine adventure to indicating a popular story of feminine fortune’,1 and sometimes as the forebear of a new breed of romance heroines who participate as much as men in the pursuit of an intense, overwhelming passion that, in Milton Viederman’s words, becomes ‘the grand organizer of the individual’s life … [so that] everything else takes a secondary role’.2 In the former sense romance has come to mean little more than a popular love story embodying wish-fulfilling fantasies of sometimes spectacular contrivance. In the latter sense, romance retains some of the transcendent and regenerative aspirations of its chivalric ancestry, in which this supreme passion, typically but not definitively taking the form of love, is capable of recuperating and transfiguring a ‘fallen’ world. The ‘anti-romance’ strain identified in Jane Eyre – in, for example, a heroine who ‘breaks with the conventions of romance and feminine performance’3 – commonly derives from the reduction of romance elements simply to the formulaic love story, and in this context Jane’s relationship with Rochester is certainly not the kind of ‘delightful romance’ that Rosamond Oliver envisages when speculating about Jane’s past.4 But, ‘original’ though Jane Eyre may be, with ‘something brave in [her] spirit, as well as penetrating in [her] eye’ (p. 418), the perception of her as radically rebellious is generally accompanied by the assumption that earlier romance heroines had been resigned to 175

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the constraints under which she chafes, when in fact they have mostly been just as busy as Jane, even if less openly truculent, in negotiating the terms on which their will could be legitimately exerted. There is much in Jane Eyre the novel that is radical and rebellious – and it was certainly perceived as such in contemporary reviews. But there is also much in Jane Eyre the character that is so thoroughly conventional that it pays to look again at the nature of the passion that drives her and at the steps she takes – or are taken for her – in the pursuit of a transfiguring love that is all too easily confused with, and reduced to, the urgency of sexual desire. Reading Jane Eyre, not as a radical transformation of romance, but as a continuation of strategic interventions in a tradition that has a long history of accommodation to changing social and cultural conditions is not to deny the revolution that Jane herself threatens to incite, preaching ‘liberty to them that are enslaved’ (p. 302), but it does help to explain the contradictions in a novel variously interpreted as both profoundly reactionary and dangerously revolutionary, as both subversive and conservative, angelic and Satanic.5

So much of her own will When Jane first takes up her position as governess at Thornfield, and prior to the master’s appearance, she quickly tires of the different kind of servitude that, after the misery of her childhood as the scorned dependent in her aunt’s home, and after the deprivations and discipline of a charity boarding school, she believes is all she is entitled to expect. With the departure of her head teacher and friend, Miss Temple, she had dreamed first of liberty, then of change and stimulus, before settling for ‘a new servitude’: ‘Any one may serve: I have served here eight years; now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much of my own will?’ (p. 100). But no sooner is she settled into her new position than the longing returns, and in moments of solitude Jane recalls indulging ‘bright visions’ of a more fulfilling life in ‘a tale my imagination created, and narrated continuously; quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling, that I desired and had not in my actual existence’ (p. 125). A year later, after rather more of incident, life, fire (particularly fire), and feeling than she might have wished, she is newly instated as the village school-mistress at Morton, conscientiously performing a task that is again useful but dull, and the visions return, ‘charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance’ (p. 410) – though this time they have a recurring finale, in the arms, once more, of the master of Thornfield.

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In the reviews that followed, and reacted against, the upsurge of ‘Jane Eyre fever’ when the novel was first published,6 it was Jane’s discontent that drew the most virulent objections. Jane, it should be remembered, is an extraordinarily lucky young woman – lucky to survive the typhoid epidemic at Lowood school, lucky to get the job at Thornfield, lucky to escape by a hair’s breadth a bigamous marriage, lucky to fall into the lap of her long-lost cousins when there is not another person in the whole of England to whom she could turn – and, as Penny Boumelha points out, she lives out an ‘extraordinarily wide range of narrative possibilities’: In the course of the novel Jane has three jobs, five homes, three families of a sort, two proposals of marriage. If her travel is restricted, at least she nearly goes to the South of France, nearly goes to Madeira, nearly goes to India. She learns French, German and Hindustani. She lives alone, receives male visitors in her bedroom in the middle of the night and hears confidences of financial treachery and sexual profligacy. She saves a life, proposes marriage and gives away thousands of pounds.7 Yet, for all this, there is, in the words of one contemporary reviewer (and echoed by many others), a ‘pervading tone of ungodly discontent’ in the novel,8 betraying not so much the defects of a woman’s lot about which Jane protests, but rather a defect in the woman who is unable to appreciate ‘simple duties and pure pleasures’.9 Not only is the nature of Jane’s desires deemed improper – wanting a life of action, stimulus, change, fire, feeling – but even desire itself is unseemly in a woman, perhaps explaining why the reviewer in The Economist declared the novel (published under the androgynous pseudonym of ‘Currer Bell’) praiseworthy if written by a man but ‘odious’ if written by a woman.10 In their singling out of Jane’s unsatisfied desires as the well-spring of discontent in Jane Eyre, the reviewers have a point, regardless of whatever ideological agenda might be driving it. Jane Eyre is perhaps the hungriest of all fictional heroines; she wants everything – or at least everything that stories can give her. In terms of their basic structure, half-a-dozen stories account for most Western literature: the story of the foundling in search of family or home; the story of a hero or heroine’s testing, in the process of either acquiring maturity or proving it; the story of a quest, in search of the solution to an enigma or the key to a treasure; the story of a contest between what can loosely be

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called good and evil; the story of a victim seeking rescue or release; and the story of love, either fulfilled or unrequited. These different stories frequently overlap – so that, for example, the story of love fulfilled is very often also the story of a hero’s or heroine’s testing or the story of a quest in which true love is the treasure.11 But each of these stories represents a different desire – a home, a place in the adult world, a treasure of some kind, a victory over warring elements, rescue, or true love – and Jane wants them all.12 Read as a variation on the foundling story, for example, Jane wants a family or congenial home, her ‘natural element’ (represented schematically in the novel by a choice between the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water). Read as a story of a heroine’s testing, on the other hand, Jane needs to prove herself as an independent being, the equal of any woman or man, and accorded ‘the privilege of free action’ (p. 469). Then again, read as the story of a quest, Jane wants to surmount the hilly horizon surrounding Lowood and Thornfield and Marsh End, to leave behind a sedentary, sequestered life and plunge into the ‘real world’, ‘a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements … [awaiting] those who had courage to go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils’ (p. 99). Read as the story of a contest, Reason and Passion alternate in Jane as good and evil, but Jane wants, neither the triumph of one or the other – that is, not absolute submission to Reason nor the determined revolt of Passion – but a means of reconciling the dictates of both. And read as the story of a victim, Jane wants release from servitude – not, as she gets after she leaves Lowood, and again after she leaves Thornfield, a different servitude (exchanging one idol for another, Miss Temple for the Master of Thornfield for the saintly St John), but rather the liberty to be her ‘own mistress’ (p. 483). Clearly, all these stories in certain respects relate to each other, and, entwined as they are in a single narrative, parts of one story will also be pieces of another. Although it is as a love story, for example, that Jane Eyre is always remembered, it is as a foundling story that it begins, and it is the foundling story – the search for a home – that provides the underlying structure of the novel. Jane is not literally a foundling: that is, she is not a deserted infant of unknown parents. But as an orphaned child and the dependent of resentful relatives, she does feel abandoned, an alien in hostile territory, and as the story develops, Jane’s search is always for somewhere to belong, somewhere that she can feel at home. The resolution to the love story provides the climactic resolu-

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tion to the story of a search for home – she finds with Rochester a place where she so thoroughly belongs that she lives entirely for and with what I love best on earth … I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. … we are ever together. … we are precisely suited in character – perfect concord is the result. (p. 500) But this final affirmation of belonging also derives its persuasiveness and its sense of climax from the other stories feeding it. Before Jane can be, for example, ‘my husband’s life as fully as he is mine’, the story of the heroine’s testing has to work its way through: she has to establish herself as his equal and shed the relationships of submissive dependency that have dominated her life – at Gateshead where she had become, under John Reed’s tyranny, ‘a queer, frightened, shy, little thing’ (p. 48); at Lowood, where her need to be loved and her desire to please those she loved had made her an obedient supplicant at Miss Temple’s altar; at Thornfield, where Rochester had become her whole world and she so besotted that she could not ‘see God for his creature: of whom [she] had made an idol’ (p. 307); and at Marsh End, where her veneration of St John makes her contemplate martyrdom as his missionary-mate. The independence that she seeks is in turn the story of a war between elements within herself (the battle between reason and passion, for example, that knows no medium between ‘absolute submission and determined revolt’ [p. 446]). The ‘perfect concord’ that she eventually finds with Rochester is in part a reflection of the peace she has made with herself, and also in part the end of a quest to find a fulfilling vocation that is not simply ‘woman’s work.’ But ‘woman’s work’ it is, of course, that she eventually embraces, as housekeeper, nurse, and amanuensis to a disabled Rochester, in an ending that looks suspiciously like her third-best wish, at Lowood school, where she had wished first for liberty, then for change or stimulus, and then, if that were too much to ask, at least for a ‘new servitude’. That it does not feel like servitude – attending to Rochester’s needs is rather ‘to indulge [her] sweetest wishes’ (p. 500) – is small comfort to readers who have expected more of a heroine who has insisted that women, as much as men, deserve adequate ‘exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts’ (p. 125) – though Jane has also taken care to remind us that domesticity in itself is not the culprit.13 As Boumelha observes, ‘what is problematic [about Jane Eyre]

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is primarily the ending of the novel, or rather, perhaps, the question of the relation of ending to beginning’.14 Boumelha goes on to argue that the ending ‘need not abolish the range of narrative possibilities intimated in the course of the text’ (and outlined above), highlighting in particular another story that is told, ‘the story that allows [Jane] to write her woman’s autobiography, not as “Mrs Edward Rochester” but as Jane Eyre’,15 but we should also be wary of assuming that Jane, any more than Adèle, subscribes to the belief that ‘a pretty gold ring’ on the ‘fourth finger of [the] left hand’ is a ‘talisman [that] will remove all difficulties’ (p. 300).

The madness of a secret love, or miry wilds whence there is no extrication Seven years before the publication of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey: ‘no young lady should fall in love till the offer has been made, accepted – … the marriage ceremony performed and the first half year of wedded life has passed away – a woman may then begin to love, but with great precaution – very coolly – very moderately – very rationally’.16 The advisability of a half-year cooling off period is also recommended by Jane Eyre in her warning to Rochester that she no more than he can expect ‘anything celestial’ from a partner: For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now, – a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again, – like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband’s ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master. (p. 292) Given that Rochester later tells Jane he intends waiting a year and a day before revealing the contents of his Thornfield attic, even a halfyear delay in ‘falling’ in love could not be considered overly cautious, though it is already too late for Jane – she is already in love and has already discovered she cannot ‘unlove’ Rochester (p. 210) – and few readers, we suspect, take seriously her prediction of the likely course of their affair. Neither Jane nor Brontë can be assumed, moreover, to be

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entirely in earnest: Jane often resorts to vexing and teasing Rochester to keep his ardour in check and his hands to himself, and Brontë also admits towards the end of her letter to Nussey that she has not always been entirely serious throughout.17 But the kind of caution both advise is the received wisdom, not only of the conduct books that were fighting a rear-guard action against novels that were inculcating the everlastingness of romantic love,18 but also of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft who were concerned less with propriety and decorum than with the education of women to responsible adulthood. For Wollstonecraft, the effervescence of love is not only inevitable but profoundly to be desired: were women ‘rationally educated’, she argues, ‘could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship – into that tender intimacy, which is the best refuge from care’.19 But, taught instead that love is ‘the supreme good’, women are educated only to inspire it,20 and consequently they are ‘subjected by ignorance to their sensations, and only taught to look for happiness in love, refine on sensual feelings, and adopt metaphysical notions respecting that passion, which lead them shamefully to neglect the duties of life’.21 Now, Jane Eyre is no ‘Mary Wollstonecraft girl’ – certainly not to the extent that Jane Bennet is, according to Waldron, ‘a Dr Gregory girl’ – and it is unlikely that Brontë had even read Wollstonecraft, though she does share Wollstonecraft’s contempt for a love that is ‘excited by evanescent beauties and graces’, a ‘stalking mischief’ whose arbitrary dominion is used as an excuse for abandoning reason and morality.22 But Jane is given the opportunity to put the higher duties of life before passionate love in the proposition from St John Rivers to embark with him on a missionary career, and she does not like it. ‘Metaphysical notions’ respecting passion are more her style, though she is also clearly vulnerable to the crudely physical as well, experiencing love as a sensation that ‘throbs fast and fully’,23 physically racking her body with symptoms that she is helpless to control when, for example, she returns to Thornfield from her aunt’s deathbed and finds herself, at the sight of Rochester, ‘beyond [her] own mastery’, trembling and without the power of speech or motion. ‘What does it mean?’, she asks herself, and the answer she gives in her salute to Rochester – that she is ‘strangely glad to get back to [him] again’, for wherever he is she considers her home – is perhaps a conservative diagnosis of the symptoms. But even this much feeling is too much when we consider what Rochester is doing as he sits on the stile as she approaches the house. He is writing

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in a book ‘about a misfortune that befell [him] long ago’ (p. 299) – that is, his marriage to the lunatic imprisoned on the third storey of Thornfield (p. 327) – and about which he does not intend telling Jane until they have been married a year and a day. However much we might feel Jane deserves the happiness she finds for the first time at Thornfield, she has erred in loving, and letting that love be known, as she admits after discovering Rochester’s secret on the evening of their intended marriage: ‘how blind had been my eyes! How weak my conduct!’ In part her self-condemnation arises from her blighted faith in Rochester: she believes that he will now want to ‘hurry [her] from Thornfield’, for ‘real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was balked; he would want me no more’ (p. 331). But she is only half right: he does want to hurry her away from Thornfield, but as his mistress, and as such, she later concludes, he ‘would have loved [her] well’ but only ‘for a while’ (p. 402).24 Justifiably or not, Jane has made herself vulnerable to the shame and pain that generations of romance heroines before her have avoided, intentionally or providentially, by not declaring their hand before the stakes are in their keeping.

An undesigning mind In many respects Jane Eyre does redraw the boundaries beyond which the romance heroine had previously hesitated to step – in particular, not simply by falling in love and voicing that love before an offer has been made, but also by twice offering herself to Rochester, the first time while still a governess at Thornfield, when she ‘glowed in the moonlight … and mutinied against fate’ (p. 294), claiming her rank as his equal, and the second time after she tracks him down at Ferndean (to which we will return later). But some limits still remain inviolable. The ‘brazen miss’ may catch the attention, but mostly her behaviour is impeccable, and she certainly observes the most fundamental of all constraints on female behaviour by doing nothing to invite suspicion of inciting Rochester’s passion for her.25 Jane does not simply try her best to suppress her love – or, as she puts it, to strangle ‘a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear’ (p. 274) – but she also conducts herself with such decorum in Rochester’s presence that not even the scrutiny of a housekeeper wary of the ‘marked preference’ of the master for his governess can fault behaviour ‘so discreet, and so thoroughly modest and sensible’ (p. 297). Rochester himself hardly knows what to make of Jane’s feelings about him, and

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resorts to a range of subterfuges that betray principles at best ‘eccentric’ and at worst callously manipulative. Having seen her manner soften in his company, he then deliberately keeps his distance, as he admits later, to test his influence on her: I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you – but you did not; you kept in the school-room as still as your own desk and easel; if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect. (p. 353) He is still left wondering what Jane thinks of him, or even whether she thinks of him at all, and so resumes his notice of her. But when she again warms to the attention, he is still unsure whether it is simply the human contact she craves or him in particular. So he tests her again, in the guise of a gypsy, to probe her feelings, but she reveals only the circumspection of a prudent woman who, like an Elizabeth Bennet and a Pamela Andrews, ‘will not be wishing’ (P&P, p. 129). The gypsy episode is in fact crucial in extracting from Jane the information necessary to establish her integrity in the most conventional of terms, providing the reassurance of a lack of design that the first-person narrative cannot otherwise provide. Jane cannot herself reject the possibility of a future with Rochester without entertaining, however hypothetically, the possibility of such a future, but Rochester in the guise of the gypsy can analyze Jane’s reserve (and reassure the reader): ‘suffer as you may, you will not beckon [love] to approach; nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you’ (p. 222). And more to the point, he can raise the possibility of ‘some secret hope’ to buoy her up ‘with whispers of the future’, which Jane can promptly deny: ‘The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself’ (p. 223). The eccentricity of Rochester’s principles also extends to tormenting Jane with the prospect of his impending engagement to Blanche Ingram, which effectively protects Jane from harbouring her own hopes, but also, as Rochester intends, makes her as madly in love with him as he is with her (p. 295). It is Rochester’s ‘curious, designing mind’ that safeguards Jane’s innocence: she discovers love only by realizing that it can never be consummated. And we are left in no doubt as to the firmness of her belief that Rochester intends marrying Blanche, both by her insistence that provision be made for Adèle’s future elsewhere, as well as her own, and by her response to Mrs Fairfax’s assurance that, however strange the prospect of Rochester’s marriage to

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Blanche, she ‘could no longer doubt that the event would shortly take place’: ‘“You would be strangely incredulous if you did doubt it,” was my mental comment. “I don’t doubt it”’ (p. 273). The certainty of Jane’s conviction that Rochester intends to marry Blanche also absolves her of at least some of the impropriety of ‘offering’ herself to Rochester. She speaks her mind in mutiny, as Rochester puts it, against her fate, but she does believe it to be her fate to leave him, and although Rochester later reminds her, ‘it was you who made me the offer’, and Jane agrees, ‘Of course, I did’ (pp. 294–5), both are investing the words with somewhat more audacity than they warrant. Jane succumbs to her propensity for ‘fierce speaking’, but she offers herself as a spiritual equal, not as a bride. Rochester presses Jane as hard as Mr B ever pressed Pamela to declare her hand, and, like St John Rivers later in the novel, seems to feel entirely justified in testing her mettle before offering her the chance to sacrifice herself in a ‘feigned union’ (p. 327) – in Rochester’s case, with a ‘defrauded wretch, already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner’ (p. 327), and, in St John’s case, with a man who has ‘no more of a husband’s heart for [her] than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge’ (p. 450). We know what St John wants: proof of Jane’s mental and moral fitness as his missionary-mate. But it is not at all clear what Rochester intends to achieve: whether, when he ignores her, he is gratified or frustrated by her failure to seek him out; whether, when he taunts her with Blanche, he is gratified or frustrated by the resignation with which she accepts a future elsewhere – and by her preparedness to allow a week or two’s absence at her aunt’s bedside to stretch to over a month even though she believes that her time with Rochester is running out. The moodiness and unaccountability of the hero’s behaviour has become a staple of popular romance,26 and is certainly common in the earlier romances we have discussed, but not even Pamela’s Mr B can be accused of a motive quite as duplicitous and unsavoury as the one we might suspect Rochester of harbouring, since only a woman as madly in love as he tries to make Jane would be likely to forgive the treachery he intends revealing once they have been ‘married’ a year and a day. The timely intervention of the mad wife’s brother forestalls that particular plan, and Jane is publicly absolved of complicity in hiding the ‘disgusting secret’. The wide ocean of ‘wealth, caste, [and] custom’ (p. 282) that she understands as intervening between herself and Rochester also protects her from the curiosity that, in fairytales at least, is a young woman’s undoing.27 Rochester’s anxieties about the crime

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he is preparing to commit – ‘For the world’s judgment – I wash my hands thereof. For man’s opinion – I defy it’ (p. 287) – are masked by Jane’s anxieties about their difference in social standing, so that not even when Rochester’s anguished self-communings are accompanied by a writhing chestnut-tree, roaring wind, livid flashes of lightning, and crashing thunder does Jane presume to suspect more is amiss than the understandable uneasiness of a man contemplating marrying outside his tribe.

‘Conventionality is not morality’28 Rochester’s unconventionality (which of course extends to principles far more eccentric than Jane can possibly imagine) in a sense licenses the stand that Jane had taken in speaking out against the necessity of leaving him when, as she saw it, the only ‘obstacle of custom’ standing between them was the one Mrs Fairfax later annoys Jane by expounding at length: ‘the equality of position and fortune’ that accounts for the fact that ‘gentlemen in his station are not accustomed to marrying their governesses’ (pp. 297–8). When spirit talks to spirit, and not ‘through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh’ (p. 284), Jane can claim her place as his equal, coming closer than any of the heroines we have discussed (even if not as close as they both pretend) to making of herself the ‘free gift’ that the Brittany Widow’s suitor sought in Urania, going ‘halfway at the least’ to meeting Rochester’s love. She goes even further later in the novel when she arrives at his doorstep in his self-exile at Ferndean and invites him to choose as a wife ‘her who loves [him] best’ (p. 494). On this occasion she still fears she may have ‘too rashly overlooked conventionalities’ – she has, after all, arrived unannounced, with her trunk, and has told the servants she will be staying the night, on the assumption that Rochester will ask her to marry him. But their entire relationship has been based on a mutual agreement to dispense with the formalities of convention, so much so that Rochester had persuaded himself to believe that Jane would eventually come around to accepting the fact that he was already married as just another ‘obstacle of custom – a mere conventional impediment’ – that they were justified in ‘overleaping’ (p. 245). On this last occasion, even with the impediment removed, there are still limits to how far Jane can go in sealing the union – in speaking friendship, she means ‘more than friends, but could not tell what other word to employ’ (p. 493) – but she leaves little for Rochester to do beyond coming to terms with his amazing good fortune in having his prayers answered.

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Jane’s faculty of ‘fierce speaking’ also takes her further than her predecessors. She is considerably more confrontational than Pamela or Elizabeth, and what she lacks in their capacity for sarcasm she makes up for in her determination to pass ‘the outworks of conventional reserve, and … [cross] the threshold of confidence’ (p. 418). She speaks her mind with sometimes startling bluntness – on one occasion, objecting to St John Rivers’s professed shock at her suggestion that she accompany him on his mission to India but not as a wife, frankly challenging his sincerity: ‘Keep to common sense, St John: you are verging on nonsense. You pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You are not really shocked; for, with your superior mind, you cannot be either so dull or so conceited to misunderstand my meaning’ (p. 460). Rochester’s delight in her plain-speaking in fact has its basis in the absence of precisely that affected punctiliousness that St John displays here in reproaching Jane for an impropriety (proposing that a single woman of her age accompany abroad a single man of his age) that she insists he knows she did not intend. What initially draws Rochester to Jane is a frank and sincere manner that abjures the conventionalities of decorum; ‘one does not often see such a manner’, he observes, but rather the contrary (as demonstrated by St John, though for reasons of his own): ‘affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning are the usual rewards of candour’ (p. 153). Jane takes Pamela’s boldness and Elizabeth’s ‘impertinence’ to another level, but she still seems to be participating in the same ‘courtship by conversation’ that plays such a large part in that ‘fantasy of the power of intelligence, wit, and critical attitudes’29 in the works discussed earlier. The scene in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth edgily spars with Darcy in an exchange whose tone and register Caroline Bingley is increasingly unable to gauge has its parallel in Jane Eyre, this time with a baffled housekeeper on the sidelines, ‘wondering what sort of talk this was’ (p. 139). Such exchanges, spiked with a nervous tension that carries a distinctly erotic charge, are no substitute, perhaps, for the sexual intimacy that the word ‘conversation’ once suggested, but they perform a similar function in establishing bonds of intellectual intimacy.30 They certainly provide Jane with an exhilarating sense of mastery over a powerful physical presence (most notably in the confrontation with Rochester, always threatening to end violently, after the aborted marriage, where she feels ‘an inward power; a sense of influence’: ‘The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe’ [p. 341]).

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If resistance to a man’s will is a measure of how far Jane has come, then the image of the pliable reed provides an insight into the nature of her power. As we saw in Chapter 5, the submissive female will imaged in Wroth’s ‘sweet Corne’ bending ‘humbly that way … it is blowne’ acquires more sinister implications when class as well as gender exact that submission as their right; as Mr B warns Pamela: ‘when you are so good as to bend like the slender reed, to the hurricane, rather than, like the sturdy oak, to resist it, you will always stand firm in my kind opinion; while a contrary conduct would uproot you, with all your excellencies, from my soul’ (P, p. 462). In Jane Eyre, Rochester is also mindful of his prerogatives (though more so as a man than a master), but, so we are led to believe, he likes to feel conquered, and in particular likes the way her character ‘bends but does not break – at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent’ (p. 292). There is a hint of deviant sexuality, perhaps, as he tells her of his pleasure in her ‘pliancy’ (‘I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart’ [p. 293]), but he is also aware of the strength of the will that she chooses to bend to his pleasure: ‘A mere reed she feels in my hand!’ (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) ‘I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage – with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it – the savage, beautiful creature!’ (p. 357) Throughout the novel Jane takes a buffeting; she bends but does not break and is clearly stronger in spirit and will than her frame and manner suggest. But in finding a man who likes to feel ‘mastered’, ‘influenced’, and ‘conquered’, Jane evades at least some of the implications of having a will of her own and exercising it, for her power over Rochester is essentially achieved by pleasing him – the complaisance that is the traditional source of a woman’s ‘special influence’. Jane’s capacity to stand up to Rochester, to vex and to tease him to the ‘extreme brink’ of provocation but no further, is all part of her charm, but it also means that she is all the more deliciously – and winningly – pliant when she bends under his kindness. Were it not for the other ‘narrative possibilities’ that Jane Eyre explores – including her disinclination to exhaust herself in the village school, and her determination

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to ‘enjoy [her] own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people’ (p. 435) – Jane’s devotion to Rochester at the end of the novel might seem little better than her third-best wish for a ‘new servitude’. As it is, even on the understanding that her will is consummated rather than effaced in service to Rochester – that ‘to yield … attendance [on Rochester] was to indulge … her sweetest wishes’ (p. 476) – the exercise of that will is still compromised by the nature of the ‘calling’ to which she responds.

A fairytale for a new age In some ways a third-best wish would be a fitting climax for a young woman suspicious of fairy tale endings promising complete happiness and conscious also that the ‘calling’ she follows is that of the human voice rather than the divine. Earlier, when St John had asked Jane to marry him and go with him to India as his ‘help-meet and fellowlabourer’, a stunned Jane felt as if the glen and sky spun round: the hills heaved! It was as if I had heard a summons from Heaven – as if a visionary messenger, like him of Macedonia, had enounced, ‘Come over and help us!’ But I was no apostle, – I could not behold the herald, – I could not receive his call. (p. 448) The call she does receive and answer is ‘the voice of a human being’ (p. 467), though sanctioned by association with ‘the work of nature’, ‘a Mighty Spirit’, and ‘the will of Heaven’ (pp. 467–8). Rochester’s cry, ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’, carrying across a distance it takes 36 hours to travel by coach, hovers on the brink of sacrilege in its analogous calling. It comes close on the heels of the ‘summons from Heaven’ and is linked in Jane’s response (‘I am coming! Wait for me! Oh, I will come!’) to St John’s embrace of his Maker in the letter that ends the novel, in which he tells Jane (in another dangerous echo of the man Jane calls ‘master’): ‘My Master … has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, – “Surely I come quickly!” and hourly I more eagerly respond, – “Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!”’ (p. 502).31 Analogy is not equivalence, and by giving St John the last word Brontë could be understood as putting Jane’s ‘soft ministry’ to Rochester in a larger perspective, though it is a reading against which the novel strains in Jane’s desperate resistance to the sacred ministry St John is asking of her.

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But Jane’s resistance to St John’s mission also needs to be set alongside her earlier resistance to the fairytale script Rochester offered her, in that both invite surrender to a higher will that will spirit her away from stagnation and restraint. When Rochester, on the brink of marriage to Jane and impatient to be rid of the encumbrances of the past, threatens to send one such encumbrance – the child of a former mistress – away to school, he explains to the child, Adèle, that he is going to take Jane to the moon. There they shall live in a cave in one of the white valleys, he explains, and he will gather manna for her, and clothe her in pink clouds. Adèle’s protests are attributed to her ‘French scepticism’: ‘She is far better as she is,’ Adèle concludes, ‘she would get tired of living with only you,’ and, besides, ‘there is no road to the moon: it is all air; and neither you nor she can fly’ (p. 299). Adèle may be French, and a gross little materialist to boot, but in her scepticism she is not all that different from Jane, who superstitiously fears a future that promises to fulfill all her wishes. As she explains to Rochester after she has blushed and then paled at his naming the date on which she will become ‘Jane Rochester’: ‘It can never be, sir; it does not sound likely. Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale – a day-dream.’ (p. 290) The tension here between superstition and commonsense – the resistance to fairytale solutions is, after all, as much superstitious as rational – is typical of the continually shifting balance of power in the novel between realistic constraints and romantic potentialities, both within Jane and within a novelistic universe that permits the realistically ‘likely’ to be prefigured in providential irony. The marriage that Rochester is anticipating, for example, ‘can never be’, but instead, as he unwittingly foretells in his fairytale, he must go with his fairy ‘out of the common world to a lonely place’ for the fairy to make him happy. When Jane eventually returns to Rochester, she makes her own way there, but her desire for Rochester is subsumed under the ‘will of heaven’, whose calling it is that she musters the will to obey.32 Jane Eyre effectively has it both ways: she is ‘a free human being with an independent will’ (p. 284), but at the crunch it is the spirit that is willing, with the authority and the power to act entrusted elsewhere. There is, it seems, extrication of sorts from the miry wilds, but for the

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‘new kind of woman’, as Lyndall Gordon styles Jane,33 will without power still requires a fairytale solution.

Epilogue For a fairy tale for the new age, and for young women like Jane and Adèle, we need look no further than Emily Henrietta Hickey’s ‘In a Nutshell’, which revisits a ‘fragment of a fairy tale’ from ‘Sidney’s fair romance’34 – Mopsa’s tale of two nuts from Sidney’s Arcadia – and in doing so illustrates both the persistence of romance conventions and their modification under the influence of changing social and historical conditions. The story is Mopsa’s tale of two nuts, given to a princess by her aunts as she wanders distractedly in search of her prince, having succumbed to the curiosity that it has done Jane no good at all to suppress. In Mopsa’s tale, the knight who has won the heart of the king’s fair daughter and carried her away has forbidden her to ‘ask him what he was nor whither he would’ (NA, p. 311), for he has been brought up by water-nymphs who will make him vanish if he is asked his name. In Jane Eyre it is Jane who Rochester fancies has been brought up among the fairies, and it is Jane who ‘vanish’d quite away’ (NA, p. 311) when Rochester attempted, illegally, to change her name, but Hickey’s continuation of Mopsa’s tale (humanely aborted in Arcadia while the princess is still accumulating nuts) encapsulates the terms upon which Jane can answer Rochester’s call. It is not ‘Mopsa’s end’ that Hickey writes, ‘Only an end that met the soul of one / Small singer of the nineteenth century’ (ll. 70–1) whose ‘heart burn[s] in her at the words’ that come with the nut. In Mopsa’s tale, the first nut carries the direction that it not be opened by the princess ‘till she was come to the extremest misery that ever tongue could speak of’ (NA, pp. 311–2); in Hickey’s continuation, the second nut also carries directions – that it be opened only ‘when thou dost know there is no need / To break the other’ (ll. 80–1). The princess suffers misery upon misery but never reaches that moment of ‘extremest woe,’ even when she hears the prince’s tortured call and is powerless to help, because ‘extremest woe’ will never come while she has the will, even if not the power, to act. Once she realizes this – that suffering has ‘quicken’d’ and not killed her, that ‘sharp regrets’ have pricked her on and ‘not stung to death’, that ‘great waters’ going over her have ‘washt clean, / Not drown’d’ – she is free to break the second nut, ‘Whose breaking was to be when thou wert sure / Thy woe should never be extremest woe’ (ll. 148–9).

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The conclusion of Hickey’s reworking of Mopsa’s tale, like Jane’s, reunites seeker and sought, but the details are perfunctory: And so she brake the nut – and then – there came That which I know not how to tell – great joy And peace and strength – and came for both of them, The seeker and the sought. (ll. 150–3) The point is clearly to get the princess to the stage where nuts (and for that matter the prince) are not necessary to her well-being, since all she needs to find is within herself: ‘the will to help, if not the power’ (l. 137). But it is a curiously ambivalent message that the tale sends, and one that will be repeated throughout fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century in which the female protagonist, in the absence of an adequate field for her endeavours, settles for the will to act, if not the power, for, where the end is self-knowledge, it is enough that the ‘great waters’ going over her have washed clean but not drowned her. But settling for will without the power to act on it, while safeguarding the desiring woman from the aspersion of design, also smacks of the threadbare pragmatism of a virtue made of necessity, nowhere more deftly depicted than in that other novel of the third-best wish, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in the Spanish proverb that stands as an epigraph to chapter 46: ‘Since we cannot get what we like, let us like what we can get.’35 Given that the texts in this study span a period of some 250 years, they reveal a surprising consistency in the constraints they impose on female behaviour at the same time as they demonstrate the degree of ingenuity, by both writers and fictional characters, expended in devising strategies that could circumvent them. From Arcadia to Jane Eyre, young men and women have continued to find themselves in love without knowing it, to have ‘fallen’ without conscious choice, to have loved across the barriers of class and caste and common sense and even, like Mr Darcy, against their will, reason, and character; and in the service of love, men have endured humiliating dependence, and women have tried not to look as if they were taking advantage of it. Many of these conventions we might not have expected to survive the pressures of social realism, given that the fictional enterprise of love and courtship at times bears so little resemblance to actual social practice (in particular the phenomenon of being in love without knowing it). And we would certainly not have expected them to withstand the challenge to a prescriptive gender ideology pursued by feminism. Yet,

192 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

as Tania Modleski observes in Loving with a Vengeance, these conventions are still rife in modern popular romance, which, not so very long ago, was unaccountably advertising itself as telling stories about ‘people like us, who live, and love.’ Most of the business of falling in love in fiction, it seems, serves the function of testifying to the fact that love is freely given, but, paradoxically, in the case of women, that it is not actively desired or pursued. Wroth’s ‘Brittany Lady’, who goes much further than the ‘halfe way’ her lover demands, understands that ‘daintynes’ – the niceties of propriety – would lose him, for a ‘free gift was what he wished’; and a preoccupation with femininity as a social construction can blind us to the value of the woman’s ‘free gift’ of herself within the courting economy. Moreover, the artless, submissive woman of the conduct books who is characterized by a fastidiousness of moral taste that renders her selfless and conscientiously will-less will inevitably be victimized, but as much by narrative dynamics as by patriarchal culture. There is not much scope in narrative for a heroine who abjures the self, since a story requires that someone wants something and is prepared to go after it, and the promotion of female characters to the status of protagonist imposes its own demands on the will. But if goal-directed action is the essence of narrative, goaldirected women, in fiction at least, have always struggled to determine the lengths to which they might legitimately go in pursuit of their desires, even with a goal like Dorothea’s in Middlemarch that is unexceptionable (even if rather vague) in its ambition – ‘desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would.’ Like Jane Eyre and Hickey’s princess, Dorothea is prepared to settle for the will without the power – not being able to do what she would – but even if in the end she might seem to be settling even for less, for a will that serves another’s goals and ‘a life filled with a beneficent activity which she had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself’, she has gone as far as the epigraph to the first chapter suggests she is capable: ‘Since I can do no good because a woman, / Reach constantly at something that is near it.’ 36 It was the Brittany lady who first focused our interest on the question of how far a woman should go in pursuit of her own desires. A minor figure in Wroth’s vast tribe of characters, as well as marginalized by her widowhood, she nevertheless suggested a keen awareness of choices other than those dictated by the advice literature and gender ideology. ‘Brave’ as well as ‘discreet’, both ‘sweet’ and ‘grave’, the Brittany Lady, as a widow, is her own woman as few fictional heroines are, but, like her, the heroines we have been discussing are far from

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being passive repositories of masculinist ideologies. From Arcadia to Jane Eyre and beyond female protagonists struggle to exercise their wills and pursue their desires in circumstances not of their own choosing, and in the process illuminate some fascinating contradictions as writers attempt to reconcile the conflicting demands of moral and narrative interests.

Notes Introduction 1 Cited in Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 120. John Wardroper in Jest upon Jest (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) gives the source as Oxford Jests, fifth edition, 1684 (compiled by Captain William Hicks), though identifies an earlier version in Wits, Fittes and Fancies, 1595 (Wardroper p. 163). 2 Mendelson and Crawford, p. 109. 3 Like Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 (London: Methuen, 1992), our concern is not to produce an account ‘intended to be synecdochal of a complete narrative’ (p. 6), but rather to contribute to the debates about women’s agency as represented in fiction. 4 Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 12. 5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), p. xxix. 6 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 2. 7 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. xxix. 8 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 44. 9 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1, 3. 10 Dennis Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen, and Therefore Beautiful”: Sidney, His Mother, and Queen Elizabeth’, Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 43, No. 169 (February, 1992), p. 20. 11 Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982). 12 See for example, Christina Luckyj, ‘A Moving Rhetoric’: Gender and Silence in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). The reappraisal of notions of passivity, in men and women, is examined in Scott Paul Gordon’s The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 13 Gervase Markham, The English Housewife, ed. Michael R. Best (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), pp. xxvii, xxviii. It must be acknowledged here that this activity is still located within a predominantly domestic sphere, rather than the world at large, but the distinction between public and private, domestic and politic, is often harder to sustain than it might seem. And anyway, the argument that women could be active only in the domestic sphere is part of a trivialization of women’s work that is endemic in patriarchal society. 14 In terms of Markham’s career more generally he does seem, as Michael R. Best suggests, to have begun ‘his career as writer by trying his hand at most of the popular literary forms of the day’ (p. xii). 194

Notes 195 15 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 33. Whigham acknowledges here the influence of the Tel Quel group and quotes from Frederic Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism’, New Literary History 11 (1979): 57. 16 Whigham, p. 186. It should be said here that Whigham is predominantly concerned with tropes of Elizabethan courtesy primarily as they relate to the courtier and then the middle-class gentleman. He does, however, suggest that ‘gender is perhaps the last bastion of the Given’ (p. 186) in the sense that it is assumed to be natural rather than socially determined. To this one might add other categories, such as race and ethnicity. 17 Whigham, p. 39. Whigham refers to Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). 18 Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), p. 18. 19 Shoemaker, p. 61. Humoral theory could also be invoked as the physiological basis of chastity. According to Valerie Wayne in ‘Advice for Women from Mothers and Patriarchs’ (in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]), Dorothy Leigh’s The Mother’s Blessing, one of the most popular ‘mother’s books’ in the seventeenth century with 16 editions between 1616 and 1674, argues along with many other writers that ‘“God hath given a cold and temperate disposition” to women – cold and moist, as opposed to hot and dry – so that they would incorporate [the virtue of chastity]’ (p. 67). 20 Shoemaker, p. 19. 21 Ilza Veith, Hysteria, quoted in Marlene LeGates, ‘The Cult of Womanhood in Eighteenth-Century Thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 10:1 (1976): 22. 22 Shoemaker, p. 63. 23 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 394. 24 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsey and Frank W. Bradbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 3, hereafter cited parenthetically (P&P). The example of Pride and Prejudice – and, indeed, of Clarissa – reminds us that, whatever the explanatory power of social theories, in practice they tend to be provisionally entertained rather than believed in implicitly, and are invoked, or not, as circumstances require. Mr Bennet clearly does not have a lot of time for Mrs Bennet’s nerves or the consideration she expects shown to them, and while Lovelace claims to be expecting rather than merely hoping that Clarissa will fall pregnant (‘it will be very surprising to me if it do not happen’), he seems prepared to overlook the implication that ‘to have a young Lovelace by such an angel’ would prove Clarissa less than angel – the ostensible agenda behind the trials to which he subjects her (Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985], p. 1147). 25 Fletcher, p. 378. 26 Fletcher, pp. 378–82. Ingrid Tague, in Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690–1760 (Rochester: Boydell, 2002), also observes that ‘although there had been didactic works written for and about women prior to this time, most of them dealt with particular

196 Notes

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36

37 38

areas of female conduct – advice for princesses and nuns, for example – rather than trying to create a complete woman, as was the goal of the later manuals. Moreover, they were rare in comparison to the numbers produced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. One of the more popular early seventeenth-century works, Richard Brathwait’s English Gentlewoman (1631), appeared in three editions by its last printing in 1652. Compare this with Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1673), which went through 12 editions by 1727, and which – in another eight editions from 1696 to 1737 – was also revised and published under the title of The Whole Duty of a Woman’ (p. 23). Richard Steele, Tatler No. 52, quoted in Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 78. Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 5. This is the social virtue at the heart of the gentlemanly code of conduct that took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exemplified in Richard Steele’s understanding of modesty as a ‘moderation of self’ that, as Edmund Leite put it, requires that ‘I show my respect for you by limiting the extent to which you must experience me’ (quoted in Yeazell, p. 9), and still strongly informing the later more broadly based, less class-specific definitions of the gentleman such as we find in John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1852). Yeazell, p. 16. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774; rpt. New York: Garland, 1974), p. 67. Yeazell, p. 41. Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (London: B. Alsop and T. Fawcet, 1631, STC 3565), p. 203. As Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford note, even among the plebeian classes, where women on average were older when they married and accustomed to greater autonomy, courting rituals still assumed that a woman would not take the initiative, and that her role was ‘to scorn, jeer, and generally discourage’ while a man’s was ‘to solicit as vigorously as possible’ (pp. 116–7). Yeazell, p. 51. See also Gregory’s observations on the ‘maxim’ laid down among women – ‘and a very prudent one it is’, too – that a woman’s love should be a consequence of a man’s attachment, discussed in Chapter 4. Preparing for the imminent arrival of her master, Fielding’s manipulative little trollop pulls down her stays to reveal as much of her bosom as possible, practises her airs in front of a mirror, and then sits down to read ‘a Chapter in the Whole Duty of Man’ (in Anti-Pamela; or, Feign’d Innocence Detected / Eliza Haywood and An Apology dor the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews / Henry Fielding, ed. Catherine Ingrassia [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004], p. 257). Fletcher, pp. 122–3. Fletcher, p. 123. Not just in the advice literature but also in the community based customs of the lower ranks there is widespread evidence, as Mendelson and Crawford argue, that women worked around the constraints of gender roles rather than simply bowing to them (p. 109ff.).

Notes 197 39 Tague, p. 6. 40 Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 238, hereafter referred to parenthetically (NA). 41 Wayne quotes Edmund Tilney in The Flower of Friendship (1568) urging husbands to use a wife’s love to ensure her subjection to his will: ‘The wise man maye not be contented onely with his spouses virginitie, but by little and little must gently procure that he maye also steale away hir private will, and appetitie, so that of two bodies there may be made one onely hart, which she will soone doe, if love raigne in hir’ (p. 67). 42 Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p. 4. 43 Charlotte E. Morgan, The Rise of the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose Fiction between 1600 and 1740 (1911; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), p. 14. This ‘back-dating’ of the term ‘romance’ to ancient Greek love stories from the period 100 BC to the third century AD acknowledges the distinction between epic tales of national heroes and tales of individuals in their private capacity. As Hubert McDermott notes in Novel and Romance: The Odyssey to Tom Jones (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989): Allowing for exceptions at individual points in individual stories, the Greek romance follows a well-defined pattern. A young couple fall in love, and are prevented from consummating their love. This ‘prevention’ usually takes the form of physical separation, as they travel about the world facing one danger after another, until they are reunited, return home, are married, and live happily ever after. There are numerous incidents which recur with boring regularity in the romances – shipwrecks; capture by pirates; narrow escapes from death, rape and seduction; trial scenes; reunions; and sensational recognitions. Despite the obsessive preoccupation with chastity, … it soon becomes obvious that chastity in the Greek romances means regard for the concept rather than practice of virtue. (p. 27) Doody refers to the Greek romances, along with all other fictional narratives, as novels, which at least has the virtue of reminding us that, whatever the differences in the way we go about telling stories, we keep telling much the same kinds of stories – a point that did not escape Mrs Barbauld in 1804 when she observed that ‘If we were to search among the treasures of ancient literature for fictions similar to the modern novel, we should find none more nearly resembling it than Theagenes and Chariclea, the production of Heliodorus’ (The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 6 volumes [1804; rpt. New York, AMS Press, 1966], p. xi). 44 If we compare Arcadia with another romance written around the same time, Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), we find the wooing couple, Dorastus and Fawnia, have met and are smitten within consecutive pages, though it takes a few more to overcome reservations on both sides arising from the fact that he is a prince and she (apparently) ‘a beggar’s brat’ (97). Even given that this is a much shorter tale than Arcadia, the perfunctoriness of the courtship (which amounts to Dorastus having to convince first himself and then Fawnia that he is prepared to marry a shepherdess) is of a piece with

198 Notes the general lack of interest in why things happen (the answer always lies in the whim of Fortune), just as long as things do keep happening. The obstacle of the apparent difference in rank, for example, is little more than the pretext for elopement. In contrast, in Arcadia, the obstacle of the apparent difference in rank in the case of Musidorus and Pamela (and of apparently same-sex love in the case of Philoclea and Pyrocles in his Amazon disguise) is the occasion of anguished soul-searching. 45 Peter Lindenbaum, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia as Cultural Monument’, in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, ed. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 80. Sidney’s Arcadia appeared in 13 editions between 1590 and 1674, but, as Lindenbaum continues, A full determination of the extent of the appeal of the Arcadia in the seventeenth century would … need to take into account not simply the number of editions but also the various offshoots from Sidney’s work, most specifically, Quarles’ 5000-line poem Argalus and Parthenia, based on a single episode extending from Book I to Book III of the Arcadia, which went through 22 editions between its first publication in 1629 and 1700. It was itself reduced to a prose chapbook version which was published five times between 1672 or 1673 and 1700. There was also an abridgement of the whole Arcadia which appeared in 1701 (in 158 duodecimo pages) and a longer prose version (that is, longer than the 24-page chapbook version) of the Argalus and Parthenia story, entitled The Unfortunate Lovers, which began to appear as early as 1695. There were also continuations of the Arcadia that were not absorbed directly into the volume of Sidney’s work, for instance, Anna Weamys’ A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, published in 1651 and perhaps again in 1690. Beyond all these are the various plays based on the Arcadia’s material which were written in the course of the seventeenth century, ranging from King Lear and Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge (1608) to Shirley’s Arcadia (1632), Glapthorne’s Argalus and Parthenia of 1638 (based more on Quarles than Sidney), the anonymous Andromana (post-1642) and at least one manuscript play, Loves Changelinges Change. (91n) 46 Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 4–5. 47 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 10. 48 The rule of vraisemblance, as Lennard Davis observes, ‘demands that though the work is a fictional one, the actual foundations for the work should be true and the characters should conform to historical reality, though their exploits may be made up’ (Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], pp. 29–30). In this respect, French heroic romance declares itself, in Catherine Gallagher’s terms, definitively ‘prenovelistic’, since novelistic narrative is ‘forthrightly fictional’, openly ‘telling the stories of people who never actually lived’ (Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994], p. 165).

Notes 199 49 While for much of the eighteenth century ‘novel’ and ‘romance’ were not generically distinct terms and were often used interchangeably, there was some attempt to exploit the sense of newness or recentness of the term ‘novel’ to distinguish ‘romances’ set in a historically remote era from the new romances, or ‘novels’, that, like the French nouvelles, were set in the present or recent past and not based on traditional stories, and to distinguish the older romances of prodigious length from shorter tales fashioned on the Italian novella. 50 Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 42. 51 Davis, p. 25. 52 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); John Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). 53 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (London: Harper Collins, 1997), pp. 1–15; Philip Stewart, ‘The Rise of I’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13.2–3 (2001):171–2. 54 Davis, p. 27n. 55 Stewart, p. 166. 56 In this respect it is interesting to note that as late as the mid-twentieth century love hardly figured in the Oxford Dictionary in definitions of romance, and in the 1933 OED and 1973 SOED not at all. 57 Duncan, p. 2. 58 Rosemary Guiley in Love Lines: The Romance Reader’s Guide to Printed Pleasures, includes Pamela, along with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, as one of 23 books ‘that belong in every romance library’ (p. 69). 59 Alan Sinfield, ‘Power and Ideology: An Outline Theory and Sidney’s Arcadia’, ELH 52.2 (1985): p. 275. 60 See, for example, Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, and, more recently, Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). 61 Rose, p. xii. 62 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 96–8. 63 Rose, p. 84. 64 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics-Queer Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 19. 65 See Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 66 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 255. 67 See, for example, Constance Jordan’s arguments that Sidney’s ‘concept of the feminine, as it describes private and moral as well as public and political action, has a greater and more impressive scope than any other writer of the century discerned’ in Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 221. 68 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and his Queen’, The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 196.

200 Notes 69 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 39. 70 Lorna Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers: Reading for the Plot in SixteenthCentury England’, Representations 41 (1993): 91. 71 A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 358. In New Arcadia this scene is also associated with another watery incident where a prince is aroused by the sight of the water running around his naked lover’s body, which leads to his lengthy and phallic song, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell, / In whose each part all pens may dwell’ (pp. 287–91), which again sees female beauty primarily as the source of male creativity. 72 See Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (1599), and Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ (1600). 73 Gervase Markham, The English Arcadia Parts I and II (1607 & 1613) STC 17351 & 17352, I: 84, hereafter cited parenthetically (Markham I), (Markham II). 74 Again there is an interesting shift from Sidney to Markham. New Arcadia refers to Pyrocles’s ‘divine fury’ (p. 287), thus linking the moment back to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. That the moment is at least tongue-in-cheek in asserting some kind of higher purpose is suggested by the fact that the position of the song ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’ has been moved from book three in Old Arcadia where Pyrocles ‘is about to consummate his love with Philoclea’ (NA, p. 856), suggesting that the fury is rather more corporeal than divine. Melidora invokes the recognition that what male lovers often claim as complete submission masks a desire to conquer. That she does so for her own less than explicit reasons reveals that the politics of the game of love can be manipulated by both sides. What is good for the gander, it appears, might work as well for the goose. 75 The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghampton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995), p. 750. All references are to this edition and The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s ‘Urania’ by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Januel Mueller (Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance English Texts in conjunction with Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999). Hereafter cited parenthetically as U, I and U, II. There are other examples of this image being used in Urania, such as, for example, where Antissia sees herself as the fish and ‘Amphilanthus stil the nette that caught her, in all shapes, or fashions she could be framed in’ (U, I: 324). Later on there is also a scene where pastimes seem to be gender specific as Queen Dalinea fishes and her husband King Parselius of Achaia hunts (U, I: 518). 76 We return to this incident in more detail in terms of its meaning in Urania as a whole in Chapter 2. 77 As we explore in Chapter 2, it is impossible not to be aware here of Wroth’s own position in relation to her husband and her cousin, by whom she had two children after her husband’s death. 78 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Peter Sabor (London: Penguin, 1980), p. 168, hereafter cited parenthetically (P). 79 Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 22, hereafter cited parenthetically (FQ). There are, of course, earlier

Notes 201 examples of foolish women misinterpreting what they see, such as Robert Anton’s Fairy Queen in Moriomachia (1613), who tries to milk a bull, and then in response to his ‘strange and unusual courtesy’ decides ‘to have him transformed into the habit and shape of a man’ (Short Fiction of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles C. Mish [New York: New York University Press, 1963], p. 49). While this can be seen as a ‘parody of chivalric romance’ (p. 45), it does not have the focus on the understandings of the female protagonist that is the concern of The Female Quixote.

Chapter 1 Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia 1 See, for example, Annabel Patterson, ‘“Under … Pretty Tales”: Intention in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 285. 2 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 177. 3 Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, p. 35. 4 William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 362. 5 Barnabe Riche, Farewell to Military Profession, ed. Donald Beecher (Binghampton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts Studies, 1992), pp. 182, 197. 6 Morgan, pp. 14–15. 7 See Maurice Evan’s summary in his edition of Arcadia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 20–7. 8 See for example Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode’, Studies in Philology 70 (1973): 269–78. 9 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 121–7. 10 Donald Beecher, Introduction to Barnabe Riche, Farewell to Military Profession, p. 31. 11 Beecher, p. 43. 12 Beecher, p. 42. 13 See our earlier discussion of Morgan’s observations on Arcadia in the Introduction. 14 See, for example, Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 15 Duncan-Jones, p. 9. 16 See, for example, Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 17 See Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds), The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: 1988), pp. 171–96; and Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, pp. 18–39; and Patterson, pp. 265–85. 18 Helgerson, p. 11. 19 See Hannay, pp. 17–8; and Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, pp. 32–8, where he particularly draws attention to the intricate strategies of conformity and subversion with which these passages engage.

202 Notes 20 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance’, Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 263. 21 See, for example, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 435–47. 22 Duncan-Jones, p. 248. 23 See, for example, p. 216, where Basilius’s song ‘Let not old age disgrace my high desire’ is accompanied by ‘a little skip’, and p. 323 where Zelmane’s rebuke of Basilius results in Basilius’s legs bowing beneath him, and ‘a general shaking’ overtakes his whole body. 24 Pyrocles takes on the disguise of an Amazon, Musidorus that of a shepherd, to gain access to the princesses in the seclusion imposed on them by Basilius in his attempts to avoid what he sees as the threat of his death as promised by the oracle. While many Renaissance texts construct more or less improbable reasons for cross-dressing, particularly in drama, the resonances in prose are significantly different given the absence of the technical imperatives of the exclusion of women from the stage. 25 Sidney is working here with a story of January and May. F. N. Robinson argues that while the form of the story is new to Chaucer ‘the figure of the aged or feeble lover is so frequent in literature that it is not necessary to multiply references on the subject’, although he does go on to list some authorities (The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer [London: Oxford University Press, 1957], pp. 712 & 13. 26 Katherine J. Roberts, Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 48. 27 Sir Philip Sidney was encouraged by some of his peers, at home and internationally, to consider his role in international politics as part of an international protestant league, but this, and his attempts to influence Queen Elizabeth I’s domestic policy (including the vexed issue of her marriage), did not find favour with Queen Elizabeth I. His subsequent retirement to Wilton saw the writing of Arcadia, which critics see as continuing some of his politic interest in pastoral form. See, for example, Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 28 Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Apology for Poetry,’ Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. David Kalstone (New York: Signet, 1970), p. 222. 29 Anne Shaver, ‘Woman’s Place in the New Arcadia’, Sidney Newsletter 10.2 (1990): p. 9. 30 See, for example, the Second Eclogues, pp. 407–8. Maurice Evans suggests that the final couplet, which sees Passion and Reason embracing, giving themselves over to ‘heavenly rules’, ‘could be the motto of the whole Arcadia’ (p. 859n). 31 Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writings 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 80. 32 Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authority in the Sidney Circle (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 78. 33 Helgerson, p. 10. 34 There is a second, telling comic counterfoil to Gynecia in Miso. Miso’s highly inappropriate advice to the princesses to do what they like with

Notes 203

35

36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50

lovers, and ‘it recks not much what they do to thee, so it be in secret; but upon my charge never love none of them’, and her story of Cupid ‘like a hangman on a pair of gallows’ (NA, p. 308), provide other examples of women’s attitude to love and desire. Shelley Thrasher-Smith in The Luminous Globe: Methods of Characterisation in Sidney’s New Arcadia (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1982) is right to find connections between Gynecia and Miso, but it is also necessary to be aware of the clear distinctions between the characters. Where gender connects them, class divides. Miso’s philosophy is functional, self-protective, and cynical, and she also provides a sharp contrast with Gynecia’s position in establishing the limits of understanding female desire. Katherine J. Roberts suggests that Basilius is comic as ‘the foolish old man in the throes of love … while Gynecia is always tragic’ (p. 54), although our view is that Gynecia is often rather than always tragic, as there are moments of humour in the text around her representation. Sidney, Apology, p. 241. Sidney, Apology, p. 242. Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 120. Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4, hereafter cited parenthetically (OA). Heather Dubrow notes how phrases throughout this passage in New Arcadia distance the narrator from his judgements (p. 168). Cleophila and Zelmane are of course substantially the same character, the disguised Pyrocles. In Old Arcadia the imitation of the beloved Philoclea by reversing her name, and the adoption of Pyrocles’s unrequited lover’s name in New Arcadia are part of different patternings in each text. In Old Arcadia Gynecia perhaps foreshadows the representation of the predatory female seen in Shakespeare’s Venus in Venus and Adonis. Susan David Gubar, Tudor Romance and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, PhD thesis, Graduate College, University of Iowa, 1972, p. 36. In relation to Gynecia’s afterlife with Basilius, there are some very telling images that prefigure this as a kind of living death. See, for example, Gynecia’s dream in which she thinks she is called by Zelmane only to ‘find a dead body like unto her husband … [which] took her in his arms and said, “Gynecia, leave all, for here is thy only rest”’ (NA, p. 376). See also Margaret Mary Sullivan, ‘Getting Pamela out of the House: Gendering Genealogy in the New Arcadia’ (Sidney Newsletter 9. 2 [1988–89]: 3–18), where she argues that ‘New Arcadia is a handbook for turning queens into wives’ (p. 3). Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: The Description Of A New World Called The Blazing World and Other Writings, ed. Kate Lilley (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 47. William Craft, Labyrinth of Desire: Invention and Culture in the Work of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 121. Gubar, p. 85. Craft, p. 116, his emphasis. Lamb, Gender and Authority, p. 106. Hackett, 2000, pp. 123, 128, 163.

204 Notes 51 Katherine J. Roberts, p. 87. 52 Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), p. 2. 53 Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 58. 54 Feminist theorists and critics such as Luce Irigarary and Hélène Cixous have, of course, argued that this differentiation along an axis of sameness and hierarchization where the feminine end of the spectrum is marked as inferior is a characteristic of Western thinking, as represented in that famous collection, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). 55 John Lyly’s Gallathea provides a point of comparison here, where two girls disguised as two boys fall in love, and explore their dilemma until Venus turns one of them into a boy. This seems to be the play that takes the dilemma of same sex love most seriously because both cross-dressers are of the same sex originally, even though the play is predominantly a comedy. See also Alison Findlay’s discussion of this play, ‘Women and Drama’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. Michael Hattaway (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), pp. 500–1. 56 Shakespeare’s Cressida also directly articulates the difficulties of expressing desire (I. ii. 272–82) and is negatively interpreted by Ulysses despite her best efforts (IV. v. 54–63) (Troilus and Cressida, ed. Kenneth Muir [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]). 57 Maurice Evans glosses ‘accusing’ as ‘betraying’ (NA, p. 232), which nicely suggests the sense of self-guarding, against inadvertently revealing something that might entail self-damage. 58 The next event in the narrative is the kidnapping of Pamela and Philoclea by Cecropia’s agents. This event, like the incursion of the lion and the bear earlier on, symbolically suggests the dangers confronting the central characters at this point. The uncertainty of Pamela’s ability to withstand Musidorus’s pressures is underlined by the fact that what she in fact would have done next is left unknown. Pamela is saved by her aunt’s plots. 59 Kay, ‘“She Was a Queen …”’, p. 39. See also Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 18. 60 We shall see in the next chapter how many difficulties bad parental decisions bring about in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania. 61 See Alan Sinfield, Literature and Protestantism in England 1560–1660 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1983), where he argues that while Protestantism and humanism might not be without their points of conflict, in Sidney’s writings common factors emerge. 62 It is significant that at first Musidorus sees Pyrocles’s love for Philoclea as a threat to their friendship. The friendships that develop between Pyrocles and Philoclea and Musidorus and Pamela begin to reflect the notion of companionate marriage and to replace the idea that friendship can only exist between men because women are not capable of the qualities that sustain friendship. As Michel Montaigne put it: ‘the ordinary suficiency of women cannot answer this conference and communication, the nurse of

Notes 205 this sacred bond; nor seem their minds strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast and durable’ (Selected Essays of Montaigne in the Translation of John Florio, ed. Walter Kaiser [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964], p. 60). In Weamys’s and Wroth’s work the notion that friendship might exist between women is further explored.

Chapter 2 ‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating Desire in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania 1 Josephine A. Roberts, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 24. 2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), I.i. 99–110. 3 In our discussion we include both parts of Wroth’s Urania. There are, of course, significant issues here concerning the differences between these texts particularly in relation to their reception and the influences they might have had, given that the first part was met with some consternation. The second part seems never to have been published. It does, however, seem important to include both parts in a discussion of the representation of female desire, and to encourage discussion of it. 4 A. R. Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyrics in Europe 1540–1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 2. 5 Luckyj discusses and criticizes the very influential work of Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’ (in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 251–770). As Luckjy suggests, it is an orthodoxy that requires revision (pp. 7–8). 6 Naomi J. Miller, ‘Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) cites examples of Wroth’s characters turning misogynist metaphors around, but sometimes misogynism is repeated in Urania. 7 The connection between bodily movement and promiscuity in the representation of female monstrosity here has its origins in depictions of the grotesque carnivalesque body where movement connotes excess, lack of discipline and unruliness. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), which draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. 8 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 77. 9 Some of these reworkings are more Pythonesque than biblical. While some of the temptations represented by women are linked back to Eve and the serpent, some owe more to the comically rapacious women like Sir Bertilak’s wife in Gawain and the Green Knight. Urania Part I contains numerous references to women ambushing unsuspecting men. See, for example, pp. 254, 349 & 403.

206 Notes 10 Philarchos is searching for his lost children who, with others of the leading princes and princesses, have been sent to Lesbos for their education. The fact that he is being distracted from his fatherly duties adds to the humour here. 11 There is a similarly jarring note in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, where, although Roxana claims her arguments in favour of the liberty of a single life are a smokescreen to hide the fact that she thought her suitor was just after her money, they are so powerfully argued that they are difficult to set aside. She suggests that marriage requires a woman to give ‘herself entirely away from herself’, since ‘the Very nature of the Marriage Contract was … nothing but giving up Liberties, Estate, Authority, and everything, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave’ (Roxana, ed. Jane Jack [London: Oxford University Press, 1964], p. 147). 12 It is of course important that the Brittany Lady is a widow, an experienced woman, and not a young virgin, but the problems that she faces are in many ways seen as the same, in Wroth’s Urania, in terms of the dangers she faces in following her desires. 13 Josephine A. Roberts, Urania II, p. 514n. 14 Luckyj, p. 43. Luckyj’s work acknowledges the influence of Hull’s book, as well as providing criticism of it. Louis Althusser’s work on the internalization of dominant discourses through interpellation so that they are naturalized is relevant here, as is the concern that his arguments so effectively describe how these discourses work that it is hard to imagine how resistance ever occurs. See ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (London: New Left Book, 1977). 15 Maureen Quilligan, ‘Lady Mary Wroth: Female Authority and the Family Romance,’ in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 273. 16 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale University Press, 1996) discusses the importance of standing and withstanding as active values, as does Alan Sinfield, Literature and Protestantism 1560–1660 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1983). 17 Luckyj herself does not discuss the second part of Urania. 18 Luckyj cites Thomas Becon’s use of this adage in New Catechism (1560) where it already had the status of a proverb (p. 49). 19 Here we are using Elaine Hobby’s arguments in a slightly different way because Wroth’s Urania troubles at some levels Hobby’s appealing argument. Taking the execution of Charles I and the death of Aphra Behn as her starting and ending dates to promote an argument about the growth and decline of women’s agency in the middle of the seventeenth century has the disadvantage of not being able to include Wroth’s work at all, as it precedes 1649. However, in many ways Urania is consistent with Hobby’s arguments about women writers who are interested in the ‘shapes of the spaces inhabited by women’, in ‘designing strategies to win as much space as possible’ (pp. 98 & 100), and of making conduct-book admonitions work for them rather than against them. Perhaps this suggests that the usefulness of the movements and patterns Hobby describes and identifies in literary texts cannot be as tightly ascribed to social and political events as she argues. The

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21

22

23

24

25

relationship between society and culture is rather more fluid and uneven as Raymond Williams suggests in Culture (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1981) and elsewhere. Part of this ambiguity lies in the question as to whether Pamphilia’s husband is dead or not. See the notes to pages 406 and 407 in the second part of Urania that discuss Rodomondro’s death and resurrection. See the interesting discussion of ‘civilite’ (Urania U, II: p. xxxvi) and the text’s tendency to mock knights’ invocations of their obligations to women to authorize their own amorous interests. The issue of the expression of male desire and its responsibilities is something we touch on throughout this book, but deserves fuller exploration in ways that might reveal how the hegemonic effects of dominant or traditionally ‘appropriate’ masculinities are often undermined and are more contradictory than they appear to be. Urania itself refers disparagingly to ‘carpet-knights’ and ‘tongue-knights’ to suggest where the outer shows of masculinity unacceptably become the substance. Sidney’s New Arcadia describes how Phalantus becomes embroiled in the game of love with Artesia, for example, as she tries to use him for her own purposes. There are also interesting distinctions made between male lovers. Wroth’s Leonius argues that Cilandro’s loss of the lady is less to be felt because she loved someone else, to which Cilandro replies that this remark classifies Leonius as ‘a self-lover’ who loves ‘but for your owne ends’ (U, I: 407). In this context it is entirely appropriate that in the second part of Urania Leonius succumbs to a ‘woeman dangerous in all kinds, flattering and insinuating abundantly, winning all matchless intisinge, and as soon cast of[f], butt with hatrad sufficient to the forsaken or forsaker’ (U, II: 158). That Leonius is besotted ‘of and with this creature’, is discovered by Steriamus lying on the ground, ‘she dandling him, (as it were) and playing with his delicate, soft lockes’ (U, II: 161), and has to be goaded into more appropriately masculine behaviour is the punishment for his selfish love. Steriamus’s accusations that his ‘armes are layd up … in your ladys Cabinett, your sword in her sharpe tongue, and prove, I fear, butt a poore defender of such stout language’ (U, II: 162) illuminatingly relocate Leonius’s lost phallic power on the phallicized monstrous female. See, for example, the Queen of Bulgaria’s assessment that ‘Pamphilia so much of an admired Lady, was the dullest shee ever saw’ (U, I: 459). Her refusal to wear any knight’s favour, and her refusal to explain why, earns her a more general condemnation, making ‘her of many to be esteemed proud’ (U, I: 64). See, for example, U, I: 81 where Amphilanthus, like Musidorus in Arcadia, expresses his fear at a negative response: ‘I am no coward, though mistrust my strength in her sight; her looke … are to me (if frowning) more terrible than death.’ If technically the situation is ambivalent, and the status of verba de praesenti marriages is uncertain, one of the significant factors here is that the marriage between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus precedes their public marriages. This may also be a reference to the long standing intimacy between William Herbert and Mary Wroth as cousins. From another more general perspective, it is also true that these different forms of marriage ceremonies

208 Notes

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27 28

29 30

31

32

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34 35 36

provided ‘an important source of plot complication in early seventeenth century’ fiction, as Josephine A. Roberts notes in ‘The Marriage Controversy in Wroth’s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 127. There are other problems in remaining silent in Amphilanthus’s presence, such as the inability to say no when he tries to kiss her (U, II: 262), and the desire to remind him what his behaviour has cost him. Josephine A. Roberts, Introduction to The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth. Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. Eslpeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London & New York: Routledge: 1989), p. 35. See the discussion by Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 92–3. William A. Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) p. 448; Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 196. This is a challenging reversal of the tactic used by Musidorus in Arcadia where Musidorus addresses Pamela through the lower-class Mopsa. While in terms of the class and gender politics of Arcadia this has a kind of acceptability (however dubious from a modern point of view), the reversal here where a young woman uses her king/father as a vehicle for her own ends is quite different. It would take too long to document here but there are indications that Amphilanthus’s self-analysis moves from a type of self-justification to a critical self-awareness, helped along the way by the kind of stern admonition from his sister Urania that he meets on Pamphilia’s wedding day: ‘Urania went and advised her brother, being that day to beare itt like him self since non butt him self was the cause of itt. This was small comfort, yett beeing truthe, hee must suffer itt’ (U, II: 275). This is of a piece with Urania’s sharp advice to another lamenting lover, Perissus, at the beginning of part one of Urania, when she finds out that for all his wailing he does not know for certain that his love, Limena, is actually dead. Admonished for his ‘unreasonable stubborn resolution’ and ‘woman-like complaints’, Perissus is finally threatened with the reputation of ending ‘his dayes like a Fly in the corner’ (U, I: 12–3) – words that have the desired and entirely salutary effect of galvanizing Perrissus into action that results in the salvation of Limena and their reuniting. Forsandarus is taken to be a reference to Hugh Sanford, tutor to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s cousin and father to two of her children. Forsandarus’s treachery is pronounced in the text, given that he was the trusted confidant of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. John Loftis (ed.), The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 18. Loftis, p. 17. While there has been critical attention to the nature of the torture of Limena, its specularity and the implications of this (see, for example, Helen Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s

Notes 209

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39 40 41 42

43

44

45 46

Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill, [Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996], pp. 93–110), in terms of the narrative as a whole, the torture is important in establishing Limena’s constancy and fortitude, echoing Pamela’s and Philoclea’s resistance to oppression in Sidney’s New Arcadia. Limena’s freedom on the death of her husband also invokes notions of the liberty of the widow. It is impossible here not to be aware that Wroth herself may well have inhabited all these solutions, as wife, widow and lover. It is also important to see these events as part of more general social patterns – as examples in Graham et al (eds), Her Own Life, suggest. The RETS editions indicate inconsistencies in the original manuscripts between references to Lesbos and Delos as Melissea’s home. Both of these places have significant interest for women. Delos is the home of Diana (and Apollo), whereas Lesbos is the home of Sappho and her fellow female writers. Perhaps Wroth’s use of both signals general rather than specific interests in women-centred locations. The explanation of these events occurs in U, II: 385–8. See U, II: 497, note to 112.31–2. See U, I: lxxxvi. See U, II: 491, note to 73.37, and Urania’s ‘masque-like’ moments discussed by Heather L. Weidemann, ‘Theatricality and Female Identity in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, p. 206. Gary Waller, ‘Mary Wroth and the Sidney Family Romance: Gender Construction in Early Modern England’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, p. 56. See, for example, Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Women Readers in Wroth’s Urania’, in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller, pp. 210–28. Goldberg, p. 12. Lamb, ‘Women Readers’, p. 213.

Chapter 3 Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How to Avoid Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’ 1 Richard Brathwait, Panthalia or The Royal Romance (London: F. G., 1659), STC 3565, p. 2. 2 Katherine J. Roberts, Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) p. 18. 3 We take this useful phrase from Writing and the English Renaissance (eds) William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 110–1. 4 Whigham, p. 33. Whigham’s book is primarily concerned with the role and production of the courtier and the gentleman, but his observations are also usefully extendable to women.

210 Notes 5 This is the discovery of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando when she becomes a woman and realizes the effort underlying traditional notions of femininity: She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires’, she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature. They can only attain these graces, without which they may enjoy none of the delights of life, by the most tedious discipline.’ (Orlando [London: Penguin, 2000], p. 110). 6 Hull in Chaste, Silent and Obedient discusses the multiple demands on middle-class women’s lives, and the correspondingly complex roles they needed to develop (p. 36). 7 Best, Introduction to Markham, The English Housewife, p. xxvii. See also the beginning of chapter four for a further discussion of this distinction between the domestic and the political in relation to romance fiction. 8 Yeazall, especially chapter two. 9 Markham, p. 8. 10 Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 33. 11 Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman, p. 34. 12 Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, ed. Patrick Colborn Cullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 81, hereafter cited parenthetically (Weamys). 13 Richard Bellings, A Sixth Booke to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624) STC 1805, hereafter cited parenthetically (Bellings). 14 This is in contrast to the general patterning of Sidney’s 1593 Arcadia, as argued in Chapter 1 above, and as suggested by Katherine J. Roberts: ‘A close examination of Sir Philip Sidney’s three major works, the Old Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella and the New Arcadia, reveals that his female characters become increasingly complex as he departs more and more from existing social and literary models of women’ (Fair Ladies: Sir Philip Sidney’s Female Characters [New York: Peter Lang, 1993], p. 1). 15 Helen Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena: Sex and Violence in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, ed. Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen and Suzanne Trill (Keele, Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1996), p. 107. 16 ‘Philisides: Sidney’s poetic persona, formed from his own names Phili[ppus] Sid[n]e[iu]s, but also meaning ‘star-lover’, from the Greek … (to love) and Latin sidus (star or constellation)’ (Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], p. 372). 17 Patrick Cullen, Introduction to Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, p. liv. 18 See Cullen, Introduction to Anna Weamys, A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, p. xliv. 19 See Anna Weamys’ Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651), ed. Marea Mitchell, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works (London: Ashgate, forthcoming 2005). 20 Basilius flees his duties for Arcadia, and Blair Worden argues in The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale

Notes 211

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22

23

24

25

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27

University Press, 1996) that writing Arcadia was a result of obstacles to Sidney’s explicit political agendas. What happens to Melidora is also about defending the via activa, ‘women’s experience of the world’, and the belief that ‘untried virtue is no virtue at all’; as Constance Jordan argues in Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), ‘man and woman have the same virtue and it requires the same exercise’ (pp. 222–3). The moment is predominantly comic here and has antecedents in Sidney’s Arcadia, and in William Dunbar’s ‘Treatise of the Widow and the Two Married Women’, where the voyeur gets rather more than he bargained on, and far from hearing anything good, overhears scathing attacks on male sexual abilities. See our discussion in the previous chapter about the conversation between Cilandro and Leonius concerning the ‘self-lover’ as opposed to the constant lover (U, I: 407). [John] Barclay His Argenis: or, the Loves of Poliarchos and Argenis: Fairthfully translated out ot Latine in to English, By Kingesmill Long (London: Printed by G. P. for Henry Seile, 1625) STC 1392. This sense of the female protagonist having a secret known to few other characters, but shared with the reader, is also a characteristic of Wroth’s central character, Pamphilia. Helen Hackett also discusses ‘the selective disclosure of secrets and the selective admission of chosen individuals to private places’ (‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the “Femininity” of Romance’, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760 [London: Methuen, 1992], p. 52). On the connections between secrets and private domestic spaces see also Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987). Quite typically here, marriage silences the previously active woman by reminding her of her femininity. See also the reversion of Clara to submissive femininity in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Love’s Cure or, The Martial Maid, ed. Marea Mitchell (Nottingham: Nottingham Drama Texts, 1992), IV ii 1587–95. Brathwait, Panthalia, p. 148.

Chapter 4 ‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’: Governing the Self in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (1656), The History of the Nun (1689), Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in Excess (1720) 1 David Oakleaf, Introduction to Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess; or The Fatal Enquiry, 2nd edn (Peterborough: Broadview, 2000), p. 23. 2 Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti, Introduction to Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xv. 3 See, for example, Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Toni Bowers, ‘Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess’, in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work’, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of

212 Notes

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5 6 7

8 9

10 11

12

Kentucky, 2000), 48–68; Kathryn King, Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); and Deborah Burks, ‘Margaret Cavendish: Royalism and the Rhetoric of Ravenous and Beastly Desire’, Inbetween: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1 & 2 (2000): 77–88. Ballaster, Seductive Fictions, p. 84. Ballaster suggests that ‘the readers of women’s amatory fiction are required to read by a process of constant movement between sexual and party political meaning’, so that in the case of Aphra Behn’s novels, for example, ‘the almost exclusive interest in feminine subjectivity’ in the short novels of the 1680s ‘is, in many ways, a serviceable fiction’ for exploring the politics of public life (pp. 19, 84). Jane Barker, Love Intrigues, in Backscheider and Richetti, p. 89. Hereafter cited parenthetically (LI). John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 20. The insufficiency of good intentions is not, of course, specific to the female code of conduct. It is commonsense for men and women alike, as in Mr Allworthy’s advice to Tom in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones: ‘It is not enough that your designs, nay, that your actions, are intrinsically good; you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also’ ([Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996], p. 122). But it is of more pressing concern for women, whose virtue is so closely tied to a chastity that must of necessity be known by public repute. Richetti, p. 20. The potential rapist would seem to require the development of a fairly flexible and dynamic understanding of moral character in order to be recuperated as a suitor, though, as Ruth Perry argues, we need to be wary of assuming that sex had the same psychological significance – and unwanted sex the same potential for psychological trauma – as it now does. Perry argues that ‘sexual disgust – the feeling that sex with the “wrong” person could be viscerally disturbing – was an invention of the eighteenth century’ and ‘can hardly be found in the repertoire of earlier English written experience’. ‘Even rape’, she observes, ‘is recorded more as pain at physical force than psychological horror at unwanted intercourse registered as an invasion of the self’ (‘Sleeping with Mr. Collins’, in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson [New York: State University Press of New York, 2003], p. 217). Kate Lilley, Introduction to Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World and Other Writings, p. xi. Richardson’s Pamela objects in similar terms to Mr B’s fear that someone will rob him of his pretty maid by helping her to escape: ‘how came I to be his property?’ she asks. ‘What right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen goods?’ (P, p. 163). Miseria’s ignorance of feelings clearly evident to readers as well as the Prince suggests a pre-dating of the (in this case perhaps not) ‘radical disjunction between knowing reader and unselfconscious heroine’ that Ballaster argues is introduced with Marie de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves in 1679 (p. 55).

Notes 213 13 See Warner’s assumptions about the heroine’s intentions in ‘disguising’ herself as a country lass in Richardson’s Pamela, discussed in the following chapter. 14 George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, Advice to a Daughter, 6th Edition (London: 1699), pp. 98–9. 15 Halifax, p. 104. 16 In a roundabout way her virtue also acquires divine sanction by means of her ability to escape the common fate of young women in her situation, unprotected and travelling alone. It is in many respects, a very odd moral that prefaces Cavendish’s tale, the endeavour being, she claims, ‘to show young women the danger of travelling without their parents, husbands or particular friends to guard them’ (p. 47) – a lesson that none but the most relentlessly literal-minded would be likely to draw from the tale. But Miseria’s survival, virtue intact, attests to heaven’s blessing, for ‘those are in particular favoured with heaven’, Cavendish observes, ‘that are protected from violence and scandal, in a wandering life, or a travelling condition’ (p. 47). 17 Dorothy Osborne, Dorothy Osborne: Letters to William Temple, 1652–54, ed. Kenneth Parker (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 182. 18 The History of the Nun, in Backscheider and Richetti, p. 24, hereafter cited parenthetically (HN). 19 Ballaster, p. 83. Isabella is said to choose the church by strategy and inclination – by the strategy of her aunt, the Lady Abbess, who does everything she can to secure a young woman whose perfections would do credit to her house and whose fortune would be sorely missed, and by her own inclination, though that inclination has been shaped by an upbringing that has left her entirely ignorant of the unenclosed world. 20 Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt, in Two Tales: The Royal Slave and The Fair Jilt (Cambridge: The Folio Society, 1953), p. 147. 21 Isabella smothers Henault and, on the pretext of securing the sack containing Henault’s body that Villenoys carries over his shoulder, sews Villenoys’s clothes to the sack, consigning him to the river as well when he throws the body from a bridge. In Jane Barker’s retelling of this story in The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen (1726) it is enough that the lady murders her first husband; the second husband’s coat is accidentally sewn into the sheet in which the body is carried. 22 Yeazell, p. 51. 23 Yeazell, p. 51. 24 Kathryn King’s critical biography Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675–1725 describes Love Intrigues (or The Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, under which title Barker later reissued the novel) as a ‘special case’ in the oeuvre of arguably ‘England’s leading producer of Jacobite fiction’, the rest of her work characterized as ‘highly allusive political meditations designed to express the hopes and anxieties’ of Catholic and Jacobite readers (p. 149). The special status of Love Intrigues derives, she suggests, from the autobiographical element, acknowledged in the preface to what is assumed to be the first, unauthorized publication in 1713, but erased in Barker’s 1719 edition, where she also apologizes to the countess of Exeter for the dedication having been published without first having been granted her patronage: ‘I was extreamly confus’d … to

214 Notes

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29 30 31

32 33

find my little Novel presenting itself to your Ladyship without your Leave or Knowledge’ (quoted in King, p. 182). Fed up with Bosvil’s calculated negligence, Galesia finds a reason to quarrel with him when he puts forward a friend as a suitable husband for her. She writes to him, telling him she can only assume the friend has been advanced as a jest since he knows her preference for the single life, and suggests that he leave her alone and stop tormenting her. She assumes, however, that Bosvil will understand ‘the natural Interpretation of these Words, See me no more’, since only a fond mistress could be offended by his championing of someone else, and that, if he loves her, he will attend her despite the prohibition and make amends by offering marriage (p. 101). Bosvil either does not get the message or does not care to respond to it. He goes off and finds someone else. Margaret Williamson suggests that Galesia is modelling herself upon Orinda (Katherine Philips) in turning to poetry and in writing ‘her commitment to a single life upon a tree, the old pastoral lover’s gesture’ (Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650–1750 [Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1990], p. 246). Philips wrote poems to a circle of friends, each of whom was given a classical pseudonym. Philips’s was ‘Orinda’ and her close friend was ‘Lucasia’, the name of the friend to whom Galesia addresses her story in Love Intrigues. In her expectation that romance conventions will provide practical solutions to commonplace problems of social life, Galesia can perhaps be seen as a precursor of Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. The introduction to Love Intrigues in Backscheider and Richetti’s Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730, for example, speaks of Galesia trying on ‘a number of roles for women’ (p. 82), and Jane Spencer in ‘Creating the Woman Writer: The Autobiographical Works of Jane Barker’ (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2.2 [1983]) argues at some length that while ‘Galesia criticizes her dedication to study, medicine, and poetry … she leaves no doubt that these vocations are the most important parts of her life’ (p. 172). Spencer, p. 171. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 82. The assumption that only a prior love could make a woman unreceptive to the family’s choice of husband was justified by a conception of femininity as innately accommodating. Thomas Gisborne, for example, suggests that this natural ‘flexibility’ is part of the providential design: ‘Providence, designing from the beginning, that the manner of life to be adopted by women should in many respects ultimately depend, not so much on their own deliberate choice, as on the determination, or at least on the interest and convenience of the parent, of the husband, or of some other near connection; has implanted in them a remarkable tendency to conform to the wishes and example of those for whom they feel a warmth of regard, and even of all those with whom they are in familiar habits of intercourse’ (An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex [New York: Garland Publishing, 1974], p. 116). John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774; rpt. New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 80–1. In Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, ‘Eliza’ (glossed by Pope as Eliza Haywood) is represented as a ‘Juno of majestic size, / With cow-like udders, and with oxlike eyes’ (II: 163–4), and is offered as the prize in a pissing competition

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36

37

between two booksellers, one of whom (William Chetwood) was the publisher of Love in Excess. In his accompanying note Pope explains: ‘In this game is exposed, in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those shameless scribblers (for the most part of that sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or impudence) who in libellous memoirs and novels, reveal the faults or misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame, or disturbance of private happiness’ (Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], p. 471). (For an illuminating discussion of ‘copiousness figured as female’, see Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 31). Haywood, Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Inquiry, p. 86, hereafter cited parenthetically (LE). Haywood is at pains to insist that a woman’s love is as passionate as a man’s, and in its nature much the same, even in the case of the virtuous Melliora. We are later told, for example, that Melliora, in the garden one night with D’Elmont, feels ‘a racking kind of extasie, which might perhaps, had they been now alone, proved her desires were little different from his’ (p. 122). Certainly little is left to the imagination when D’Elmont steals into her room one night when she is asleep, lies down beside her, and she, in her sleep and dreaming of him, flings her arm around his neck; he is delighted to hear his charmer ‘in a soft and languishing voice, cry out, “Oh D’elmont, cease, cease to charm, to such a height – Life cannot bear these Raptures. – And then again, embracing him yet closer, – O! too, too lovely Count – extatick ruiner!”’ (p. 116). Ballaster argues that ‘Under cover of the dream state, Haywood can even bring her heroines to orgasm without undermining the conviction of their virtuous principles’ (Seductive Fictions, p. 171), but what Haywood is doing here is in essence no different from what countless writers have done before and since: trying to find ways of showing that a woman’s love for a man is as overpowering as his for her, but without suggesting that she is acting upon it, or doing anything to expedite a man’s attraction to her. Melliora retains her virtue, not by the absence of desire, but by the absence of self-interested, goal-directed behaviour that would realize that desire. See, for example, Gregory’s no less extraordinary assertion that, in England at least, unless a man’s attachment to a woman excites a gratitude that can develop into a preference, ‘there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of love’ (p. 83). Tania Modleski suggests that this is a consideration that still prevails today: ‘[women’s] most important achievement is supposed to be finding a husband; their greatest fault is attempting to do so’ (Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women [1982; rpt. New York: Routledge, 1990], p. 48).

Chapter 5 Pamela

Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s

1 Samuel Richardson, Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 67–8.

216 Notes 2 From ‘To my worthy Friend, the Editor of Pamela’, in The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 1740–1750, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, 6 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), I: 14. The letter, appearing prior to the publication of Pamela in the Weekly Miscellany 408 (11 October 1740) and included in Richardson’s Preface, has been attributed to the Rev. William Webster. 3 Richardson, Selected Letters, p. 232. 4 John Mullan, ‘High-Meriting, Low Descended’, London Review of Books, 12 December 2002, p. 29. 5 T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, ‘Richardson’s Revisions of Pamela’, Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 88. Even given speculation about the authority of revisions not published in Richardson’s lifetime, our preference for the final revised edition has also been guided by the principle of allowing the author the last word on what book he wanted to write. 6 The closest Sidney’s Pamela comes to having to negotiate the gap between self and representation is in the letter that she writes at the end of Arcadia, when the lovers have been captured and Musidorus and Pyrocles are under sentence of death. It is only as a princess that she can assert the authority of self-representation, for if she is still a princess, and Basilius’s heir, her word is her captors’ will: Musidorus ‘is a prince, and worthy to be my husband, and so is he my husband by me worthily chosen’ (NA, p. 828). But if her captors kill Musidorus, she argues, they also have to kill her, because whatever guilt they attribute to him extends to her and implicitly renders her, not a princess but a ‘private person’, without the authority to speak. As it happens, Pamela’s right to speak is neither confirmed nor denied because the letter is intercepted and remains unread. 7 By his own admission, Richardson was not a great reader, and even direct quotation of other works, as Eaves and Kimpel point out, does not imply ‘first-hand acquaintance’: ‘Three quotations in Pamela, five in Sir Charles, and no less than 43 in Clarissa are to be found in Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry’ (Samuel Richardson: A Biography [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971], p. 572). Even the fact that Richardson’s firm printed the 1724/25 threevolume edition of Sidney’s works is no guarantee that he had read Arcadia, even in part. William Sale’s analysis of printer’s ornaments suggests that Richardson printed parts of this edition, but, it seems, he printed everything other than Arcadia: only the introductory matter for Volume 1 (also containing Books I and II of Arcadia), none of Volume 2 (containing Books III, IV, and V of Arcadia), and all of Volume 3 (containing the ‘sixth book’, Richard Belling’s continuation of Arcadia, together with Sidney’s other works) (Samuel Richardson: Master Printer [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1950], p. 204). More recently, Keith Maslen has confirmed Richardson’s role in the printing of Sidney’s Works in Samuel Richardson of London, Printer (Dunedin: University of Otago, 2001, p. 139); however, he states that Volume 3 contains the Arcadia – possibly a confusion of Belling’s ‘sixth book’ with Sidney’s work. 8 The Arcadia in common currency might include details such as Pamela’s name, perhaps by way of Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband (or, somewhat less likely, by way of Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Miss Blount); a few odd phrases (most notably Pamela’s representation of herself as ‘a fine sportingpiece for the great, a mere tennis-ball of fortune!’ [p. 280], though this too

Notes 217

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12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20 21 22

might have come secondhand, by way of Shakespeare); or, more generally, ‘the idea of the adventure’ in which the heroine is imprisoned by her enemies, ‘imploring heaven that her virtue may be preserved’ (J. J. Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, trans. Elizabeth Lee [1890; rpt. London: Ernest Benn, 1966], p. 249) – perhaps by way of the controversy surrounding Charles II’s borrowing of Pamela’s prayer in her captivity, attacked by John Milton as ‘stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction’ (Eikonoklastes, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Y. Hughes [New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957], p. 793). Walter Allen, The English Novel (1954; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 25. Jacob Leed, ‘Richardson’s Pamela and Sidney’s’, AUMLLA 40 (1973): 240–5. Gillian Beer, ‘Pamela: Rethinking Arcadia’, in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor, pp. 23–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 23. Barbauld, 1: xviii. Beer, p. 29. What was once an aristocratic name acquired, after the popularity of Richardson’s Pamela, distinctly plebeian overtones. By the midnineteenth century, Charlotte Yonge in her History of Christian Names (1884; rpt. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1966) suggests that Richardson used the name from Sidney’s Arcadia ‘as a recommendation to the maid-servant whom he made his heroine’, and notes that ‘Pamela is still not uncommon among the lower classes’ (p. 464). According to Leslie Dunkling’s frequency count in First Names First (London: Dent, 1977), it has subsequently found particular favour in the colonies (see, for example, p. 225). Ian Watt, ‘The Naming of Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding’, Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 329. Watt suggests ‘in choosing the name Richardson was himself unconsciously aware of the ambiguities of Pamela’s character and motivation’ (p. 329). Pope, Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, l. 52, p. 48. See, for example, Richard Steele, The Tender Husband: or, The Accomplish’d Fools, II. ii, in The Plays of Richard Steele, ed. Shirley Strum Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 238. In what looks very much like a rearguard action, this play becomes the object of some scathing observations from Richardson’s Pamela in Pamela 2. Samuel Richardson, Pamela Part II, vols III and IV of The Works of Samuel Richardson, 19 vols (London: James Carpenter and William Miller, 1811), IV: 94, hereafter referred to as Pamela 2 and cited parenthetically (P2). Milton, p. 793. Richardson was also prepared to acknowledge that the benefits might be very much one-sided. He observed to Solomon Lowe, for example, that ‘it is apparent by the whole Tenor of Mr. B.’s Behaviour to Pamela after Marriage, that nothing but such an implicit Obedience, and slavish Submission, as Pamela shewed to all his Injunctions and Dictates, could have made her tolerably happy’ (Selected Letters, p. 124). Beer, p. 29. Leed, p. 240. Beer, p. 29. Leed and Beer go on to raise other possible parallels: the grotesqueries of their keepers; the similarities between Cecropia and Mrs Jewkes; the transformation of eclogues into hymns; the threat of forced marriages

218 Notes

23 24

25 26

27

28 29

30

31 32

33 34 35

deflected by the dictates of filial obedience; the ‘problem of love between persons placed high and low in society’ (Leed, p. 243); and meditations on suicide. Murray L. Brown, ‘Learning to Read Richardson: Pamela, ‘Speaking Pictures’, and the Visual Hermeneutic’, Studies in the Novel 25.2 (1993): 141. Brown, 142. Brown argues that Richardson is deliberately invoking Arcadia, but the danger also applies to uninvited parallels between Richardson’s heroine and her namesake. Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 58. Brown, p. 142. We might ask why Richardson should court this danger in the first place by allowing his heroine to go fishing – why he did not simply have her engage in some other, less allusive, pastoral activity – though Brown argues the danger is inherent in the title, Pamela. Peter Shaw, The Reflector (London: Printed for T. Longman, 1750), p. 14, quoted in Ivor Indyk, ‘Interpretative Relevance, and Richardson’s Pamela’, Southern Review 16 (1983): 32. Brown, p. 142. Lois E. Bueler comments that the ‘concept of literature’ had changed by the eighteenth century, so that ‘instead of applying the topics and practicing the authoritative forms of the culture at large, the expressive text “consecrates the writer”, claiming to express individual experience, sanctify individual sensibility, and glorify the private voice’ (The Tested Woman Plot: Women’s Choices, Men’s Judgments, and the Shaping of Stories [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001], p. 144). Our point is that a more highly developed interiority does not necessarily improve the female character’s lot. Betty Rizzo, ‘Renegotiating the Gothic’, in Revising Women: EighteenthCentury ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula Backscheider (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 65. Janine Barchas, The Annotations in Lady Bradshaigh’s Copy of Clarissa (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1998), p. 85. His rejoinder follows hard on Lady Bradshaigh’s note, continuing down the left-hand margin, across the bottom of the page onto the facing page and along its right-hand margin, until he finally seems done, leaving off with ‘But no more – ’. Apparently, though, he could not contain himself and over the next five pages he continues to make his point by heavily marking up the text, underscoring words and whole sentences, adding vertical lines (both straight and wavy) and brackets in the margin, and occasionally resorting to the pictorial attention-seeking aid, the pointing hand ( ☞). (In Barchas’s edition four asterisks indicate an illegible word and double asterisks a ‘highly speculative reading’. Other editorial marks have been omitted.) Barchas, pp. 85–6. Barchas, p. 9. In the eighteenth century ‘device’ did not as a matter of course include the sense of underhandedness. Johnson’s Dictionary lists four meanings: a contrivance or stratagem; a design, scheme, project, or speculation; an emblem on a shield; and invention or genius. Another sense of the word, referring to a mechanical contraption, was also common. It is perhaps significant, though, that the word was seldom used to refer to a design implemented by

Notes 219

36 37 38 39

a woman. In the 77 novels collected in the Chadwyck-Healey eighteenthcentury fiction database, there are 58 ‘devices’, about half of them stratagems (rather than insignia or mechanical contrivances) and all except three are devised by men. Of these three, one belongs to Mrs Pickle (devised to keep her sister-in-law, Mrs Grizzle, out of her hair), one is imputed, unfairly, to Clarissa by her family, and one, tellingly, is of Mrs Cole’s devising for replicating virginity in Fanny Hill. Richardson, Clarissa, pp. 1233, 1265. Barchas, p. 98. Barchas, p. 87. Although modern critics tend to attack Pamela for not trying hard enough to extricate herself from Mr B’s clutches, Richardson’s early commentators, as Ivor Indyk points out, thought that she was already doing too much: Richardson’s early commentators object as much to Pamela’s active role in the novel as they do to the fact that this activity is rewarded by social elevation. The objection applies to all aspects of her activity – her letterwriting, her piety, her knowledge of sexual implication, her use of clothing, her aggression and her submission, her verbal strength, her physical weakness. It also applies to the activity of thought, Pamela’s incessant reviewing of motive and consequence. These attributes, and thought in particular, evidently complicate Pamela’s presumed role as modest Virgin, chaste Bride and obliging Wife. (Indyk, p. 32.)

40 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 187. 41 Warner, pp. xv, 193. 42 Warner, pp. 193, 194. The discussion of Pamela is part of a larger study of the early novel in relation to the print-media culture that, Warner insists, needs to be read in its entirety in order to grasp its ‘complex interplay’ (p. xv). 43 Warner, p. 194. Warner deliberately chooses for comparison ‘a character who could not be more different from Pamela’ (p. 194), but it is not only character that, in some respects at least, could not be more different. 44 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 7. 45 As Bueler points out in The Tested Woman Plot, Pamela’s satisfaction with her humble dress can be seen to partake in the long-standing tradition of the tested woman: ‘Like Griselda’s, part of Pamela’s test involves responding to status-signifying changes of dress with humility and grace’ (p. 157). 46 It is sometimes argued that Mr B does not in fact recognize Pamela, which may well be true when he first glimpses her with her back towards him in the room he is about to enter. But once the action becomes close-up and personal, it is hard to take seriously Mr B’s professed ignorance of her true identity, though it is possible that the romance convention of total anonymity in disguise is allowed to confuse the issue. 47 Warner, p. 196. 48 Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 33.

220 Notes 49 Thomas Keymer, in his Introduction to his and Alice Wakely’s Oxford edition of Pamela (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), argues, for example, that ‘the failure of Pamela to obey her parents’ urgent advice to ‘flee this evil Great House and Man’ at the very beginning of the novel is not just a convenient plot device (without which there would be no story) but also ‘introduces psychological complications – a vivid sense of competing duties and desires which the heroine herself seems the last to spot’. Keymer argues that Richardson actually cultivates these ‘irruptions of mixed motive’, and that ‘the notorious obsession with the waistcoat, and Pamela’s anxiety … about Mr B.’s mishap while fording a stream (“What is the Matter, with all his ill Usage of me, that I cannot hate him?”), are among the indicators of divided consciousness that gave Richardson his early reputation for representing, as never before, “the inmost Recesses of [the] Mind”’ (p. xv). But while ‘divided consciousness’ and ‘secret impulses’ (p. xvi) may make better sense to the modern reader than Sidney’s explanation of Philoclea’s feelings for Zelmane, both can be seen as mechanisms for naturalizing the convention that love develops independently of human volition. 50 As a comparison of the first edition and the final revised edition of Pamela suggests, Richardson seems to have been aware that this crucial issue needed bolstering. At the risk, perhaps, of bringing suspicions of Pamela’s credibility to the reader’s attention, he has added Lady Davers’s assurance to Pamela that she can afford to be perfectly candid, and removes (as elsewhere) the reference to Mr B’s ‘naughty’ actions, which could be misconstrued as trivializing his offence. In the first edition, the corresponding passage reads as follows: I believe, if the Truth was known, you lov’d the Wretch not a little. While my Trials lasted, Madam, said I, I had not a Thought of any thing, but to preserve my Innocence; much less of Love. But tell me truly, said she, Did you not love him all the time? I had always, Madam, answer’d I, a great Reverence for my Master, and thought all his good Actions doubly good; and for his naughty ones, tho’ I abhorr’d his Attempts upon me, yet I could not hate him; and always wish’d him well; but I did not know that it was Love. Indeed I had not the Presumption!’ Sweet Girl! said she; that’s prettily said. (Pamela, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, p. 452) 51 Chapter 4 outlines a range of prudential reasons for a woman not to be seen to love first, but of particular interest in the context of the parallel Warner draws between Fantomina and Pamela is the advantage that Fantomina identifies in her series of disguises. The woman who is seen to love prior to an unequivocal commitment on the man’s part risks the ignominy of her affections being publicly slighted, and, quite apart from the objective of keeping Beauplaisir’s flame alive, Fantomina foresees that, should he prove false, she will ‘hear no Whispers’, ‘the odious Word Forsaken’ will never wound her ears, and it will not be in the power of her ‘Undoer himself’ to triumph over her (Eliza Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias [Peterborough: Broadview, 2004], p. 49). Not

Notes 221

52 53

54 55

56 57

58

everything the heroine does is solely in her sexual character; sometimes the ‘human creature’ has an agenda as well. Warner, p. 192. In Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Laura Gowing notes that ‘Vows of marriage had to be spoken in the present tense and unconditionally; promises in the future tense represented no more than an intention, and additions like “if my friends consent” made a contract conditional’ (p. 144). Warner, p. 190. Robert Greene, Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, in The Descent of Euphues: Three Elizabethan Romance Stories, ed. James Winny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 97–101. Richardson certainly knew Dorastus and Fawnia by name. In Clarissa, the rake, Lovelace, blames this story for the threat of fire that in the middle of the night persuades Clarissa to unbolt, unbar, and unlock her door, defending himself against the suspicion that the fire was staged in order, as Clarissa puts it, to frighten her ‘almost naked into his arms’ (754), by insisting that the fire was real: ‘all owing to the carelessness of Mrs Sinclair’s cook-maid, who, having sat up to read the simple history of Dorastus and Faunia, when she should have been in bed, set fire to an old pair of calico window-curtains (723). The Historie of Dorastus and Fawnia was the running title of Greene’s Pandosto and was frequently known by this name in reprintings and broadside redactions. Richard Gooding, ‘Pamela, Shamela, and the Politics of the Pamela Vogue’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7.2 (1995): 120, 121–2. Winfried Schleiner, ‘Rank and Marriage: A Study of the Motif of “Woman Willfully Tested”’, Comparative Literature Studies 9 (1972): 365. A number of critics have argued that the Griselda motif seems to inform Richardson’s depiction of his heroine’s trials. See, for example, Bueler, p. 157; James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (1949; rpt. NY: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1966), p. 109; Mark Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 11; Barbara Belyea, ‘Romance and Richardson’s Pamela’, English Studies in Canada 10.4 (1984): 409. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 113.

Chapter 6 Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to Earth in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote 1 In the Introduction to The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), James Raven, Helen Small, and Naomi Taylor point out that by the late seventeenth century ‘a broadsheet ballad could be bought for 1d, while 24-page chapbooks might cost up to 6d’, and while books were ‘substantially more expensive … ranging from a few shillings to several guineas’, their availability in ‘part-issues, cheaper “reprint” series and a flourishing second-hand market did assist many modest buyers’ (8). 2 Eaves and Kimpel, Samuel Richardson, p. 149. 3 Barbauld, I: lxxvii.

222 Notes 4 As Florian Stuber points out, ‘the first four editions of Pamela (November 1740, February 1741, March 1741 and May 1741) close with the words, “Here end the Letters of Pamela.” Only in the fifth edition (September 1741) is the sentence emended to, “Here end, at present, the Letters of Pamela”’ (‘Pamela II: “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”’, in New Essays on Samuel Richardson, ed. Albert J. Rivero [London: Macmillan, 1996], p. 54). 5 Richardson, Selected Letters, p. 53. In the same letter (to Stephen Duck), Richardson refers to the well-intentioned advice of an ‘excellent Physician’ who ‘was so good as to give me a Plan to break Legs and Arms and to fire Mansion Houses to create Distresses’ (p. 52), but maintains he is prepared to forgo profits for instruction, conscious ‘that there cannot, naturally, be the room for Plots, Stratagem and Intrigue in the present Volumes as in the first’ (p. 53). (See also note 29 below.) 6 The reference to the romance heroine’s facility in dropping from windows has disappeared (among many other things) from the Everyman edition, which was based on Charles Cooke’s 1811 abridgement – perhaps because it reflects poorly on Pamela, who window-drops herself when she is escaping from Lady Davers. 7 The conditions cover four pages (P2, III: 330–3). Elizabeth Inchbald makes an interesting observation in her Preface to The Maid of the Mill, in the collection The British Theatre, regarding the ‘equalizing’ tendencies of Pamela (on which The Maid is, somewhat circuitously, based). She suggests that although the novel, like the play, ‘most laudably, teaches man to marry where his heart is fixed, it unfortunately encourages woman to fix hers, where ambition alone may direct her choice; or where, sometimes, her hopes ought never to aspire’. Even so, she observes, Pamela’s marriage was ‘the delight of every reader, at the time that book was first published, and for some years after – but when admiration began to abate, ridicule was substituted in its stead; and a marriage for love, contracted by a man of quality, with his inferior in birth and fortune, was, with poor Pamela’s preferment, held in the highest contempt’ (Preface to The Maid of the Mill, in The British Theatre; or, A Collection of Plays, … with Biographical and Critical Remarks by Mrs. Inchbald, 25 vols [London: 1808], XVII: 4–5). 8 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 4 (31 March 1750), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 16 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–90), III: 19. 9 Johnson, III: 21. 10 Johnson, III: 21. 11 McKeon, p. 52. 12 For a comprehensive account of the perceived dangers of fiction in this period, see Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 13 ‘M. d. L., Chirugien’, quoted in a review of De l’Homme, et de la Femme in The Monthly Review (July 1773), for example, warns that ‘[a] young girl, instead of running about and playing, reads, perpetually reads; and at 20, becomes full of vapours, instead of being qualified for the duties of a good wife, or nurse’ (p. 543). In the dramatic interlude, Half an Hour after Supper, Mr Sturdy is more worried about the disruption to his household, com-

Notes 223

14

15

16

17

18

plaining to his sister Tabitha: ‘It’s enough to provoke a saint to see how these cursed novels interrupt the whole order of one’s house! I can neither go to dinner, supper, or to bed, if you happen to be in a d—d “interesting crisis”, as you call it’ ([London: 1789], p. 8). In ‘On Novel Writing’, for example, Henry Mackenzie (in The Lounger 20, 18 June 1785) criticizes novels that deliver their imaginative pleasures without any corresponding ‘labour of thought’ (p. 77). Other common complaints were that the habit of reading novels ‘breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature, and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities’ (James Beattie, ‘On Fable and Romance’, in Dissertations Moral and Critical [London: 1783], p. 574). Oliver Goldsmith, for example, advised his brother against allowing his son to risk the disaffection that fiction encourages: ‘Above all things, let him never touch a romance or novel: those paint beauty in colours more charming than nature; and describe happiness that man never tastes. How delusive, how destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss. They teach the youthful mind to sigh after beauty and happiness which never existed; to despise the little good which fortune has mixed in our cup, by expecting more than she ever gave’ (Letter to his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, February 1759, in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols [London: John Murray, 1854], IV: 418). According to the writer known as ‘the Sylph’, novels ‘sap the very foundations of virtue’ by liberating the passions. Even fiction that professes to imitate life was thought liable to ‘generate and promote a corruption of manners’, for, ‘under the pretence of following nature’, such novels ‘take off that curb from the passions, which reason and religion would impose’ (Sylph 5 [6 October 1795], p. 35). Less sweepingly, Mackenzie locates the ‘principal danger of novels, as forming a mistaken and pernicious system of morality’ in the ‘rivalship of virtues and duties’: ‘The duty to parents is contrasted with the ties of friendship and of love; the virtues of justice, of prudence, of economy, are put in competition with the exertions of generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion’ (79). While fiction was sometimes criticized for cultivating an artificially refined and mawkish sensibility, there were also complaints that it redirected tender feelings away from real afflictions and concentrated them instead on the more elegant distresses of its imaginary heroes and heroines. ‘The Sylph’ claims, for example, to ‘have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread’ (36–37). In Half an Hour after Supper, Mr Sturdy also takes exception to his wife’s defence of fiction on the grounds that her daughters have been taught ‘taste – and sentiment and sensibilities’ (8). Sturdy retorts: ‘Sensibility!’ for what? – to blubber and roar over distresses that never existed, and steel your hearts against that which surrounds us. Could I collect more than a crown amongst ye all the other day, for poor Bob Martin, his distressed wife, and seven children, all ill at once, and not a shilling to buy them necessaries? – because, truly, their distress wasn’t elegant’ (p. 8). Stories about ordinary men and women in common life exacerbate the danger, but as fears about the harmful effects of fiction become more urgent

224 Notes

19

20

21 22 23 24 25

26

27

28 29

30 31

as a consequence of the absorptive reading encouraged by more realistic stories, those fears are also generalized to all kinds of fiction, and the attacks do not always discriminate between the older style of narrative and the new. See Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, and Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), for accounts of changes in the reading experience during the eighteenth century that encouraged sympathetic identification. Letters of Jemima, Marchioness of Grey, Lucas Collection: Beds. and Luton Archive, L 30/9/56/8, Hon Mrs Heathcote to Marchioness Grey, 25 November 1753. The French is a bit wobbly, but seems to mean ‘tender feelings lead further than you think’. Gisborne, p. 216. Gisborne, pp. 216–7. Gisborne, pp. 216–7. Gisborne, p. 214. In Licensing Entertainment, Warner attributes the kind of ‘absorptive reading’ characteristic of Pamela to a different kind of dramatic effect, through the technique of masks and screens used ‘to project a new persona’ that, paradoxically, seems not to be performing for an audience: ‘Anonymous publication allows Richardson to publish his narrative in the form of naive familiar letters by throwing his voice into the mouth of a young girl’ (p. 227). The dramatic technique of narrative that we are referring to here, however, is not specific to the sincerity-effect that Warner describes but associated more generally with the structure of narrative and its focus on a central character. When Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story was praised in an anonymous review as ‘truly dramatic’, for example, it is because the ‘rising interest is not broken, or even interrupted, by a constellation of splendid characters, as to make the reader at a loss to say which is the hero of the tale’ (Analytical Review, X (1791): 101). Elizabeth Montagu, The Letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, with Some of the Letters of her Correspondents, ed. Matthew Montagu, 4 vols (1809; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1974), II: 87–88. Betty A. Schellenberg, ‘Enclosing the Immovable: Structuring Social Authority in Pamela 2’, in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson, ed. David Blewett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 90. Doody, A Natural Passion, p. 77. David Shuttleton notes that when Richardson asked Dr George Cheyne to report on the reception of Pamela 2 in Bath, Cheyne told him that ‘readers were finding it “defective in Incidents”’. Later, after another complaint that ‘the sequel lacked “moving Incidents” and the subject matter seemed “too barren of Distresses to excite our Pity,” Richardson replied that “an excellent Physician was so good as to give me a Plan to break Legs and Arms and to Fire mansion Houses to create Distresses; But my Business and View was to aim at Instruction in a genteel and usual Married Life”’ (‘“Pamela’s Library”: Samuel Richardson and Dr. Cheyne’s “Universal Cure”’, Eighteenth-Century Life 23.1 [1999]: 72). Schellenberg, p. 90. Michael McKeon, quoted in Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers’, p. 85.

Notes 225 32 Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travelers’, p. 96. 33 At the end of Pamela’s lecture, the Dean’s daughter draws the moral for the convenience of other listeners: ‘it behoves a prudent woman to guard against first impressions of favour, since she will think herself obliged, in compliment to her own judgment, to find reasons, if possible, to confirm them’ (P2, IV: 432). The lesson on first impressions, whether of favour or disfavour, is one that Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet might well take to heart. 34 Cf. Sigmund Freud’s discussion of ‘the phenomenon of sexual overvaluation’ in ‘Being in Love and Hypnosis ‘where he argues that ‘when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on to the object … If the sexual overvaluation and the being in love increase even further, then … the ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacrifice thus follows as a natural consequence. The object has, so to speak, consumed the ego. Traits of humility, of the limitation of narcissism, and of self-injury occur in every case of being in love’ (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols [London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74], XVIII: 112–3). 35 Scott Paul Gordon, ‘The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38.3 (1998): 501. 36 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols (1785; rpt. New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930), I: 68. 37 Reeve, I: 67–8. 38 Clara Reeve, Preface to The Champion of Virtue (Colchester: 1777). 39 Duncan Isles, Appendix to The Female Quixote, ‘Johnson, Richardson, and The Female Quixote’, p. 426. 40 Jocelyn Catty, Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England (London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 13. The looseness of the terms ‘rape’ and ‘ravishment’ can also be seen to encourage a blurring of the boundaries between rape and ‘forceful seduction’. ‘Figurative “ravishment”’ in a woman, as Catty points out, quoting the OED, ‘indicates “transport, rapture, ecstasy”; to “ravish” is thus “to transport with the strength of some feeling, to carry away with rapture; to fill with ecstasy or delight; to entrance”’ (14), so that signs of the woman’s figurative ravishment could be read as an invitation to physical ravishment. In Behn’s play, The Rover, for example, Antonio is certainly encouraged by the song he hears coming from Angellica’s rooms, the last verse of which ends: She gazed around upon the place, And saw the grove (resembling night) To all the joys of love invite, Whilst guilty smiles and blushes dressed her face. At this the bashful youth all transport grew, And with kind force he taught the virgin how To yield what all his sighs could never do. (II.i) (In Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd [London: Penguin, 1992], p. 180.)

226 Notes 41 ‘I cannot live without you and since the thing is gone so far, I will not!’ (P, p. 232); ‘I could curse my weakness and my folly, which makes me own, that I cannot live without you’ (P, p. 244); ‘as I have often said, I cannot live without you; and I would divide, with all my soul, my estate with you, to make you mine upon my own terms’ (P, p. 251); ‘spare me, my dearest girl, the confusion of following you to your father’s; which I must do, if you go on; for I find I cannot live without you’ (P, p. 286). 42 In Keymer and Sabor, 1: 13–14.

Chapter 7 ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice 1 For a discussion of the Cinderella parallel, see, for example, Henrietta Ten Harmsel, Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), and for a discussion of parallels with Fanny Burney’s work, see Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2 To our knowledge, the closest anyone comes to suggesting the possibility of Austen’s familiarity with Sidney’s work is Jocelyn Harris’s observation in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) that, in relation to Northanger Abbey, ‘the two writers do look very alike’ in their defence of poetry/fiction (p. 28). 3 Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 274. 4 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley and Frank W. Bradbrook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 7, hereafter cited parenthetically (P&P). 5 Edward Neill in The Politics of Jane Austen (Houndmills: Palgrave, 1999) suggests that a similar symmetry structures Pride and Prejudice, in that Darcy ‘is to his amiable but weak-minded friend as the spirited Elizabeth is to her charming but insipid sister Jane’ (p. 65). 6 Maurice Evans, Introduction to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, NA, p. 44. 7 In some respects the parallels between Sidney’s and Austen’s sets of sisters are more inevitable than surprising, given that the feminine ideal has remained so constant and both sisters need to be virtuous yet different – which is a problem with the parallel between Marianne and Philoclea. We may know less of Jane’s feelings than Marianne’s or Philoclea’s, and Bingley’s fascination with her charms may find more subdued expression than Pyrocles’s, but, unlike Marianne, she bears her trials with quiet dignity and never becomes so absorbed in her own feelings that she is blind to the distresses of others. 8 Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778–1860 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 73. 9 In public, Evelina spends a lot of her time in agonies of embarrassed silence, but on the page, recording her social disasters for her guardian or her friend Maria, her wit can be merciless. 10 In an otherwise admirable three-part adaptation of Clarissa for television, for example, much of necessity was lost, but the greatest loss was Clarissa’s

Notes 227

11 12

13

14

15

16 17

18

19

20

21 22

ability to articulate the terms in which her experience was to be understood. Without the means of mediating through words between who she was and what was happening to her, she became much more of a victim than she ever was in the novel. Waldron, p. 49. For a somewhat different interpretation of the implications of this scene, see Lorna Ellis, Appearing to Diminish: Female Development and the British “Bildungsroman” 1750–1850 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), where Ellis argues that Elizabeth is experimenting with ‘the possibility of being both the subject and object of the gaze’, initiating Elizabeth’s development of control over ‘how she appears and how he perceives her’ (p. 133). The other side of the coin is Mr Collins’s assessment of Darcy. Bingley may be everything a young man ought to be, but Darcy possesses, according to Mr Collins, ‘every thing the heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive patronage’ (p. 322). Kate Lock, ‘The Wait is Over’, Radio Times (5 July 1997), quoted in Virginia L. Blum, ‘The Return to Repression’, in Jane Austen and Co.: Remaking the Past in Contemporary Culture, ed. Suzanne R. Pucci and James Thompson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), fn. 38, p. 177. Austen may be having a sly dig at Mr Bennet. He fears that Elizabeth is entering upon an ‘unequal marriage’, which he seems to understand as a marriage in which a woman does not look up to her husband as her superior. Deborah Kaplan, Jane Austen among Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 186. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 27. The reference is to Richardson’s contribution to Johnson’s The Rambler 97 (19 February 1751) where he declares: ‘That a young lady should be in love, and the love of the young gentleman undeclared, is an heterodoxy which prudence, and even policy, must not allow’ (Johnson, IV: 156). Interestingly, Sidney’s Philoclea is allowed the liberty of realizing in dreams desires that are repressed by day, so that in a sense she falls in love in her sleep: ‘dreams by night began to bring more unto her than she durst wish by day, whereout waking did make her know herself the better by the image of those fancies’ (NA, p. 240). As we saw in Chapter 4, Melliora in Love in Excess vocalizes her desire in her sleep. The tone here is a worry: it suggests that someone is not taking these elevated aspirations very seriously, though whether the archness – the comic exaggeration of ‘the admiring multitude,’ the ponderous gravity of ‘connubial felicity’ – is the narrator’s or Elizabeth’s it is hard to tell. In one respect, Elizabeth’s revelation of her knowledge of Darcy’s intervention in Lydia’s affairs is itself an obstacle to the frank and open disclosure of feeling that Darcy seeks since Elizabeth could be understood as being constrained by obligation to the man whose largesse has rescued her family from disgrace. It is to Darcy’s credit that he has attempted to conceal his generosity, but it is also in his best interests if his object is to establish the true state of her heart. Waldron, p. 41. Waldron, p. 44.

228 Notes 23 Janet Todd, ‘Jane Austen, Politics and Sensibility’, in Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 75. 24 Kaplan, pp. 200–2. 25 Kaplan, p. 183. 26 It should be noted that the personal attributes on which Arabella would base her esteem are all concerned with a man’s suitability as a lover: the ‘Sufferings’ that he is prepared to endure for her sake and the ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Respect’ that he has shown her. 27 Fielding, p. 235. 28 Newton, p. 48. 29 Robert M. Polhemus, Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 49. 30 Polhemus, pp. 49, 51. 31 Polhemus, p. 51. 32 B. C. Southam, in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts: A Study of the Novelist’s Development through the Surviving Papers (London: The Athlone Press, 2001), notes that Austen ‘wrote to Cassandra in 1807 that the Steventon household has been reading … [The Female Quixote] for their “evening amusement; to me a very high one, as I find the work quite equal to what I remembered it”’ (p. 11). He also suggests that ‘the situation in “Edgar and Emma”, where the heroine, in search of a confidant, turns in desperation to the footman, is perhaps a memory of Mrs Lennox’s heroine, Arabella, who may also have been in Jane Austen’s mind when she was writing of Margaret Lesley in “Lesley Castle”’ (p. 12). 33 Gregory, pp. 82–3. 34 Richard Handler and Daniel Segal, Jane Austen and the Fiction of Culture: An Essay on the Narration of Social Realities (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1990), p. 72. 35 Handler and Segal, p. 72. 36 Waldron takes a different slant on the problem: ‘If Darcy were behaving according to the conventions of fiction here he would hesitate – if we are to believe him sympathetic – to put Elizabeth under a financial obligation. Austen ignores this expectation and allows her aunt, her father and herself to accept his generosity with little demur. In another novel, Elizabeth would have to refuse him again out of “delicacy”’ (p. 59).

Chapter 8 Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All the Way with Jane Eyre? 1 Barbara Milech, ‘Romancing the Reader’, in Literature and Popular Culture, ed. Horst Ruthrof and John Fiske (Melbourne: Murdoch University, 1987), p. 190n. 2 Milton Viederman, ‘The Nature of Passionate Love’, in Passionate Attachments: Thinking about Love, ed. William Gaylin and Ethel Person (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. 7. 3 Nancy Cervetti, Scenes of Reading: Transforming Romance in Brontë, Eliot, and Woolf (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 59.

Notes 229 4 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Michael Mason (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 412, hereafter cited parenthetically. 5 Ellis, for example, talks of the ‘tension between the two aspects of Jane Eyre, its subversive portrayal of relationships filled with conflict and disguise and its more conservative emphasis on fated love and idealized self-fulfillment’ as being played out both within the novel itself and in Brontë criticism (p. 158). More famously, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar draw attention to ‘the oscillation between overtly “angelic” dogma and covertly Satanic fury’ (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], p. 314). 6 ‘E. P.’ [Edwin Percy Whipple], ‘Novels of the Season’, North American Review 141 (October 1848), in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 97. 7 Penny Boumelha, Charlotte Brontë (Hemel Hemstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 75. 8 Elizabeth Rigby, Review of Jane Eyre, Quarterly Review 84 (December 1848), in The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, p. 109. 9 Ann Mozley, Christian Remembrancer 15 (April 1853), quoted in Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 162. 10 Quoted in Gordon, p. 163. 11 As John Gardner remarks in On Becoming a Novelist (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), most fiction can be reduced to a single plot: someone ‘wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including [his or her] own doubts)’, and either gets it or doesn’t (p. 54). 12 In Russian Formalist terms, it is the desiring subject who ‘embodies the motivation which connects the motifs’ that he (or she) is the means of stringing together (Boris Tomashevsky, ‘Thematics’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965], p. 90), though the status of protagonist is understood to be a function of plot rather than story, a distinction that we do not pursue here. 13 When Jane proposes to ‘clean down’ Moor House as the first indulgence of her new wealth, St John exhorts her to ‘look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys’, but Jane insists that they are ‘the best things the world has!’ (p. 436). 14 Boumelha, p. 73. 15 Boumelha, p. 74. 16 To Ellen Nussey [20 November 1840], in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, 2 vols, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), I: 234. 17 Brontë advises Nussey: ‘As to little Walter Mitchell – I think he will not die for love of anybody – you might safely coquette with him a trifle if you were so disposed – without fear of having a broken heart on your Conscience – I am not quite in earnest in this recommendation – nor am I in some other parts of this letter’ (The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, I: 234). 18 John Gregory went so far as to recommend that, should a woman find herself in love, she should never reveal its true extent, even when married. The fact that the woman has agreed to marriage ‘sufficiently shews [her] preference, which is all [the husband] is intitled to know’ (p. 88). 19 Wollstonecraft, p. 119.

230 Notes 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27

28

29 30

Wollstonecraft, p. 67. Wollstonecraft, p. 183. Wollstonecraft, p. 118. The reference to a passion that ‘throbs fast and fully’ comes from Brontë’s famous criticism of Austen, whom she damns with the faintest of praise. She acknowledges in a letter to having read Austen’s Emma ‘with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable.’ While admitting that Austen ‘does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well’, she complains that this ‘business’ is ‘not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet; what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study, but what throbs fast and fully, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of death – this Miss Austen ignores’ (quoted in Rebecca Fraser, Charlotte Brontë [London: Methuen, 1988], pp. 363–4). It comes as something of a shock much later in the novel when Rochester insists he would not have forced Jane to be his mistress (p. 489). The very possibility might make one reassess the calibre of a man who can conceive of such an option. In one of the first studies to deal at length with Jane Eyre’s debt to Richardson’s Pamela, Janet Spens’s essay on ‘Charlotte Brontë’ draws extensive parallels between the two works but distinguishes between Jane’s portrayal as ‘a sympathetic and really virtuous heroine’ and Pamela’s as ‘a designing minx’ (Essays and Studies, ed. H. W. Garrod [London: Clarendon, 1929], pp. 60–1). See, for example, Step 3 of Janice Radway’s 13 ‘logically related functions’ in the romance plot of today’s mass-market fiction: ‘The aristocratic male responds ambiguously to the heroine’ (Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984], p. 134). Jane’s resolute refusal to entertain fairy tale possibilities actually blinds her to what in reality is going on in Thornfield. When Mrs Fairfax had first shown her over Thornfield Hall, Jane likens the third storey to ‘a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle’ (p. 122). But she resists the spell of the fantastic, even when that observation followed by a ‘preternatural’ laugh that echoes its ‘clamorous peal’ in every lonely chamber (p. 123). Jane not only rejects Rochester as a potential Bluebeard; she also displays none of the curiosity of Bluebeard’s wife. Given the brave spirit, penetrating eye, and lack of timidity that St John later congratulates her on, her docility in this instance might be considered somewhat out of character, but her resistance to fairy tale possibilities does have effect of masking the nature of the story she herself is acting out. In Brontë’s Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre she defends the novel against those who think that ‘whatever is unusual is wrong’ by reminding her readers of ‘certain simple truths’: ‘Conventionality is not morality. Selfrighteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last’ (p. 5). Newton, p. 73. Such conversations can also be seen as participating in the development of the novelistic fiction that redefines what a man wants as a woman to talk

Notes 231

31 32

33 34

35

36

to. It is certainly one of Jane’s chief attractions, not only for Rochester, but also for St John, who, after discovering that he and Jane are cousins, concedes that he can love her as a sister, telling Jane: ‘your presence is always agreeable to me; in your conversation I have already for some time found a salutary solace’ (p. 433). Interestingly, the attraction of someone to talk to seems to be the only convincing explanation that Henry Crawford can give for the appeal of Fanny Price in Austen’s Mansfield Park: ‘I could so wholly and absolutely confide in her’, he tells his sister, ‘and that is what I want’ ([London: Penguin, 1996], p. 243). The risk is increased further by the echo of Rochester’s earlier frantic plea for Jane to accept his lawless embrace: ‘Oh! come, Jane, come!’ (p. 357). In Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury British Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), Alison Case observes that Jane abdicates agency at all those ‘moments that most decisively move her “plot” forward’, not only with Rochester’s call but also with ‘the image in the moon that tells her, “My daughter, flee temptation!”’ when she tears herself away from Rochester after the aborted marriage, and earlier still at Lowood, when she is trying to work out how a person goes about finding employment as a governess, with the ‘kind fairy’ that she says must have ‘dropped the required suggestion’ on her pillow (p. 105). Gordon, p. 144. Emily Henrietta Hickey, ‘In a Nutshell’, ll. 1– 2, in Chadwyck Healey Literature Online . Emily Henrietta Hickey is a littleknown poet, active in literary circles in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the author of several collections of poetry. ‘In a Nutshell’ comes from her first collection, A Sculptor, and Other Poems, published in 1881. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 375. Dorothea’s ‘third-best’ wish is her marriage to Will, the deflation of her grander aspirations charted in the transformation of a ‘little speech of four words’ (p. 484) that echoes throughout the novel, from ‘What could she do, what ought she do’ (p. 24), to ‘What shall I do?’ (p. 225), to ‘Tell me what I can do … think what I can do’ (p. 238), to ‘What should I do – how should I act now’? (p. 644), until she finally settles for ‘this is what I am going to do’ (p. 670) – that is, marry Will and become his help-meet and fellow labourer. Eliot, Middlemarch, pp. 321, 680, and 7. The epigraph to chapter one is from Beaumont and Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (1619).

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Index Allestree, Richard, 6 Allen, Walter, 119 amatory fiction, 96–99, 128, 212n Amphialus Sidney’s, 49–50 Weamys’s, 83–5 Amphilanthus, 58, 61, 62–6, 67, 69, 71 Antissia, see also Mary Fitton, 63, 71 Austen, Jane, 159 Mansfield Park, 231n Northanger Abbey, 168 Pride and Prejudice, 5, 9, 15, 158–74, 183, 186 Sense and Sensibility, 160, 226n Ballaster, Ros, 97, 103 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 119, 142–3 Barchas, Janine, 126–7 Barker, Jane, 106 Love Intrigues, 97–8, 106–11, 212–13n Barclay, John Argenis, 90–2 Basilius, 29, 31, 32–5, 78, 81 Beecher, Donald, 27, 28 Beer, Gillian, 119, 122 Behn, Aphra, 103 Fair Jilt, 105 History of the Nun, 103–6 Rover, 225n Bellings, Richard Arcadia, 78 Best, Michael R., 3 Blount, Charles, 67–8 Boumelha, Penny, 177, 179–80 Bradshaigh, (Lady) Dorothy, 125–7 Brathwait, Richard English Gentlewoman, 6, 8, 29, 75, 76, 77 Panthalia, 92–4 Brooks, Peter, 17 Brontë, Charlotte, 1, 2, 180, 181 Jane Eyre, 1, 2, 15, 17, 24, 54, 175–91

Brown, Murray L., 123–4 Burke, Kenneth, 4 Burney, Fanny [Frances] Cecilia, 158 Evelina, 161, 171 Butler, Judith, 2 Catty, Jocelyn, 154 Cavendish, Margaret [Duchess of Newcastle], 99–100, 129 ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, 80, 99–103 Cecil, Anne, 30 characterization, 99, 116 and motivation, 126–8, 134–5, 171–2 chastity, 4, 16, 26, 27, 43, 55, 67, 80, 154 Chrétien de Troyes Ywain, 99 Claius and Strephon, 52, 78, 80–3 class, 16, 41, 71, 73, 98, 133, 136, 137–9, 159, 162–4, 184–5, 222n Clifford, (Lady) Anne, 67 comedy, 32, 34, 37, 44, 57 conduct literature, 2, 6, 9, 76–8, 111, 142–3, 181, 192, 195n, 196n, 197n courtship, 1, 18, 31, 151, 197n Craft, William, 38 Crawford, Patricia, 1 Cullen, Patrick Cullen, 82 Davies, Andrew, 166 Davis, Lennard, 13 Denny, Lord, 53 de Scudery, Madeleine, 12–13 De Vere, Edward, 30 desire female, 1, 2, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 30, 31, 37, 38, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 62, 64, 65, 74, 85, 98, 112–14, 134, 148, 172, 176–9

243

244 Index desire – continued male, 39, 43, 53, 56 sexual, 18, 55–8, 59, 73 Devereux, Penelope see Rich, Penelope Doody, Margaret, 14 Donne, John, 18 Dudley, Mary (Philip Sidney’s mother) see Sidney, Mary Duncan, Ian, 12, 15 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 25, 29, 30 Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel, 118, 142 Eliot, George Middlemarch, 191, 192 Elizabeth I, 16, 25, 28, 29, 30, 34, 37, 44, 48, 49, 53, 84 Evans, Maurice, 160 female agency, 2, 3, 10, 16, 47, 98, 117, 142, 164–5, 185, 219n, 231n female dress, 127–131 female sexuality, 55, 153–4, 166, 181, 212n, 213n, 225n female subjectivity, 2, 4, 97–8, 105, 116, 117, 124, 220n female virtue, see also modesty, 1, 7, 16, 24, 31, 76, 92, 98, 102, 113–14, 116, 125, 127, 134, 137, 138, 147, 150, 155–7, 160–1, 166, 171, 212n femininity acquired, 2–4, 6–8, 76–8, 210n Fielding, Henry, 9, 13 Tom Jones, 171, 212n Shamela, 6 fishing metaphor, 18–24, 86–7, 123–4, 127 fishing maid, 20–1, 60–1 Fitton, Mary, 63 Fletcher, Anthony, 5–6, 9 Fordyce, James, 6 Forsandarus, 69, 71 Gamage, Barbara see Sidney, Barbara gender, 26, 31, 37, 39, 53, 54 as performance, 2–3, 16 genre, 14

Gisborne, Thomas Inquiry in to the Duties of the Female Sex, 145–6, 214n Goldberg, Jonathan, 2 Gooding, Richard, 138–9 Gordon, Scott Paul, 151 Greenblatt, Stephen, 56 Greene Robert Pandosto, 138, 221n Gregory, John, 6, 8, 169 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, 111, 172–3 Greville, Fulke, 29 Grey, Jemima, Marchioness of, 145 Gwilliam, Tassie, 131 Gynecia, 31–7, 39, 49, 50, 51, 61, 78 Hackett, Helen, 35, 38 Halifax, Marquis of [George Savile] Advice to a Daughter, 6, 100 Halkett, (Lady) Anne, 69–70 Handler, Richard and Daniel Segal, 173 Haywood, Eliza, 111–12, 215n Love in Excess, 111–16 Fantomina, 128, 220n Heathcote, Mrs, 145 Helen Sidney’s, 30, 37, 47–51 Weamys’s, 78, 84–5 Helgerson, Richard, 28, 30 Herbert, Mary see Countess of Pembroke Herbert, William (Wroth’s cousin and lover), 54, 63, 67 Hickey, Emily Henrietta, 190, 231n Howard, Thomas, 70 Hull, Suzanne W., 3, 61 humanism, 17, 32, 48 Hunter, J. Paul, 13 Hutson, Lorna, 16, 17 ideal, feminine see female virtue ideologies of womanhood, 4–7 Isles, Duncan, 153 Kaplan, Deborah, 166, 170 Kay, Dennis, 3, 25, 29 King, Kathyrn, 107

Index 245 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 33, 38 Laquer, Thomas, 4 LeGates, Mary, 6 Lennox, Charlotte Female Quioxte, 23–4, 141–2, 151–7, 170, 172 Lindenbaum, Peter, 198n literary hierarchies, 32, 34 love, 15, 21, 40, 43, 35, 38, 53, 58, 59, 63, 93 at first sight, 112, 148–51, 164, 170–1, 173, 225n disinterested, 101, 132, 135, 162–3, 170–4, 215n romantic, 48, 51, 89, 132, 142, 181 unconscious, 100, 104, 132–6, 164–6, 169, 191, 220n loving first, 111–16, 196n Luckyj, Christine, 3, 61–2 male virtue, 38–9, 159–60, 164 Mandeville, 8 Manley, Delarivière, 97 Markham, Gervase English Arcadia, 3, 19–20, 29, 77, 78, 85–90, 105, 142, 164 English Housewife, 77, 89 marriage, 20, 26, 30, 41, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 78–9, 83, 141–51 ceremonies, 64, 65 companionate, 51 Marxism, 2 McKeon, Michael, 13, 145 Melissea, 58, 71–4 Melidora, 19–20 Mendelson, Sara, 1 Milech, Barbara, 175 Milton, John, 120 Montagu, Elizabeth, 146–7 Mullan, John, 118 modesty, 7, 8, 9, 60, 67, 68, 76, 105–6 Modleski, Tanya, 192 Montrose, Louis, 2 moral integrity, 67, 68, 70 Morgan, Charlotte, 11, 27, 28 Musidorus, 28, 31, 43–7, 79

narrative, 26, 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 36, 45, 47, 74, 75, 94 conventions, 118, 133–4, 170 development, 67 dilemmas, 68, 70 dynamics, 14, 17, 72, 99, 147, 174, 192, 229n form, 161–2, 218n plot, 15, 17, 21, 38, 97, 148, 164–5 strategies, 24, 69, 75–95 Newcastle, Duchess of, see Cavendish, Margaret Newton, Judith Lowder, 161, 171 novel, 14, 15, 17, 18, 146 dangers of, 141, 144–7, 222–3n reading practices, 141–7, 154–5, 223n, 224n realism and, 141, 142, 189 Nussey, Ellen, 180 Oakleaf, David, 96 Oedipus and the Devil, 9 Osborne, Dorothy, 102–3 Painter, William, 26, 27, 29 Palace of Pleasure, 26 Pamela Richardson’s, 9, 15, 22–3, 46, 62, 117–40, 141 Sidney’s, 2, 28, 38, 43–7 Pamphilia, 53, 58, 61–70, 71, 74, 91 Parker, Patricia, 11 Parthenia, 30, 48–9 Pembroke, Countess of (Mary Sidney, née Herbert), 17, 29, 52, 72–3 Philoclea, 10, 28, 36, 37–43, 84 Philisides, 29, 30, 53, 73, 82 physiology models of, 4–7 plot, see narrative Polhemus, Robert, 172 Pope, Alexander, 120 Potter, Lois, 33 Protestantism, 15, 17, 25, 33, 34, 48, 62 psychomachia, 33 Pygmalion, 42 Pyrocles, see also Zelmane, 28, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 43, 50, 79, 81, 84

246 Index Quilligan, Maureen, 30, 62, 68 Reeve, Clara Progress of Romance, 152 Champion of Virtue, 152–3 Rich, (Lady) Penelope, 30, 67–8 Richardson, Samuel, 5, 13, 15, 16, 17, 26, 62, 117, 125–7, 216n, 218n Clarissa, 5, 17, 125–7, 153–4, 226n Familiar Letters, 117 Pamela, 15, 17, 22, 26, 100, 101, 103, 104, 117–40, 155–6, 183, 184, 187 Pamela 2, 120–2, 141–51, 156–7, 164 Riche, Barnabe, 26, 27, 28, 29 Richetti, John, 97, 98 Ringler, W. A., 68 Rizzo, Betty, 124 Roberts, Josephine A., 53 Roberts, Katherine J., 32, 75 Rodomondro, 65–6, 68, 69, 70 roman à clef, 25, 90 romance, 3, 11, 15, 17, 18, 25, 31, 54, 60, 72, 86, 90, 101–2, 96, 141, 143–4, 151–3, 175–6, 189, 192 see also love chivalric, 16 dangers of, 141, 144–6, 152–4 definitions of, 11–5 French heroic, 12–3, 152 Greek, 27 heroines, 11, 15, 24, 42, 68, 92, 102, 132, 140, 154, 182 romantic conventions, 99, 109–10, 135, 136, 138, 139, 154–5, 155–7, 191–2, 219n Roper, Lyndal, 9 Rose, Mary Beth, 16 Ross, Deborah, 11 Schellenberg, Betty, 147–8 Schleiner, Winifred, 139 Shakespeare, William, 54, 63 Shoemaker, Robert, 4–5 Sidney, Barbara (née Gamage), 52 Sidney, Mary (Philip’s mother), 30, 48 Sidney, Mary (Philip’s sister) see Pembroke, Countess of

Sidney, Philip, 1, 10, 16, 20, 29–31, 40, 53, 67, 73, 147 as Philisides, 73, 82, 210n Apology for Poetry, 35 definitions of comedy and tragedy in, 32–7, 52 ‘Astrophil and Stella’, 30, 67 Arcadia, 1, 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25–51, 81, 94, 198n New Arcadia, 18, 31–51, 47–5, 99, 100, 118–24, 125, 127, 129–31, 132–3, 136, 158–63, 173–4, 190, 216n, 217n politics of, 25, 29, 32–3, 52–4, 73 Old Arcadia, 35–6 Sidney, Robert (Philip’s brother), 52 silence, 3, 9, 55, 61 Pamphilia’s vow of, 61–9 Sinfield, Alan, 16 Smith, A. J., 18 Spenser, Edmund, 30 Steele, Richard Tender Husband, 120 Stewart, Philip, 14 Stone, Lawrence, 67 Strephon, see under Clauis Tague, Ingrid, 10 Thirsis, 86–90 Todd, Janet, 170 tragedy, 32, 34, 37 Urania Sidney’s, 32, 52, 79 Weamys’s, 79–83 Wroth’s, 52, 79 Vickery, Amanda, 110 Viederman, Milton, 175 Waldron, Mary, 162, 169, 181 Walsingham, Francis (Philip Sidney’s wife), 30 Warner, William B., 127–8, 131, 135, 138 Weamys, Anna Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, 78–85, 135 Westcomb, Sophia, 117

Index 247 Whigham, Frank, 4, 75, 76 Wickerson, John, 30 willfulness, 39, 48, 89 will, 10, 11, 21, 38, 45, 48, 49, 137, 142, 156–7, 173, 176–80, 187–8, 189–91, 192 independent, 37–51, 75 infected, 33 man’s weak, 56–8 non-compliant, 3 Williams, Raymond, 27, 140 wit, 48 erected, 33 women and, 25–51 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 181 Vindication of the Rights of Women, 128, 181 women and feminine code, 1, 10, 24, 97, 102, 107–11, 149–51, 155–7, 164–8, 170–4, 182–3, 184, 192, 214 and language, 114–15, 117–18, 161, 171, 186, 230n

and nature/custom debate, 102–3, 110–11, 116–27, 185 designing, 16, 17, 18, 24, 31, 40, 49, 51, 75, 86, 93, 104–5, 112–14, 119, 123–5, 134–5, 167, 169–70, 183, 218n readers, 17 representation of, 1, 3, 6, 14, 161, 169 secret intentions of, 97–8, 107–9, 116, 124 stratagems of, 124–7, 164 writers, 3, 51, 73, 74, see also individual authors Wroth, Mary Urania, 16, 20–2, 31, 51, 52–74, 139, 187, 192 Robert, 54 Yeazell, Ruth, 7, 8, 9, 77, 106 Zelmane, see also Pyrocles, 32, 33, 37, 42, 43