‘sage’, and ‘wise’, Melissea is also frequently associated with women, including her nieces Saphalina and Denia ( U, II: 2–4; 61) and her sister, another grave lady ( U, II: 224). These women in turn are associated with Delos and Lesbos, and with caring for the lost princes and princesses.38 Melissea is associated with foretelling the future, and she warns Amphilanthus not to trust a servant in a strand of the story that is not unravelled until much later in part two, where he learns that Forsandarus lied about Pamphilia’s marriage and failed to deliver a letter to her.39 Melissea’s role throughout the text is one of guiding, advising, and comforting the central characters. Whereas in part one she is most often a resource that others travel to, in part two her role seems to be more directly interventionary.40 She cures Antissia of her madness, and thoughtfully provides her husband Dolorindus with a potion to cause forgetfulness so that he will not be discomforted by memories of her eccentricity ( U, II: 52). Her aid is material and practical – providing a horse for Amphilanthus ( U, II: 193), a viol of water, milk and a goat for Selarinus ( U, II: 39) – and consolatory ( U, II: 182).
Yet while Melissea’s power surges through the text, it is also part of her characterization that she is neither infallible nor omniscient. While she knows ‘most things’ ( U, II: 159), she explains to Amphilanthus at the
72 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre beginning that the enchantment must be undone by him as that
‘darken[s] some part of my knowledge of you’ ( U, I: 140). In some ways Melissea represents a personification of the narrative drive, intervening at the right moment to move the plot along, providing the boat that is necessary to move a character from one place to another, or the information that someone needs to understand events. She brings together the magical elements of romance, making things appear out of thin air, at the same time as inhabiting her own gynocentric world. She is independent, powerful, nurturing and distanced – qualities wittily combined in the passage where she helps out Selarinus. Seduced into sin with a lady by whom he has two children, Selarinus has then been thrown out ‘soe weake, soe tottered, soe torne, as certainly hee was nott able to have lived’ ( U, II: 397), until he is saved by Melissea’s provision of the phial of water, a goat whose milk he drinks, and a kid that is then slaughtered to provide food. The tone of this scene is delightfully self-conscious. The ‘Violl’ appears carried by an arm, and accompanied by a voice with otherwise disembodied greetings from Melissea. The house at which he quickly arrives provides a young woman who is a paragon of hospitality:
The kid she tooke, and gave order for part of that and other more rare provisions to bee made reddy for him, which was dunn in sivile, orderly, and quiett a way without noise ore boisterousnes, as was and indeed is the true essence and quintessence of true entertainment; the other butt Inn-like. ( U, II: 398) Yet the care with which all things now seem to be ordained for Selarinus’s benefit is undercut by its fortuitousness, given that it was only ‘by chance’ that Melissea ‘looking over her bookes, found his infinite and neere-approaching miseries’ ( U, II: 397), prompting her to send hand, viol, goat and kid. At one level this suggests that Melissea has a life of her own, beyond the needs of the characters, who are, nevertheless, of concern to her. She seems not to be determined solely by her connections with them, however little we see of anything else.
It could also suggest that not even Melissea can control everything.
The association of Melissea with providential interventions, wise advice (particularly of a consolatory kind for the central female figures), and an overall view of how events will turn out, has suggested to critics the real person of Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, Wroth’s aunt.41 By including members of her own family and prominent women writers and patrons in her work, as she also does by
‘Free Gift Was What He Wished’ 73
figuring the Countess of Pembroke as the Queen of Naples, Wroth provides a space for the idea of a woman writer that she can identify with herself. Melissea can be taken as a self-conscious and light-hearted representation of the controlling author in a series of representations that foreground performativity. Apart from providing the aid for Selarinus, one of the most striking incidents is Melissea’s appearance in a fiery chariot in a scene that signals both its literary antecedents in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and its indebtedness to masques and studiedly spectacular representations.42
Melissea also makes her own masque, contrived specifically for Pamphilia, which stages an exchange between a love-struck ‘sea-faring lad’ and an ‘aged sheapheard’ ( U, II: 113). The exchange is conventional enough, rehearsing the laments of the overwhelmed and desperate lover against the cynicism of the older man in terms that are generic. Yet it is also possible to draw a specific link back to Philip Sidney and Arcadia, given that a similar kind of debate staged in his texts involves Geron as the generic old man, and Philisides as the romantic youth. If Phillisides represents Sidney, then in this reworking here it is possible to see Wroth as both Pamphilia and Melissea, where Pamphilia represents the possibility of a position beyond young lover or aged cynic, providing a ‘more steddy place and throne of abiding’
for love that ‘never must ore ever shall have remove, butt firme and safe possession’( U, II: 115). If Pamphilia is the acme of constancy throughout Urania then Melissea is the guiding spirit, consistently seeking to bring all the characters to safe and happy havens.
This kind of reading is also revealing of the problems of the woman writer in the early seventeenth century, and the contradictions faced by women in general. It is also extremely telling that of all the characters in the book, male and female, Melissea seems not to be concerned with her own sexual desire. Melissea can be seen as a fantasy of the powerful author benevolently intervening and helping, devoid of any personal emotional investment save the disinterested one of helping others. The myriad female characters that Urania presents, it seems to us, compellingly lay out the complex and contradictory issues facing women of a certain social class in the early seventeenth century. While arguments have been made for the specific connections between events and characters in Urania and Wroth’s own life, it is also true that these adventures ‘are articulated within the narrative forms and ideological contradictions produced by their culture.’43 Nowhere is this clearer than in the intricate and compelling presentation of Melissea, who has a controlling effect in a
74 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre narrative characterized by many critics as being vitally interested in female desire,44 while being detached from it herself. She is the benign genius of the text, ostentatiously powerful and command-ing,45 and guiding spirit to the troubled Pamphilia, absolved from any stigmatization attached to female desire herself, and ultimately unable to bring about the ending that Pamphilia would like. In this sense it is highly ironic that in being one of the first women writers to go about representing women as subjects ‘able to think, to desire, to produce meanings in their minds and bodies sometimes at vari-ance with patriarchal objectives’,46 Lady Mary Wroth created a character like Melissea – a figure with narrative power but one that is limited, and a figure without sexual concerns of her own – who stands as a fantasy of the author herself, powerful but not omnipo-tent, without desire and therefore free of the aspersions (but also denied the joys) that occupy her more materially situated sisters, within the narrative and beyond.
3
Stratagems and Seeming
Constraints, or, How to Avoid
Being a ‘Grey-hounds Collar’
Useful effort can be expended, if it is hidden. (Whigham) The injunction not only to be chaste but also to appear chaste taxes many romance protagonists, as we have been exploring in the previous two chapters. When Richard Brathwait’s Bellingeria writes to Clarentio forbidding him her presence, she does so ‘holding it not sufficient to be innocent; that she might decline all occasion of aspersion, apt to traduce the purest an
d refinedst tempers’.1 Yet Katherine J. Roberts also identifies the problems, at the level of narrative, of creating female characters – of designing women – capable not simply of sustaining narrative interest but also of generating the narrative itself. As she argues, many of the precursors to Sidney’s Pamela and Philoclea ‘tend to be boring in their virtuous maidenhood’.2 Seen from a functional perspective of creating narratives likely to engage male and female readers, the issue is one of designing women who are more than two dimensional ideals but who are also virtuous heroines – of designing women capable of acting for themselves, of having designs of their own, without falling into negative stereotypes. In this chapter we explore how some female protagonists act upon their own desires without endangering their reputations, and related to this, how a woman who has once rejected a suitor can indicate a change of heart without seeming to becoming an active wooer. We also begin to explore the ways that these ‘strategies of indirection’3 feed suspicions that women’s speech is unreliable, and specifically that ‘“No” is no negative in a woman’s mouth’ ( NA, p. 533). Linking back to the stratagems of deception that Pamphilia flirted with in Urania, we also analyze some of the ways that writers in the early to mid-seventeenth century negotiated the need for female characters to assert their own 75
76 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre autonomous wills without compromising their modesty. In other words we are looking at the ways that writers tried to create virtuous characters capable of sustaining narrative interest.
Our second purpose here is to explore the way that the qualities so often associated with feminine virtue are revealed to be arduously acquired rather than natural or inherent – a critical commonplace today, perhaps, but not always understood as a consideration informing the behaviour of characters themselves in earlier fiction. Strategies of indirection also illustrate the idea that ‘useful effort can be expended, if it is hidden’,4 or in other words that those values and attributes considered socially desirable in women are achieved through
‘the most tedious discipline’ that appears at the same time to be effortless. 5 What Frank Whigham calls ‘the practice of being an individual’, based on ‘achieved rather than ascribed characteristics’, is particularly complex in relation to feminine virtue. This calls to mind the image of the duck on the pond, where the serenity of her gliding across the water belies the rapid paddling of the feet underneath.
The frontispiece to Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman (1631) wonderfully encapsulates the sheer hard work involved in being a gentlewoman. Ten separate cells illustrate the qualities she needs to embody, and this complex visual representation is then followed by a page that describes each image. The full title of the book gives some indication of the magnitude of the task to be undertaken: The English Gentlewoman drawne out to the full Body: Expressing, What Habilliments doe best attire her, What Ornaments doe best adorne her, What Complements doe best accomplish her. These characteristics are then repeated in the specific address to the Right Honourable the Lady Arabella Wentworth, again in the address to the general reader, and again summarized in some detail in the ‘Abstract or Summarie of all such principal points’, before reaching the text itself.
What this energetic repetition reveals is how much effort is required to live up to the expectations of an English gentlewoman. The proliferation of guide or conduct books for women from the late fifteenth century on has generally been taken as an indication of the constraints and restric-tions placed on women, and as representative of an anxiety about controlling their behaviour. Between 1475 and 1640 at least 163 books in 500 editions were directed at women readers.6 Yet such books also provide strategies and guides that women might actually use in developing patterns of behaviour that were socially acceptable and individually enabling. As Suzanne W. Hull argues, what the conduct books suggest are the many demands and responsibilities placed on upper middle-class
Stratagems and Seeming Constraints 77
women’s lives, and they not only proscribed behaviour but also took into account the many demands on these women. While it is true that most of these roles are firmly located in the domestic rather than the public or political domain, writers like Richard Brathwait and Gervase Markham both acknowledge that ‘the housewife’s role is far from being passive and subservient’.7 What we are interested in exploring here, then, is how the multiple responsibilities and duties of woman proclaimed in conduct books have their parallel in fictional texts that represent active female agents who at the same time must disguise or minimize their efforts to maintain their honour. While conduct books were often seen in opposition to frivolous and potentially dangerous romances, both kinds of literature reveal the discipline underpinning feminine modesty or what Ruth Yeazall calls ‘the fictions of modesty’.8
From this perspective it should come as no surprise that two of the authors of popular conduct books, Richard Brathwait and Gervase Markham, also wrote romances that acknowledged the lengths to which women might have to go in pursuit of virtuous love but without revealing the extent of their effort. In The English Housewife (1615) Markham, for example, presents a typical sense of the tightrope that the English housewife must tread:
To conclude, our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighbourhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsels, and generally skilful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.9
Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman is similarly critical of the extremes of female behaviour, specifically in relation to love or affection, anatomizing the problems of women overcome by love, such that ‘their discourse is semi-brev’d with sighes, their talke with teares’, and who
‘walke desperately forlorne’, as well as those who ‘will not deigne to cast a looke upon their beloved: but stand so punctually upon their termes, as if they stood indifferent of their choyce.’10 The problems associated with either extreme are clearly articulated, and the position of a golden mean advocated, but the pathway to such perfection is littered with contradictions:
In briefe, let such as are too hot in the quest of their desires, attem-perate that heat with intermissions: such violence is best rebated by
78 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre absence. Contrariwise, such as are too coole, let them quicken that easinesse with their more frequent conference, and assiduate presence.11
The rest of this chapter analyzes some examples in fiction of the difficulties of negotiating these often contradictory demands.
As a final point we also suggest that female figures who are independent, intelligent and active in the pursuit of their own desires also threaten to destabilize narratives that position them as still in need of assistance in the resolution of difficulties. While there is a trajectory of female independence, there is also a countervailing persistence of narrative structures that provide resolution for women through superior male counterparts or authorial control. The tensions between these two get stronger as the focus on female protagonists gets sharper.
‘Censorious suspicions’: Anna Weamys’s Continuation
(1651)12
Anna Weamys’s text is one of three seventeenth-century texts that directly attempts to pick up where Sidney’s Arcadia left off. Gervase Markam’s The English Arcadia, alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending (1607 and 1613), and Richard Bellings’s A Sixth Booke to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624)13 are two others. Weamys’s continuation most explicitly focusses on three stories left incomplete in Sidney’s Arcadia as the title page declares: ‘Wherein is Handled the Loves of Amphialus and Helen Queen of Corinth, Prince Plangus and Erona: With the History of the Loves of Old Claius and young Strephon to Urania’. And in each of these three stories Weamys brings her female characters to
a happy and successful conclusion. Having said this, the resolutions that she brings about are not the perfunctory happy endings that Bellings visits upon his characters. While Sidney declines to comment on Basilius and Gynecia after the faux adultery with any suggestion of how married life might continue thereafter, Bellings blithely leaves them ‘in the happie quiet of their after life’
(p. 108). So too, like Weamys, he brings Helen and Amphialus to marriage and harmony, yet far more of his narrative is spent on Amphialus describing his adventures (like the Arcadian princes) en route to reunion with Helen once their wedding day has been arranged than is spent on the process by which that marriage is achieved. A year after that marriage, Helen ‘makes him the happie father of a much-promising sonne, whom they named Haleamphilus’
Stratagems and Seeming Constraints 79
(p. 107), where the son’s name has the perfunctory ring of a tidy narrative neatly rounded off with the reproduction of the political and social status quo. Weamys’s text, on the other hand, focusses on marriage as a celebratory ritual (with considerable detail on the ceremonies themselves) and as an affirmation of female agency made possible in a romance narrative, in the process displaying greater concern with the mechanisms by which that can be achieved.
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