Marea Mitchell

The Old English Homily: Precedent, Practice and Appropriation (review)

Parergon 27.1 (2010) Kaeuper’s book offers much to the understanding of knighthood because it examines a little understood aspect of chivalry in detail, namely, the religious ideas of chivalry and their application in the daily life of the knight. It will be of great interest to both students and researchers. His style is lively and interesting, and his examples from knightly treatises and medieval literature will ensure that the book will be read across disciplines. This is a book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how knights justified their activities. Diana Jefferies University of Western Sydney

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.

‘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.

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

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

‘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 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 enactment 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

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

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.

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.

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