Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Read online

  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

  This page intentionally left blank

  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

  2005047465

  10

  9

  8

  7

  6

  5

  4

  3

  2

  1

  14

  13

  12

  11

  10

  09

  08

  07

  06

  05

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

  for our mothers

  Marjorie and Lorna

  This page intentionally left blank

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  viii

  Introduction

  1

  1

  Women of Great Wit: Designing Women in Sir Philip

  25

  Sidney’s Arcadia

  2

  ‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’: Negotiating Desire

  52

  in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania

  3

  Stratagems and Seeming Constraints, or, How to Avoid

  75

  Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’

  4

  ‘A Scheme of Virtuous Politics’: Governing the Self in

  96

  ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ (1656), The History of the Nun (1689), Love Intrigues (1713), and Love in Excess (1720)

  5

  Poor in Everything But Will: Richardson’s Pamela

  117

  6

  Turret Love and Cottage Hate: Coming Down to Earth

  141

  in Pamela 2 and The Female Quixote

  7

  ‘It Was Happy She Took a Good Course’: Saving

  158

  Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice

  8

  Agitating Risk and Romantic Chance: Going All the

  175

  Way with Jane Eyre?

  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 constrain
ts 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 longi-tudinal 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 repro
ductive 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: