Miseria is unable to protect herself, however, when she is not only unaware of the symptoms but also ignorant of the disease. The unconscious attraction that Miseria displays is understandable given that the Prince is, in everything other than his monopolizing of virgins, a man of uncommon parts, his ‘noble disposition and affable behaviour’
(p. 78) as capable of softening the hearts of pirates as they are of softening the heart of a young and tender girl. His power to charm her affections, even as his assaults on her virtue harden her resolve to die honourably rather than live in guilt, provides, moreover, the reassurance of a disinterested love once circumstances permit an honourable resolution. Without that initial involuntary responsiveness her subsequent acquiescence might seem more expedient than ardently desired (a consideration that might also be of compelling interest to Richardson’s Mr B).
But if that unconscious attraction is not to provoke a premature and violent conclusion, something more than the heroism of passive resistance is required to prevent the disinterestedness of her love becoming rapidly beside the point, and not all women have a pistol at hand, or the gumption to use one, or the autonomy to take their fate in their own hands. One of Miseria’s objections to the romances that the Prince’s aunt offers for her amusement is that they set a standard of perfection that incites only envy in those unable to attain it. But the remoteness of earlier romances, not only from the society and times of their readers, but also from the practicalities of mundane reality,
102 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre permits solutions that ordinary women, with family and friends looking over their shoulders, could never attempt. And like the romance heroine, conveniently deprived of family and friends, and blessed with a character that all and sundry can identify as virtuous, Miseria can perform feats that ought never to be tried at home.
Miseria’s virtue is never an issue in ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’.
Like her romance predecessors, she is virtuous, and instantly identifiable as such,16 even though she offends against a basic tenet of the feminine code. She may not have been aware of love – or, as Richardson’s Pamela later puts it, she ‘did not know, it was love’ that she was feeling ( Pamela, p. 472) – but according to the strictest interpretation of the female moral code, she ought not even to feel love until the suitor’s honourable intentions have been unequivocally declared (and the Prince’s intentions are anything but honourable since not only has he already offered violence but he also already has a wife). It could be argued, of course, that the little flame he has kindled hardly deserves to be termed ‘love’, but, whatever we call it, the damage is done simply by giving the Prince reason to hope, which is encouragement enough.
The proscription on a woman loving independently of a suitor’s declaration of honourable intent is framed, within the female moral code as it became defined during the seventeenth century, as the
‘natural’ condition of will-less womanhood, a reflection of an appropriately passive and submissive disposition. But there are also strong pragmatic considerations that suggest this particular virtue might owe more to necessity than to a woman’s natural character, and, at the very least, there is certainly room for confusion between what is and what ought to be a woman’s role in affairs of the heart. Dorothy Osborne, for example, writing to William Temple in 1654 about the merits of Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (1654–5), finds only one character who takes her fancy: ‘she [who] was in a besieged Towne, and perswaded all those of her Sexe to goe out with her to the Enemy (which were a barbarous People) and dye by theire swords, that the provision of the Towne might last the longer for such as were able to doe service in deffending it.’ Osborne admires this self-sacrifice as a ‘handsome thinge’ to do, but declares herself outraged when it is revealed that ‘this woman left behinde her [a letter] for the Governour of the Towne, where she discovers a passion for him and makes that the reason why she did it.’
Osborne’s scorn is directed at the woman’s impudence: ‘I confesse I have noe patience for our faiseurs de Romance, when they make women court. It will never enter into my head that tis possible any
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woman can Love where she is not first Loved, & much lesse that if they should doe that, they could have the face to owne it.’17 This is the conduct-book orthodoxy: a woman should not love, let alone speak, before she is bespoken. But Osborne’s complaint also reveals a telling slippage from what is possible to what is politic – from what a woman, as a woman, can do, to what she should do, to preserve dignity, or save face. She herself seems in two minds whether the fault represents a breach of plausibility or a breach of decorum, and it is an uncertainty that becomes even more pronounced in the amatory fiction of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Taking secret charge in The History of the Nun
In Aphra Behn’s The History of the Nun (1689), the heroine, Isabella –
the nun of the title – certainly understands the force of decorum when she falls in love with Henault, the noble, handsome, and charming brother of Sister Katteriena, her friend and fellow nun at a monastery in Ipers [Ypres]. The History of the Nun is typical of much of Behn’s fiction – most of it written in the years immediately prior to her death in 1689, following a successful career as a dramatist – in its depiction of passions that are often defended as essentially amoral in their overwhelming intensity. At one stage Isabella, for example, claims that she gives in to a passion that she is convinced is the will of Heaven since it is so little in her power to conquer – this despite the fact that she is initially established as another model of virtue. The sincerity of her belief, despite its apparent expediency, is attested to by the narrator, who glosses the argument that ‘it was resisting even Divine Providence to struggle any longer with her heart’ with the observation that ‘this being her real belief, she the more patiently gave way to all the thoughts that pleased her.’18
Sincerely persuaded though Isabella may be of the inevitability of the sin she is about to commit, her vow-breaking is with some difficulty subsumed under the kind of political double-speak that Ros Ballaster attributes to amatory fiction. ‘The plot convention of a heroine torn between vows … takes on a newly political light’, Ballaster argues, in the context of a Catholicism under threat of persecution and the necessary expedient of disavowing the church as a means to its own survival. ‘The contingencies of political and social survival’ might, by inference, be seen to mitigate Isabella’s vow-breaking, even on a personal level, since it is clear that she was not entirely free in her original choice of vocation.19 But what is unnerving – and
104 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre unsettling to a party political reading – is the speed with which Isabella acquires the arts of equivocation and deceit even before she breaks her vows.
Isabella is protected from the worst excesses of shamelessly desiring women by the expedient of falling in love before she knows what is happening to her. When she is first importuned by Villenoys, a nobly born young man who, alone of all her admirers, dares speak his love, her defences are impenetrable, and her standard of conduct impeccable. She even blames herself for perhaps having inadvertently encouraged him: she is impervious to his entreaties, but she is not blind, and fears mischief has been done by what Halifax calls the ‘ Language of the eyes’ – ‘she fears she might, by something in her looks, have enticed his heart, for she owned she saw him with wonder at his beauty’ (p. 10) – and she fears also that she might have ‘given him hope by answering his letters’ (p. 10), though even when he is gravely ill she is unrelenting. Isabella is immune to Villenoys’s appeals, but she is defenceless before an enemy she is unable to recognize. When she falls in love with Henault, she does not even recognize it as love until Katteriena describes her own experience with the page Arnaldo, though she is conscious of disturbing feelings that she can guard against if warned of their approach. Henault, for hi
s part, does not realize that the pleasure he finds in Isabella’s presence is also love, for ‘love very rarely takes birth without hope’ (p. 11) and Isabella’s young life was already ‘a proverb, and a precedent’, for the holiest of women.
Yet for all Isabella’s reputation for piety, once love strikes she acquires in an instant the ability to dissemble and manipulate, and
‘with her woman’s skill begins to practice an art she never before understood’ (p. 17). The transformation is disturbing, suggesting a capacity for feigning virtue that suddenly makes sense, for later readers, of Mr B’s distrust of Pamela’s innocence. One moment Isabella’s name is synonymous with devout living, such that when people wanted to ‘express a very holy woman indeed, they would say,
‘She was a very “Isabella”’ (p. 11); the next moment this woman who
‘in the whole course of her life … never could be charged with an untruth, or an equivocation’ (p. 18), is scheming to ‘dissemble her own passion and make him the first aggressor; the first that loved, or at least, that should seem to do so’ (17). Seemingly effortlessly, she manipulates Katteriena until, worried by Katteriena’s confidence that her brother has subdued his passion, she deems it ‘time to retrieve the flying lover’ (21).
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Behn claims at the beginning of the story that, while women are ‘by nature more constant and just than men’ (p. 4), they learn from men’s example until long habit takes the place of nature, and it is now only modesty, she insists, and not inclination that sets women apart. But modesty, in Isabella’s case, relates only to appearance, and her impropriety is ultimately exposed in sensational fashion: having survived the shame of running off with Henault, she eventually marries Villenoys after believing Henault killed in battle, but when Henault returns from the dead, she resolves to protect herself from the infamy of a bigamous marriage by becoming ‘the murderess of two husbands (both beloved) in one night’ (p. 42). It seems a long way from the Isabella of proverb and precedent, though she quickly recovers respect sufficient to deliver a half-hour warning against vow-breaking before her execution, depart-ing the world ‘generally lamented and honorably buried’ (p. 42).
There is throughout Behn’s work a trust in the efficacy of confession and penance that is at odds with consistency or even coherence of characterization – issues that are also largely irrelevant to the moral essentialism of earlier concepts of character. (Another striking instance of penitential redemption is the career of Matilda in Behn’s The Fair Jilt. A so-called ‘Galloping Nun’ – that is, a woman who enters an Order on a short-term contract rather than vowing perpetual chastity –
Matilda has an innocent man convicted of attempted rape, purloins her sister’s fortune, and twice attempts to have her sister murdered, yet the penitent is allowed to live more or less happily ever after, in ‘as perfect a state of happiness, as this troublesome world can afford’.20) But the speed and ease with which Isabella becomes an accomplished dissembler, the price she is prepared to pay to avoid the loss of reputation or even her husband’s reproaches,21 the coolness with which she is able to manipulate both Henault and Katteriena while in the throes of an ungovernable passion, all raise questions about what is going on beneath an exterior that is – in Isabella’s case, definitively – chaste, silent, and obedient. The dangers were already stirring in a character such as Markham’s Melidora, who in the elaborate stratagem of the tiger hunt was attempting to save herself the embarrassment of admitting she was wrong in rejecting Thirsis’s suit. But her clear-sighted analysis of the pragmatic implications of her actions and her willingness to contrive a face-saving deception point to the ways in which a developing self-consciousness can compromise female subjectivity.
The modesty that Behn suggests ‘makes the difference’ between men and women also becomes equivocal in the context of an active intelligence, always in danger of tipping over from something a woman ‘is’
106 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre to something that she ‘does’. While she is a paragon of piety, Isabella’s modesty defends her from the attentions of the hordes of young men who aspire to her hand: they find her reserve so off-putting that they do not dare speak to her of love. The reserve is not ‘natural’, to the extent that, when she is ‘at perfect peace and tranquility’ (p. 10) with herself, and safe within the enclosed world of the nunnery, she relaxes into a more outgoing and animated demeanour, but when her tran-quillity is once again disturbed by the intrusion of worldly interests –
this time in the form of her awakening regard for Henault – she deliberately withdraws into herself and resumes the cloak of modest retirement. From a modesty that is the expression of diffidence in relation to worldly affairs to a modesty that controls and subdues an unseemly personal interest requires no great leap of faith in Isabella’s virtue. But it is such a tiny step from there to a modesty that controls and subdues an unseemly personal interest for the purpose of surreptitiously promoting it that it is no wonder that modesty became such a suspect virtue.
True modesty is in a sense incompatible with a fully functional subjectivity, since it derives from a humility that is ignorant of the claims of the self. Consciously modest behaviour, in contrast, implies a knowledge of something to be modest about, either one’s own merits or what lies beyond the limits of the decorum that words or behaviour may infringe. Consciously modest behaviour also acts as a screen behind which a woman’s desires, innocent or otherwise, are known only to herself, so that, as Ruth Yeazell observes, ‘under the cover of modesty … a woman who knows her own desires always threatens to take secret charge of the scene’. The interests of prospective husbands, therefore, are best served by women remaining
‘modestly unaware that they love until they are asked to marry, their desires [remaining] … safely in the keeping of their husbands’.22 But, of course, if women remain modestly unaware of their love, they also risk, as Miseria does, betraying evidence of that love. Moreover, symptoms of a preference, accompanied by a steadfast negative, might also imply not modesty but, as Yeazell suggests, a capacity for manipulation ‘all the more dangerous for being concealed’.23
The exact rules of virtue and modesty in Love Intrigues
The ‘Scheme of virtuous Politics’ that Galesia recommends in Love Intrigues would seem, in the circumstances, an essential safeguard, but it is also a tall order for a 15-year-old embarking on her first amours.
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Barker’s novel (a term she herself uses, though perhaps in the sense of ‘novella’) is generally assumed to be semi-autobiographical, and possibly not originally intended for general consumption, the political intentions of its author (a staunch royalist who converted to Catholicism after fleeing to France in 1688 after the Glorious Revolution) confined, Kathryn King argues, to the strengthening of community bonds effected through manuscript circulation within a select circle of sympathizers.24 The story Galesia tells her friend Lucasia concerns her first love, Bosvil, who courts her while she is staying with an aunt in London. They apparently reach an understanding – at least Galesia seems to thinks so – but when she returns home to the country he blows hot and cold in a seemingly unaccountable fashion, until he eventually marries another. Even if only loosely based on personal experience, it is an extraordinary social document, remarkable for its psychological acuity yet ultimately inconclusive, with neither Galesia nor Bosvil allowed an unambiguous insight into the other’s feelings.
Each blames the other for obscuring his or her intentions, but Galesia also blames herself, though she has done all that a woman ought to do when importuned by a suitor, never once betraying an affection that might be interpreted as encouragement. But as Galesia sets out the case against herself, she acted on suspect motives, allowing a secret pride, disguised as modesty, to govern her actions. That is, she was modest because she was too proud to be indiscreet, her behaviour driven not by the love of that
virtue with which she should honour her Maker, but by an effort to look good:
How far my Looks, or Gestures, might betray my Thoughts, I know not; but I kept my Words close Prisoners, till they should be set at Liberty by the Desire of his Father or the command of mine or at least conveyed into the Mouth of my prudent Mother. Thus I thought I planted my Actions in a good Soil, in the Ground of Virtue; and watered them with the Stream of Discretion: But the worm of Pride, and Self-esteem was at the bottom and gnawed the Root. (p. 96)
Galesia offers her story to her friend as an object lesson in the dangers of pride, but as with all the works discussed in this chapter, the moral seems oddly tangential to the story, which in this case demonstrates, more than anything else, how little room in the social world there is for the ‘truth and sincerity’ that Galesia laments has been supplanted by modesty and pride. When she had first met Bosvil – a kinsman who
108 Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre had visited the family home – the inadequacy of the stricture on not loving first is immediately apparent. Her thoughts are already prudently armed ‘with a thousand Resolutions against Love’, but she succumbs instantly and, it seems, genuinely: ‘the first Moment I saw this Man [Bosvil] I loved him; though he had nothing extraordinary in Person or Parts, to excite such an Affection’ (p. 84). In London, where Bosvil is a student at the Inns of Court, he makes his intentions clear, the language of looks and gestures transparent enough to prompt Galesia’s aunt to exercise, in the interests of discretion rather than harassment, her custodial obligations, though he is still allowed opportunity to snatch a few moments in which to declare everlasting love and to seek the same affirmation from Galesia. But Galesia knows the ropes: she dismisses his protestations as youthful gallantry, which he, as expected, construes as the modesty demanded of a young woman who must wait upon parental consent – though Galesia also admits that she wanted a courtship with all the frills, disdaining ‘to be courted thus in hugger mugger’ (p. 86). It is, however regrettably, the way of the world to mix ‘Pride with Honour, Dissimulation with Modesty’, and ‘as the World now rolls, we are under a kind of Constraint to follow its Bias’ (p. 86).
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