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

  ‘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 genera-tional 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 delin-quent will (discussed later in this study) testifies both to the intransi-gence 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 exuber-ance 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 organiz-ing 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 vernacul
ar 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.