Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature

M. Trull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349448821, 9781137282989
• eBook ISBN: 9781137282996
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book argues that the early modern public/private boundary was surprisingly dynamic and flexible in early modern literature, drawing upon authors including Shakespeare, Anne Lock, Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn, and genres including lyric poetry, drama, prose fiction, and household orders. An epilogue discusses postmodern privacy in digital media.

1

Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women

A privacy performed would, it seems, be a facsimile of true privacy. However, the phrase prompts us to think about performance as constitutive of privacy, and therefore pries open the apparently natural opposition between “private” and “public.” For example, applying the notion of “performing privacy” to authorship and publication usefully complicates the meaning of becoming “public.” We think of entry into the public sphere as a defining moment in which a text, released from the immediate control of its author, risks scrutiny and judgment. Harold Love defines publication as “a movement from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption.”¹ This notion of publication as a movement between two discrete and well-defined realms has seemed particularly appropriate for early modern women’s writing, which is often marked as transgressive.² Since women’s rare appearances in print violated the period’s explicit gender norms, women’s publication appears as a moment of liberation in which the writer escapes, in her authorial persona at least, her imprisonment in the domestic cares of the private realm. The work that follows proposes that the early modern public/private boundary was the site of both discipline and self-creation for women; and that rather than separating two fully distinct realms, the boundary was flexible and dynamic, open to new definition with each author’s work. The phrase “performing privacy” designates the transition from privacy to publicity as a performance, one that defines both poles of the binary at the same time as it reveals them as mutually constitutive.

The idea of performing privacy focuses critical attention on authorship by rejecting the assumption that either manuscript or print publication is definitively public. Consider Lady Mary Wroth, a seventeenth-century English noblewoman who circulated her poetry within select Jacobean court circles.³ Wroth’s gender and social position entailed social pressures not to write for the public at large, but to present herself as a decorous ornament to the court: a dancer in masques, a player of the lute, and a writer of occasional verses offered as gifts to acquaintances (roles that she both praises and satirizes in her prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania).⁴ By Hannah Arendt’s criteria, Wroth’s poetry is private, since the public is the “common world,” the “common meeting ground of all,” where “being seen and heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position.” Private life, in contrast, offers “only the prolongation or multiplication of one’s own position with its attending aspects and perspectives.”⁵ Wroth’s court-centered writing seems to be not an encounter with diverse points of view in the “common world,” but a collection of personal missives that both critique and reproduce aristocratic culture. In another sense, though, Wroth’s limited or “private” circulation might constitute an initial step in the creation of a public, fitting Nancy Fraser’s stress on counterpublics that, while aimed at a limited audience, encompass wider aspirations. In Fraser’s terms, Wroth’s address to a small group could be seen as a tactical withdrawal, part of a long-term strategy to “disseminate one’s discourse to ever widening arenas.”⁶ Wroth’s manuscript poetry is private by Arendt’s definition, but public by Fraser’s.

Further complications are offered by the print publication in 1621 of Urania. We might consider print publication as an assurance that a text has entered the public realm; yet Urania seems to aim not for the “common world” in Arendt’s terms, but for coterie status.⁷ Its title marks it as a personal text meant for one special reader, Wroth’s neighbor and kinswoman Susan Vere, Countess of Montgomery. Moreover, the content of the romance makes private circulation appropriate: it is a roman à clef half-concealing passionate feelings under pseudonyms and veiled allusions, and Wroth claimed that the manuscript was printed against her will.⁸ Given its various gestures towards privacy, should we consider Urania as part of an emergent public sphere? If the answer is “yes” for the printed Part One, then what of the never-published Part Two, which may well have been written with the same expectations as Part One, although it met with a different fate? Mary Wroth’s example suggests the extent to which the boundary between public and private in the early modern period was both performative and dynamic; each author renegotiated the terms and placement of this boundary through acts of self-representation such as means of publication, paratexts, and stand-ins for the author and audience within the text. Since the dominant early modern religious and philosophical traditions limited women’s public roles, women writers in particular provoked their contemporaries to confront questions about who could count as a public person and what kind of discourse belonged to public space.

The early modern public/private boundary was a key fault line, as Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin have argued, defining the concepts of both the person and the world; however, its borders were continually in flux.⁹ Although I approach the meaning of “private” and “public” as dynamic terms rather than a stable dichotomy, Wilson and Yachnin’s definition captures the general opposition that I seek to convey with these slippery terms: what is public is “open to others and potentially boundless in its effects,” while what is private is restricted to one or a few persons.¹⁰ The real force of the terms, I will argue, lies in the concrete visions of private and public relations sketched out by early modern authors, for whom the private sphere could mean isolated contemplation, domestic family life, intimate friendship, or self-interested commercial relations.¹¹ In tracing a course through the shifting waters of “private” and “public,” I emphasize the crucial importance for early modern writers of defining the public/private boundaries of two elements: form and gender.

In order to attend to form and gender in early modern literature, Performing Privacy and Gender ranges across a variety of genres, focusing on women authors, “public” women, and tropes of privacy and overhearing. I draw examples from devotional and secular lyric poetry in chapters on Anne Lock’s sonnets and Aphra Behn’s panegyric poetry, from drama (Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well), prose fiction (Montemayor’s Diana, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Wroth’s Urania), and a non-literary genre: household orders. This range of genres allows me to compare how formal conventions shape privacy, authority, and gender in many kinds of texts. I analyze the work of each woman author in the context of her immediate literary influences, male and female, as well as her place in a developing tradition of women’s writing. Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well provides an instructive contrast to the works by women authors, since both the play and the ballads that it references focus on the desire of private persons to enter the public eye. Comparing female narrators of ballads to Shakespeare’s female and male lamenters reveals how women’s authorship was represented through tropes of overhearing and violated privacy. I also use the non-literary genre of household orders to cast light on privacy and aristocratic households. Contrasting imaginative or literary visions of privacy with the privacy negotiated in household orders produces a fuller understanding of the context within which writers like Aphra Behn and Mary Wroth represented aristocratic women and their servants.

Performing Privacy and Gender attends to literary form as an important influence on the development of ideas about public and private. I show how authors used form, including genre, intertextuality, typology, tropes, and imagery, as a resource to create new possibilities for women’s representation as public persons. Recently, critical theorists have emphasized the creative power of public discourse to re-envision the social world, a process that Michael Warner calls “poetic world-making.”¹² Writing calls a public into being by addressing an implied audience that is both specific and open-ended, as Warner writes: “Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way’. It then goes in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success.”¹³ Public speech does its work not only by advancing propositions through rational debate, but also by performances that model the public/private distinction while enacting it. Therefore, public speech relies on formal and aesthetic qualities. Warner’s “poetic world-making,” like Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Cornelius Castoriadis’s “social imaginary,” highlights how the public/private boundary appears through creative, aesthetic, and embodied expression.¹⁴ As my emphasis on style as well as affects and ethics suggests, this book situates imagined publics in their literary contexts, seeking to understand how genre and form delineate public/private borders, even as the dialectic between public and private helps to shape literary form.

I bring to special notice the “private” woman made public in order to examine privacy’s diverse contexts and connotations, women’s publication as authors, and women’s equally tendentious appearances as subjects of public writing. In particular, I focus on tropes of overhearing, which dramatize the publication of what was, or ought to have been, private. Scenes of overhearing, in which one character eavesdrops on another’s private meditation (often in verse), are a prominent feature of early English prose fiction and drama.¹⁵ My investigation of overhearing tropes reveals authors playing with conventions about gender and privacy and staging the violation of those conventions. Overhearing often brings into question the subject’s agency in becoming public. Did he or she stage this revelation, or inadvertently suffer exposure? What are the appropriate affects for subject, overhearer, and audience – shame, anger, desire, sympathy? When does overhearing or being overheard signal a breach in the social fabric, and when does it create new social ties? In early modern works, I argue, overhearing is often a frame through which authors interrogate the meaning of privacy and its social, sexual, devotional, and political dimensions. Each performance of privacy through overheard lament conjures up a public with a distinctive style that evokes specific affects and establishes an ethics for relations between audiences and performers.

The trope of overhearing often intersects in early modern literature with a form strongly marked by gender: the complaint or lament. Tracing abandoned women’s laments from Sappho to Anna Akhmatova, Lawrence Lipking treats lamenting women as critically neglected mirror images of literature’s male heroes. He notes that the etymology of “abandon” means both “submission to power” and “freedom from bondage”: “This verbal duplicity hints at the roots of power beneath the desolation of abandoned women – are they chattels or do they belong to themselves? – as well as the uneasiness with which most cultures regard them. Those who are banished are also let loose; utter surrender resembles utter freedom.”¹⁶ Lamenting women are licensed to critique not only their abusers but the larger world that produced their pain, a conjoining of cultivated affect and barbed social commentary that has drawn male and female authors to speak through these figures for millennia. In The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Lauren Berlant notes that female complaints are characteristic of women’s culture in twentieth-century fiction and film. She identifies women’s culture as an “intimate public,” a mass market that reflects the experiences and desires of a group of consumers who “feel as though it expresses what is common among them,” creating strong identification with an imagined community while obscuring the role of commercial interests in creating that social space.¹⁷ The laments that I study also invoke a community of the injured and treat women as archetypes of unjust suffering. Like twentieth-century women’s culture, early modern literature spotlights the spectacle of an abused woman’s affect-laden rhetoric as a register of the costs of the ordinary injustices of patriarchal society. The figure of the lamenting woman then becomes representative of the experiences of marginalized groups such as radical Protestants (see Chapter 2) and, later, disaffected Royalists (see Chapter 6). The twentieth-century laments in Berlant’s The Female Complaint aim at well-defined demographic slices typical of modern marketing strategies. In contrast, I will show that the attempts of early modern writers to envision an “intimate public” of women are both fragmentary and ambivalent.¹⁸

In pastoral romance and drama, the overheard laments of female characters are touchstones for the possibility of authentic feeling unmediated by art, constructing what I call an “erotics of authenticity.” The lamenter’s privacy signals the expression of authentic feeling, while the presence of an eavesdropper dramatizes the pleasure of piercing the veil of an author’s privacy. When the lamenting poet is a woman, the interloper’s pleasure becomes more explicitly scopophilic, and authors draw implicit parallels between the spectacle of a woman’s body in dishabille and the revelation of her feelings in poetry. In so doing, these writers suggest that poetry offers readers a unique, and even voyeuristic, insight into private feelings, as we see in Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 2 provides an instructive contrast to the explicitly erotic laments in prose, drama, and ballads by focusing on Anne Lock’s verse paraphrase of Psalm 51. Devotional poetry often relies on the reader’s role as eavesdropper on a scene of private confession, but such poems rarely foreground the voyeuristic aspect of this relationship. Lock’s imitation of King David, I argue, differs from most other psalm imitations by reminding the reader of King David’s own role as voyeur and suggesting that the penitential psalm could be a vehicle for Bathsheba’s lament as well as David’s. I show that the themes of voyeurism and authenticity unite portrayals of female lamenters, from Anne Lock’s penitential sonnets of 1560 to Aphra Behn’s panegyric poetry of the 1680s. Focusing on overhearing and laments in many kinds of texts shows how articulations of women’s privacy helped to shape a wide range of genres: devotional poetry, political poetry, romance, drama, and ballads.

Early modern England was a crucible in which several radically transformative and historically significant concepts of privacy swirled together. Performing Privacy and Gender focuses on four of these models: two influential classical models and two that emerged in the course of the seventeenth century. Aristotle viewed the private as the domestic realm, in which basic needs are satisfied, while some early modern uses of the word “private” evoke an ideal of intimate friendship linked to the writing of Plato and Cicero. In early modern England, a new current of thought idealizing the domestic family contrasted with the view of the market as a private realm. In all four models, domestic forms of privacy contrast with extradomestic forms. Similarly, the private realm is in two models idealized as a source of freedom and emotional satisfaction, and in the other two depicted as a domain of necessity offering neither true pleasure nor freedom. Table 1.1 sketches out these oppositions; shaded areas indicate the classical influence on early modern England and unshaded areas denote emergent concepts of privacy.

Classical portrayals of the family, the household, and the private/public boundary were widely quoted and imitated in early modern England, especially Aristotle’s view of the family as the domain of necessity and the Ciceronian ideal of friendship. Early modern writers were familiar with Aristotle’s Politics, in which the family, “the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants,” contrasts with the sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women
• 2 Private Lament in Calvin, Knox, and Anne Lock
• 3 Privacy and Gender in Household Orders
• 4 Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well: Mastery and Publicity
• 5 Marriage and Private Lament in Mary Wroth’s Urania
• 6 Interest and Retirement in Aphra Behn’s Odes
• 7 Epilogue: Performing Privacy on Facebook
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index