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Introduction
Stephanie Merrim
he
Book of the Tenth Muse derives from the final projects of a course in Comparative Literature at Brown University entitled "The Tenth Muse Phenomenon." I offered the seminar for the first time as an advanced undergraduate course in the Spring of 2003, and in modified form as a graduate course in the fall of 2005. In the course, we seek
to form a cross-cultural picture of women's writings and issues during the early
modern period--especially the seventeenth century--in Spain, Latin America,
North America, England, and France. We center our work on writers published
and celebrated in their times. An ancillary goal of the course is to compile
this online book, intended to complement the superb collection of texts and
secondary contextual materials provided by the Women Writers Project at Brown
University (www.wwp.brown.edu).
The Women Writers Project deals with early modern women's writing in English.
Our Book of the Tenth Muse, which Women Writers Project coordinator Julia
Flanders generously agreed to post as a link on the WWP website, purports to
supplement in a small way the offerings of the WWP with essays on (mostly) seventeenth-century
women's writing in Spanish and French, as well as English.
As the reader will see in more detail in the Course
Syllabus, authors and works under study in the course and thus in this book,
include:
- Anne Bradstreet, British writing in North America (1612-72), selections
of her work found in Electa Arenal's play, "This life within me won't keep still."
In Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of the Literature of the United
States and Spanish America, eds. Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari Laguardia (NY,
London: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 158-202.
- Margaret Lucas Cavendish (1623-73), British, The Description of a New
World, Called the Blazing World (1666); The Convent of Pleasure (1668).
- Catalina de Erauso, (1585?-1650?), Spanish, Vida i sucesos de la Monja
Alférez (c. 1625). In English: Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque
Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston:
Beacon, 1996).
- Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648?-95), Mexican, selections of her
work including the "Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz" (1691 and the "Primero
sueño" (1692). In English: "Reply to Sor Philothea," "First Dream." In
Alan S. Trueblood, ed. A Sor Juana Anthology (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard University Press, 1988).
- Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette (1634-93), French, La Princesse de Clèves.
In English: The Princess of Clèves, ed. and trans. John D. Lyons,
Norton Critical Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 1994)..
- Marguerite de Navarre, 1492-1549, French, L'Heptaméron (1558).
In English: The Heptameron, ed. and trans. Paul A. Chilton (London: Penguin,
1984).
- Christine de Pizan (1364?-1431?) French, Livre de la Cité des
Dames (1403-04). In English: The Book of the City of Ladies, ed. and
trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982).
- María de Zayas y Sotomayor (1590-1669?), Spanish, Novelas amorosas
y ejemplares (1637) and Desengaños amorosos (1647). In English:
The Enchantments of Love: Amorous and Exemplary Novels, trans. and intro
H. Patsy Boyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) and The Disenchantments
of Love, trans. and intro H. Patsy Boyer (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1997).
oth the present book and the course revolve around an array
of overarching themes relevant and crucial to most of the writers under
consideration: Education and learning; Religion; Self-fashioning; The
querelle des femmes, gender, and sexuality; Love and marriage;
Imagined worlds; Places and spaces; 'Ex-centricity' (eccentricity, the
bizarre or shocking, margins vs. center); Writing and fame. Each student has chosen one of the themes as the subject of her final paper. Their essays constitute the body of the
Book of the Tenth Muse, and are available for you to visit one
by one.
Finally, as mentioned above, the course carries the title that gives this book
its name: "The Tenth Muse Phenomenon." The "Tenth Muse Phenomenon," while my
own coinage, clearly refers to the Greek poet Sappho (c. 613 B.C.-570 B.C.),
whom Plato considered the human counterpart to the nine muses of classical mythology.
"Tenth Muse" became a classical epithet of praise for great poets. Seventeenth-century
Europe and its colonies in the New World also applied the epithet to women writers
who had achieved the heights of learning and whose works had entered the public
sphere through publication. Seventeenth-century women designated "Tenth Muses"
include: María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Anne Bradstreet, Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, and Ana Maria van Schurman. Now, what happens when, unlike the nine
muses of classical mythology, the tenth muse is neither divine nor necessarily
virginal, when she does her job not in heaven but in profoundly patriarchal
societies?
As the question suggests, the women writers' incursion into
the public sphere remained deeply problematic. Indeed, the "Tenth Muses" focused
tensions of the times regarding women at large--whence the "Tenth Muse Phenomenon."
Seventeenth-century learned women, especially published women writers, defied
the generally conservative, largely misogynist climate of their respective crisis-ridden
countries, each of which had witnessed a retrenchment from the relatively liberal
climate of the sixteenth-century Renaissance vis-à-vis women. In achieving
publication and fame, often as an icon of their cultures and of Culture in general,
the seventeenth-century "Tenth Muses" were a useful commodity and a dangerous.
As I note in my Early Modern Women's Writing and Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz (Vanderbilt University Press, 1999 [30-31]), when it behooved the
patriarchy to celebrate a female writer, the epithet "Tenth Muse" allowed for
an uneasy acceptance of the learned woman into the public sphere, as well as
for her containment in a circumscribed space. For their part, the "Tenth Muses"
themselves all display sharp awareness of the ambiguity of their position, of
its precarious and problematic nature. They see themselves as both celebrities
and orphans or pariahs, alone of all their sex; they represent themselves as
exceptional, as oddities, as transgressive. In short, the seventeenth-century
"Tenth Muse" bears the full weight of being a supplement to the nine
consecrated muses.
ot all of the writers whom the Book of the Tenth Muse
treats received the designation of "Tenth Muse." For example, the cross-dressing
Catalina de Erauso, and the flamboyantly eccentric Margaret Lucas Cavendish,
hardly fit the public "Tenth Muse" mold. Yet they too entered the public sphere,
gaining fame or notoriety. Their works, like those of the designated "Tenth
Muses," focus the tensions of the times regarding women. They provide important
counterpoints as well as kinships to the "Tenth Muses" per se.
Jody Caldwell, Mariah Garnett, Elizabeth Giancola, Samantha Gorman, Ariane Helou, Allison Hutt, Ashlee Morgan-Piper, Nora Peterson, Kerry Smith, Courtney Wilson, and I hope that you enjoy making your way through our contribution to a comparatist's understanding of seventeenth-century women's writing in Europe and the New World.
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