Women, 'Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period

Margo Hendricks, Patricia Parker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135088118
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period is an extraordinarily comprehensive interdisciplinary examination of one of the most neglected areas in current scholarship. The contributors use literary, historical, anthropological and medical materials to explore an important intersection within the major era of European imperial expansion. The volume looks at: * the conditions of women's writing and the problems of female authorship in the period. * the tensions between recent feminist criticism and the questions of `race', empire and colonialism. *the relationship between the early modern period and post-colonial theory and recent African writing. Women, `Race' and Writing in the Early Modern Period contains ground-breaking work by some of the most exciting scholars in contemporary criticism and theory. It will be vital reading for anyone working or studying in the field.

Part I
Defining Differences

1
The Color of Patriarchy

Critical difference, cultural difference, and Renaissance drama

Ania Loomba

Like Middleton's Beatrice-Joanna, but in conditions quite unlike hers, I "feel a giddy turning in me."¹ Mine is occasioned by an oscillation from Renaissance to postcolonial studies: the first being the right kind of thing an Indian student of English literature was supposed to do, and the other, a concern she ought to make a priority today. The oscillation defines me as a changeling in both areas - traditional Shakespeareans in India are upset at my suggestion that the bard be removed from the fulcrum of literary studies, other colleagues because I continue to teach Shakespeare even when I have the choice not to.² Out of the Indian context, I am resentful at the possibility of being ghettoized into talking solely about the intersection of race and gender, and upset when enough attention is not paid to that subject. On all counts, it is difficult to escape what Martha Minow has nicely described as "the dilemma of difference" whereby "both focussing on and ignoring difference risk recreating it."³

Thanks to the pedagogic and cultural hangovers of colonialism, these seemingly disparate areas occasionally intersect and make the giddy turnings worth while. The encounters are variegated: Hamlet, for example, is, for many male postgraduate students in Delhi, the ultimate representation of "the human condition"; it is also the name of a prizewinning variety of mango developed recently in Trivandrum in south India. In the small north-eastern border state of Mizoram, it approximates a folk cult show, while a road sign on a Himalayan highway caudons speeding drivers by asking them whether they want "to be or not to be." Together, these encounters reveal some of the strands of the postcolonial fabric.⁴

But Renaissance and postcolonial studies also meet each other via their common interest in marginalized peoples of different sorts, and in their disparate attempts to theorize and recover subaltern resistance (or agency) and locate it in relation to power. The difficulty of doing that with respect to the female subject has been an especially pressing concern within both areas and has almost become an index of critical politics. It has been alleged, for example, that those histories and theories of the colonial encounter which find it practically and theoretically impossible to recover the female subaltern voice rehearse and contribute to the continuing marginalization of colonized people, especially women.⁵ It appears that there are analogous problems in recent Renaissance studies. Some years ago, Walter Cohen's review of political criticism of Shakespeare astutely juxtaposed (but without especially interrelating) the "strangely quietist feel of these radical critiques" (referring particularly to new historicist work) with his contention that in these readings "women have disappeared."⁶ More recendy, some feminist critics have polemically amplified aspects of this critique, contending that the effect of new historicists' and cultural materialists' inadequate focus on female presence and agency in Renaissance drama "has been to oppress women, repress sexuality, and subordinate gender issues."⁷

Such critiques might appear to be manifestations of the by now widespread reservations about the politically quietist implications of "poststructuralism" and "new history" — reservations which are framed within the larger problem of squaring critical inquiry with politics which has so bedevilled poststructuralist theory in general. Women and "third world" critics have been especially uncomfortable with some poststructuralist assumptions and methods: it has been variously alleged that the agency of the marginalized subject is obscured when that subject is theorized as discontinuous, or as merely "the site" for the intersection of various discourses; that a Foucauldian emphasis on the relational aspects of power and resistance implies the ultimate containment of the latter; that if power is theorized as dispersed and fragmented then it emerges as either too benign or too pervasive; and that poststructuralist skepticism about knowledge and metanarratives only results in intellectual angst and political paralysis.⁸ These problems point to very real difficulties involved in theorizing social difference — race, gender, class, caste, and other social differentials cannot be easily accommodated without risking an endless fragmentation of subjectivity.⁹

"The Renaissance" has been both an especially fruitful site for poststructuralist critical work and an embattled one.¹⁰ The potential alliance between various strands of political criticism is becoming increasingly fissured, although there is widespread regret about these critical/political ruptures as well as continuing attempts to heal them. In the course of what Ann Thompson rather mildly characterizes as "an uneasy relationship" between feminism and various forms of historical and cultural materialist criticism, the sprawling debates that took place between Marxism and feminism in the 1960s and 1970s are revisited, but only implicidy, and often in a way that is not conducive to posing a viable alternative to these poststructuralist shortcomings in the theorizing of gender issues, and especially female agency, within Renaissance drama.¹¹

Since this essay will run the risk of exemplifying what Lynda Boose rightly criticizes as "the contestatory model of scholarship" which "turns the literary profession into a shoot 'em out at the You're-Not-O.K. Corral," I want to underline the compulsion that a self-conscious criticism necessarily faces in having to confront the basis of its differences with others.¹² As Jean Howard puts it,

essays which explain how and why one does and should read in a particular way are both more generous and more risky since they do not try to seal themselves off from what is polemical by aspiring to a timeless commonsense, but expose what is difficult and what is at stake in "making knowledge" at this historical moment.¹³

Boose criticizes the contestatory model by contrasting it with a sisterhood and a familial supportiveness that is supposed to mark the relations among American feminist Shakespeareans. My own differences with her and others are articulated in the hope that the exclusions which both "sisterhood" and "the family" have sometimes historically been party to need not be reinscribed in the present context.

Both Lynda Boose, in "The Family in Shakespearean Studies," and Carol Neely, in "Constructing the Subject," seek to redress the alleged neglect of women by cultural materialists and new historicists (who are conflated in different ways by both critics) by invoking their own experiences as critics (as I have done), and by situating these within the history and political agenda of American liberal feminism. Therefore, let me briefly discuss the question of critical self-reflexivity. Cultural materialists have been addressing this for some time, but today it has become almost fashionable: now there is a wider recognition and discussion of the ways in which Shakespearean criticism might "negotiate power relations in our own social context."¹⁴ But there is a potential paradox here: even though it is increasingly acknowledged that intellectual differences about "what happened in history" or "textual meaning" are shaped by our own political differences, such a recognition does not end critical claims to a "truer" historicism or a "better" literary criticism. In other words, the desire to situate the writer-critic ostensibly stems from the need to contest universalist notions of knowledge or value but sometimes ends up replicating such notions. An analogous circularity is evident in those inquiries into cultural difference which are undertaken from, or which return to, a position of self-privileging. Orientalist discourses are of course notorious in this respect. But Gayatri Spivak argues that some influential French feminists also privilege Western culture precisely via their "occasional interest in touching the other of the West."¹⁵ While at some level all inquiry stems from the question "who am I?," the distinction between situating oneself critically and critical self-obsession is still worth taking trouble over.

The issue of self-reflexivity is also involved with the historical and epistemological status of "experience," an issue which motivated feminist research to attach great importance to locating oneself in one's discourse. While "experience" is important in recalling the reality of both oppression and agency and thus a way of countering the debilitating effects of some recent poststructuralist perspectives, it is hardly a transparent concept. First, the gaps between what is "out there" and "what is internalized" cannot be swept under the carpet; second, experience itself is so profoundly colored by various social contexts and differentials that it only underlines the fact that women are a heterogeneous group.¹⁶ The experience of one group must be placed alongside those of others: the relations between them also determine and circumscribe the validity of each. To make these connections is also one way in which we can negotiate the paradoxes of difference, and determine overlaps even as we pay attention to specific and varying contexts.

As Susie Tharu and K. Lalita point out (while setting their new anthology of women's writing in India in the context of the Western feminist academy), "when the new validity women's experience acquired as a resource that could be drawn on for critical discussion was conflated with the empiricist idea that experience was the source of true knowledge, experience lost the critical edge it had acquired as a political tool," feminism was annexed to a bourgeois humanist scheme of things, and finally, the experiences and issues of Western feminism were offered as "natural."¹⁷ Such a trajectory is evident in both Boose's and Neely's essays. Their own experience is not understood as specific and relative; rather, it swells to define what both of them are at some pains to establish, that is, what Neely calls a female "subjectivity, interiority, identity which is continuous over time and is not the product of ideology" and "some area of 'femaleness'" which is understood as standing free of both history and context (7). Both of them begin by righdy pointing out the dangers of dissolving gender into analogies. Gerda Lerner's pioneering guideline for gender critique emphasized exacdy this: "all analogies - class, group, caste approximate the position of women but fail to define it adequately. Women are a category unto themselves; an adequate analysis of their position in society requires new conceptual tools."¹⁸ I have expressed my discomfort with the way in which the analogies between gender and power relations in the Renaissance have been used to explicidy undermine the specificity of the former.¹⁹ But where Lerner cautioned against letting the uniqueness of women's position deteriorate into asserting a simplistic hierarchy of oppression, Neely ends up reiterating that gender is "a primary category" (15). It has been pointed out in so many earlier feminist debates that the primacy of gender as an analytical category can only be asserted by devaluing other social differences and thereby the "experiences" of "other" women.²⁰ That this warning needs to be repeated in the context of Renaissance studies, especially at a time when such studies are beginning to consider issues of cultural difference, is perhaps a measure of the way in which the centrality of "The Renaissance" to Western culture constantly exerts a pressure to discuss it entirely within the values and parameters that are a legacy of that socio-cultural tradition.

"Sisterhood" has never precluded fundamental political differences among women. But in Boose's essay, and Neely's, it. is invoked very easily precisely at the expense of all variegation between women even within the United States, let alone the rest of the world. It is not surprising, then, to find that while these critics reiterate Walter Cohen's point about the neglect of gender in political criticism of Shakespeare, they do not acknowledge his observation that "Third World and other ethnic studies are regrettably relegated to the same subordinate role (as women) despite their obviously political thrust" (19). A focus on woman and one on race and cultural difference are both collateral and divergent tasks. But Boose unfortunately chooses to pit them against each other: "when gender is not being ignored in materialist critiques, it repeatedly ends up getting displaced into some other issue — usually race or class" (729). Studies of race in early modern Europe (as a theoretical parameter, as a historically constituted category, and as a factor in analyzing textual strategies as well as responses to them) are pitifully few and I cannot think of even one instance where race is critically prioritized over gender.

Such a demarcation of gender from other categories of difference predictably maps onto a whole series of other divisions — notably the ones between text and context, gender and history, family and politics. In Boose's essay, all of the former are the terrain of feminism, and the latter the interests of Marxism. The twain can never meet, it is implied, not by pointing out the very real tensions between them but simply because "American feminists are committed to liberal rather than radical Marxist politics" and "what has never been clear to American liberal feminism is how one can serve feminism and Marxism too" (724). First, the long history of Marxist debates on the intersection between the social and the individual is reduced to a hackneyed caricature of a crudely deterministic materialist criticism which is the hallmark of right-wing attacks on cultural materialists, which Boose would like to distance herself from (731, n. 22). Second, the interconnections between private and public are muted, and the binary oppositions which have historically rendered women invisible are resurrected. To argue, as Neely does (12), that "a focus on power, politics, and history, and especially, the monarch, turns attention away from marriage, sexuality, women and the masterless," is to abandon the former set of historically demarcated and contested spaces as those in which women cannot be inserted. Instead of positing the family as a privileged place for locating women, as both Boose and Neely do, feminists can demonstrate, as indeed they have done in other contexts, how these spaces are themselves gendered. I'll return to this later; here I only want to argue that surely the multiple alternative histories of the family which black and "Third World" feminists have been making visible, and the linkages between the development of the family and those of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism, should problematize a simple invocation of that institution, and of the place of women within it.²¹

Michèle Barrett, among others, has discussed the ideological and historical contours of the ways in which the literary text, the psyche, and "woman" are linked by virtue of their compartmentalization from the social, the historical, and material.²² Boose defends her rehearsal of this process by arguing that,

given feminism's very different historical relationship to "history," it seems thoroughly consistent with the feminist goal of liberating women from their history that the mainstream feminist interpretations of Shakespeare did indeed marginalize the historical and concentrate instead on the literary text.

(735)

One wonders where this leaves feminist historians, for whom "liberating" women entails rewriting history itself. Surely, it is possible to question dominant historiography without having to retreat from history. The "literary text," moreover, is at least as problematic a category for feminists as is "history," and a legitimate form of feminist critique has been to question canonical texts as well as their dominant cultural and institutional deployment, which notoriously also marginalized the historical in the name of the literary. This should hardly need to be restated today, except that skepticism on the part of other feminists about the special status of the Shakespearean text becomes the target of Boose's wrath. She is of course perfectly right in pointing out that canon-bashing (particularly in the case of the Bard) may cut the academic branches we perch on, because so many jobs depend on our continuing to teach Shakespeare. It is also true that women readers may take pleasure in Shakespeare, as in other canonical texts. But possible pleasure and professional exigencies are strangely mutated into an insistence that we must not feel too alienated from Shakespeare's plays, or find them effecting patriarchal closures. Those who do, like Kate McLuskie, are reduced to another tired caricature — that of the "tough," "uncompromising," puritanical feminist, who, we are told, can "only warn us away from Shakespeare in terms that warn us away from pleasure" (725). Via this stereotype, our choices as feminists are narrowed and we are not allowed to question, beyond a certain acceptable point, the value of the Shakespearean text.

In the recent and lengthy controversy over Shakespeare in The London Review of Books, an analogous pleasure-in-the-text formula emerges. Boris Ford attacks cultural materialists thus:

I found myself speculating when th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Defining Differences
• Part II Male Writing, Exoticism, Empire
• Part III Female Authorship and Negotiating Differences
• Part IV Gender, Race, and Class: Colonial and Postcolonial
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index