Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700

Tamara Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754664529
• eBook ISBN: 9781351936521
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Inventive in its approach and provocative in its analysis, this study offers fresh readings of the arguments and practices of four seventeenth-century Euro-American women: Anne Bradstreet, Anne Hutchinson, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Marie de l'Incarnation. Tamara Harvey here compares functionalist treatments of the body by these women, offering a new way to think of corporeality as a device in literary and religious expressions of modesty by women. In doing so, Harvey explores the engagement of these women in ongoing religious, political, scientific and social debates that would have been understood by the authors' contemporaries in both Europe and America.

Chapter 1
“Now Sisters ... impart your usefulnesse, and force”: Anne Bradstreet's Feminist Functionalism

In his commendatory poem included at the beginning of Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America (1650), Nathaniel Ward¹ praises Bradstreet as "a right du Bartas Girle," but ends with a warning: "And chode buy Chancers Boots, and Homers Furrs,/Let men look to't, least women weare the Spurs" (n. pag.).² Ward does not say Bradstreet's poetry was "stolne, or else, it was by chance." as Bradstreet fears in "The Prologue," but he does mock the female poet for cross-dressing in the male trappings of the poetic tradition. Bradstreet's "The Prologue" may easily be read as responding to or anticipating Ward's gibe. In a particularly pointed stanza, she writes.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue.
Who sayes, my hand a needle better fits,
A Poets Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits:
If what I doe prove well, it wo'nt advance,
They'l say its stolne, or else, it was by chance.

(4)

The Pen and the activity of writing poetry, like Chaucer's boots. Homer's furs, and a rider's spurs, are understood to be naturally male while "each carping tongue" finds "a needle better fits" a woman's hand, and any transgression of these expectations will be deemed accidental or illusory. Bradstreet takes the Pen (with a nod. perhaps, to its phallic associations), but softens her poetic ensemble by asking to be crowned with parsley instead of bays in recognition of "this meane and unrefined stuffe of mine."

Critics interested in Bradstreet's position as a female poet writing within a male poetic tradition almost inevitably comment on "The Prologue" in The Tenth Muse and frequently on Ward's poem as well. Many, including Wendy Martin, Kemieth A. Requa. Agnieska Salska. and Jennifer Waller, find these early "public" poems imitative or derivative and favor instead Bradstreet's later "personal" poems for either their more feminine or their more expressive qualities. From this perspective, Bradstreet's request for parsley instead of bays signals, in Waller's words, "an obvious sense of inadequacy and unease in approaching a traditionally male preserve" (442). Even when Renaissance conventions are accounted for, this critical approach seems to find Chaucer's and Homer's garments ill-fitting adornments for this tenth muse.

More recently, critics have read the final stanzas of "The Prologue as" ironic or double-voiced displays of poetic, personal, or female power through well-wrought expressions of powerlessness. Rejecting the Romantic values that privilege Bradstreet's personal and seemingly expressive poems, critics like Ivy Schweitzer, Timothy Sweet, and Carrie Galloway Blackstock look instead to veiled, deconstructive. and/orironic strategies like "mimicry" (Schweitzer), "strategies of reformation" (Sweet), and "performativity" (Blackstock) that use and engage dominant traditions and conventions while criticizing and dislocating their gendering as male or not-female. Most of these scholars comment on how Bradstreet successfully uses conventions of her time while nonetheless signaling the difference gender makes in the use of apparently neutral figures and topoi. But whom she is signaling remains unclear. In exploring the interstices between prevailing ideology and resistant or subversive poetic practices, these studies frequently leave us with the sense that Bradstreet is alone and feels herself alone in her struggle with misogynistic literary traditions. If her poetic attire is seen to fit better, though primarily because Bradstreet has cunningly altered it for masquerade, the focus is still on her individual body and her negotiation of what appear to be relatively uniform literary sumptuary laws.

Neither of these approaches fully takes into account that Bradstreet and Ward were both engaging a debate tradition they expected their audiences to recognize, and in doing so were struggling over and shaping dynamic, mutable notions of literary propriety, physiological sex differences, and the place of women in society. Though she may at times have felt alone, to characterize Bradstreet primarily as intimidated and/or isolated by dominant literary expectations is to underestimate her project and oversimplify that which is "dominant." Ward and Bradstreet weigh in on issues about women and culture being debated throughout European literary and scientific circles of the period. Interestingly. Ward is concerned that women might robe themselves in the warm attire of Chaucer and Homer—boots and furs. Greater heat, in Aristotelian medical thinking, is a male attribute, and when women make themselves hotter they are challenging natural categories. (Other commendatory poems make connections between Bradstreet and the (male) sun that, as in Ward, are both praising and mocking). As we shall see, Bradstreet answers this hierarchical notion of heat and gender with a more subtle and effective theory of gender difference presented in a debate poem that openly rather than covertly challenges one kind of antifeminist argument. Throughout The Tenth Muse, Bradstreet consciously and intelligently participates in contemporary literary battles of the sexes. I will here pay particular attention to her staging of a querelle des femmes in her quaternion on the four humors in which she uses contemporary medical knowledge, namely medical functionalism, to challenge the Aristotelian belief that women are cooler than men and therefore inferior. Early modem feminists and antifeminists alike use these literary and scientific debates to argue their points, but Bradstreet's combination of the two is striking. Each debate tradition bears further consideration before proceeding to a reading of this second quaternion, "Of the Four Humours of mans Constitution."

“Sex weigh'd, which best, the Woman, or the Man?”: Conventions and Argument in the Querelle des Femmes

Jane Donahue Eberwein is one critic who points to generic debates about women in developing an alternative to both submissive and subversive readings of "The Prologue." insisting in "'No Rhet'ric We Expect': Argumentation in Bradstreet's 'The Prologue'" that this poem is best read as "consistently ironic ... in deploying both sides of the argument: inviting both male and female champions (and the vast majority of more tolerant readers) to approach her writing with respect" ("No Rhet'ric" 218).

The carping tongues, probably imagined, offered a useful opportunity for forceful, witty expression in this ironic battle of the sexes. Straw men, they were set up only to be knocked down. None of the deference Bradstreet shows in passages of the poem was meant tor them.

("No Rhet'ric" 220)

Eberwein's concern in this essay is to explore how. "[l]ike most of Bradstreet's successful poems. 'The Prologue' is an argument: an attempt to articulate and reconcile opposition by emphasizing discrepancies while hinting at unity" ("No Rhet'ric" 219). Yet in praising Bradstreet's irony and the sophistication of her rhetorical strategies. Eberwein tends to minimize the misogyny of Bradstreet's contemporaries, dismissing the work of critics who hypothesize that Bradstreet bore the brunt of gender bias but do not offer specific examples of such oppression. Although many women, including Anne Hutchinson and Bradstreet's sister. Sarah Keayne, were punished for their public speech, to the best of our knowledge Bradstreet's poetry was universally praised: thus. Eberwein sets aside many feminist readings by insisting that "Who those carping tongues might be remains a question" ("No Rhet'ric" 220). She chooses to ignore the possibility that Bradstreet was influenced by the examples of Hutchinson and Keayne. and instead suggests that she was entirely self-assured in her sense of herself as a poet and her manipulation of rhetorical irony and humility topoi. In this essay she very usefully reminds us that Bradstreet was a skilled poet addressing an astute audience, though she says little about what difference gender makes.³

Rosamond Rosenmeier likewise resists reading a general hegemonic misogyny as Bradstreet's target in "The Prologue." but she does suggest a source for those carping tongues. A learned reader of Bradstreet's time might have recognized in these lines a citation of Cornelius Agrippa, who in his treatise "Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of womankynde" condemned those who permit a woman "to know no father [sic] than her nedle and her threede" (cited in Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited 59-60, from the 1542 David Clapam translation). She explains:

Agrippa's treatise belongs to that long-lived Renaissance debate about the superiority of the sexes. Nathaniel Ward may have been referring to this tradition when in his dedication to The Tenth Muse he suggests that Bradstreet's book provides evidence for settling the question "Sex weigh'd, which best, the Woman, or the Man?" [n. pag.] .... If Bradstreet's readers, especially an inner circle of readers who shared, say, Ward's education, interests, and wit, heard the echo of Agrippa's treatise here, they would have understood the doubleness: those "carping tongues" represent the force of a recent tradition that Agrippa pointed out has not always existed, is not God's law, and since its sanctions are mere custom, law, and education, can change. Bradstreet's critics frequently assume that the phrase "carping tongues" refers to Puritan society generally, dominated as it was by androcentric values; critics then equate Bradstreet's own attitudes with those expressed by her poetic speaker: acquiescent, defensive, deviously subversive. I think it possible that the "carping tongues" represent an indeed prevalent, but in some circles, much discredited view of women's lives. Thus while appearing to give ominous weight to a publicly antifeminist position, Bradstreet's line, in its citation of Agrippa, would signal to her readers that she expects them to cry "slander" here, as she assumed they would in the elegy to Queen Elizabeth [in which Bradstreet writes, "Let such, as say our sex is void of reason,/Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason].

(Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited 59-60)

Like Schweitzer and Sweet, Rosenmeier emphasizes doubleness. but a doubleness that would have been recognized by Bradstreet's readers as participating in an ongoing debate reflecting mutable social dynamics. In this reading of "The Prologue." Rosenmeier also stresses Bradstreet's unusual use of the declarative present tense to emphasize a present but not eternal situation. This too. she argues, would have been evident to attentive readers in the seventeenth century. Like Eberwein, Rosenmeier insists on the skill of Bradstreet's argument, but she also emphasizes the ways in which Bradstreet's poetry continually registers an attention to change, change that throughout The Tenth Muse is frequently related to gender relations.

Bradstreet's possible allusion to Agrippa highlights the influence of conventions and ideas from the tradition of the querelle des femmes or what Linda Woodbridge calls the "formal controversy about women" (13). Nathaniel Ward acknowledges this debate even more directly, asking. "Sex weigh'd. which best, the Woman, or the Man?" A brief discussion of his commendatory poem usefully highlights some of the issues and conventions Bradstreet was engaging. Ward, who describes women of fashion in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America as "ill-shapen-shotten shellfish. Egyptian Hyeroglyphicks. or at the best... French flurts of the pastery" (20), is often identified as one of the misogynist carping tongues who put Bradstreet on her guard, but as Robert D. Arner reminds us, "the war between men and women has long been one of the mainstays of comedy and humor" (280) and Ward's productions in this genre, both in this dedicatory verse from The Tenth Muse and in The Simple Cobler, need to be read in terms of this comic tradition and not merely as mean-spirited. misogynistic attacks. Indeed. Ward was Bradstreet's minister and a family friend during her years in Ipswich, and likely used his influence with Stephen Bowtell. the publisher of The Simple Cobler. to help bring The Tenth Muse to print (also published by Bowtell). Arner goes on to condemn the "historical myopia" of many modern feminist readings of Ward's work, insisting that women are not the only or even the most significant objects of ridicule in his writings. He explains parenthetically, "even his famous—or infamous—misogynist attack on women and their fashions in The Simple Cobler occupies only a few highly wrought pages, while his criticism of the King and Parliament is sustained throughout the tract" (280).

Arner's remark highlights an important aspect of the querelle des femmes. As many scholars of the Renaissance have observed, this debate tradition and humor about women more generally are driven by aims other than "the woman question."⁴ According to Woodbridge, most texts within the formal controversy were undertaken as "a kind of intellectual calisthenics" (17). exercises in argument and rhetoric that may contain political agendas and certainly reflect social issues of their time, but rarely are really concerned with the status of women themselves.⁵ Both defenses and attacks frequently take the form of dialogues filled with familiar exempla and commonplaces; discussions of women's intellectual capacity, physical strength (or weakness), and virtue; and catalogues of good and bad women. The querelle des femmes has its roots in medieval literature, but its form and function shifts with the rise of humanism.⁶ Ian Maclean suggests that apparently antifeminist assertions by Renaissance humanists should be read as intellectual jokes that are meant ironically.

In each case it seems that the satire is directed against an object other than woman: socinianism, prejudice, academic ponderousness. In each case, the effect of the joke is to reinforce the contrary proposition: woman is a human being. It may be coincidental that woman is chosen as a vehicle for satire in this way; or it may be that she is particularly well suited to be such a vehicle, as it will be evident to those to whom the satire is addressed that there is a discrepancy between what she is and what she is said to be according to traditional authorities. One way of escaping from the infrastructure of scholastic thought would thus appear to be by the use of humour.

(Renaissance 85-86)

Thus, the querelle des femmes tradition as practiced by men may serve as an opportunity to practice argumentation or attack scholastic commentary, but even when it manifestly favors women it does little to further materially their cause. Agrippa's proposal that women are superior to men in "Of the Nobilitie and Excellencie of womankynde" may be read as humorous in just this way; in its extremity it lampoons the other extreme which asserts the absolute inferiority of women. In the process he acknowledges legitimate social injustices and the false logic of those who ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Modesty's Charge: Feminist Functionalism and Seventeenth-Century Feminist Theory
• 1 "Now Sisters ... impart your usefulnesse, and force": Anne Bradstreet's Feminist Functionalism
• 2 "Cuerpo Luminoso": Body and Soul in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Primero Sueño
• 3 "I doe not thinke the Body that dyes shall rise agayne": Anne Hutchinson's Mortalism as Feminist Functionalism
• 4 Femmes fortes: Mysticism and the Female Apostolate of Marie de l'Incarnation
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index