The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  Any girl who was personable, healthy and good-natured,10 was likely to be heartily wooed, but love was always subject to firm considerations of suitability and advantageousness. Her husband must not be old or disfigured or cruel or a whoremaster. She was not married away vilely for money, for the heroes of ballads and their admirers strongly condemned the practice of the nobility in disposing of their children like stud cattle; on the other hand a girl could not be married out of her father’s house until a suitable groom presented himself in a proper manner. She agreed to treat him well, respect him and joyfully to do his will in bed, but there is no indication that she expected her life to be transfigured by love. She considered herself to be as others thought her, a sexual creature ready for mating, and her husband was chosen as likely in this fashion too. On her marriage day she would be wakened by her bride knights and maidens, dressed in her best gown, stuck over with rosemary and crowned perhaps with ears of wheat, and taken in procession to the village church, where she would be assured of her husband’s protection and a share in his fortunes. The blessing would promise children and freedom from nameless fear and jealousy. Feasting would last all day while the young couple chafed to be alone, for weddings were held in midsummer when the sun does not set until eleven; then they would be escorted to bed and left alone.

  This is what happened according to the folklorists of the sixteenth century. Too often it did not, but it supplies the justification for the boast of the country to the court, that it alone knew the secrets of ‘true love’, based on familiarity and parental control.11 But the legacy of Petrarchan passion, with the invention of printing, became more and more accessible as an idea and reacted on the sensibilities of young folk whose brains were already inflamed by the sexual abstinence imposed by a system of late marrying. Schoolmasters, preachers and reformers raged and wept over the prevalence of lecherous books and plays; prose works spun out long tales of chivalry debased into adventure, poems sang of adultery and the delights of sexual titillation, plays set forth images of juvenile infatuation and clandestine marriage. Young men in search of uncontaminated women, for the arrival of venereal disease at the beginning of the sixteenth century had complicated many things, rode up and down the country wooing country girls of substance with snatches of Serafino, Marino and Anacreon, justified in the name of the great Petrarch whom few Englishmen had ever read.12 The Elizabethan press thundered with denunciations of the lewd seducers of silly country girls. Elizabeth and Mary both brought out the severest edicts against young men who charmed country wenches, lured them into marriage, wasted their dowries and then cast them off.13 The church authorities insisted on the reading of the banns in the parishes of both parties, but often they were read in quite the wrong places and more often not read at all. Religious turmoil added to the confusion. Parishes left without incumbents depended upon hedge-priests to legitimize children; the preposterously ramified laws which could nullify marriage were unknown until invoked by an interested and better informed party. We will probably never know how many people suffered from the confusion about ecclesiastical law, which dealt with all questions of marriage and inheritance, and the changes of official religion in the sixteenth century. Perhaps it was only the reforming clergy persecuted by Mary, and disappointed by Elizabeth’s refusal to recognize clerical marriage, who created the myth of perfect marriage, but minorities change the culture of majorities and certainly a change was occurring.

  By the end of the sixteenth century love and marriage was already established as an important theme in literature. The nuclear household was certainly typical of urban households and a greater proportion of the total population now lived in cities, but even the agricultural majority was also following the trend to triadic families. But it was still a developing argument, and not yet an escapist theme. The town took its cue from the country, where marriage was tolerance and mutual survival in a couple of rooms, where winter was longer than summer and dearth more likely than plenty. The disastrous step to marriage as the end of the story, and the assumption of ‘living happily ever after’ had not yet been taken. One of the most significant apologists of marriage as a way of life and a road to salvation was Shakespeare. It is still to be proved how much we owe of what is good in the ideal of exclusive love and cohabitation to Shakespeare, but one thing is clear—he was as much concerned in his newfangled comedies to clear away the detritus of romance, ritual, perversity and obsession as he was to achieve happy endings, and many of the difficulties in his plays are resolved when we can discern this principle at work. Transvestism is a frequently discussed Shakespearean motif, but it is rarely considered as a mode of revelation as well as a convention productive of the occasional frisson. Julia (in Two Gentlemen of Verona) and Viola (in Twelfth Night) are both transvestite heroines, on close terms with the audience, who are explicitly contrasted with Petrarchan idols living on another plane of ceremony and imagery, Silvia and Olivia. These goddesses are debased in the course of the play by their own too human tactics, and even in the case of Silvia by an attempted rape. The girls in men’s clothing win the men they love by a more laborious means, for they cannot use veils and coquetry; they must offer and not exact service, and as valets they must see their loves at their least heroic. In As You Like It Rosalind finds the means to wean Orlando off his futile Italianate posturing, disfiguring the trees with bad poetry; love at first sight for a stranger lady who addressed kind words to him on a day of victory becomes the love of familiarity for a sexless boy who teaches him about women and time, discovering her own role as she teaches him his, thereby leaping the bounds of femininity and tutelage. In Romeo and Juliet the same effect is got by Romeo’s overhearing Juliet’s confession of love, so that she cannot dwell on form, however fain. Because their love is not sanctioned by their diseased society they are destroyed, for Shakespearean love is always social and never romantic in the sense that it does not seek to isolate itself from society, family and constituted authority. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream obsession is shown as a hallucination and a madness, exorcized by the communal rite. Portia in The Merchant of Venice only manages to show Bassanio the worth of what he really found in his leaden casket when she dons an advocate’s gown to plead for Antonio, her husband’s friend and benefactor, so that her love is seen to knit male society together, not to tear it apart.

  When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago, Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the tragedies are all feminine—even Lady Macbeth (who is so often misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious, helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female hero.

  The opposition between women who are people and women who are something less does not only rest in the vague contrast between the women of the comedies and the women of the tragedies. There are more explicit examples of women who may earn love, like Helena who pursued her husband through military brothels to marriage and honour in All’s Well, and women who must lose it through inertia and gormlessness, like Cressida. In The Taming of the Shrew Shakespeare contrasted two types in order to present a theory of marriage which is demonstrated by the explicit valuation of both kinds of wooing in the last scene. Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a stale, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false colours, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man enough to know what he wants and
how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no objection to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of duplicity, married without earnestness or good-will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough.

  There is no romanticism in Shakespeare’s view of marriage. He recognized it as a difficult state of life, requiring discipline, sexual energy, mutual respect and great forbearance; he knew there were no easy answers to marital problems, and that infatuation was no basis for continued cohabitation. His lifetime straddled the decay of the ancient state and the development of the new, the collapse of Catholicism and the solidification of English Protestantism, and the changes in the concept of the created universe, of ethics and science and art which we call the English Renaissance. Much of his writing deals expressly with these changes and their meaning, balancing notions of legitimacy and law with cooperation, spontaneity and moral obligation, nature and mercy against authority and vengeance.

  The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem marriage from the status of a remedy against fornication by underplaying the sexual component and addressing the husband as the wife’s friend.14 It was unthinkable to them that children should marry without consent of their parents, but unthinkable also that parents should oppose a match which was suitable in the sense that the parties were of the same social standing and wealth, of an age and not disqualified by illness or criminality. Now that the property to be parcelled and transferred in marriage was more divisible and portable, girls may have had more freedom of choice but by the same token the old safeguards had ceased to apply. Parents demanded the right to know something of a bridegroom’s background, and feared marriage with a stranger who might prove to be bigamous or a pauper. The country still taunted the city with the differences between their marryings but now the urban community was growing at the expense of the agrarian, and the rural community was losing its cohesiveness.

  Where the wife is actively employed in production, helping with planting out and harvesting as well as minding the women’s work, she was naturally not the family’s chief consumer in circumstances of vicarious leisure. She was not primarily chosen for her obvious charms, not used to manipulating them for her own ends, had no opportunity to gad about, wear fine clothes and make mischief. The subjects of popular farces about marrying and cuckoldry were the town-wives who were not employed in running their husband’s business with them, who sat about with their gossips all day, flirting, drinking, flaunting new fashions and making mischief by carrying assignations and rumours, or entertaining the priest. Antoine de la Sale’s very circumstantial account, Les Quinze Joies de Mariage, enjoyed several centuries of popularity and was even translated and adapted by Dekker at the end of the sixteenth century.15 This was no mere misogynist’s account, but the heartfelt cry of a man who felt that he had been exploited by women all his life. In the larger community of the town there was more sexual competition and girls learnt early to enhance their chances by the use of cosmetics and other forms of sexual display, laying forth their breasts and padding their buttocks. Their mothers superintended the process and instructed their daughters in the arts of sexual bargaining; if the worst came to the worst, and dalliance with a lusty young buck menaced an advantageous match with untimely progeny, mother arranged for an abortion or for the patching up of a hasty wedding with a more or less wealthy gull. The tensions in the situation were exaggerated by the laws which prevented apprentices from marrying until their long articles were over: many a master craftsman free at last to wive picked out a juicy young thing only to find that he had some soldier’s or apprentice’s leavings. Many of the city wives were idle, but, unlike women in other countries where urban dwelling had developed at an earlier epoch, they were not chaperoned and supervised and kept indoors, but allowed to walk forth freely and salute their acquaintances. The staple of French and English farce was the unwitting cuckoldom of the hardworked and henpecked husband whose wife will not keep house or cook for him.16 The miserable husband reflected that her lust seemed to fire at the sight of every man but him, that she nagged, wheedled for fine clothes to attract strangers, that the first pregnancy meant the decline of her health and the assumption of permanent valetudinarianism. Obviously, such a dismal picture is an exaggeration, but the characteristics of middle-class marriage are already present: the wife is chief consumer and showcase for her husband’s wealth: idle, unproductive, narcissistic and conniving. She had been chosen as a sexual object, in preference to others, and the imagery of obsession became more appropriate to her case. This is the class who were most exposed to the popular literature of escapist wedding which grew out of the collision of upper-class adulterous romance and the simple stories of peasant wedding. As long as literature kept the essential character of marriage in sight, stories of love and marriage remained vibrant, ambiguous and intelligent, but true love was quick to become a catch-phrase: the country had used it to mean their innocent couplings leading to a life of shared hardship and endeavour; the religious reformers added the notion which they culled from the scripture, ‘Rejoice in the wife of thy youth, may her breasts delight thee always.’ Sexual pleasure within marriage was holy, nevertheless marriage was also meant to be a remedy for lechery in that a good wife restrained her husband’s passion and practised modesty and continence within marriage, especially when breeding. Unrestrained indulgence was thought to lead to illness, barrenness, disgust, and deformity of issue. For this reason it was considered particularly horrible when a woman married against her better judgement.17 It was originally considered to be a mistake to marry a woman with whom you had been ‘in amors’, at whose feet you had grovelled and wept, to whom you had made flattering poems and songs. Shakespeare made his comment on the disparity between what is promised to the courted woman and what the wife can realistically expect in his picture of Luciana and Adriana in The Comedy of Errors. The divine mistress was to dwindle into a wife within hours of her wedding: the goddess was to find herself employed as supermenial.

  These London Wenches are so stout,

  They are not what they do;

  They will not let you have a Bout

  Without a Crown or two.

  They double their Chops, and Curl their Locks,

  Their Breaths perfume they do;

  Their tails are pepper’d with the Pox

  And that you’re welcome to.

  But give me the Buxom Country Lass,

  Hot piping from the Cow;

  That will take a touch upon the Grass,

  Ay, marry, and thank you too.

  Her Colour’s as fresh as a Rose in June

  Her temper as kind as a Dove,

  She’ll please the Swain with a wholesome Tune,

  And freely give her Love.

  English ballad, c. 1719

  Despite all pressures to the contrary from religious reformers, intelligent poets and playwrights, and the desperate interest of propertied parents in retaining control of marriage behaviour, love-and-marriage took over, ending in that triumph of kitsch, the white wedding. Part of the explanation can be found in the story of what happened to Petrarchism in Protestant England. The English sonnet sequences of the 1590s were either frankly adulterous like Sir Philip Sidney’s or totally honorific like Daniel’s artifical
passion for the Countess of Pembroke. Wyatt had been unable to keep a note of genuine physical tension out of his dramatic and colloquial translations of Petrarch, but he never ceased to battle with this irrelevant sensuality. Sidney makes no such effort. His sexual successes with Penelope Rich are chronicled in the poetry.18 Reaction to this licence in a society crusading for marriage as a sacred condition and deeply conscious of the differences in the practice of the nobility after a half-century of scandals was not slow in making an appearance on the same literary level. The Puritans were agitating for severer punishments for fornication as standing at the church door in a white sheet was treated by some blades as a sign of prowess and prestige. The reaction to the adulterous element in the courtly literature of the nineties can be found in the epithalamia which were written as public relations work for marriage. Spenser’s, the best of them, was also virtually the first, for its precedents were mainly Fescennine and Latinate. In it he combined reminiscences of the rural modes of celebrating brides with imagery from the Song of Songs and a Platonic injection of veneration for intellectual beauty. The result is a poetical triumph, although the sonnet sequence of which it is the climax is a failure. The adoption of the Petrarchan mode to describe the methodical steps of Spenser’s very proper wooing is simply a mistake, but it is a mistake which continues to be made. The anguish and obsession of the Petrarchan lover is artificially stimulated by his lawful betrothed in fits of pique or capriciousness: the lawful wooer lashes himself into factitious frenzies at her father’s frown.19 William Habington followed the new pattern of Petrarchan wedding in a dreary sequence called Castara,20 which ought to have proved beyond further dispute that adultery provided greater inspiration than marriage. Playwrights succeeded better than poets at establishing marriage as the non plus ultra of romantic love, but the real source of the marrying-and-living-happily-ever-after myth is that art-form invented to while away the vacant hours of idle wives, the love-novel.