Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World

Kimberly Anne Coles, Eve Keller, Kimberly Anne Coles, Eve Keller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317041016
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

All of the essays in this volume capture the body in a particular attitude: in distress, vulnerability, pain, pleasure, labor, health, reproduction, or preparation for death. They attend to how the body's transformations affect the social and political arrangements that surround it. And they show how apprehension of the body – in social and political terms – gives it shape.

Part I

Debates and directions

1
Ain’t I A Ladie?

Race, sexuality, and early modern women writers

Melissa E. Sanchez

In a foundational essay for woman-of-color feminism, “White Woman Listen!: Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” Hazel V. Carby details the ways that a failure to confront racial power dynamics “compromises any feminist theory and practice founded on the notion of simple equality.”¹ She concludes with a question that summarizes the limitations of abstract ideals of women’s solidarity: “In other words, of white feminists we must ask, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘WE’?”² In this essay, I propose that in the thirty-plus years since Carby posed this piercing question, its implications have yet to be confronted squarely by feminist criticism of the early modern period. Scholars have generally been comfortable critiquing the racialized logics of male-authored texts. But – with important exceptions – they have been slower to consider representations of women’s racialized privilege and dominance in literary works written by women.³ Insofar as it has sought models of “simple equality,” at least among women, much early modern feminist criticism has been (as Carby warned) compromised in its ability to consider the effects of racial hierarchy and privilege on early expressions of feminist consciousness. As scholars practicing woman-of-color feminism and queer-of-color critique have long noted, the pursuit of solidarity along a single axis of identity may actually divert our attention from other forms of injustice. Cathy J. Cohen puts it succinctly: “Only through recognizing the many manifestations of power, across and within categories, can we truly begin to build a movement based on one’s politics and not exclusively on one’s identity.”⁴ The problem becomes particularly acute when we study women writers from periods in which perceptions of racial and sexual norms were very different from our own. Rather than note or censure their participation in the complex and uneven construction of a white supremacist ideology that privileges fair skin, Christianity, and European heritage, the critical tendency is to accentuate and applaud those rare examples of proto-feminist consciousness that we have.⁵

The growing body of scholarship on Aemilia Lanyer offers a particularly incisive example of the extent to which the desire for feminist forbears can avert critical attention from other forms of privilege and domination. To read through much Lanyer criticism is to be repeatedly assured that Lanyer is not only a feminist but a “radical” one at that. Indeed, this adjective pervades assessments of her politics. Lynette McGrath argues that Lanyer “forced the grounds of protest available in her culture to their most radical possible feminist expression.”⁶ Barbara Lewalski praises Lanyer for drawing “radical egalitarian conclusions” from scripture.⁷ Barbara Bowen argues that “the radical impulses” of Lanyer’s work make her “of major importance to the feminist project of recovering such initiatives in the texts of early modern writers.”⁸ Marie H. Loughlin praises Lanyer’s “radical re-visioning of women’s roles in biblical history and early modern patronage systems.”⁹ Most recently, Suzanne Trill has contrasted the “right-wing” agenda of “most modern forms of Western Christianity” to the “radicalism” of Lanyer’s text and its “anticipation of the disruption of the social order” posed by female prophets in the English civil wars.¹⁰ To be sure, there has from early on been a counter-tradition of Lanyer criticism that resists such an optimistic view of sisterhood. Many critics have challenged the early assessment of Lanyer as a champion of radical female solidarity and separatism, emphasizing instead Lanyer’s attention to socioeconomic hierarchies among women.¹¹ Yet, with the exception of Kari Boyd McBride and Barbara Bowen, analyses of Lanyer’s awareness of inequalities among women have tended to focus on what we would now call differences of class rather than those of race or ethnicity. Many readers have also quietly accepted a conservative valuation of female chastity. As a result, while critics have credited Lanyer’s “feminism” to different degrees, they have generally let pass without comment the consistent and prominent racist, anti-Semitic, and sexually shaming dimensions of Lanyer’s writing.¹²

This critical silence is surprising, for it does not take a paranoid reader to dig up Lanyer’s exaltation of fair-skinned, sexually pure, Christian, Western-European subjects, both male and female, and her denigration of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual others. These statements are overt, habitual, and right on the surface. In focusing this essay on precisely those passages that challenge our connection with past women and that thwart our desire to find precedents for modern challenges to social injustice, my intent is not to tear down a beloved icon of feminist criticism. Nor is it to castigate previous critics for not addressing women writers’ participation in the ideologies that would prepare the way for modern racial hierarchies – indeed, my own previous work is subject to that very charge. Rather, it is to suggest that Lanyer’s writing is valuable not in spite of its troubling support of a nascent ideology of white power and privilege but because of it. For in confronting the dissonance between her calls for women’s equality to men and her assertions of racial and ethnic hierarchy, we are forced to reassess our own loyalties and priorities as feminist critics. When we are willing to excuse, ignore, or even champion women writers’ expressions of anti-Semitism, racism, or sexual shaming, we sacrifice feminism’s larger political goal of social justice for all – itself a utopian project that may never be reached – in favor of narrower and more concrete identitarian loyalties. In attending to the blind spots of past feminist thought, we do not betray or threaten feminism, much less “kill” it.¹³ We make it stronger.

“Vertuous” reading

As critics have observed, Lanyer’s most explicit calls for female solidarity, liberty, and equality occur in two of the most widely discussed and anthologized sections of Salve Deus, her prefatory epistle “To the Vertuous Reader” and the section from Salve Deus entitled “Eves Apologie in defence of Women.”¹⁴ In both sections, Lanyer stridently takes the pro-woman side in the ongoing querelle des femmes, drawing on numerous of its arguments even as she claims to outdo previous defenses of women. In her epistle “To the Vertuous Reader,” for instance, Lanyer repeatedly castigates women who criticize other women, even as she suggests that such behavior may itself be a patriarchal myth:

Often I have heard, that it is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightnes of their deserved fame: now contrary to this custome, which men I hope unjustly lay to their charge, I have written this small volume, or little booke, for the generall use of all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdome… . And this I have done, to make knowne to the world, that all women deserve not to be blamed though some forgetting they are women themselves, and in danger to be condemned by the words of their own mouthes, fall into so great an errour, as to speake unadvisedly against the rest of their sexe; which if it be true, I am perswaded they can shew their own imperfection in nothing more; and therefore could wish (for their owne ease, modesties, and credit) they would referre such points of folly, to be practiced by evill disposed men.

(1–20)

Fashioning herself as a defender of women, Lanyer makes female solidarity itself a measure of virtue, one that she herself practices in Salve Deus by rehearsing women’s importance as mothers of the human species, the deeds of venerable Old Testament female heroes, Christ’s close association with his female followers, and the presence of female confessors and martyrs.

Along with these stock motifs of the querelle, in the section of Salve Deus titled “Eve’s Apologie” Lanyer offers an original reading of the dream of Pilate’s wife conveying the divine warning to “Condemne not him that must thy Savior be” (757). Pilate’s decision to proceed with the crucifixion, Salve Deus argues, is a shocking instance of male “indiscretion” that “sets us free” (760, 761). The “power to over-rule us all” given to men as punishment for Eve’s initiative in the fall no longer holds after the crucifixion:

Then let us have our Libertie againe,

And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;

You came not in the world without our paine,

Make that a barre against your crueltie;

Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine

Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?

If one weake woman simply did offend,

This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.

(825–832)

Lanyer’s politicized vocabulary of liberty and equality here engages many recognizable proto-feminist themes – the constructedness of gender, the natural equality of the sexes, the analogies of the period between marriage and political order – that women and men from England and the Continent had used to challenge misogynist constructions. Weaving such arguments into the New Testament claim that the crucifixion had abrogated Mosaic law, Salve Deus offers the original interpretation that as a male-authored event, the crucifixion releases women from the postlapsarian subordination enjoined in Genesis. The “Sov’raingntie” of men over women inevitably degenerates into “crueltie” and “tyranny” on visceral display in Lanyer’s account of the Passion, a connection between hierarchy and abuse strategically accentuated by rhyme. Nor, she insists, is the plea for liberty and equality revolutionary. Rather, it is a return to the prelapsarian freedom that women should enjoy “againe,” now that Christ’s sacrifice has miraculously canceled out humanity’s incalculable debt.

As numerous critics have noted, it is difficult to tell whether Lanyer or Pilate’s wife is the speaker throughout “Eve’s Apologie.” This indeterminacy, Kimberly Anne Coles points out, “produces the effect of all women, regardless of specific time and place (except insofar as it is Christian), suing for their release on the basis of men’s greater sin.”¹⁵ This solidarity is, for Beilin, evidence of the “inclusiveness by which [Lanyer] tries to interest a wide feminine audience in its long spiritual history.”¹⁶ Such inclusiveness, Lewalski influentially proposes, also characterizes the female separatist community imagined in “To Cooke-ham,” an “ageless, classless society” and “community of good women” extending all the way back to Eve.¹⁷ Nor, according to Loughlin, is this female community only in the past: it is also part of the apocalyptic future, “beyond time itself.”¹⁸

It would seem that to speak against this vision is to refuse the generous reading for which Lanyer herself pleads in her prefatory epistle in which she defines the “vertuous readers” as those who “will rather, cherish, nourish, and increase the least sparke of virtue where they find it, by their favourable and best interpretations, then quench it by wrong constructions” (“To the Vertuous Reader,” 59–61). And to refuse such generous reading is also to betray Lanyer’s larger project “to inforce all good Christians and honourable minded men to speake reverently of our sexe.” Lanyer’s calls for solidarity, that is to say, perform the rhetorical work of situating any critique of her poem – including its politics – as hindering a feminist project. Lisa Schnell remarks just this dilemma for feminist readers: “Writing about Lanyer and other e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: sex education
• Part I Debates and directions
• Part II Authorship and patronage
• Part III The matter of reform
• Part IV Bodies of knowledge
• Part V The place of production
• Index