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

  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, span-ning 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 compara-ble 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 attain-ing 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 s
eemingly 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.