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Writing and Fame
Women who had previously been confined to a domestic sphere now had to negotiate for themselves a life in the public eye. Female writers needed to be able to engage their male peers in dialogue about art and letters, women’s intellectual abilities and the ways in which they could be employed. The discourse that arose from these women’s writings, and from those of the men who alternately supported or dismissed their efforts, developed into the querelle des femmes. By publishing their works, women writers could contribute to this discourse in a substantial and important way. However, there was a vast difference between engaging in dialogue within an elite group of intellectuals, and creating a broader readership (both male and female). The crucial issue in accomplishing this had to do not simply with the quality of an author’s literary output, but with her social and cultural acceptability. It was rare for women to be well educated, and rarer still for them to produce any work outside of the domestic arts. Social and religious institutions looked askance at those who did. A successful early modern woman writer often had to find a way of marketing herself as a good woman as well as a competent artist. Education and Public Opinion
The education of women in early modern Europe, and the ways in which they were encouraged (or, frequently, forbidden) to develop their minds varied among social classes and ranks. Aristocratic women were the most likely to be schooled in letters, foreign languages, and sciences, especially if they displayed an inclination toward scholarly pursuits. They would have had the leisure time and the funds or social connections necessary to receive tutoring in gender-appropriate subjects. Like the storyteller Isabel in María de Zayas’ The Disenchantments of Love (1647), such women could be instructed in “not only the qualities that make one a virtuous Christian but also the edifying exercise of reading, writing, playing music, dancing, and all the other requisites in a person of [their] category” (Zayas 44). Nuns were usually taught reading and Latin. Upper-echelon nuns disposed to scholarship could become well versed in Biblical and patristic writings, although they could not write or vocalize their scriptural criticisms or theological beliefs without censure. For example, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, though one of the most highly respected intellectuals in seventeenth-century Mexico, was attacked by Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz, the Bishop of Puebla, for her criticism of a contemporary male theologian’s work. Even bourgeois families could usually obtain a more than basic education for a daughter. Skill in certain fine arts, such as playing music or writing letters and poetry, could increase her social worth, making her as accomplished as her wealthier neighbors, and therefore potentially appealing to a husband of higher rank. Thus, some women were able to expand their spheres of knowledge within limits determined by their social or economic status. An intellectually curious female could even approach such esoteric subjects as mathematics or natural philosophy, as long as that approach was made within the bounds of the domestic sphere and with no intention to take her inquiries into a public, academic arena of discourse. Accordingly, the topic that was most strictly forbidden to women, the study of which by women was most vehemently protested, was that most public of disciplines: rhetoric.
Women who wanted to publish their own writings had to find ways to negotiate these cultural and social taboos. Due to their high social position, female members of royal or prominent aristocratic families may have had to face fewer obstacles. For bourgeois as well as elite women, there was another avenue: religious sisterhood. Nuns had remarkable educational opportunities, and ranked among the few privileged women who could, if they chose, devote their lives largely to scholarship. Even women writers who had not taken the veil could produce works of a spiritual, devotional and reflective nature. As long as their work steered clear of theological argument, the province of men, these women could carve a socially suitable niche for themselves in writing about human virtues. Furthermore, literary work that focused on private life and family relations not only did not transgress the domestic sphere, but could even exemplify feminine virtue. Finally, there was a more extreme way in which women writers could make their works, and themselves, appealing to literary consumers. Rather than try to fit within socially acceptable norms, these women exploited their uniqueness, even exaggerated it. They created personae for themselves that existed apart from familiar cultural categories, or in the simplest cases, used the uniqueness of their situation to play on the sympathies of their audience. Novelty and Originality: Christine de Pizan
The necessity for new sources of income, for social connections, and for her sons’ education, led Christine to seek patronage or assistance from members of the royal court. Even more unusual, she pled her own cause in front of the law courts in the cases regarding her inheritance. It was in this environment that her works first became public. Copies of Christine’s poems, first distributed as personal gifts to the monarchs and their courtiers, circulated locally and spread to other French courtly circles as well. In the age before printing became the dominant method of textual dissemination, Christine de Pizan earned a remarkably large manuscript-based readership. However, Christine does not attribute her success to any innate skill. She humbly suggests that her readers were simply intrigued by the idea of a female author, not by the substance of her work, and read her poetry out of mere curiosity:
Christine does not claim that she had any intent to publish her works at the time. Describing these events in her autobiography years after they occurred, Christine employs a trope of humility. She never sought fame, she says, and the acclaim she received was not due to the artistic value of her works but to their novelty as products of a female writer. Furthermore, she produced these works as a means of caring for her family, since they were gifts to the aristocrats who looked after her interests and her children’s. This circumstance only reinforced Christine’s feminine virtue in the eyes of her readers. Her exquisite and polemical Book of the City of Ladies (1403-04) could have been banned or condemned. Instead, as a result of Christine’s good reputation, it received a lasting readership and established Christine as the foremost woman of letters of her generation. The success of The Book of the City of Ladies is due in great part to the attitude of humility Christine assumes in presenting her works to the reader, and to the spiritual nature of her work and its commendation of virtue. Spiritual Writing and Humility: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Bradstreet
The prefatory material to Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) consists of a foreword and several dedicatory poems addressed to the author by her publisher and several male admirers. In his “Epistle to the Reader,” a prose preface to The Tenth Muse, Woodbridge claimed to have copied Bradstreet’s poems and taken them to England to be printed without her knowledge or consent. “Contrary to her expectation,” he wrote, “I have presumed to bring to public view, what she resolved should (in such a manner) never see the sun” (Bradstreet 3). Where early modern authors would often open their publications with a poem introducing the book, perhaps dedicating it to a noble or royal patron, Anne Bradstreet’s first poem offers her collection of writings to her father, Thomas Dudley. The idea of publication is neither implicit nor explicit, and the address to Dudley establishes Bradstreet’s work firmly within the domestic sphere. Her poems on political and historical events (“A Dialogue between Old England and New”) and public figures (the elegies on Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth I) are woven with threads of humility. Bradstreet apologizes for her “bleating” verse and her “rudeness” in writing on such exalted themes (“In Honor of…Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” 16, 19). She admits that “To sing of Wars, of Captaines, and of Kings” (“Prologue” 1) is beyond the scope of most women’s writings, and tempers her wider-ranging topics by interweaving them with poems about her husband, children and parents: acceptable, familiar and appropriate territory for a Puritan woman. By emphasizing her lack of agency in the publication of her works, Woodbridge acquits Bradstreet of any sin of pride or untoward desire for public exposure. Moreover, he stresses her feminine virtues: she is “honoured,” “esteemed,” “gracious,” “pious,” “courteous,” and “discrete.” Poetry, claims her editor, is not her life’s work, but something extraneous, “the fruit but of some few hours.” In accordance with the Puritan work ethic, these few hours do not constitute true leisure time, but labor of a different sort, since they encroached upon “her sleep and other refreshments” ( Bradstreet 3). It cannot be determined what role Bradstreet played, if any, in having her works printed. A skeptical reader might think Woodbridge’s disclaimer a mere publicity stunt, or imagine that Bradstreet deliberately cultivated a pious, matronly persona in order to mitigate the unseemliness of publication. In any case, Woodbridge as her publisher contributes to, even creates her public image as a virtuous wife and mother. From the perspective of her male readership, Bradstreet’s spirituality and familial piety become her defining qualities. The elegance of her poetry matches her personal grace and courtesy, which allows her to be classified as tenth among the Muses.
The “Reply” is part rhetorically sophisticated legal defense, part autobiography. Sor Juana describes herself as a child prodigy in the past, and in the present as a woman of enormous intellectual energies. Her self-portrait is self-contradictory, probably deliberately so, especially in terms of her ambition to publish. On the one hand she maintains that she wrote poetry only at the behest of her patrons, never for her own pleasure. On the other, she emphasizes that even as a child her inclination to write was unquenchable and undeniable. Juana contests that it is not only her right, but even a necessity to educate herself in such a wide variety of topics. Logic, physics, music, astronomy, mathematics, history, law, and even rhetoric are necessary tools for reading and understanding “the book which takes in all books, and the knowledge which embraces all knowledge” (Trueblood 214). The book to which Sor Juana refers is, of course, the Christian Bible. She points out that she cannot fulfill her duties as a member of a religious order if she lacks the tools to understand the text that guides her life. Nonetheless, before presenting this argument, Sor Juana employs the familiar humility trope, addressing Sor Philothea as her superior and softening the eventual blow of her polemic with the “clustering formulas of self-abasement with which she tries to shield herself at the outset” (Trueblood 8). “Sor Philothea” (the Bishop) considers Sor Juana’s approach to reading and understanding Scripture as well as her literary pursuits to be inappropriately intellectual for a woman, and accuses Juana of not focusing her attention on purely religious matters. For Juana, however, religious zeal takes its form in the pursuit of knowledge itself, and her personal spirituality arises from the acquisition of knowledge. All types of knowledge, religious and secular, are interconnected. Faith and learning, in Juana’s view, are intimately linked and indispensable to each other. Her devotional studies cannot be separated from her private spirituality. Piety and devotion privileged Bradstreet’s writings. In a similar way, Juana’s emphasis on knowledge as an aid to religious faith makes her feminist discourse less transgressive in the eyes of male readers. For both Anne Bradstreet and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, women’s writing becomes more acceptable for public readership when couched in the language of spirituality. The Cult of Personality: Catalina de Erauso and Margaret Lucas Cavendish
Catalina de Erauso defined herself in action first and then in writing. Her memoirs narrate travels and events with surprisingly little introspection or interiority. Except for a few poignant moments, such as when she goes unrecognized by her father or mourns her brother’s death, Catalina does not dwell on emotions. Her writing style is action-driven and almost stereotypically masculine. In this respect it reflects Catalina’s interior state, her true sense of self, better than does her biological form. The narrative itself follows Catalina’s many changes of persona, from female to male, from nun to soldier, seducer, virgin, fratricide, and outlaw, from Basque noblewoman to Peruvian mercenary to Spanish courtier. Her constant journeying between cities and settlements mirrors her transformations: for every new destination, it seems, there is a new Catalina. This prodigious ability to change and adapt not only makes the Lieutenant Nun’s memoirs fascinating and terrifically entertaining, but also accounts for the remarkable way in which Catalina seems to have captivated the imaginations of her European readership. In 1625 she returned from America and petitioned the Spanish Crown to reward her, ostensibly for her military service and accomplishments in the New World. Yet the petition itself, even as it describes Catalina’s career as a soldier, emphasizes the uniqueness of her “extraordinary life” as reason enough in itself for reward. It requests the King to commend Catalina for “the worthiness of her deeds and for the singularity and prodigiousness of her life” (1996, 37; emphasis added). Prodigiousness, excess, the shocking and the bizarre shaped the Baroque aesthetic. Like the King, the Baroque world at large ought to admire Catalina for the spectacular and marvelous aspects of her person and personality, and not merely for her achievements. Catalina’s public appeal was immeasurably increased by her status as a nun and, despite having lived for nearly two decades in the company of men, a virgo intacta. Her life was now marked not only by extraordinary accomplishments, but by a virginity dedicated to God. Contemporary readers may even have seen connections between Catalina’s life story and the hagiographies of transvestite female saints. Her lifelong association with the Catholic Church endeared her to a religious readership that might otherwise have been offended by her unorthodox lifestyle. Catalina even earned a dispensation from the Pope that allowed her to continue dressing as a man.
Cavendish is also remarkable vis-à-vis predecessors such as Christine de Pizan, Anne Bradstreet, and Sor Juana for another reason. Unlike them, she published her own works (with her husband’s support). The humility trope is all but absent from her prefaces and dedications. When Cavendish does warn her audience of imperfection in her writing, she addresses the question of her craft rather than of her innate shortcomings as a woman author:
Cavendish’s approach is bold and uncompromising. She adventures to publish her writings. The prefatory material does not ask forgiveness for her unconventional style, but practically boasts of it. Her plays will be criticized because they do not follow the prescriptions of dramatic composition, but in her view, that is their greatest virtue. Given that Cavendish has the unique freedom to publish her own works and has full control over the publication process, she is able to emphasize the idiosyncratic aspects of her work and to create with impunity a full-fledged public image of herself as a prodigy and an iconoclast. Her high rank made it possible for her to move with relative ease in the public sphere, and her wealth negated the conflictive issue of women writing for profit. Above all, Cavendish’s cultivation of an eccentric persona placed her outside the bounds of the domestic sphere (therefore rendering her literally ex-centric), and freed her from many of the restrictions placed on other women writers. Conclusion
WORKS CITED
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