Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

Nicole Pohl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351871426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The first full length study of women's utopian spatial imagination in the seventeenth and eigtheenth centuries, this book explores the sophisticated correlation between identity and social space. The investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As Pohl's primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention is given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate Paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon's Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality and offers their own utopian judgment.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

I was your house. And, when you leave, abandoning this dwelling place, I do not know what to do with these walls of mine. Have I ever had a body other than the one which you constructed according to your idea of it? Have I ever experienced a skin other than the one which you wanted me to dwell within?¹

Luce Irigaray’s remark is a particularly suggestive introduction to a study of women’s utopianism. What is at stake in her observation is the relationship between individual and socio-political space, between the production of space and the production of knowledge. The enclosure of women in men’s physical space reaffirms women’s enclosure in a masculinist conceptual world. We are familiar with a modern history of spaces that unveils the complex linkage between space, knowledge and power, identity and the body. However, Christine de Pizan (1365-after 1429), Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1586–c. 1651) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) already pointed toward gendered ‘geographies of exclusion’.² In The Book of the City of Ladies (1404), Pizan exposes an architectural practice that is foreclosed to women:

I am not Saint Thomas the Apostle, who through divine grace built a rich palace in Heaven for the King of India, and my feeble sense does not know the craft, or the measures, or the study, or the science, or the practice of construction.³

She thus imagines a necessarily allegorical space that is based on principles of Christian virtue, nobility and female collectivism. Lady Mary Wroth conspicuously echoes Christine de Pizan’s call for autonomous utopian imagination when the main character Pamphilia in Urania (1621) is recommended to ‘bee the Emperess of the world commanding the Empire of your owne minde’.⁴ And Margaret Cavendish emphasizes the aspect of utopian autonomy in her Blazing New World (1666). The social map used in Cavendish’s quote reveals the early modern gender-exclusive allegiance to colonialism and imperial expansion:

I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like.⁵

The prohibitive spaces that these authors point towards are exclusive to a range of disempowered groups. Postcolonial theorists have unveiled the complicity of early geographers in the project of imperialism and colonialism and continue to explore the enduring reproduction of colonial relations and practices in the imaginary geographies of the postcolonial present that rely on centre-periphery cartography.⁶ Feminist and queer theory has identified the active construction of space and place as masculinist and heterosexist and thus as exclusionary to women and dissident sexual identities. Christophe Martin’s study Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle continues this debate with a typological study of the metonymic and metaphorical spaces in the literature of the period that he identifies as sites where gender roles are negotiated, consolidated and challenged.⁷ Whilst these are fictional spaces, they are based on social practices. Thus, Martin argues, the boudoir, the closet, the convent and the harem function as ‘une prison élargie aux dimensions de l’univers’ as they enforce the ideals of domesticity, intimacy and retirement (23). In these seemingly different histories of space, we can identify a correlation between ‘lived’ (‘representational space’) and ‘conceived’ (‘representation of space’), in other words, between ‘physical’ and ‘conceptualized’ space.⁸ My own concern with women’s utopian thought derives from an engagement with these contemporary debates. I want to look at those texts that Martin left out in his study — texts that offer a diverse range of emancipatory strategies, ranging from the symbolic recoding of representational spaces to the invention of an innovative architectural practice. In these texts, the convent, the harem, the country house and the palace become spaces of resistance. The expression of an autonomous utopian vision that we encountered in Pizan, Wroth and Cavendish is thus a far-reaching discursive practice that intervenes in contemporary ideas about social power, utopias, gender and space. One of the primary preoccupations of utopian thought is the relationship between individual and socio-political space. When utopian thinkers portray an ideal community or society, they design a physical setting to establish and strengthen its existence.⁹ What utopias do is to experiment with spatial imagination, to reconceptualize the relationship between space and subject and its corporeality. What utopias as a fundamentally experimental and transformative genre reveal is the paradox between ideal and lived space, between ideology and social practice. My desire is to explore how women writers negotiate the complex gender politics of space by redefining the social production of space.

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In their study Communitas, Paul and Percival Goodman suggest that the ‘background of the physical plant and the foreground of human activity are profoundly and intimately dependent on one another’.¹⁰ This significant interaction and reciprocal correlation between the physical and material environment and the human individual is the crucial concern of utopian spatial imagination. The physical setting such as geography and climate, and the architecture of utopian communities are central to their ideological and political make-up. Thomas More had already emphasized this concern in his Utopia (1516) that made ‘utopia’ become a geographical metaphor. Renaissance and early modern utopias displaced their ideal and other worlds by locating them in faraway, undiscovered countries and remote unchartered islands and planets. Texts such as More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of A Voyage Thither (1638) and Gabriel Plattes’ A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Marcaria (1641) were clearly influenced by contemporary quests of discovery and colonialization.¹¹ Although geographical utopias of this period are akin to contemporary narratives of explorers, conquerors and merchants, they also project archaic ideals of Paradise and utopia onto the new worlds. The classical utopia gave form to religious, ethical and colonial desires in a way that blurred the paradigms of empirical truth and myth.¹² Despite the paradigmatic shift from eu/utopias to eu/uchronias in the mid-seventeenth century, the literary utopia of the eighteenth century still endorsed in principle the imaginary geographies of the classical utopia.¹³ Eighteenth-century reports of South Seas and Native American societies refuted the Enlightenment model of progressive development and inspired a primitivist dream of the ideal society that was perhaps first expressed in Montaigne’s essay, ‘Des Cannibales’ (c. 1580) and, in the eighteenth century, in Bolingbroke’s ‘natural society’ and Rousseau’s reconstruction of l’homme naturel. Utopias such as Denis Vairasse’s History of the Sevarites (1675) or Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (1676) document simple, virtuous and self-sufficient communities and thus offer their own contribution to the contemporary debate on luxury. Aphra Behn’s rather conventional description of the Indians in Surinam in her Oroonoko (1688) anticipates Rousseau’s l’homme naturel in his innocence, simplicity and peaceableness. Abb6 Pr6vost’s Le Philosophe Anglois; ou, Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland (1731–1739) has the main progagonist Cleveland travelling to America where he becomes the chief of the Abaquis Indians to reform their society according to European ideas of civilization and society. In The History of Emily Montagu (1769), Brooke sets her micro-utopia on the American continent where the narrator’s remarks on the Canadian Indians combine primitivist anthropology with an explicit social critique aimed at European gender inequality.¹⁴ And Sophie La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1798), an interesting reworking of Rousseau’s Julie, outlines a conjectural history of society from the Edenic union of Adam and Eve (the Wattines) in the American wilderness to the creation of a city with other European immigrants. This premodern association that we also find in Rousseau, Diderot and Foigny, assumes, paradoxically, as Mullan notes, a sentimental ‘individualist utopia’: countercultural mini-societies or retreats based on principles of natural sociability, community and fellowship.¹⁵ Driven by distrust of commerce and modern, proto-capitalist civilization, these utopias promote domestic, self-sufficient economies of production, often accompanied by the internal abolition of private property and money. What is conspicuous in eighteenth-century utopian fiction is the metamorphosis of eu/topia into eu/chronia through the discourse of colonialism and ‘anthropological metaphysics’.¹⁶ Indeed, the extensive appropriation and colonization of the ‘New World’ is justified by a model of progressive socialization: such narratives use the displacement of fantastic voyages, Robinsonades, Gulliveriana and, of course, utopia, to define society and civilization as progressive alienation from barbarism to civilization.

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But it was not only the geospatial setting that reflected the tension between the ideal and the real. Golden Age and Garden of Eden motifs (sponte sua) that merge with the celebration of self-sufficiency and good husbandry of Virgil’s Georgics are commonplace in classical utopianism. The physical and climatic environment of these experimental societies is in most cases fertile, lavish and, more importantly, stable. It secures ample agriculture and food production and provides an agreeable place for human beings, free from the basic anxieties of survival. The most famous example is the influential fourteenth-century poem Land of Cockaygne that depicts a hedonistic paradise where all desires and needs are instantly and automatically gratified. Subscribing more to the ethics of restraint and work, More’s island is nevertheless well provided with a pleasant climate, fertile soil and plenty of fresh water to secure a stable supply of food and drink. The ideal society in The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances of James Dubourdieu, and his Wife (1719) subsists on an abundance of fruit, herbs and plants, which grow lavishly in the warm and protected climate.¹⁷

On a smaller scale, the constructed environment, especially architecture, has an established symbolic function in utopias. In Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Krishan Kumar writes that ‘[a]rchitecture has always been the most utopian of all the arts. It has longstanding concern with the marriage of mathematical and human forms, the finding of a harmony and correspondence between the mathematical relation...