New Arcadia represents a range of intelligent women with designs or interests of their own. Of all of these, apart from Gynecia’s, perhaps Helen of Corinth’s story is most equivocal. While Parthenia’s story concerns a justified resistance to tyrannous parental authority, Helen’s story has no such clear justification, and is complicated by being told (largely) by herself to others, again linking her back to Gynecia.
Helen’s self-accusations indicate both her errors and her awareness of her errors, providing another complex portrait of female will. If Helen is a shadowing of Elizabeth I, then it is an Elizabeth self-conscious enough to reflect on her own wilfulness, and an Elizabeth grateful for the advice of others. As Helen tells it, her problem arises from being pursued by Philoxenus when her interest is in Amphialus. She, like various other characters in Arcadia, tries to use one man to come at another, but it is Amphialus’s indignation at being so actively pursued at the expense of his friend that is the focus. Convinced that
50 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Amphialus will never see the situation for himself, Helen, ‘grown bolder, or madder, or bold with madness’ as she puts it, ‘discovered my affection unto him’ ( NA, p. 124). The quandary in which this active desire by a woman puts a good man is vividly described by Helen: ‘But lord, I shall never forget how anger and courtesy at one instant appeared in his eyes when he heard that motion; how with his blush he taught me shame’ ( NA, p. 124). Caught between anger at the unseemly behaviour of this active woman, and at the treatment of his friend Philoxenus, and a distaste at behaving discourteously to someone of Helen’s rank and fame, Amphialus demonstrates to Helen the discrimination that she herself has abandoned. That Amphialus then becomes the unwilling murderer of a friend who is incensed at what he perceives to be his betrayal indicates once again the dangers that desiring women represent. They destroy male friendships, and cause the death of good men.62 But, just as readers can understand the errors in Gynecia’s behaviour and condemn them without completely condemning Gynecia herself, observers both within and outside New Arcadia can have empathy for Helen. Taking up the story of Helen in book two, Pyrocles’s estimation of her is complex. He is at pains, for example, to shield Helen from contumely:
For never, I think, was there any woman that with more unremov-able determination gave herself to the counsel of love after she had once set before her mind the worthiness of your cousin Amphialus, and yet is neither her wisdom doubted of, nor honour blemished.
For O God, what doth better become wisdom than to discern what is worthy the loving? What more agreeable to goodness than to love it, so discerned, and what to greatness of heart, than to be constant in it once loved? ( NA, p. 352).
Pyrocles provides justification of a kind for Helen’s actions. Her constancy in a good cause absolves her from recrimination. It is partly Amphialus’s error in loving where he is not loved in return and partly his mother’s malicious pursuit of her own ends that force Helen to take up her own cause. It is Amphialus’s judgement that is faulty, as Pyrocles insists in his references to the extensive reputation of Helen’s beauty and judgement. The poignancy of Helen’s pursuit of Amphialus even unto the brink of death is palpable in the descriptions of book three, where even the misogynist Anaxius provides Helen with access to Amphialus and an escort for her safe return with his body to Corinth.
Women of Great Wit 51
By finishing with Helen here we hope to have illustrated how ambiguously positioned good desiring women are in New Arcadia, where neither Gynecia nor Helen are unequivocally condemned, even if their errors are evident. Part of the complications surrounding these figures lies in their uneasy relationship to a living monarch, but Arcadia’s representation of intelligent and witty women, capable of determining their own actions, with desires and designs of their own, also has a wider resonance. Sidney also speaks both specifically and generally to his audience in that so many of the dilemmas that his female figures face relate to problems confronting aristocratic woman of the period. The tensions between concepts of romantic love and companionate marriage, issues of strategic and political alliances, dis-satisfaction and incompatibilities within marriage, and male and female inconstancy were factors facing many men and women of the time, as Sidney himself well knew. In subsequent chapters we explore how the kinds of ambiguous representations that we have seen in New Arcadia recur in later texts, and how these ambiguities in designing women with desires of their own are increasingly resolved in favour of female characters who escape from the condemnatory axis that positions the good woman as passive and the active woman as bad. In particular, we take up work by later women writers who, it seems, were sufficiently perturbed by the poignancy of a story like Helen’s to rewrite it to give Helen a happy ending – to finish some unfinished business. First, however, we turn to a relative of Sidney’s, Lady Mary Wroth, who in her own life and work explored what it meant to be ambiguously positioned.
2
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’:
Negotiating Desire in Lady Mary
Wroth’s Urania
Making 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 (née 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.
That Wroth should find in Sidney’s work material that was congenial but marked by limitations is understandable. No more than Sidney himself could Wroth begin to imagine worlds outside the references that were available to her, yet in identifying with a celebrated relative Wroth also invokes those familial connections to gain herself some new ground. That her essay into the literary field met with a very different response from her uncle’s testifies both to the vulnerabilities of a woman who chose to write fiction rather than translate the work of others and to the different interests that a woman like Wroth inevitably brought to her work.
It is no overstatement to say that if female characters in Arcadia threaten to dominate their male counterparts, often asserting their 52
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’ 53
moral superiority, then in Urania this potential has become a reality.
Where Sidney’s princesses certainly strive to escape being only the sexual objects of male desire, in Urania the tables are almost entirely turned, limiting the space allocated to the expression of male desire and demonstrating intense interest in how women understand and come to terms with their own desires. Urania is most certainly a text focused on women, and one that demonstrates quite different values from those seen in Arcadia.
In considering the representation of female desire as it is played out in Urania it is once again impossible to ignore how the relationship between autobiography and text is affected by gender. It is fair to say that Sidney’s reputation considerably improved after his death, and it is also true that Wroth encountered significant notoriety in her own lifetime. The story of the attacks on Urania by Lord Denny, who saw himself in it, attests to the differences between topical references in Arcadia and in Urania. If various figures in the former recall Elizabeth I, then this is a safer kind of reference to make given that Sidney could be reasonably sure that she was not likely to see the manuscript. The publication of Urania takes it into a less predictable arena, and the kind of correspondences identified
in it also seems to have a more local and personal focus. Josephine A. Roberts outlines Denny’s identification of himself in Urania, shadowed under the character of Sirelius in an episode that symbolizes the text’s critique of patriarchal structures.
When a husband becomes jealous of his wife’s relationship with another man – which she refuses to end ‘more out of her spirit, that disdaind to be curbd, than extraordinary liking of him’ ( U, I: 515–6) –
it is her father who threatens to kill her and eggs on his son-in-law to violence. Denny’s irate self-identification and outburst in a poem
‘To Pamphilia from the father-in-law of Sirelius’ testifies to the effectiveness of Wroth’s criticism even as it identifies her as Pamphilia. As Wroth’s verse in reply puts it: ‘Your spitefull words against a harmless booke / Show that an ass much like the sire doth looke.’1 Denny’s strong reaction suggests that if pastoral veiling is a courtly game it is one whose rules can be violated on either side – by a writer who goes beyond general and political observation, by a reader who rips down the veil intended to mask the writer.
While Sidney as writer explores self-representation as an educated shepherd courtier in Arcadia, it is significant that the representation of Wroth in Urania is multiple rather than single. Roberts suggests that Pamphilia, Bellamira and Lindamira can be seen as the most prominent self-portraits ( U, I: lxxi), all of which deal with secret love and the
54 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre struggle to reconcile the personal and the public. Wroth’s less than happy marriage to Robert Wroth, her well-known affair with her cousin William Herbert, and the birth of their two children resulted in the retirement of another member of the Sidney family to compose a work (probably between 1618 and 1620) that once again came at public events in a different guise. Yet Wroth’s use of pastoral and romance iterates an understanding of the gender inequalities of the seventeenth century that reflect much more closely her lived experience as wife, lover, and mother. Throughout Urania Wroth employs satire and humour to canvass the constraints on women and the options available to them, and in over 300 female characters demonstrates some of the contradictions surrounding women in this period.
Her use of romance also exceeds Sidney’s in its employment of magical contrivances and fantastical scenarios, highlighting the difficulties of imagining circumstances that might be more propitious for the expression of female desire. It has also been said that Urania’s treatment of women and gender is inconsistent ‘for the narrator occasionally includes asides that imply an acceptance of male superiority’ ( U, I: lvii). To acknowledge these two points is to remember that the road from Arcadia to Jane Eyre is not a smooth path of evolution. Just as formally and stylistically Urania curves back to the extravagances of earlier Spanish romances, so it includes the spectacles of contemporary court masques, and again sweeps forward in its focus on female characters and the imagination of worlds not circumscribed by marriage and male domination. Urania rehearses and tries to find ways to resist specific ideological constraints against the expression of female desire.
In its overall structure and narrative impasses it also acknowledges the difficulties of a woman writing in a fictional form that was nevertheless clearly recognized as alluding to specific and general concerns of the time.
How far should a woman go?
Wroth’s Urania illustrates at great (and sometimes bewildering) length Lysander’s statement in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that
‘the course of true love never did run smooth’.2 The obstacles that he lists as hindering the course of true love are specific: differences in class, incompatibility in age, the involvement of friends, or interventions through war, sickness or death. To these must be added in Lysander and Hermia’s case the specific circumstances of parental control. All these obstacles, and more, are present in Urania, and in this
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chapter we begin to map out the range of ways in which women deal with their own desires in inauspicious circumstances, and against specific social and ideological constraints in the long complex texts that make up Urania.3
There are, for example, a series of minor characters who actively pursue their love. Nereana’s pursuit of Steriamus, for example, invites condemnation not only from him but also from the protagonist Pamphilia, and throughout Urania Nereana is dubbed the ‘amorous lady’ ( U, I: 193), ‘the strange princesse’ ( U, I: 195), ‘an adventurous lover’ ( U, I: 196), and ‘a poore, imagined distracted creature’ ( U, I: 495).
She finally runs off with a married prince, serving as a negative example to others. No one more explicitly demonstrates the ‘chastity-silence equation’,4 though, than the naughty Lady who lives within the marvellously named ‘Forrest Gulfe’ where ‘doe all delight to ride, and yet none but are swallowed up when past that plaine, and arrived heere within this devouring throat’ ( U, I: 401). The connection between sealed female bodies and silence has become a critical orthodoxy, and this is surely a good example of how those connections very often were made and understood.5 The Lady, who ‘maintaines her selfe and her pleasures’
( U, I: 401), dresses with ‘her necke all bare as low as her brests could give her leave for too much immodestie to shew’ ( U, I: 403), and is the paradigm of promiscuity and assertive female sexuality:
She had her hair curled, and dress’d up with Jewels, and Rings, and many pritty devices, as wantonly, and phantastically placed as her eyes, which laboured in twinckling to moistnesse, giving occasion for beliefe, that that humour was most ruling in her. Unsteady she was in her fashion, her head set upon so slight a necke, as it turnd like a weather-cocke to any vaine conceit that blew her braines about: or like a staulke of Oates, the eare being waighty: her feete neuer but mooving, as not willing to stand, or sit still; her gate wagling and wanton. ( U, I: 403)6
There is also the female monster in part two, much of whose monstrous-ness depends on her assertive female sexuality: ‘This thing, monstrous and fauning, came towards mee [Clavarindo], wagling her head like a light wanton, licking her lips for treacherous kisses, and bowing, as idol-ators doe to Images, courting as farr as beastlines can doe’ ( U, II: 69).7 In part one there is the aptly named Lycencia who plays off against each other the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Urania, the Dukes of Wirten-berg and Brunswick. Having toyed with their passions and fled, Lycencia
56 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre meets an appropriate death with a ‘man equall to her’ ( U, I: 625), who throws her off a craggy cliff: ‘but as she fell loving all mankind, she held him so fast as he went unwillingly with her, breaking their necks, and so past the same way of unfortunate end, yet fittest for ill so to go together’ ( U, I: 625). In these examples, Wroth’s depictions of immodest and sexually aggressive women reflect the extreme cultural associations of women with flesh, sin, and seduction, but in each case this is undercut by the sheer excessiveness of the descriptions and the sense that the monstrous threatens to become caricature. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, ‘where the modern structuralist understanding of the world tends to sharpen its sense of individuation by meditating upon the normative, the Renaissance tended to sharpen its sense of the normative by meditating upon the prodigious’,8 and this is a tendency that still exists residually in Urania.
Yet while these three examples can be seen as part of the monstrous regiment of women characterized by their licentiousness, other incidents in Urania present more complex and contradictory pictures of desiring women and include a reworking of the notion of the monstrous sexual female in a way that mocks male vulnerability.9 One particularly amusing scene involves Philarchos, happily married to Orilena,10 who meets the beautiful princess Claribella. Confronted with the sight of her beauty in a verdant arbour, Philarchos remembers past pleasures as a lover. His uncertainties in the face of evident temptation are described in a lengthy passage that smacks of self-justification, with the end result that he
resolves to ‘bee a while a taster, if nott possesso[r] of sum pleasure. Lett Varietie a little come in place instead of teadiousness to one course’ ( U, II: 123). Philarchos’s actions, his deviation from the path of married fidelity, are marked out spatially. In his eagerness to get downstairs to the princess in the arbour he finds a door behind a hanging in his room that leads not downstairs but into a bedroom, wherein lies, centre stage, ‘a most rich bed standing in the midst of the roome’, in which lies ‘a lady of admirable beautie’ ( U, II: 124) marred only by her sadness, which, as it turns out, is caused by her unrequited love for him. Overhearing her declaration of love for him, ‘fearing I might heere bee wrought to the full height of libertie’
( U, II: 124), Philarchos realizes that he should save himself from temptation and leave immediately. That he knows this and does not do so comically implicates him as the victim of his own desires. Again justifying his actions, this time through a sense of his own ability to withstand temptation based on his bravery in the field, as well as the wish to avoid the charge of ‘insivilitie’ ( U, II: 125), Philarchos steels himself
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to address the beautiful lady and console her in her grief. Her response is a parody of the vulnerable lady, articulating as it does all the grounds of her vulnerability. The lady was, says Philarchos (as one might imagine) ‘infinitely amased to see her self thus surprised, att such a time of night, and in such a place, her chamber, all alone in bed, and wholy att my mercy, as she caled itt’ ( U, II: 125). The archness of tone here is emphasized, given that this account of adulation for Poliarchos is one re-told by Poliarchos himself to two women, Veralinda and Pamphilia. His extensive account includes specific details that make it hard to take the scene seriously, as we hear how he
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