Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre

by Marea Mitchell

  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 tricki-ness 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 obser-vant 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.