Melidora is, of course, the daughter of Musidorus and Pamela and Markham’s Arcadia is a kind of second generation Arcadian adventure. Melidora, devastated by the death of her father, forsakes the commonwealth and crown. Rebuked by the Senate, she cedes government to them, and retires to Tempe, thus re-enacting movements traced by both Basilius and Sidney in electing some pastoral retreat. 20
What Melidora discovers, like many before her, is that retreats are also likely to contain unforeseen challenges. Melidora lives ‘Nymph-like’ (Markham, I: 75), forbids the presence of any prince or nobleman, and seems to have made a nun-like decision to abjure the things of the world.21 However, into this pastoral reclusivity comes what can best be described as a kind of entrepreneurial shepherd, Thirsis. If pastoral is conventionally uninterested in the world of commerce and money, then there are signs in Markham’s Arcadia that the times might be changing. Here be no idealistic shepherds more interested in poetry than fleeces, and Markham amusingly deflates the pretensions of aristocratic shepherds who would not have had a clue how to deal with their four-legged charges in a real world.
Thirsis’s acquisition of a flock is specifically attributed, not to some unquestioned divine or natural order, but to his own ability and the failures of others. Through wit and money, we are told, he buys his flock from ‘a silly block-headed swain called Coridon’ (Markham, I: 76), thus suggesting both his own financial nous and the foppishness of the pastoral tradition. In many incidents surrounding the relationship between Thirsis and Melidora, the pastoral and romance forms are invoked only to be gently mocked or rewritten. Thirsis’s first sighting of Melidora, as he describes it to fellow shepherd Silvagio, is a stereotypical one, as she sits re-ordering her hair by a fountain. Her reaction to being thus observed when she thought herself alone is again typical. She runs away when she realizes that someone is present.22 By degrees, however, Thirsis establishes a relationship with Melidora that is premised on his being no threat to her, as she has excluded from her company anyone who might, by reason of birth or background, prove to be a viable suitor. She is happy for him to help her to pick fruit, and to fish, but then takes exception to his unex-pected declaration of love. As so often in pastoral romance, and as we have seen before, it is the activity of fishing that is loaded with resonance. Previously stirred by the sight of damsons (which he has shaken from the tree) falling into her lap, it is the sight of a fish
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making off with her hook just as she thought to land it that provokes the ill-fated passionate declaration:
at which sight my passion quickning my blood, and my blood reuiuing the spirrit of my wordes: I could not forbeare to say, behold thou all conquering Empresse of mens hearts, the glorious blaze which this angling beautye layes to catch mens soules, shall euen in this manner bee gnawne and taken away by the Yron teeth of consuming tyme; and where shall then be the future power of killing? yet louely Maide tryumph ouer me, whome you have already taken, euen 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 downe 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. (Markham, I: 83)
Melidora’s sudden, angry, but silent departure tells Thirsis that he has overstepped the mark.
Later, we, along with Silvagio, see Thirsis’s second encounter with Melidora. Silvagio has offered the advice that Thirsis find someone else on whom to bestow his attention, but Thirsis, the constant, denies this possibility.23 In this next incident Melidora picks up on the fishing metaphor and uses it in her own way. In the story that Thirsis tells to Silvagio, Melidora is the one who laid the baits to catch others but Melidora reverses the image to indicate the dangers that she sees for herself, presaging the trap she will fall into, though not with Thirsis but with an inconstant lover, Diatassan. So she asks Thirsis if he has been the shepherd responsible for the baits and traps made ready for her and her nymphs to use.
he made her answere, it was hee; why then said Melidora, Shepheard farewell, I will no longer stay with thee, lest I bee taken likewise by thee; but hee staying her againe, said; Excellent Ladie, how can you be made captiue by your prisoner, or howe can your subject alter anye of your determinations (Markham, I: 90).
In reversing the image of who is at risk and who is in control, Melidora directly attacks the dynamics of courtly love that Thirsis tries to reinstate in his image of himself as her captive. Banishing him, she is, she says, fearful of the effects of his frenzy, if she allows him to remain. Yet
88 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre Melidora’s insertion of some kind of Realpolitik into the rhetoric of courtly love would be rather more persuasive if the narrator did not go on to divulge the reason behind Melidora’s adamant stance, which is that Diatassan has already ‘so won the heart of the excellent Princesse Melidora, that shee did not disdain to call him her servant’ (Markham, I: 92).
Diatassan, however, proves unreliable and when his inconstancy is demonstrated to her in ways that cannot be denied, Melidora realizes that she has indeed been trapped, and that Thirsis (as the narrator has consistently told the reader) is indeed the ‘most rare’ (Markham, I: 92).
Here, though, comes the dilemma. When her servant Ethera praises the skills and virtues of Thirsis, Melidora displays an acute sense of what is at stake in terms of her reputation.
‘my former scornes have setled so much dispaire in the heart of Thirsis, that except I should grow neerely familiar with impudence, and my selfe discover what my selfe would have closest conceal’d; it is impossible that he should, once more, dare to attempt mee with the tender of his service.’ (Markham, II: 26)
It is a wise servant who knows her own mistress and also clearly understands her predicament. Like many a wily confidante before and after her, Ethera has a cunning ‘strategeme’, by which, she tells Melidora,
‘you shall, by the hand of fate, be freed from the opportunities of Diatassan without any publicke shew of your own distemperance, and enjoy the service of Thirsis by a seeming constraint, against any desire or wish of your creation’ (Markham, II: 26–7).
Ethera proposes that Melidora announce a tiger hunt, and that if anyone can outrun her or hit the tiger before she does they should
‘enioy [her] for his perpetuall Mistresse’ (p. 27). The cunningness of this plan lies in its being based on the knowledge that no-one is as fast as Melidora – except Thirsis. This plan may bring about what she wants without it looking as if she has taken direct action to achieve it, thus absolving her of any wilfulness, or any sense that she has made herself available. This might be a useful, if somewhat fantastical solution, but the difficulties are compounded by another shrewd observation from Melidora about the problems of being a heroine in a romance. It is a measure of shifts within the romance genre that the objection Melidora comes up with is of a quite different nature. This ploy would suggest, she feels, that ‘I care not whom I have, so one I have’, and that her election is ‘grounded neither upon wisdome,
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love, nor vertue, but upon the nimblenesse of a deliuer foot’ (p. 28).
She recalls the Lady in Urania who reminds a suitor that she is not
‘Marchandise, nor to be gaind that way’ ( Urania, I: 407). Part of her problem is wanting to avoid criticism for being wilful, and another part is that she does not want to look will-less either. She does not want to be the trophy wife, or as she puts is, a ‘sommer-games prize, a horses Race-bell, or a Grey-hounds collar’ (pp. 28–9). The problem the narrative presents is how she can get what she wants without looking on the one hand assertive and unfeminine, or, on the other hand, worthless and undiscriminating.
Neither Melidora nor Ethera can come up with a better solution, so the tiger hunt goes ahead, though predictably it does not wo
rk out as anticipated, and after many unforeseen intrigues, Diatassan is the winner and due the prize of Melidora. Other complicated narrative strategies are then put in place to extricate Melidora, in danger of losing on all counts, from being given as a trophy to the person she was trying to avoid. Through a whole series of disguises, and mistaken and revealed identities, Melidora does end up with Thirsis as the reader has long hoped and expected, without any direct intervention by Melidora in the resolution of these events.
The most significant thing about this, from our perspective, is that while Melidora and Ethera can analyze quite astutely the constraints on female behaviour in the realms of romantic love, they are much less successful at coming up with solutions. This is left to the author.
Melidora knows what the problems are, though cannot resolve them, but if she could, she would still be compromised, if not in relation to the other characters in the romance, then with the reader. If the tiger hunt had worked, Melidora would have been a prize, given away to the successful combatant, as far as other characters were concerned. But to the reader she would have been a scheming planner who exercised considerable cunning to achieve her ends, with the added problem that she covered this duplicity. She might have fooled the other characters, but she cannot fool the reader, precisely because we have an insight into her thoughts and feelings. The problems then must be solved by the narrator and the author, not by the character herself. The tension evident in Markham’s English Housewife between virtuous activity and avoidance of any ‘violence of spirit’, between demonstra-tions of agency, on the one hand, and denial of autonomy, on the other, is replicated at the level of narrative. Melidora is quite capable of analyzing the problems but cannot provide their narrative resolutions.
Melidora is caught between the imperatives of practical competence
90 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre and the injunctions against autonomous authority. The English housewife was designed to be a useful partner and a complementary manager but had to stop short of independence, and at the level of narrative fiction she still needs the assistance of the narrator. Yet in giving an insight into Melidora’s thinking, her understanding of her own desires, and the perception of her behaviour by others, Markham’s text has ventured into potentially difficult terrain. It was not for want of intention on Melidora’s part that the plans did not work out. Someone else may make the judgement ‘that Thirsis should enjoy the free gift of the Princesse’ (Markham, II: 123), but it does not alter the fact that readers know the lengths to which Melidora was prepared to go to achieve her ends. Nor does it alter the sense that conduct books and narrative that encourage a high degree of female ability and intelligence struggle to put the lid back on the box that Melidora is nudging open.
Equivocating in the Temple: Barclay’s Argenis (1625) and Brathwait’s Panthalia (1659)
Weamys’s Urania and Erona get what the reader might expect them to want. Weamys’s Helena and Markham’s Melidora get what the reader knows they want, but in doing so open up an arena of dangerous knowledge by giving the reader an insight into the designs and intentions of the female protagonist. Exactly how dangerous this knowledge has the potential to be is indicated in John Barclay’s Argenis (1625),24
where the discussion of how far a woman (who is the protagonist and not a negative exemplum) is prepared to go to achieve her desires reaches another level. Barclay’s Argenis shares similarities with Sidney’s Old Arcadia in its direct discussion of politics and good government, and is in that sense a pastoral romance. It is also a roman à clef, a narrative function also attributed to Wroth’s Urania. One of its central concerns is also how a woman who has made a personal choice in favour of a lover can remain true to that choice in the face of parental opposition. Like many romances it begins in medias res, which is particularly intriguing in that readers have to work out as they go how and why Argenis decided on Poliarchos, and what exactly is the state of their relationship.
We learn fairly early in this lengthy narrative that Argenis’s affections are engaged with Poliarchos, and significantly this occurs at a moment when she is trying to hide that information from those around her. Argenis’s love is an endangered secret, and she dares not reveal her grief at the news of his supposed death ‘because she would
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not give her Maids occasion of suspecting anything.’ When she can ‘no longer dissemble her sorrow, she runnes hastily into her priuate Closet’
(p. 28).25 Like Pamphilia, Argenis uses solitude to avoid revealing her emotions to others. Yet Pamphilia uses these private spaces to contemplate or lament her situation, generally resolving on patience and constancy, while Argenis’s quiet times are more often times of deliberative planning. Barclay’s text is part of an emerging tradition that develops the connection between reader and female protagonist through giving the former insight into the latter, and in this respect it is significant that the title bears the name of the protagonist. As we saw in Markham’s text, our knowledge of Melidora’s intentions to try and regain Thirsis, whom she has previously rejected, is softened by the fantastical nature of Ethera’s stratagem of the tiger hunt. The problem might be real, but the solution is fantastic, and in any case does not work. How then do we feel about the methods that Argenis employs to keep at bay the suitors her father has in mind for her? The difference may lie in the fact that Melidora’s and Ethera’s stratagems come from the world of romance, Argenis’s from the world of Realpolitik. While Melidora and Ethera are out of their depths, and not in control of the situation, Argenis displays keen abilities and shrewd understandings.
Argenis, like Gynecia, knows more and better than those around her, though unlike Gynecia, the object of her love is appropriate and sanctioned by the norms of virtue and class. Yet Argenis’s actions raise the issue as to whether the ends justify the means. An early example of this occurs when Argenis tries to disguise Poliarchos’s presence in Pallas’s temple from her father, invoking the custom of encouraging ‘as many of the Plebeians as will’ (p. 63) to worship Pallas. While sympathy is with Argenis, her deliberate manipulation of the people, and the direct lie to her father (seeming to care for the people, while she uses them in schemes of her own) takes the notion of the active woman into difficult territory. Later again, Argenis has it pointed out to her by her father that she is not a private person but a king’s daughter and that her refusal to marry has public consequences. Argenis agrees that she ought to give a reason ‘if she desireth to chuse her own Husband’, but then equivocates by suggesting that her real reason for not wanting to marry her current suitor, Radirobanes, is not a matter of her preference, but of his attitude. She might, she says, ‘not have hated this Radirobanes if hee had rather loved mee, than beleeued that I was a duetie owing him’ (p. 218).
Having fudged her way out of having to accept two suitors, Argenis is then confronted with a third suitor, Archombrotus, the choice that
92 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre her father comes up with as a solution to the problems these two initial suitors have caused as powerful foreign interests whose disappointments have led to foreign wars. Archombrotus is a noble kinsman, and was introduced to the reader right at the beginning of the story, as a helper and friend to Poliarchos himself. At this point Argenis relies on time-wasting strategies, hoping to buy time until Poliarchos returns. What seems to redeem Argenis, and to account for her actions, her prevarications, and downright lies is that she remains true to her word. Argenis loves Poliarchos partly for his constancy and that ‘rare thing in men, [his] modesty’. So it is, as she tells him, ‘long since, that I haue called thee Husband, not disposing my Fathers command but not asking it’ (p. 205). John Barclay’s Argenis is of a piece here with moves in Wroth’s Urania to redefine female virtue as more than simply chaste, silent, and obedient. Given that Argenis’s father believes that Poliarchos is a traitor and enemy, she cannot tell him that she loves Poliarcho
s, and is forced into subterfuge. Later again, to resist her father’s attempts to promote Archombrotus as suitor, Argenis actually considers fleeing to France, and raising a faction at home, creating a civil war, exploiting her popularity ‘to keepe her selfe from the marriage that he would inforce her to’ (p. 346). When the final obstacle to her marriage to Poliarchos is removed, with the revelation that Archombrotus is her brother, Argenis blushes and ‘now remembered she was a Virgin’ (p. 396) in a rhetorical sleight of hand that tries to reassert an innocence that previous events have questioned.26
Brathwait’s romance Panthalia (1659) presents a similarly troubling heroine. While her story takes up less space in a book bearing her name than one might have expected, it is concerned with how to obtain a particular outcome without seeming to try, and once again the reader is privy to the protagonist’s machinations. Acolasto and Panthalia are privately contracted, and his extended absence leads to her pursuit of him, despite being warned that the trip is ‘full of danger, and prejudicall to her honour’. Disguised first as a female pedlar in ‘her perilous Progress’, Panthalia then takes on male disguise, afraid of the soldiers’ attention in the garrison in which Acolasto is serving.27 Like so many heroines before her, in drama and prose, Panthalia here also acknowledges that that the armour of virtue and chastity is not necessarily sufficient protection against male attention. Moral virtues might also require material support. To support her disguise she encourages the attentions of another woman in the first of a number of deliberately deceptive actions. Presenting herself at a convent, Panthalia next writes a letter to Acolasto that directly addresses the possibility of inter-
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preting her actions as designing while revealing them (to the reader) to be precisely that.
‘As for this tedious addres which I lately undertook; have not the least thought, that it was any intentionall designe in me, to make this inquiry as a relative Object of Fancy: in conceipting otherwise, you infinitly delude yourself. This taske was to divorce us, not unite us.’ (p. 181)
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