Women’s Works’ and Acceptance in Literature, Research Paper Example

In 17^th-century England, patriarchal narratives and male privilege ruled as supreme in the literary arts as they did in every other aspect of life. And yet, the period was also a time of rising social status for women, of contesting narratives of women’s subordination and the equality of Christian believers. The works of Aemilia Lanyer and Katherine Philips stand as profound challenges to the embedded discourses of patriarchy: both women articulated alternate discourses in defense of women and women’s qualities.

In her time, Aemilia Lanyer was a rather marginal figure: born Aemilia Bassano, her family was of Venetian (possibly Jewish) extraction, and both her father Baptist and her uncle Anthony were court musicians (Lewalski 214). She had a taste of high society in the years of her affair with Henry Cary, the Lord Hunsdon, who served as Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain (214). Later, at the age of twenty-three, she married Captain Alfonso Lanyer, court musician to Queen Elizabeth and later King James (214). But it is for her work Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published in 1611, that she is remembered. A true watershed in the history of women’s literature, Salve challenged the patriarchal conventions of Lanyer’s own Jacobean England, articulating a discourse in defense of women: women’s nature, women’s values, and gender equality (Mueller 211). In a deeply religious, Christian culture, Lanyer’s deeply unconventional, even radical, re-reading of the Christian scriptures establish her work as a bold and profound challenge to deeply-embedded gender norms (211).

At this time in early Jacobean England, there was an extensive reliance on the Pauline texts to reify established patriarchal gender norms (Elder 209). Here one must recall that the Pauline texts played a critical role as a catalyst for the Protestant Reformation: in particular, Paul’s reading of the Genesis account of the creation and fall of Adam and Eve, an essential bastion of the apostle’s thought regarding his understanding of the human condition (209). As Elder explains, this Pauline understanding of human nature, interpreted in the Protestant England of Lanyer’s time, thus served to legitimate the construction of gender (209). From Paul, this discourse drew its conceptions of the gendered order as God-given in both humanity’s prelapsarian state, and as a consequence of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (209). In particular, the Genesis account holds that man was created first, and then woman; conversely, it depicts Eve as having been deceived first—and then deceiving her husband in turn (Reeder 35). Thus, the Christian scriptures reified the subordination of women on the basis of both woman’s place in the order of creation, and in the order of transgression (35).

However, the Reformation itself promoted another discourse, again based on the Reformers’ reading of Paul: the conception of “the radical spiritual equality of all believers” (Elder 209-210). This discourse had mixed effects on narratives of gender in Protestant England: whilst it at once undermined the pre-Reformation ideologies which had legitimated “the material hierarchies of church, state and home”, and—with the rejection of clerical celibacy—gave pride of place to married life, there was also an implicit challenge to gendered conventions (210). In essence, the challenge was this: “if all believers are equal, why should women obey the male heads of their households?” (210). It is an especial irony that the Pauline corpus itself contains both discourses of women’s subordination to husbands (Eph. 5:24), and of women’s equality (Gal. 3:28) (ctd. in Elder 210). A further development in the England of Lanyer’s time was that of “advances in the status of women”: the education of women was on the rise, and women were beginning to publish and patronize books in greater numbers (Krontiris 102). It is therefore particularly of interest that Lanyer, whose economic exigencies motivated her efforts to support herself through her writing, bid specifically for female patronage (103). All nine of the dedications in her book are to women of high status (103). However, as a woman Lanyer faced a crucial challenge: although women in early Jacobean England could offer patronage, they were not eligible to be the recipients of it (103). Thus, Lanyer had to establish the legitimacy of the very enterprise in which she was engaged, which led her to adopt the literary practices of both sexes (103, 105). On the title page itself, Lanyer identifies herself in the conventional gender- and class-based norms of the time: she is “a married gentlewoman whose status is defined through her husband’s position as an officer and court musician” (Lewalski 213). However, Lanyer’s work presents a conceptual frame that is decidedly feminist: it defends an “enduring community of good women… from Eve to contemporary Jacobean patronesses” (213).

Critically, Lanyer depicts the Crucifixion as an action for which men alone were responsible—thereby vindicating women (Mueller 211). But in Christian doctrine, Christ’s crucifixion cannot be understood apart from Genesis 1-3—and in light of the aforementioned Pauline readings of the sin of Adam and Eve, with all their ramifications for patriarchal gender norms, Lanyer’s “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” can be understood the more fully (Reeder 34). “Eve’s Apology” begins with Pontius Pilate’s judgment of Jesus, and refers to the incident wherein Pilate’s wife urged him not to spill Christ’s blood, on the basis of her dream: “Do not in innocent blood inbrue they hands; But hear the words of thy most worthy wife, Who sends to thee, to beg her Savior’s life” (lines 750-752). Thus, it is a woman who begs for the Savior’s life. Lanyer then depicts a reinterpretation of the Fall in the Garden of Eden, presented as a revelation received by Pilate’s wife in her dream (Elder 214).

In Lanyer’s vision, Eve was the innocent victim of the guileful and crafty serpent: she was incapable of understanding that the serpent was tricking her (Reeder 42). “That undiscerning ignorance perceived No guile or craft that was by him intended… But she, poor soul, by cunning was deceived” (“Eve’s Apology” 769-770, 773). Lanyer further defended women by observing that Eve recounted the divine proscription to the serpent, who then “denied the truth of her words” (Reeder 42-43). Thus, Eve was deceived due to her own weakness—and as such, she was truly blameless, and bears no fault for original sin (43). Reeder notes that this portrayal may seem to be in accord with male commentators’ portrayals of women as weak, but a closer reading soon dispels this: Eve’s weakness was not due to her sex per se, but rather to her ignorance (43). Thus, it was not a moral weakness, but rather weakness due to lack of knowledge—particularly apropos in light of the fact that the proscribed tree was that of the knowledge of good and evil (43). As Elder explains, in Lanyer’s work “power is knowledge, and weakness is ignorance”—and this is the quintessence, the crux, of Lanyer’s defense of Eve (43). Lanyer declares: “If Eve did err, it was for knowledge sake: The fruit being fair persuaded him [Adam] to fall” (“Eve’s Apology” 797-798).

But Lanyer’s coup of reinterpretation goes still further, by inverting conventional Christian doctrine concerning the respective culpability of Adam and Eve entirely. In a feat of astonishing brilliance, Lanyer drew upon the patriarchy’s own discourses concerning the order of creation to argue that even if Eve was blameless due to ignorance, Adam had no such excuse: “But surely Adam cannot be excused: Her fault though great, yet he was most to blame” (“Eve’s Apology” 776-777). Lanyer’s argument is that Adam could not be so excused, because God had created him first and given him lordship of all: “God’s holy word ought all his actions frame, For he was lord and king of all the earth, Before poor Eve had either life or breath” (782-784). Moreover, Adam had received God’s command directly—and thus, where Eve’s sin was one of ignorance, Adam’s sin was a sin of discretion (Reeder 43). While Eve was still at fault in listening to the serpent, her intent in the act itself was good, inasmuch as she aimed to increase her own knowledge (44). Furthermore, Eve’s intention in giving of the fruit to Adam was also good: she was trying to increase his knowledge (44). In perhaps her boldest statement in this revolutionary work, Lanyer explicitly juxtaposes Eve’s sin—now revealed as nothing more than ignorance—with the crucifixion, depicted by her as the work of men alone (“Eve’s Apology” 815-816).

The work of Katherine Philips evinces salient parallels to that of Lanyer, inasmuch as Philips also challenged conventional, patriarchal conceptions in an endeavor to vindicate women. Where Lanyer articulated a conception of an “enduring community of good women” with an especial aim towards vindicating women’s nature through reinterpretations of Christian scripture, Philips too championed women’s society, with an aim towards contesting philosophical and societal assumptions of male superiority (Lewalski 213; Backscheider 177). But it was a delicate balancing act between her tremendous success as a poet on the one hand, and her negotiation of the traditional conventions of women’s subordination on the other hand (Williamson 64-65). Before her early death at thirty-three, Philips wrote “a substantial volume of poems, another of letters, and translated one play and most of another”—all while maintaining a self-effacing mien, claiming that she sought neither fame nor publication (64). Philips’s clever strategy was one of allowing men to fight her battles for her: indeed, a cardinal element of this strategy lay in convincing men that she had no desire to compete with them (66-67). Unthreatened by her, men were glad to support her poetry—and thus, she could claim that they had “virtually forced her into actions that she alone might never have risked”, thereby giving no small measure of the credit to them (67).

Writing in the mid- to late-seventeenth century, in her friendship poems Philips contests a Western philosophical tradition older than Aristotle: the idea that “friendship between men was more serious, more philosophical, and more pure than any other relationship” (Backscheider 177). Of course, in this patriarchal discourse, women were consigned to an inferior status: they were deemed to be intellectually deficient and emotional by nature, and by dint of these purported attributes were therefore incapable of attaining any relationship on par with that of male-male friendship (177). In her friendship poems, Philips describes her friendships with other women as passionate in nature—but it is a passion born of the noblest inclinations of the heart and mind, a true recognition of souls (Hodgson-Wright 11). Concerning her friend Mary Awbrey, Philips acclaims her as: “’Soul of my soul, my joy, my crown, my friend… Whose well-acquainted minds are now as near As love, or vows, or friendship can endear?” (qtd. in Hodgson-Wright 11). This, then, was Philips’s ideal: a true companionship of souls between women.

Indeed, so passionate is Katherine Philips about her female relationships that she has become famously identified as a proto-lesbian (Hammill 185). As Hammill explains, Philips has been portrayed as one who used “earlier Renaissance conventions of male friendship in order to elevate and explore erotic love between women” (185). Hammill enjoins caution concerning such judgments, however, and argues that the most significant aspect of Philips’s poetry regarding the history of sexuality is the way in which her discourses articulated “a mode of life that resists integration to the state” (185). A staunch royalist, Philips response to the crises attending sovereignty engendered by the English civil war was to develop her own Society of Friendship (185). The Society included some of Philips’s male friends, but was primarily female (185). As described by Sir Edward Dering, known in the Society as Silvander, Philips’s aim “’was to unite all those of her acquaintance… into one societie, and by the bands of friendship to make an alliance more firme then what nature, our countrey or equall education can produce’” (qtd. in Gammill 185).

Marriage, however, was a threat to the very institution of female friendship that Philips so prized (Barash 76). Philips expressed her fear of losing the love of a friend upon the latter’s marriage: “’We may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship’”, portraying the love of friendship flowing into, and becoming absorbed by, the commitments of marriage (qtd. in Barash 76). In her poem “A Married State”, Philips contrasts the responsibilities and hardships of the wife in pleasing her husband with a happy and innocent virginal state: “A married state affords but little ease; The best of husbands are so hard to please” (“Married State” 69). The virginal state is happy and innocent for women: “No blustering husbands to create your fears, No pangs of childbirth to extort your tears, No children’s cries for to offend your ears” (69). In this ideal virginal state, women lack the cares and burdens attendant upon marriage and family life. Philips then gives women a stunning piece of advice: they should forego the married state, “turn apostate to love’s levity” (69). Her final admonishment: “Suppress wild nature if she dare rebel, There’s no such thing as leading apes in hell” (69).

Both Lanyer and Philips confronted the discourses of patriarchy in distinct ways. Lanyer’s cardinal concern in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was the vindication and celebration of women, from Eve to her own time. She boldly reinterpreted the gendered discourses of Christian scripture, exculpating Eve of any fault but ignorance, and place the blame on Adam for his sin of indiscretion. As seen, one of the most remarkable things about this achievement was the way in which Lanyer used the patriarchy’s own narratives against it. Philips, for her part, championed female friendship in opposition to discourses of the superiority of men and of male friendship. In “A Married State”, Philips criticizes marriage for the cares that it burdens women with, and enjoins them to eschew it, maintaining their idyllic state by ‘apostatizing’ to love. By rejecting this institution, Philips argued, women could maintain their happiness.

Works Cited

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Barash, Carol. English Women’s Poetry: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority. New  York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print.

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Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie. “Early Feminism.” The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. 2^nd ed. Ed. Sarah Gamble. New York: Routledge, 2006. 3-14. Print.   

Hammill, Graham. “Sexuality and Society in the Poetry of Katherine Philips.” Queer Renaissance Historiography: Backward Gaze. Ed. Vin Nardizzi, Stephen Guy-Bray, and

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Krontiris, Tina. Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. 2^nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

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Lewalski, Barbara K. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.

Mueller, Janel. “The Feminist Politics of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.’”Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory. Ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller. Detroit, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994. 208-221. Print.

Philips, Katherine. “A Married State.” Songs of Ourselves: The University of Cambridge International Examinations Anthology of Poetry in English. New Delhi, India: Cambridge House, 2005. 69. Print.

Reeder, Caryn A. “Vindicating Womankind: Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.” Breaking Boundaries: Female Biblical Interpreters Who Challenged the Status Quo. Ed. Nancy Calvert-Koyzis and Heather Weir. New York: T & T Clark International, 2010. 34-52. Print.

Williamson, Marilyn L. Raising Their Voices: British Women Writers, 1650-1750. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Print.