Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800 (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) 0754652572, 9780754652571

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
2 The Architecture of Paradise: Eden and Jerusalem
3 ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: The Country House as Utopia
4 ‘In this Sacred Space’: Convents and Academies
5 Fatima’s House: Oriental Voyage Utopias
6 Afterword
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

WOMEN, SPACE AND UTOPIA, 1600–1800

Women and Gender in the Early Modern World Series Editors: Allyson Poska and Abby Zanger In the past decade, the study of women and gender has offered some of the most vital and innovative challenges to scholarship on the early modern period. Ashgate’s new series of interdisciplinary and comparative studies, ‘Women and Gender in the Early Modern World’, takes up this challenge, reaching beyond geographical limitations to explore the experiences of early modern women and the nature of gender in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Submissions of single-author studies and edited collections will be considered. Titles in the series include: Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700 Form and Persuasion Edited by Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England Edith Snook Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew Matthew Biberman The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714 Political Pornography and Prostitution Melissa M. Mowry Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe Edited by Helen Hills

Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800

NICOLE POHL

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2006 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2006 Nicole Pohl Nicole Pohl has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pohl, Nicole, 1961– Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800. – (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 3. English literature –  Women authors – History and criticism. 4. Utopias in literature. 5. Feminism and architecture – Great Britain – History – 17th century. 6. Feminism and architecture –  Great Britain – History – 18th century. 7. Architecture, Domestic – Social aspects –  Great Britain – History – 17th century. 8. Architecture, Domestic – Social aspects –  Great Britain – History – 18th century. 9. Space (Architecture). 10. Utopias. I. Title. 820.9'372'09032 US Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Pohl, Nicole, 1961– Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800 / Nicole Pohl. p. cm. – (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World) Includes index. 1. English literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 3. Women and literature – Great Britain –History – 17th century. 4. Women and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 5. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 6. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 7. Space and time in literature. 8. Personal space in literature. 9. Country homes in literature. 10. Sex role in literature. 11. Utopias in literature. 12. Setting (Literature) 13. Women in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR113.P64 2005 820.9’9287’09032–dc22 ISBN 9780754652571 (hbk) ISBN 9781138264816 (pbk)

2005011860

Contents List of Illustrations

vi

Acknowledgements

vii

1

Introduction

1

2

The Architecture of Paradise: Eden and Jerusalem

17

3

‘An Emblem of Themselves’: The Country House as Utopia

53

4

‘In this Sacred Space’: Convents and Academies

95

5

Fatima’s House: Oriental Voyage Utopias

125

6

Afterword

155

Works Cited

157

Index

195

List of Illustrations 2.1 View of Solomon’s Temple, his palace and the Fortress Antonia. Jacob Judah Leon, Retrato del Templo de Selomoh, Middelburgh: Heeren Staten van Zeeland, 1642 (BL Shelfmark C183149) 2.2 Bird’s-eye view of Christianapolis. Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianapolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Felix Emil Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916 2.3 Patrick Devlin. © Reconstruction of the Palace in The Blazing New World (1666) 3.1 Frontispiece of Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent, by a Gentleman on his Travels (1762), London: J. Newberry, 1762 3.2 Patrick Devlin.© Reconstruction of Munster Village (1778)

41

42 44 75 82

Acknowledgements Many people have helped me to write this book. Unfortunately, I cannot name everyone individually here, but to all I am deeply grateful. I would like to thank the British Academy, the Central Research Fund of the University of London, the AHRB, the Department of English at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, the Department of English at Birkbeck College, University of London, The Huntington Library, San Marino, and University College Northampton for generously supporting this project. I am particulary indebted to Adam Dadeby, Patrick Devlin, Hero Chalmers, Erica Gaffney, Michaela Giebelhausen, Tom Healy, Alessa Johns, Gary Kelly, Emma Major, Claudia Opitz, Betty Schellenberg, Lyman Tower Sargent, Simon Perril, and the Society for Utopian Studies. Ana Acosta, Laura Gowing, Diane Morgan, Rebecca D’Monté, Slaney Begley and Brenda Tooley read large portions or entire drafts of the manuscripts at various stages and provided illuminating comments and unfailing support. I am amazed that they are still my friends!

Chapter ONE

Introduction I was your house. And, when you leave, abandoning this dwelling place, I do not know what to do with these walls of mine. Have I ever had a body other than the one which you constructed according to your idea of it? Have I ever experienced a skin other than the one which you wanted me to dwell within?1

Luce Irigaray’s remark is a particularly suggestive introduction to a study of women’s utopianism. What is at stake in her observation is the relationship between individual and socio-political space, between the production of space and the production of knowledge. The enclosure of women in men’s physical space reaffirms women’s enclosure in a masculinist conceptual world. We are familiar with a modern history of spaces that unveils the complex linkage between space, knowledge and power, identity and the body. However, Christine de Pizan (1365–after 1429), Lady Mary Wroth (c. 1586–c. 1651) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) already pointed toward gendered ‘geographies of exclusion’.2 In The Book of the City of Ladies (1404), Pizan exposes an architectural practice that is foreclosed to women: I am not Saint Thomas the Apostle, who through divine grace built a rich palace in Heaven for the King of India, and my feeble sense does not know the craft, or the measures, or the study, or the science, or the practice of construction.3

She thus imagines a necessarily allegorical space that is based on principles of Christian virtue, nobility and female collectivism. Lady Mary Wroth conspicuously echoes Christine de Pizan’s call for autonomous utopian imagination when the main character Pamphilia in Urania (1621) is recommended to ‘bee the Emperess of the world commanding the Empire of your owne minde’.4 And Margaret Cavendish emphasizes the aspect of utopian autonomy in her Blazing New World (1666). The social map used in Cavendish’s quote reveals the early modern gender-exclusive allegiance to colonialism and imperial expansion: I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like.5

The prohibitive spaces that these authors point towards are exclusive to a range of disempowered groups. Postcolonial theorists have unveiled the complicity of early geographers in the project of imperialism and colonialism and continue to explore the enduring reproduction of colonial relations and practices in the



Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

imaginary geographies of the postcolonial present that rely on centre-periphery cartography.6 Feminist and queer theory has identified the active construction of space and place as masculinist and heterosexist and thus as exclusionary to women and dissident sexual identities. Christophe Martin’s study Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle continues this debate with a typological study of the metonymic and metaphorical spaces in the literature of the period that he identifies as sites where gender roles are negotiated, consolidated and challenged.7 Whilst these are fictional spaces, they are based on social practices. Thus, Martin argues, the boudoir, the closet, the convent and the harem function as ‘une prison élargie aux dimensions de l’univers’ as they enforce the ideals of domesticity, intimacy and retirement (23). In these seemingly different histories of space, we can identify a correlation between ‘lived’ (‘representational space’) and ‘conceived’ (‘representation of space’), in other words, between ‘physical’ and ‘conceptualized’ space.8 My own concern with women’s utopian thought derives from an engagement with these contemporary debates. I want to look at those texts that Martin left out in his study – texts that offer a diverse range of emancipatory strategies, ranging from the symbolic recoding of representational spaces to the invention of an innovative architectural practice. In these texts, the convent, the harem, the country house and the palace become spaces of resistance. The expression of an autonomous utopian vision that we encountered in Pizan, Wroth and Cavendish is thus a far-reaching discursive practice that intervenes in contemporary ideas about social power, utopias, gender and space. One of the primary preoccupations of utopian thought is the relationship between individual and socio-political space. When utopian thinkers portray an ideal community or society, they design a physical setting to establish and strengthen its existence.9 What utopias do is to experiment with spatial imagination, to reconceptualize the relationship between space and subject and its corporeality. What utopias as a fundamentally experimental and transformative genre reveal is the paradox between ideal and lived space, between ideology and social practice. My desire is to explore how women writers negotiate the complex gender politics of space by redefining the social production of space. *** In their study Communitas, Paul and Percival Goodman suggest that the ‘background of the physical plant and the foreground of human activity are profoundly and intimately dependent on one another’.10 This significant interaction and reciprocal correlation between the physical and material environment and the human individual is the crucial concern of utopian spatial imagination. The physical setting such as geography and climate, and the architecture of utopian communities are central to their ideological



Introduction



and political make-up. Thomas More had already emphasized this concern in his Utopia (1516) that made ‘utopia’ become a geographical metaphor. Renaissance and early modern utopias displaced their ideal and other worlds by locating them in faraway, undiscovered countries and remote unchartered islands and planets. Texts such as More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of A Voyage Thither (1638) and Gabriel Plattes’ A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Marcaria (1641) were clearly influenced by contemporary quests of discovery and colonialization.11 Although geographical utopias of this period are akin to contemporary narratives of explorers, conquerors and merchants, they also project archaic ideals of Paradise and utopia onto the new worlds. The classical utopia gave form to religious, ethical and colonial desires in a way that blurred the paradigms of empirical truth and myth.12 Despite the paradigmatic shift from eu/utopias to eu/uchronias in the mid-seventeenth century, the literary utopia of the eighteenth century still endorsed in principle the imaginary geographies of the classical utopia.13 Eighteenth-century reports of South Seas and Native American societies refuted the Enlightenment model of progressive development and inspired a primitivist dream of the ideal society that was perhaps first expressed in Montaigne’s essay, ‘Des Cannibales’ (c. 1580) and, in the eighteenth century, in Bolingbroke’s ‘natural society’ and Rousseau’s reconstruction of l’homme naturel. Utopias such as Denis Vairasse’s History of the Sevarites (1675) or Gabriel de Foigny’s La Terre Australe connue (1676) document simple, virtuous and self-sufficient communities and thus offer their own contribution to the contemporary debate on luxury. Aphra Behn’s rather conventional description of the Indians in Surinam in her Oroonoko (1688) anticipates Rousseau’s l’homme naturel in his innocence, simplicity and peaceableness. Abbé Prévost’s Le Philosophe Anglois; ou, Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland (1731–1739) has the main progagonist Cleveland travelling to America where he becomes the chief of the Abaquis Indians to reform their society according to European ideas of civilization and society. In The History of Emily Montagu (1769), Brooke sets her micro-utopia on the American continent where the narrator’s remarks on the Canadian Indians combine primitivist anthropology with an explicit social critique aimed at European gender inequality.14 And Sophie La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1798), an interesting reworking of Rousseau’s Julie, outlines a conjectural history of society from the Edenic union of Adam and Eve (the Wattines) in the American wilderness to the creation of a city with other European immigrants. This premodern association that we also find in Rousseau, Diderot and Foigny, assumes, paradoxically, as Mullan notes, a sentimental ‘individualist utopia’: countercultural mini-societies or retreats based on principles of natural sociability, community and fellowship.15 Driven by distrust of commerce and modern, proto-capitalist civilization, these utopias promote domestic, self-



Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

sufficient economies of production, often accompanied by the internal abolition of private property and money. What is conspicuous in eighteenth-century utopian fiction is the metamorphosis of eu/topia into eu/chronia through the discourse of colonialism and ‘anthropological metaphysics’.16 Indeed, the extensive appropriation and colonization of the ‘New World’ is justified by a model of progressive socialization: such narratives use the displacement of fantastic voyages, Robinsonades, Gulliveriana and, of course, utopia, to define society and civilization as progressive alienation from barbarism to civilization. *** But it was not only the geospatial setting that reflected the tension between the ideal and the real. Golden Age and Garden of Eden motifs (sponte sua) that merge with the celebration of self-sufficiency and good husbandry of Virgil’s Georgics are commonplace in classical utopianism. The physical and climatic environment of these experimental societies is in most cases fertile, lavish and, more importantly, stable. It secures ample agriculture and food production and provides an agreeable place for human beings, free from the basic anxieties of survival. The most famous example is the influential fourteenth-century poem Land of Cockaygne that depicts a hedonistic paradise where all desires and needs are instantly and automatically gratified. Subscribing more to the ethics of restraint and work, More’s island is nevertheless well provided with a pleasant climate, fertile soil and plenty of fresh water to secure a stable supply of food and drink. The ideal society in The Adventures, and Surprizing Deliverances of James Dubourdieu, and his Wife (1719) subsists on an abundance of fruit, herbs and plants, which grow lavishly in the warm and protected climate.17 On a smaller scale, the constructed environment, especially architecture, has an established symbolic function in utopias. In Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Krishan Kumar writes that ‘[a]rchitecture has always been the most utopian of all the arts. It has longstanding concern with the marriage of mathematical and human forms, the finding of a harmony and correspondence between the mathematical relations of the cosmos and the forms and functions of the human body.’18 Indeed, it is no coincidence that there is a close resemblance between utopian texts and architectural treatises: from Plato’s Critias, More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602) and the writings by Ledoux to Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, the architecture of these societies is a reflection of their social organization.19 The 54 cities on More’s island Utopia are uniform and well ordered. The city plan is based on a grid system and allows the supervision of human activities within the city. The houses are easily accessible and their doors are never locked: ‘Whoso will may go in, for there is nothing within the houses that is private or any man’s own.’20 Utopia’s



Introduction



communal dining halls and their prescribed serving and seating order reinforce age and gender hierarchies.21 Here, urban planning and urban architecture not only reflect the deterministic political and social system of the utopian society, but also reinforce it by introducing mechanisms of social control, perhaps first expressed in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria (1443–1452). The Renaissance cities of Pienza, Sabbionetta, Freudenstadt and Karlsruhe were only a few examples of actual urban experiments committed to the same utopian architectural principles: rationality, geometry, and harmony.22 The principles of the Renaissance città felice were, in some ways, extended into the eighteenth century. Motivated by contemporary research into the origins of society and redefinitions of the contrat social, utopian architecture, and particularly urban planning aspired to serve a didactic and reformist political and social purpose. Manfred Tafuri, Hanno-Walter Kruft and Helen Rosenau suggest that in the Enlightenment, the architect indeed becomes an ‘ideologist of society’.23 Quatremère de Quincy summarizes this new task in his article in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1778): Among all the arts, those children of pleasure and necessity, with which man has formed a partnership in order to help him bear the pains of life and transmit his memory to future generations, it can certainly not be denied that architecture holds a most outstanding place. Considering it only from the point of view of utility, it surpasses all the arts. It provides for the salubrity of cities, guards the health of men, protects their property and works only for the safety, repose and good order of civil life.24

This architectural utopianism found its expression in diverse projects. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux sketched out his plans for Chaux in his fictive travel narrative, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs, et de la législation (1804). The basis of Ledoux’s plans provided a safe and clean environment for the workers of the salt works at Chaux but an architecture parlante that instructed and edified the beholder. Whilst Chaux was basically a radial city, William Penn decided on the rectangular grid plan to establish a most harmonious and ordered society in Philadelphia (1682). In eighteenth-century Savannah, Georgia, the grid structure was used to guarantee the freedom, equality and self-sufficiency of each citizen. The city was consciously designed to provide a counter-model to the plantation system in the American South. An egalitarian community of freeholders with defined plots and an urban superstructure of wards that make up the whole of the city, Savannah prefigured Frank Lloyd Wright’s anti-urbanist Broadacre City (1930–1932). It also pointed towards another trend that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in plans by John Claudius Loudon and Ebenezer Howard: the Garden City. How do these considerations apply to gender? It is the aim of this book to explore how women’s utopian imagination targets the gendering of space/ place. Thomas Markus has suggested that ‘a simple gender classification



Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

of utopias is not very useful’ and rightly reads utopianism as expressions of spatial resistance: ‘First, theoretical, intellectual argument. Second, the creation of counter-propositions, alternative visions. And third, action, where built territory has been resisted or reclaimed’.25 I would want to complicate this argument, however. Early modern and eighteenth-century utopias by men and women are concerned with order, an aspect that Markus also identifies in modern utopianism. This discourse for harmony and purity is expressed in, as indicated above, spatial structures, that is, geometrical city plans, the subdivision of cities into uniform sections and, on a smaller scale, the employment of classical architectural orders. These principles are reflected in and enforced by the respective utopian strategies of social determinism: hierarchies of class and race or absolute social and political equality, spatial and social transparency, environmental protection and, with few exceptions, the desexualization of the human body. However, Markus fails to see how women’s utopian imagination not merely contributes to contemporary utopian imagination but provides a critique of classical utopianism. When Michel de Certeau sets apart ‘strategies’ and ‘tactics’, he identifies the former as the ‘calculus of force relationships. … A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serves as the basis for generating relationships distinct from it.’ The latter is a ‘calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place fragmentarily, without taking over its entirety.’26 What is at stake here is of course the complex correlation between utopia and ideology. In general terms, I side with the critics such as Frederic Jameson who argue for the transformative power of utopia beyond its mere ideological imprisonment. It is therefore still possible to read utopianism as discursive or actual tactics of resistance that deconstruct, resist or avoid the ‘calculus of force relationships’, that is, dominant ideology. Considered in the dialectical terms of ideology/ transformation; strategies/tactics, the critical intervention of utopia reaches out for alternative visions of society and community through both preserving and reconceptualizing the status quo. What then are the main parameters in women’s utopias in the period under investigation? *** The understanding of the paradox between lived and conceptual space, between real and ideal space is based on the assumption that space displays a physical, and at the same time, social quality. This understanding has led to a specifically feminist architectural theory and practice. We have seen that utopias provide an opportunity to investigate the architectural, spatial and representational issues that arise out of social practice. In this study, I want to consider how



Introduction



women’s utopias reconfigure symbolic and building forms within a larger, socio-political blueprint. The chosen historical period is therefore important. Whilst Francis Bacon uncompromisingly declared that ‘[h]ouses are built to live in, and not to look on’, theories on architecture came to be developed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that discovered space as political, as ‘the created space of social organization and production’.27 Palladianism especially created a narrative of progress from architecture as the craft of building to architecture as art, from the primitive hut to the classical orders, from barbarism to civilization.28 The conception of architecture as political (and nationalist) is pertinently summarized in Wren’s first Tract: Architecture has its Political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a common-wealth. (Wren, 351)

John Evelyn added in his translation of Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle (1650) that ‘the promotion of such publick and useful Works (and especially that of Building) [is] a certain Indication of a prudent Government, of a flourishing and happy People’.29And Richard Pococke affirmed, that a ‘taste for architecture has had effects very much to the honour of our country’ (II, 277). This civic functionalism was, as we have seen, pre-empted in the Renaissance città felice, Thomas More’s Utopia or Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.30 The increasing professionalization of architecture, hand-in-hand with the rising numbers of country houses built or remodelled in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, led to a growth in the publication of architectural tracts – often elaborate pattern books – and building manuals.31 Whilst the pattern books and building manuals for private houses addressed an increasingly varied group of clients and patrons, they sought to provide flexible building designs ranging from smaller villas and townhouses to large estates for a variety of budgets. However, underlying the range of all designs – domestic and civic – were contemporary disputes about taste and ethics, the essence of Palladianism, English versus ‘foreign’, that is, Palladian, architecture, and the politics of architecture. Palladianism became the emblem of a progressive Whig humanism and classical republicanism, caught up in ideological and also party-political debate about the meaning of virtue, self-interest and citizenship.32 Palladianism became also the symbol for the excellence of the English nation, a symbol for political and moral superiority, advanced trade and industry. ‘Public magnificence’, writes John Gwynne as part of his campaign in 1749 to rebuild London according to Wren’s ‘Grand Design’, ‘may be considered as a political and moral advantage to every nation; politically, from the intercourse with foreigners expending vast sums on our curiosities and productions; morally, as it tends to promote industry, to stimulate invention and to excite emulation in the polite and liberal



Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

arts …’.33 But Palladianism became also a matter of a related macro-economic discourse. Whilst late feudalism and mercantilism were essentially domestic economies, the late seventeenth century saw the decline of monopolies, of regulations for domestic industries, and the succession of small-scale merchant companies by expanding colonial companies. Scientific and geographical discoveries, which in themselves facilitated the acquisitions of new, natural resources, profitable foreign markets and commercial opportunities such as slave trade and plantations, advanced the development of a successful consumer economy. This development might be seen to culminate in the institution of the Bank of England in 1694 which became symbolic for the shift from a mercantile economy ruled by the principle of state regulation and ‘balance of payments’ to commercial capitalism with no restrictive regulation of domestic industry, growth of competition and a system based on credit.34 Palladianism in its uniformity and regularity, as Cynthia Wall suggests, became one counterpoint to the social and economic destabilization, especially in London.35 Architecture, then, was more than a mere construction of a building, but a moral, political and social practice. In terms of space though, as Varey confirms, ‘the theorists tend to restrict their commentaries on space to rather generalized questions of relative scale: of large and imposing spaces, such as grand entrance halls and staircases, or small and “convenient” spaces, such as bedrooms … The function of a space therefore tends to be more important than the dimensions, proportions, or architectural idiom.’36 Whilst pattern books and building manuals gave indications of size and proportion of houses and individual rooms, the principle of proportion and classical harmony ruled the overall design. Convenience, proportion and regularity were the operating terms for the majority of tracts.37 Social relations were therefore configured by the function of space and architecture. How does gender intersect with these figurations of space and architecture? The ‘structural transformation’ of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century society, as mapped out by Jürgen Habermas, was manifest in this reorganization and creation of space that configured social intercourse.38 It resulted in the establishment of a bourgeois public sphere that was disengaged, as a rational and critical mass, from the realm of the absolutist state and/or court. Located in the realm of theatres, museums, coffee houses, booksellers, salons, circulating libraries and the press, the opinion of the bourgeois public came to be the focal political and increasingly legal authority. It was construed to arbitrate between state authority, civil society and the private sphere of the family, and can be, as Baker suggests, ‘understood either as a discursive category expressing a normative ideal or as an actually existing social reality’.39 Feminist studies of the eighteenth century have focused on the former point and noted that Habermas’s interpretation elides questions of the gendered specificity of the



Introduction



public and the private. Indeed, Joan Landes argued that the dichotomy of spheres described by Habermas’s model is fundamentally hegemonic, mutually exclusive, and gendered, and reduces women to the domesticity, leisure and conspicuous consumption.40 This meant that women were excluded from the political and cultural domains that engaged in critical debates to regulate civil society. It was taken to literally confine women to the house and home. However, the public-private spatial exclusion is not as hegemonic as the model, nor indeed Habermas himself, seem to suggest. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw many shifts in social structures that produced different spheres of social interaction: public and private spheres co-existed, overlapped and were continuously redefined. Indeed, the meaning of public and private in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries was not necessarily a straightforward one and more complex than postulated by the model of separate spheres. The semantic history of the terms shows an incongruence between public/private, home/work, outside/inside, male/female spheres.41 Furthermore, there is ‘a confusion between public and private issues and events and public and private spaces. Public events might take place in private spaces; women’s participation in one kind of public realm did not give them a place in others’ (Gowing, 133). Place – associated primarily with the women’s sphere, the house and home – seems in itself subdivided into areas that display social division or solidarity: ‘The household is a “sociogramm” of a family but of something much more: of a social system.’42 The physical layout of the house, as sketched out by historians and archeologists, reflects and inscribes conventions of ‘social solidarity’, in other words, sociability, privacy, and divisions of class, race and finally gender (Hillier and Hanson, 158). Mark Wigley, Diane Agrest and Dolores Hayden have gone further to suggest that domestic architecture constitutes and contains spaces of exclusion.43 This exclusion is displayed in a range of architectural practices, implicating ‘that man builds and woman inhabits; that man is outside and woman is inside; that man is public and woman is private; that nature, in both its kindest and its cruelest aspects, is female, and culture, the ultimate triumph over nature, is male’.44 Analyzing specifically Alberti’s architectural treatise The Art of Building in Ten Books (1485), Wigley puts forward that the study ‘is the true centre of the house’. Although adjacent to the communal bedroom and theoretically accessible, the woman of the house is nevertheless excluded from this room. ‘This space’, concludes Wigley, ‘marks the internal limit of woman’s authority in the house’ (347–8). In her study on Wollaton Hall, Alice Friedman agrees that there is a prescriptive ‘ideal social map’ in the Elizabethan country house that regulates upper-class women’s movements and basically restricts them not to the house itself but to very specific sections within the house: to the nursery, the chapel, the great chamber, their own bedrooms, closets, the garden and the banqueting houses.45 However, as I will

10

Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

show in the course of this study, this gender differentiation was articulated much more clearly at the level of ideology than it was on the ground. Clearly, what is at stake here is the incongruity between prescriptive and descriptive gender ideologies that impact on the social production of space. If architectural space means, to quote Bernard Tschumi here, ‘to determine boundaries’, then space become the site where ideology and social practice are negotiated but not necessarily reconciled.46 *** The utopian telos of women’s utopianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the establishment of, as Jean Pfaelzer argues, an ‘intersubjective space’ – a space ‘in which the self evolves through relationships rather than quests, in which the society recognizes that integrity and individuality stimulate community; dependence rather than autonomy nurtures personal integrity’.47 Utopian literature serves as a site for experimentation with alternative ideas of community, government, nation state, kinship, status, notions of home, family and property, gender and sexuality – in short, a complex political and social agenda. As the classical model of geographical utopias was not available to women, imaginary voyages (in the case of Margaret Cavendish), pastoral utopias (in the case of Mary Wroth), or domestic utopias formed the body of women’s utopias. In her recent study, Alessa Johns divides women’s utopias of the ‘long’ eighteenth century into the subgenres of intimate utopia, educational utopia, anti-utopian satire and invented societies.48 Focusing particularly on invented societies, Johns’ study documents the range of socio-political discourses that women utopianists adopted and reproduced: One member of utopia modeled behavior that inspired imitation and utopian converts; another gave birth to and educated followers; one ideal community formed another; one text called forth a sequel. (2–3)

What emerges is not a uniform vision but utopian narratives that struggle with the dual operation of resisting ideology and producing oppositional practice. Consequently, some of these utopian narratives qualified if not contested masculinist discourses whereas others endorsed them by buying into essentialist categories of gender. A new domestic ideal – the woman who orders and shapes the home, the arbitress of values enclosed within and protected by domestic authority – offered a form of utopia as surely as the more apparently egalitarian and progressive hopes of utopian thinkers who strove for gender equality in all aspects of private and public life.49 Rather than seeing utopianism, and more specifically women’s utopianism, as monolithic, we should think in terms of reform, appropriation, resistance and the creation of alternative utopian spaces according to the social determinants of gender. We witness the development of



Introduction

11

a new mode of utopianism – the domestic utopia – that counters the colonial paradigms of men’s utopian narratives and strives to reform and to reinscribe the private and domestic with political relevance. And finally, we are presented with the development of a new and alternative production of space – a practice that does not reform, or appropriate, but creates newly gendered utopian spaces. The choice of texts in this book is based on the display and construction of utopian space in a wide range of genres in literature between 1600 and 1800. Although the focal point of this study is on England, I have also drawn on some continental texts that were available to English readers as translations or as discourse. My investigation is mainly driven by conceptual questions and thus seeks to link theoretical debates about space, gender and utopianism to historiographic debates about the (gendered) social production of space. As my primary aim is to demonstrate how women writers explore the complex (gender) politics of space, specific attention will be given to spaces that feature widely in contemporary utopian imagination: Arcadia, the palace, the convent, the harem and the country house. The conception of these spaces is both literal and allegorical. Utopian space and utopian architecture are defined by a set of functions that are ascribed to them; because of the duality between ‘lived’ and ‘conceived’ space, these spaces reveal the paradox between architecture as representative of ruling social discourses and actual user’s space. The spaces and architectures that we encounter in this study are thus defined by a desire and quest, a ‘need of something Else and Beyond’.50 There are thus, to echo Greimas, actants that function as helpers to act towards the fulfilment of this greater quest. The early modern writers Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish seek to recreate paradise in their versions of Eden and Jerusalem; the one yearns for Arcadia, the other for Solomon’s Temple. Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell redefine the convent as an emancipatory space, dismissing its symbolic meaning as a confining and surveilled architecture. The utopia of the country house in the work of Delarivier Manley, Sarah Scott and Mary Hamilton will reveal how women writers resignify the traditional metonym of the country estate. The study will finish with an investigation of Oriental tales and travel writing by Ellis Cornelia Knight, Lady Mary Montagu, Elizabeth Craven and Lady Hester Stanhope who unveil the seraglio as a location for a Western, specifically masculine discourse on Orientalism, despotism and female sexuality, and offer their own utopian judgement. These are case studies only – I am not suggesting a coherent history of utopian spatiality in women’s writing. This book is, quite simply, an attempt to think about alternative ways of being. In recent times, the fall of the Berlin Wall has been declared symbolic for the end of utopia, symbolic for a political and cultural climate where ‘radicalism and the utopian spirit that sustains it have ceased to be major political or even intellectual forces’.51 Postmodernism has also been declared another nail in utopia’s coffin since utopia’s supposedly homogenizing and limiting quest

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Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

for unity, stability and collectivity runs counter to the postmodern matrix. Finally, as one voice of post-feminist thinking, Sally Kitch blames utopianism for a range of political fallacies and proposes a theoretical framework that is based on ‘post-utopian realism’ to restart ‘humanity from scratch’.52 Yet, an equally persistent number of voices have reminded us of the necessity of utopian hope. Indeed, the utopian work by George McKay, Lucy Sargisson but also the project of ‘reconstructing’ a postmodern feminist theory of ethics by Drucilla Cornell bear witness to a new utopianism that addresses some of the most pressing dilemmas of contemporary political life. I want to join the latter group to remind readers of utopian spaces that had been carved out by previous generations which dare us to ‘demand the impossible’.53 Notes 1

Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. 49. 2 Ed. by David Sibley. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. London: Routledge, 1995. 3 Christine de Pizan. The Book of the City of Ladies (1404). Trans. by Earl Geffrey Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1983. 15. 4 Lady Mary Wroth. Urania. Newberry Manuscript, I, fol. 40v. Quoted in Mary Wroth. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621). ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. xlix. 5 Margaret Cavendish. The Description of a New World Called the Blazing World (1666). Margaret Cavendish: New Blazing World and Other Writings. Ed. by Kate Lilley. London: William Pickering, 1992. 119–225 (124). 6 Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, eds. Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies. New York: Guilford Press, 1994; David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 7 Christophe Martin. Espaces du féminin dans le roman français du XVIIIe siècle. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004. 8 See Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwells, 1991, who provides the important framework of my reading in this study. 9 See Ernest J. Green. ‘The Social Functions of Utopian Architecture’. Utopian Studies 4.1 (1993): 1–13. 10 Paul and Percival Goodman. Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life. New York: Random House, 1947. 3. 11 David Beers Quinn suggests that More is the first English writer to use colonia in an imperial context, ‘Renaissance Influences in English Colonization’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (1976): 73–92. 12 We are aware of the convergence of Paradise and the New World in the writings of Columbus. A striking eighteenth-century example is Berkley’s ‘Proposal for the better Supplying of Churches in our Foreign Plantations, and for Converting the Savage Americans, to Christianity, By a College to be erected in the Summer



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Islands, otherwise called The Isles of Bermuda (1725)’. Without ever having been to Bermuda, Berkley projects his eschatological yearning for an earthly paradise onto the island. See Costica Bradatan, ‘Waiting for the Eschaton: Berkeley’s “Bermuda Scheme” between Earthly Paradise and Educational Utopia’. Utopian Studies 14.1 (2003): 36–50. 13 Reinhart Koselleckt. ‘Die Verzeitlichung der Utopie’. Utopieforschung. Ed. by Wilhelm Voßkamp. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985. II, 1–14. 14 Frances Brooke. The History of Emily Montagu, in four volumes. London: J. Dodsley, 1769, I. 39. 15 John Mullan. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Chapter 3. 16 ‘Enlightenment’. Dictionary of the History of Ideas. Ed. by Philip P. Wiener. 4 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. II, 90. 17 For an important analysis of the tension within these narratives of Cockaygne, see Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. London: The Hogarth Press, 1973. 18 Krishan Kumar. Utopia and Antiutopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. 5. 19 Françoise Choay. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (1980). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. 20 Thomas More. Utopia (1516). London: Everyman Library, 1919, 1992. 60–61. 21 See the interesting analysis of More’s seating order in the dining halls by Louis Marin. Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces. Trans. by Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1990. 140–41. Edward Bellamy also introduced communal dining halls in his Looking Backward (1888). Here the members of a large, unqualified industrial army provide the service in the halls. 22 Hanno-Walter Kruft. Städte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. München: C. H. Beck, 1989. 23 Manfred Tafuri. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. 3. 24 M. Quatremère de Quincy. ‘Architecture’. Encyclopédie méthodique (1778), quoted in Tafuri. 12. 25 Thomas A. Markus. ‘Is There a Built Form for Non-Patriarchal Utopias?’. Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis. Ed. by Amy Bingaman, Lise Sanders and Rebecca Zorach. London: Routledge, 2002. 15–33 (16). 26 Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life (1974). Trans. by S. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. xix. 27 Francis Bacon. ‘Of Building’. Francis Bacon. The Essays; or, Counsels Civil and Moral (1625). Ed. by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 100; Edward Soja. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. 79. 28 There were some dissidents on the theory that the classical orders – and hence the elevation of architecture to art – was an invention by the Greeks. Richard Pococke, Isaac Ware and Christopher Wren trace back this development to the Egyptians, Romans or to the ‘Tyrian Architecture’ of Solomon’s Temple. See Richard Pococke. A Description of the East and Some Other Countries. 2 vols. London: Printed for the Author, 1745; Isaac Ware. The Complete Body of Architecture. London: J. Rivington, L. Davis, C. Reymers et al., 1757; Christopher Wren. ‘Of Architecture’; ‘Observations on Antique Temples, &c’. Parentalia; or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens. London: F. Osborn, 1740.

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29 John Evelyn. A Parallel of the Antient Architecture with the Modern. Written in French by Roland Freart, Sieur de Chambray, Made English for the Benefit of Builders. To which is added an Account of Architects and Architecture, in an Historical and Etymological Explanation of certain Tearms particularly affected by Architects. London: John Place, 1664. B2v. Charles Augustus Busby disagreed somewhat and suggested that magnificent architecture does not necessarily mirror the level of civilization but is ‘rather the consequence of local circumstances and a despotic government’. Charles Augustus Busby. A Series of Designs for Villas and Country Houses. Adapted with Economy to the Comforts of Modern Life. London: J. Taylor, 1808. 9. 30 In his History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, Hanno-Walter Kruft has included More and Bacon in his chapter on seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury architectural theorists. Hanno-Walter Kruft. History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present. Trans. by Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander and Antony Wood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994. Chapter 19. 31 John Shute was the first to use the word ‘architect’ as a craftsman and theoretician on architecture. John Shute. The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture. London: Thomas Marshe, 1563. 32 Christy Anderson makes the point that there is a connection between Inigo Jones’ classical architecture and contemporary notions of masculinity. Christy Anderson. ‘A Gravity in Public Places: Inigo Jones and Classical Architecture’. Gender and Architecture. Ed. by Louise Durning and Richard Wrigley. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. 7–28. 33 John Gwynn. London and Westminster Improved. London: Printed for the Author, 1766. xiv. 34 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications, 1982. 13. 35 Cynthia Wall. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 214. 36 Simon Varey. Space and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 23–4. 37 Robert Morris. Rural Architecture: Consisting of Regular Designs of Plans and Elevations for Buildings in the Country. In which the Purity and Simplicity of the Art of Designing are variously exemplified. London: Printed for the Author, 1750. Preface [n.p.]. 38 Jürgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962). Trans. by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. 39 Keith Michael Baker. ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations of a Theme by Habermas’. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Ed. by Craig Calhoun. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 181–211 (183). 40 Joan B. Landes. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 41 See Lawrence E. Klein. ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytical Proceedure’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1995): 97–109; Laura Gowing. ‘“The Freedom of the Streets”: Women and Social Space, 1560–1640’. Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Ed. by Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 130–15.



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42 B. Hillier and J. Hanson. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. 159. 43 Dolores Hayden. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. London: MIT Press, 1982; Diane Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman, eds. The Sex of Architecture. New York: Abrams, 1996; Mark Wigley. ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’. Sexuality and Space. Ed. by Beatriz Colomina. New York: Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 327–89. 44 Diane Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman. ‘Introduction’. The Sex of Architecture. 11–13 (11). 45 Alice Friedman. ‘Architecture, Authority and the Female Gaze: Planning and Representation in the Early Modern Country House’. Assemblage 18 (August 1992): 40–61 (45). 46 Bernard Tschumi. ‘Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox’. Studio International 190.177 (1975): [n. p.] 47 Jean Pfaelzer. ‘Subjectivity as Feminist Utopia’. Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Ed. by Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerten. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994. 93–106 (99, 98). 48 Alessa Johns. Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University Press of Illinois, 2003. 7–10. 49 Indeed, Eve Tavor Bennet identifies two strands in eighteenth-century utopianism: matriarchal and egalitarian utopianism. Eve Tavor Bennet. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 50 A. J. Greimas. Structural Semantics: An Attempt of a Method (1966). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. 209. 51 Russel Jacoby. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 7. 52 Sally L. Kitch. From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. 1. 53 Tom Moylan. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. London: Methuen, 1986.

Chapter TWO

The Architecture of Paradise: Eden and Jerusalem hard by a Wood side, where shee had the benefit of that shade, and before her a delicate greene Playne, through the which ran a most pleasant River: shee liking this place, which (as shee thought) humbly by delights sought to invite her stay in it, as a Woman that would take what content shee could compasse, for that time laid aside State, and to recreate her selfe after her owne liking, went into the Wood, pretending, her thoughts would not bee so free, as when shee was alone … . (Lady Mary Wroth, Urania) [T]he city itself was built of gold, and their architectures were noble, stately, and magnificent, not like our modern, but like those in the Roman’s time; for our modern buildings are like those houses which children use to make of cards, one storey above another, fitter for birds, than men; but theirs were more large, and broad, than high; the highest of them did not exceed two storeys, besides those rooms that were under-ground, as cellars, and other offices. (Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing New World)

What dominates early modern utopian thought is the quest for paradise, characteristically embodied in the iconographic tropes of the Golden Age and Arcadia that signify eternal peace, eternal spring, perpetual youth and material simplicity. These tropes are shaped by either a nostalgic grief for the lapsarian loss or a dynamic utopian impulse that seeks to recreate the terrestrial paradise: Eden and Jerusalem.1 ‘In both media,’ suggests McClung, ‘the translations, or re-creations are both literal and metaphoric’ (1). We can trace these archetypal models of paradise from the Renaissance neopastoral and the città felice well into the twentieth century in its manifestations of the garden city and the ville radieuse. Spatial metaphors testify to the importance of space in the construction of identity, both conceptually and materially, in the abstract and in the concrete. Traditionally, early modern spatial metaphors equated the female body with this yearning for paradise: ‘paradise’ … means nothing more than a most pleasant garden, abundant with all pleasing and delightful things, of trees, apples, flowers, vivid running waters, song of birds and in effect, all the amenities dreamed of by the heart of man; and by this one can affirm that paradise was where was a beautiful woman, for here was a copy of every amenity and sweetness that a kind of heart might desire.2

Indeed, the pastoral idiom conjures up images of the female body, of erotic love and pleasure. In early modern plays, the neopastoral is used to negotiate erotic love and courtship and marriage, to the point that homoerotic episodes are acted out in fictitious Arcadian spaces.3 We also remember John Donne’s depiction of his mistress as ‘Oh my America, my new-found-land!’ that documents the

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evident congruence of the quest for paradise and sexual/colonial domination united in a subgenre of utopias, somatopias.4 It seems that, as Baudrillard suggests, woman is ‘a living Utopia’ who has no need to produce utopias herself.5 However, it is the motive of the present study to demonstrate that there is female tradition of ‘otherworldly’ utopianism figured in pastoral conventions and in tropes of the earthly city. The texts discussed in this chapter achieve the critique of a gendered spatial practice symbolically by, to return to Lefebvre, targeting ‘representational spaces’ that ‘embody complex symbolisms’ (33). In Wroth’s Urania, the castle and the royal palace are spaces of incarceration and domestic abuse, prefiguring the Gothic inversion of the domestic into a space of terror, and the negative utopia. They embody the spatial power relations between the sexes. The retreat to a utopia arcadia in the work of Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer offers a different space for selfdetermination and happiness, for a vita contemplative. The locus amoenus is determined by the classical bucolic tradition where nature inspires true creativity and artistic power and is contrasted with the grotesque, gendered representation of nature that we find for instance in Donne, Raleigh’s Guiana or Spenser’s ‘Bower of Bliss’. The conventional coding of the female body as ‘natural’ and thus as an object of domination is rendered invalid. Both writers also forcefully evoke the influence of a courtly querelle des femmes literature, when they promote the idea that Eve’s (and thus woman’s) true origin is Paradise, ‘her Metropolitan Residence’ that makes her surpass Man (who was created ‘out of Paradise, in a rural Field, with irrational Brutes’) in nobility and sacredness.6 The female communities in Wroth and Lanyer promote a naturally feminocentric (and courtly) society based on virtue, constancy, female friendship and companionate marriages. The other side of Paradise – Jerusalem – is created by Margaret Cavendish who recodes the symbolic and metonymic space of Solomon’s Temple as a celestial city of female rule. *** The relationship between utopia and the pastoral is problematic as the latter is often seen as the primum mobile for mere escapist visions of courtly love and the pleasures of a happy rural life seemingly in simplicity and equality. Both Raymond Williams and James Turner have suggested the tropes of natural beauty, contentment, courtly love and rural simplicity to be distortions of actual social and economic relations as they only reflected a particular vision of country life and thus serve as mere panegyrics of the powerful.7 What is at stake here is the biblical opposition between the pastoral and the georgic, between Abel and Cain. In this explicatory model, arcadia utopica seems a mere end-of-history valedictory. However, Annabel Paterson has suggested that the use of the pastoral as genre and mode is indeed more complicated



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as it is used within historically specific contexts to affirm but at the same time provide the reader with ‘a whole range of eccentric responses within the hegemonic corpus, intimations of doubt, criticisms of self or of the monarch or of the socio-political system’.8 The dialogic structure of the pastoral echoes the basic structures of utopia in its juxtaposition of the real and the ideal. The pastoral’s yearning for containment forges an ‘artful’ harmony that reassures the individual in an immediate natural environment but at the same time alludes to the conflicts in the ‘nonpastoral’ world. Instead of merely harking back to the memory of a long-lost Golden Age, the pastoral juxtaposes an idea of moral economy with the historical disturbances of war, feudal exploitation and the increasing split between country and court. Ettin thus suggests that the estrangement in the pastoral is ‘based on a perceivable distance between the alleged and the implied’.9 When critics state that the neopastoral literature was ‘of no importance politically’, they are contradicted by Sidney who very clearly identified the pastoral as a vehicle for social critique and, prefiguring primitivist utopianism of the eighteenth century, political theory:10 It is then the Pastoral poem which is misliked? For perchance, where the hedge is lowest they will soonest leap over. Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Meliboeus’ mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest; sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience … .11

Pastoral’s purpose, Puttenham states, is ‘to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed in any other sort’.12 And Spenser, in his Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, places The Faerie Queene (1590–1596) in the tradition of a Morean utopianism, depicting ‘a Commune welth such as it should be’.13 The ‘secret meaning’ of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, The Faerie Queene, or Sidney’s Arcadia in terms of political controversies is both literal and allegorical. The sponte sua and O fortunatos nimium theme in seventeenth-century estate poetry and the idea of Albion as ‘Earth’s rare paradise’ speak of the persistence of the Golden Age motif in the Stuart period and the eighteenth century.14 With an increasingly commercial society from the late seventeenth century onwards, Republican and Christian writers specifically targeted issues of luxury, conspicuous consumption, the degeneration of Christian virtues and simply the meaning of ‘civilization’ as such. In the poem ‘The Golden Age’ (1697), Aphra Behn calls for the return of the ‘Blest Age’ that is not only constituted by eternal spring, peace and happiness but by the absence of arbitrary political power, greed and injustice:15 Monarchs were uncreated then, Those Arbitrary Rulers over men;

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Kings that made Laws, first broke ‘em, and the Gods By teaching us Religion first, First set the World at Odds: Till then Ambition was not known. (IV, 4) … Right and Property were words since made, When Power taught Mankind to invade: When Pride and Avarice became a Trade; Carri’d on by discord, noise and wars, For which they barter’d wounds and scarrs. (V, 5)

Nearly 100 years later, Lady Mary Hamilton warned: ‘It was what is called pleasure, that sunk into ruin the ancient states of Greece; that destroyed the Romans, that overturns cities; that corrupts courts; that exhausts the fortunes of the great; that consumes youth; that has a retinue composed of satiety, indigence, sickness, and death.’16 The trope of the Golden Age found its way into colonial utopias and Robinsonades, where ‘natural’ simplicity and happiness was discovered in primitive societies but partially condemned to an unrecoverable past. Rousseau’s l’homme naturel could be perhaps found in the New World and the South Seas but mankind’s disposition for a natural amour de soi could never be salvaged – Poussain’s Et in Arcadia ego speaks of this irretrievable loss.17 The literary dispute between Alexander Pope, Thomas Ticknell and Ambrose Phillips over the neopastoral resulted in a range of poetic responses ranging from satires (John Gay, The Shepherd’s Week, 1714 ) to Goldsmith’s ‘radical pastoral’, The Deserted Village (1770). Oliver Goldsmith’s, William Cobbett’s and John Clare’s responses to changes in modes of agriculture and therefore changes in England’s social and actual landscape are well-documented as combining the pastoral with radical agrarian politics that also filtered into the utopianism of Owen, Spence and the Chartists. Timothy Morton forges an interesting link between vegetarianism and a general evaluation of political power. Writers such as John Evelyn, Robert Pigot, Thomas Tyron and Benjamin Franklin commented – if in different ways – on the connection between animal rights and human rights (slavery is the issue here); between commercial capitalism and the abuse of political power; in short, juxtaposed a capitalist, expansive, patriarchal and meat-eating system with a vegetarian, ‘non-violent community of all races and species’.18 This ‘radical pastoral’ celebrates a ‘Golden Age view of spontaneous and wholesome production’ (Morton 78, 79). Donna Landry has traced the creative use of the neopastoral in labouringclass women’s poetry that is defined by ‘the predominance of class-conscious georgic and pastoral poems’.19 In short, the contrast in value between the two societies in pastoral utopias is a literal and metaphorical one, rooted in the social ideologies of their time. It is particularly Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue that established the utopian nature of the pastoral:



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Sicilian Muses, sing a nobler music,. For orchard trees and humble tamarisks Do not please everyone; so may your song Be of a forest worthy of a consul. The last great age the Sybil told has come; The new order of centuries is born; … The Age of Iron gives way to the Golden Age.20

The prophecy of the forthcoming Golden Age, the introduction of perfectibility for both mankind and nature and the promise of a harmonious society is complemented by the georgic and the epic forewarning that the process towards the Golden Age demands sacrifices and heroism; that, in fact, the Golden Age must be created: As soon as you are old enough to read The praises of heroes and your father’s deeds And therefore know what excellence consists of, The grain will yellow and ripen in the fields, The purple grapes will cluster on wild vines, And honey will drip like dew from the hard oak tree. But there will still be vestiges of sin, … There will be need for yet another Argo To carry its chosen heroes on their mission; There’ll will be another war, and once again Another Achilles will be called to Troy. (31)

The spiritual evolution towards perfection and civilization that, as Ettin rightly points out, removes us from the pastoral state of innocence, and embraces both the Blochean ‘Not Yet’ and an imaginative dialectic that reaches beyond the confines of historical reality (48–9). Recalling Bloch’s concept of the novum, we find that a perhaps more useful understanding of the pastoral is as a ‘dialectical force that mediates the material, historical possibilities, and the subjective awareness and action engaged with those possibilities’.21 Whilst not a contractual utopia, I would argue that the pastoral romance creates a ‘speculative myth; designed to contain or provide a vision for one’s social ideas, not to be a theory connecting social facts together’ (Frye, 25). Instead of deploring the loss of Eden or a Golden Age, the neopastoral romance of the Renaissance embedded Virgil’s temporalization of the mode in its texts – the Golden Age could be re-established. As such, Bloch argues, social utopianism is shaped by the ‘wishful landscapes’ of Arcadia. Both are defined, if in different ways, by the tension between compensation and utopian anticipation, the ‘Not Yet’. In short, radical neopastoral utopias point towards a future that is an improved past.22 If the pastoral’s ‘secret meaning’ lies in the gaps of meaning, the hidden allegories, the manifold secrets, then Lady Mary Wroth’s

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Urania (1621) and her effective omission of conventional pastoral elements serves as an remarkable example for an infusion of romance and the pastoral with utopian elements. *** Men talke of the Adventures strange, Of Don Quishott, and of their change, Through which he Armed of did range.23

Drayton’s reference to Don Quixote indicates one of Lady Mary Wroth’s key models for her Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (First Part, 1621) which, as Josephine Roberts suggests, ‘may have guided her response to more direct sources, including her uncle’s Arcadia, Montemayor’s Diana, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Amadis de Gaule, and d’Urfé’s Astrée’.24 The biographical details that link Urania to Wroth’s pastoral play, Love’s Victory (c. 1620) have been discussed in detail by critics. More important to our purpose, we remember that whilst keeping the formal elements of the romance and its related modes of the pastoral, the epic and the picaresque, Wroth redefines the traditional female figure of romance, so concisely defined by Richard Brathwaite as ‘chaste, silent and obedient’, to passionate, autonomous and constant women whose virtues are continuously challenged by the political economy of gender.25 Thus the ‘adventures strange’ that the female protagonists encounter in Wroth’s Urania are very different to the quixotic quests of contemporary romances or the expansionist enterprises of utopias. Similar to her handling of the Petrarchan sonnet in ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ (1621), the operating mode of Wroth is the cross-gendering (‘negotiation’) of existing literary paradigms that were exclusive to men.26 The romance was maligned as detrimental to female readers as they might become ‘the idle Sisters of foolish Don Quixote, to believe every vain Fable which you read or to think you might be attired like Bradamant’ (quoted in Roberts, xxi). Addressed specifically to women readers as the titles of both Sidney’s and Wroth’s book imply, the critics wanted romances to be read as mere allegories – thus Bradamant’s warrior existence in Orlando Furioso or even the stories Antissia hears about Amazonian warriors and hunters in Urania were not to be emulated. As it is rooted in ideas of perfectibility and later in idealizations of courtly love and honour, the pastoral, but more so the neopastoral, stages the process of the socialization of men and women. Wroth draws on these conventions, though amplifies the typical aspects of male heroism, female martyrdom and the disciplining of the Amazon – we remember the exemplary fate of Silvia in Tasso’s Arminta (1573). Targeting the absolutist analogy between family and state that James I endorsed for his own political purposes, Wroth promoted the



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complementary and companionate model that advanced the essential freedom of women as wives, mothers or heads of households/states, and, as Linda Dove suggests, limited, by inference, the absolute monarchy.27 The sites where these discourses collided were in the iconography of castles and palaces; symbolic of patriarchal political power, segregated spheres (‘inner households’), confinement and incarceration but also of freedom and sanctuary.28 The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania is a continuation and negotiation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. Arcadia provided a perfect inspiration for later writers to rewrite and continue the incomplete text.29 Whilst critics have debated the implied readership of the Old Arcadia (‘private and feminine’) and New Arcadia (‘public and therefore masculine’), I would like to focus on the only two female responses to Sidney and their relationship to issues of space and place.30 In her analysis of women’s utopias, Jan Relf underlines their special concern with space and states that ‘[i]n utopia, women frequently retreat into the private, oneiric world of separation from men, into fantastic pastoral enclosures, or walled-off spaces in which they guard and protect a cluster of values as characteristically feminine.’ Relf defines these utopian spaces as metaphorical and positions them against the male ‘active, externalized quest in the outer world of fiction’.31 Relf’s focus on locality explores the important complexity of the gender politics of space in general and stresses the connection between the topos-orientated tradition of utopia and other forms of literature like Arcadias and Pastorals. However, that analysis should not distract us from an engagement with the production and materiality of space and place. Book Three in Sidney’s Arcadia and the forced imprisonment of Pamela, Philoclea and Zelmane is a particularly Gothic episode. Cecrophia’s castle ‘stood in the midst of a great lake upon a high rock, where partly by art, but principally by nature, it was by all men esteemed impregnable’ (443). Cecrophia separates the three sisters in the castle, locking them up in chambers ‘vaulted of so strong a thickly built stone as one could no way hear the other’, and tries to coerce one of them into marrying her son Amphialus (557). With growing adverse conditions, particularly Philoclea and Pamela grow stronger and more confident, ‘with so fair a majesty of unconquered virtue that captivity might seem to have authority over tyranny’ (492). Philoclea identifies the freedom of choice Cecrophia offers her as no freedom at all: ‘I am not mistress of mine own [life]’, and prefers a ‘virgin’s life’ to her death instead of submitting to the ‘burdenous yoke’ of an enforced marriage (449, 460). Pamela is an exemplar of Christian virtue unbroken in her spiritual devotion and faith in love: A sight full of pity it was, to see those three (all excelling in all those excellencies wherewith Nature can beautify any body: Pamela giving sweetness to majesty; Philoclea enriching nobleness with humbleness; Zelmane setting in womanly beauty manlike valour) to be thus subjected to the basest injury of unjust fortune. (546)

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The moral and spiritual resistance to the physical incarceration invokes, as Helen Hackett suggests, the iconography of martyrdom (123). The process of their confinement traces a journey from physical captivity to spiritual freedom, from the castle as prison to the castle as (temporary) spiritual retirement. The allegorical triumph of the spirit over space and matter provides an otherworldly utopian space in the absence of the sisters’ control over their own lives and destinies. In the end though, the faith in true love and constancy is rewarded with a double marriage. Anne Weamys’ Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651) uses the unfinished New Arcadia (1593) as its textual point of departure.32 Interestingly, the episodes of domestic violence towards women, a depiction of the ‘traffic of women’ in a patriarchal world that Sidney so eloquently wove into his text, are downplayed in Weamys’ Arcadia, as ‘ill usage’ of women (Weamys, 135). There are no heroines, no Amazons, simply female protagonists whose agency is expressed in finding companionate marriage partners. The text ends coherently in multiple marriages and romance: Then after all Ceremonies accomplished, they [Pamela, Philoclea, Musidorus, Pyrocles] retired severally to their flourishing Kingdoms of Thessalia and Macedon, and Armenia, with Corrinth, where they increased in riches, and were fruitfull in their renowned Families. And when they had sufficiently participated of the pleasures of this world, they resigned their Crowns to their lawfull Successours, and ended their days in Peace and Quietness. (196)

In Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania the episodes of domestic violence in particular borne out of a conflict over primogeniture, sexual rivalry and patriarchal dominance are manifold. The divinely and politically validated authority of the father/monarch in family and kingdom, the lack of women’s rights under public law and a demographic change that echoes changes in the importance of castles and country estates provide the background to these ‘histories’. Meriana, Queen of Macedon, is imprisoned in a ‘strong tower til she be of age’ to secure the throne to the next male heir in line (Bk I, 24). Orilena, Princess of Meterlin, is held in a castle as she marries Philachos against the will of her father (Bk II, 206ff). And Nereana, Princess of Stalamine ‘was left in a miserable state, imprison’d in a Towre [by her sister], locked up in conceit of maddnesse, and made a poore, imagined distracted creature where she was absolute Princesse; little Justice was in this, yet she as a woman must suffer …’ (Bk III, 495). But the story ends well for Nereana. After her rites of passage – incarceration and a previous abduction where she was ‘living in a Cave alone, and feeding on hearbs, roots, and milke of Goats’, she ‘deserved their due restoring her, prooving an excellent Governess, and brave Lady, being able to overrule her old passions, and by them to judge how to favor, licence, and curb others, and this experience, though late, is most profitable to Princes’ (Bk



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II, 334; Bk III, 496). ‘[T]yranically tortured by love’, Pamphilia’s visions of losing Amphilanthus to her rivals Musalini and Lucenia in the ‘enchantment of the Crown of Stones’ episode are conspicuously embedded in an iconography of monarchical power: Musalina sitting in a Chaire of Gold, a Crowne on her head, and Lucenia holding a sword, which Musalina tooke in her hand, and before them Amphilanthus was standing, with his heart ript open, and Pamphilia written in it …. (Bk IIII, 583)

However, again after ordeals and sufferings, she proves herself to be a controlled and wise political leader – a spiritual journey that male leaders do not have to undergo. Whereas violence and aggression enhance the masculinity of the male protagonists, they chasten and tame the potentially Amazonian women into dignified women. The true utopic space of being is thus outside of a masculinist geography of power. The disenfranchisement of women in Sidney’s and Wroth’s romances is not only allegorical but also speaks of their insecure legal situation as single and married women.33 Anne Clifford (1590–1676), later Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery was not only involved for years in claims against Francis Clifford to her father’s lands which she considered rightfully hers, but also had to stand up to her husband Richard Sackville’s attempts to rid her of her jointure. Her Diary from the years 1616–1619 witnesses how Sackville tried to evict Anne Clifford from their houses and take her child away to make her agree to a financial settlement with no further claims to her father’s lands. He put more pressure onto Anne Clifford when he required more money: ‘Upon the 17th [May 1617] the Steward came from London & told me that my Lord was much discontented with me for not doing this business because he must fayne to tye land for the payment of the money which will much incumber his Estate.’34 Lady Mary Wroth’s jointure, Loughton Hall, was financially threatened as the household’s finances were not in order and stretched by frequent visits of James I to their other property, Durants (Fowler, 66). And Hofgreve mentions the case of Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, whose right to the Willoughby estate was challenged by her uncle Sir Christopher Willoughby until she married (98). Perhaps the best example for a successful circumvention of the clash between public and private law was Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608), who build the New Hardwick Hall and completed Chatsworth after having being widowed several times. The popular literary trope of the ‘virtue in distress’ incarcerated in castles or old halls, abandoned without means and relatives, is exposed by the eighteenth-century writer Charlotte Lennox: The Dignity of my Birth can very little defend me against an Insult to which the Heiress of great and powerful Empires, the Daughters of valiant Princes, and the Wives of renowned Monarchs, have been a thousand Times exposed … What then should have hinder’d him from placing

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me in a Chariot? Driving it into the pathless Desart? And immuring me in a Castle among Woods and Mountains? Or hiding me perhaps in the Caverns of a Rock? Or confining me in some Island of an immense Lake? … Why should I imagine that the Face of the Earth is alter’d since the Time of those Heroines, who experienc’d so many changes of uncouth captivity?35

Ancient halls or castles that housed several households were celebrated even before the formalization of country houses in the Caroline period as emblems of hospitality, good housekeeping, social unity and self-sufficiency. However, with the introduction of the Great Chamber and consequently a greater division of the household into servants, and inner and outer circles, these communitybuilding ceremonies and rituals were slowly abolished.36 Elizabethan and Jacobean houses continued the trend of dividing up space into smaller units for ceremonies, privacy or mere household tasks. Withdrawing chambers, closets, exercising galleries, parlours and grand rooms were part of the new layout that favoured representation, hierarchy and privacy over communality, epitomized in the Elizabethan houses of Hatfield and the new Hardwick Hall. But the formal division of space into public and private does not necessarily enlighten us about actual social practices. We need perhaps to consider private as ‘owned’ or safe space. Whilst Julie Sanders rightly points to the closet in early modern literature as a potentially ‘private as free’ space, I would add that the closet also represents a gendered sociogramm.37 Flecknoe’s description of Margaret Cavendish’s Closet (1666) expresses surprise at the use of the closet as her library: What place is this? Looks like some sacred cell Where holy hermits anciently did dwell, And never ceased importunating heaven, Till some great blessing unto Earth was given! Is this a lady-closet? ‘T cannot be, For nothing here of vanity we see, Nothing of curiosity, nor pride As all your ladies’ closets have beside.38

Lisa Jardine suggests that the ‘man of property’s closet was a physical place of his greatest privacy … It was generally locked, inaccessible to anyone but himself and his most intimate personal servants. The woman of the household might have her own closet or ‘cabinet,’ which might [as Flecknoe confirms] her personal effects and toiletries, but she would not have access to her husband’s.’39 But perhaps it is more important that women’s closets are not rooms of great privacy, but spaces that could be consistently invaded by the master of the house.40 In Urania, Limena, wife of Philargus but beloved of Perissus, is repeatedly threatened, incarcerated and violated by her husband. Her retirement into a private space does not prevent domestic violence:



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After my departure from his house to the Citie, and so to the Campe, the jealous wretch [Philargus] finding my Ladie retired into a Cabinet she had, where she used to passe away some part of her unpleasant life: comming in, he shut the dore, drawing his sword, and looking with as much furie, as jealous spite could with rage demonstrate; his breath short, his sword he held in his hand, his eyes sparkling as thicke and fast, as an unperfectly kindled fire with much blowing gives to the Blower, his tongue stammerling with rage … . (Bk I, 11)

‘Such as desire for privacy,’ argues Gary Waller, ‘articulates a deep psychological and social yearning. It is the fantasy of one continually under surveillance, for whom privacy was a rare and valuable achievement.’41 Wroth’s stories of violence and physical threat are juxtaposed again, like in Sidney, with a hagiographic iconography that elevates the victims to martyrs for justice and constancy in love. The pastoral retreat seems the only private space: Poore Pelarina your creature lived in this Countrey when it was in that happinesse, and innocency, as those dayes were, when the Satirs, Nimphs, and Spepheards liv’d free with one another, fearelesse of harmes; Wolves, Foxes, Sheepe, and Lambes, fedde, liv’d, and were as one Flocke, neerer in familiarity then Goates are with the tamest now. Plenty grewe for men to reape, and they reap’d but what grewe for them. (Bk IIII, 528–9)

However, even this retreat is threatened by ‘the hard cold Iron where rusty disquiets eate, and spoyle, devouring like Vipers their owne kind’ but also by heterosexual love. The self-fashioning of the female protagonists in Urania is determined by a conflict between the enchanting power of love (‘Love’s throne’) and the yearning for constancy to one self and the lover, autonomy and, in the case of ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, poetic creativity. The ‘knightlike’ Nereana finds her true retreat in the woods: hard by a Wood side, where shee had the benefit of that shade, and before her a delicate greene Playne, through the which ran a most pleasant River: shee liking this place, which (as shee thought) humbly by delights sought to invite her stay in it, as a Woman that would take what content shee could compasse, for that time laid aside State, and to recreate her selfe after her owne liking, went into the Wood, pretending, her thoughts would not bee so free, as when shee was alone … . (Bk II, 196)

Also Pamphilia, reminiscent of Erminia in Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), retreats into nature to escape even the pangs of love: ‘Then opened shee a doore into a fine wood, delicately contriv’d into strange, and delightfull walkes … Here was a fine grove of Bushes, their roots made rich with the sweetest flowres for smell and colour. There a Plaine, here a Wood, fine hills to behold, as placed, that her sight need not, for natural content, stray further then due bounds’ (Bk I, 90–91). Nature is marked by her suffering, ‘fore there was a purling, murmuring, sad Brooke, weeping away her sorrowes, desiring the bankes to ease her, even with teares.’ Her reading and writing is only possible

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in a retreat beyond the artificially safe, walled garden, where she can express her creativity freely. There, she also participates in ‘masculine’ entertainments: Pamphilia ‘followed those delights shee was wont to affect, which was Hunting and Hawking, and such like’ (Bk II, 266). She thus oscillates between a constrained existence in public, being ‘generally the most silent and discreetly retir’d of any Princesse’ and the creative, sensitive private persona (Bk I, 61). Her allegorical role is epitomized in her name as she carries the name of her future empire. Her private qualities unite, as Helen Hackett argues, the strengths of Sidney’s Pamela and Philoclea (172). Her self-control, bordering on masochism, is an emblem of her qualities as political leader of Pamphilia: ‘I will never trouble any eares but those of mine owne soule with my sorrowes …’ (Bk III, 471). The retreat to a pastoral environment in Wroth’s work signifies the return to a Golden Age of female self-determination and selfhood, to a natural existence unfettered by social conventions. Whilst the pastoral mode traditionally negotiates and stratifies social and sexual behaviour, it is used in Wroth to indicate the possibility of free subjecthood. The return to paradise or the Golden Age is, in this text, the return to a natural, which is self-sufficient but sociable, Self. The aspect of an originally feminocentric paradise (as promoted by Agrippa and Fonte) is enhanced by Wroth’s celebration of female friendship and love as truly genuine relationships. In Wroth, Pamphilia and her cousin Urania are united in a friendship and are ‘called the true loving friends, a rare matter (as men say) to bee found amongst us’ (Bk IV, 450). The amorous relationships between the Sheperdess Celina and Lady Rossalea and between Veralinda and the cross-dressed Leonius indicate the possibility of lesbian desire based on mutuality rather than sacrifice of one’s self. These are friendships that ‘do not depend upon a “primary” context of male/female love or a “parallel” context of male friendship’.42 The motif of reconciliation to a natural and unfettered existence recurs also in Aemilia Lanyer’s work. In 1611, Aemilia Lanyer published a volume of mainly religious poetry entitled Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. The concluding poem of this collection is ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’, an estate poem written at the request of Lanyer’s patron Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. It precedes Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ in publication, and possibly in creation. This makes Aemilia Lanyer’s work the first known country-house poem in English literary history. In this chapter however, I want to highlight the pastoral legacy of ‘To Cooke-ham’, as it is the garden that embodies the idea of female community. Lanyer wrote this valedictory to the estate of Cookham on the request of Margaret Clifford as the earlier lines of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum show: And pardon (Madam) though I do not writ Those praisefull lines of that delightful place, As you commaunded me in that faire night



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When shining Phoebe gave so great a grace, Presenting Paradice to your sweet sight, Unfolding all the beauty of her face With pleasant groves, hills, walks and stately trees, Which pleasures with retired minds agrees. (17–24)43

‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ is part of a collection of religious poems mainly on the Passion of Christ interwoven with the celebration of female virtue and community and preceded by nine dedications to potential or former patrons or aristocratic ladies, echoing the convention of Boccacio or Christine de Pizan of providing a catalogue of notable women.44 However, in opposition to Boccaccio, the ‘contemporary community of good women’ is based on the meritocratic imitatio (not admiratio) – Lanyer implies that through patronage, good example and learning, women readers are able to participate in this virtual community of women.45 The final address ‘To the Virtuous Reader’ is a remarkable contribution to the querelle des femmes, pronouncing a general defence of  ‘all virtuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of this kingdome’ against the ‘ill speaking’ of ‘evill disposed men, who forgetting they were borne of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world …’ (Lanyer, 48). Lanyer especially stresses the fact that ‘God himselfe … gave power to wise and virtuous women to bring downe their pride and arrogancie’ and gives numerous examples of biblical female figures who are outstanding in courage, virtue and moral supremacy (49). The women to whom Lanyer dedicated her poems, especially Margaret Clifford, Countess Dowager of Cumberland (mother of Ann Clifford), continue this female lineage. The address, again in prose, marks Margaret Clifford as Lanyer’s main patron and offers her the book as ‘the mirrour of your most worthy minde, which may remaine in the world many yeares longer than your honour …’ (35). The Countess features again and again, even in the main body of the poem, and is used as a constant example of a virtuous woman who, in direct lineage with Eve and the Daughters of Jerusalem, has preserved her piety and virtue and who has chosen to dedicate her life to religious contemplation in retirement in the countryside. This idealization of the person of Margaret Clifford is continued in the valedictory to Cookham. Formally, ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ is an elegiac valediction with both elements of the pastoral, mourning the loss of a female community at the estate of Cookham. Margaret and Anne Clifford were given this royal manor in Berkshire as temporary accommodation between 1603 and 1605 while Margaret Clifford was fighting a legal battle against her estranged husband George Clifford and his brother to secure her daughter’s rights to the Clifford estates. Aemilia Lanyer joined the two women for an indefinite period of time, probably as a tutor to Anne.46 ‘A Description of Cooke-ham’ celebrates the existence and at the same time, mourns the loss of a unique paradise:

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Farewell (sweet Cooke-ham) where I first obtain’d Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain’d; … Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest, And all delights did harbour in her breast: Never shall my sad eies againe behold Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold. (1–10)

The estate, the personified natural surroundings and indeed the women of the place blend into a locus amoenus: The Walkes put on their summer Liveries, And all things else did hold like similies: The Trees with leaves, with fruit, with flowers clad, Embrac’d each other, seeming to be glad, Turning themselves to beauteous Canopies, To shade the bright Sunne from your brighter eies: The cristall Streames with silver spangles graced, While by the glorious Sunne they were embraced: The little Birds in chirping notes did sing, To entertaine both You and that sweet Spring. (21–30)

Still, as Susanne Woods has pointed out, the personification of nature is inferred through ‘the poetry of surmise’ which not only ‘distances the poem’s pathos’ but also highlights the role of the poet in the depiction of this earthly paradise (Woods, 119): ‘Oh how me thought each plant, each flowre, each tree/ Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee’ (33–4). This bliss, though, is transient: And you, sweet Cooke-ham, whom these ladies leave, I now must tell the grief you did conceave At their departure: when they went away, How everything retaind a sad dismay: Nay long before, when once an inkeling came, Me thought each thing did unto sorrow frame: The trees that were so glorious in our view Forsooke both flowres and fruit, when once they knew Of your depart, their very leaves did wither, Changing their colours as they grewe together. But when they saw this had no powre to stay you, They often wept, though, speechlesse, could not pray you; Letting their teares in your fair bosoms fall, As if they said Why will ye leave us all? (127–40)

With the departure of the three women, the paradise withers away: ‘The house cast off each garment that might grace it,/Putting on dust and cobwebs to deface it’ (201–2). Lanyer’s poem demonstrates that the destruction of this unique female paradise is caused by the adverse social structures of contemporary society which deny women their own space. Since Margaret Clifford has not provided a



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male heir, she consequently loses her right to the Clifford estates. Anne Clifford –‘that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race,/ Of noble Bedfords blood, faire steame of Grace’– enters an unhappy marriage with Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset and, finally, Aemilia Lanyer loses her patron (93–5). Lewalski concludes that ‘Lanyer’s estate poem is a long lament for the loss of this happy garden state in which women lived without mates but found contentment and delight in nature, God, and female companionship’ and further, in the case of Lanyer herself, in fulfilling their own professional and creative vocation.47 In ‘Eve’s Apology in Defense of Woman’, part of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum, Lanyer presents a variation of this argument and shifts the blame for the Fall of Man from the responsibility of Eve to the equal responsibility of Adam: But surely Adam cannot be excusde, Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame; What Weaknesse offerd, Strength might have refusde, Being Lord of all, the greater was his shame: Although the Serpents craft had her abusde, Gods holy word ought all his actions frame, For he was Lord and King of all the earth, Before poore Eve had either life or breath. (777–84)

If it had not been for the unfaithful and ignoble husband George Clifford, paradise would not have existed. It is the infidelity of the Duke which made this close relationship between the three women possible in the first place. The absence of Adam restores true paradise to women and in the eyes of Lanyer, men are equally if not more responsible for the Fall of Man. The poem closes with the last farewell: ‘This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give:/ When I am dead, thy name in this may live’ (205–7).This couplet epitomizes the process of poetic self-fashioning which Stephen Greenblatt has developed in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt has conspicuously ignored the issue of women’s subject formation. However, McBride suggests, ‘that the poetic construction of virtuous female community is the first step in her [Lanyer’s] poetic self-fashioning. But within that female community, Lanyer fashions herself as a poet by using material that traditionally had silenced women, manipulating features of Petrarchism, the pastoral, and the country house genre to construct her poetic vocation.’48 In the tradition of the genre, the estate Cookeham becomes a mythical place, a model for human relationships and at the same time, it provides a profound socio-political critique. The legal system of patrilinear descent is overturned by the creation of a pastoral separatist community. Unlike women in maleauthored poems, Margaret Clifford, as the mistress of the estate, is not the mere adjunct of the master of the house but as much as the self-fashioned poet Lanyer is a subject in her own right. Where Jonson eulogizes Sidney’s virtues through the metonymic logic of the well-managed and hospitable estate,

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Lanyer relocates this praise into a paradisical landscape to draw attention to the fact that Margaret Clifford is only a temporary mistress of the estate, and to highlight the relationship between gender and the social construction of space. The instability and tenuous relationship with houses underpins the utopian element of the pastoral. However, architectural language is still used to praise Anne Clifford’s virtues: ‘Of noble Bedfords blood, faire steame of Grace;/To honourable Dorset now espows’d./ In whose faire breast true virtue then was hous’d’ (94–6). Virtue ‘is “hous’d” in the woman, not the woman (or her qualities) in the house …’.49 While the exclusion of men guarantees a feminocentric locus amoenus in ‘Cooke-ham’, a very well-defined class division between writer and patron remains intact: Unconstant Fortune, thou are most to blame, Who cast us downe into so lowe a frame: Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a diffrence is there in degree. (103–16)

This deep social separation is finally resolved in the context of the whole of Salve where Lanyer ‘bows to authority in her patronage poems and at the same time condemn social privilege by invoking the greater authority of Christ. She both decries her weakness of her social position and makes use of it by allying herself to Christ, occupying both positions of authority, that of holy poverty and that of holy power’ (McBride, ‘Engendering’, 14–15). Cookeham does not represent the political integrity or good stewardship of its owner, but the empowered subjectivies of its female guests and chronicler. Mary Leapor’s poem ‘Crumble Hall’ constitutes a unique contribution to the tradition of the estate poetry in England. Published in her Poems on Several Occasions in 1748–1751, it was written by an untutored and self-educated poet who partially worked as a maid and later as a housekeeper, before being supported by her patron Bridget Freemantle.50 ‘Crumble Hall’ reflects Leapor’s own labouring-class biography. Written from the perspective of a female servant, it demystifies the values of the country-house ethos that is based on the exploitation of her labour force and also needs to be read in the context of the pastoral satires by Pope and Gay that ridicule female labour. The poem closes with pastoral visions that embody larger political or philosophic concepts of natural and innate virtues and cosmic order. This pastoral space momentarily releases the female protagonist from her servant’s existence into the fulfilling existence of a writer. Whilst I acknowledge the complex social and political particulars which distinguish ‘Crumble Hall’ from poems such as ‘A Description of Cooke-ham’, I suggest that Leapor’s spatial imagination continues the pastoral vision of Lanyer. Leapor’s poem questions the interaction between gender and space which confines every woman to the ‘domesticating’ space of the house. Leapor’s utopian spatial imagination replaces the masculinist and



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class-determined place of the house with the liberating space of Arcadia. Like Leapor’s and Maria Fairfax’s ‘blazing’ freedom, this spell of independence is short-lived. This time it is not marriage or expropriation which disrupts Paradise, but it is the social positioning of the protagonist, which forcefully returns her to the house only to finally discharge her, even from this space. The poem is structurally divided in three sections, of which the first concentrates on the house, Edgcote House in Northamptonshire, the second on the spirited life of its servants and the third part on the gardens and surrounding landscape. The poem is thus a narrative voyage through the different social and aesthetic layers of the house through the eyes of Mira, an exploited and weary servant. The poem commences with a satire on the traditional country-house trope of architectural grandeur as the site of ancient hospitality: That Crumble-Hall, whose hospitable Door Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor; Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires, Well known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires. (13–16)

Both the outside of this ‘rude Palace’ and the Jacobean Hall are unwelcoming and cold (29): Then step within – there stands a goodly Row Of oaken Pillars – where a gallant Show Of mimic Pears and carv’d Pomgranates twine, With the plump Clusters of the spreading Vine. Strange Forms above, present themselves to View; Some Mouths that grin, some smile, and some that spew. (35–40)

What is apparent in the last quotation is Leapor’s critique of conspicuous consumption and unapologetic display of wealth: Shall we proceed? – Yes, if you’ll break the Wall: If not, return, and tread once more the Hall. Up ten Stone Steps now please to drag your Toes, And a brick Passage will succeed to those. Here the strong Doors were aptly fram’d to hold Sir Wary’s Person, and Sir Wary’s Gold. (84–9)

Sir Wary stops at nothing to refurbish his mansion in order to conform to fashion and style: But hark! what Scream the wond’ring Ear invades! The Dryads howling for their threaten’d Shades: Round the dear Grove each Nymph distracted flies (Tho’ not discover’d but with Poet’s Eyes): And shall those Shades, where Philomela’s Strain Has oft to Slumber lull’d the hapless Swain; Where Turtles us’d to clap their silken Wings; Whose rev’rend Oaks have known a hundred Springs; Shall these ignobly from their roots be torn,

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And perish, shameful as the abject Thorn; While the slow Carr bears off their aged Limbs, To clear the Way for Slopes and modern Whims; Where banish’d Nature leaves a barren Gloom, And aukward Art supplies the vacant Room? (165–78)

Leapor is referring to the alterations introduced by Richard Chauncy, the owner of the estate, who tore down the sixteenth-century house, built a new one between 1747–1752 and obviously landscaped the gardens according to contempor­ary trends. History repeats itself: whilst Jonson deplored the ‘prodigy houses’ of the early seventeenth century which displayed the owner’s wealth and vanity, the eight­eenth-century fashion of building and landscape gardening is again seen as mere folly and violation of nature. Indeed, as Landry has suggested, Leapor’s poem does echo in form and content Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ in her critique of wastefulness and display of wealth and power. Whilst Pope’s poem redeems some few individuals, Leapor develops a more encompassing critique of gentry and aristocracy: the country-house ethos relies on the exploitation of the lower classes. However, despite this, the only rooms which spread light and warmth are the kitchen and the servants’ rooms: Would you go farther? – Stay a little then: Back thro’ the Passage – Down the Steps again; Thro’ yon dark room – Be careful how you tread Up these steep Stairs – or you may break your Head. These Rooms are furnish’d amiably, and full: Old Shoes and Sheep-ticks bred in stacks of Wool; Grey Dobbin’s Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow; Wheel-spokes – the irons of a tatter’d Plough. (94–102)

In the ‘nether world’, the toil and labour of servanthood and the double identity of the protagonist becomes obvious in the domestic drama between Ursula and Roger (108). The utopian view onto the gardens and surrounding landscape in the last section of the poem offers a relief from this plebeian existence: Now to those Meads let the frolick Fancy rove, Where o’er yon Waters nods a pendent Grove, In whose clear Waves the pictur’d Boughs are seen, With fairer Blossoms, and a brighter Green. (156–9)

But this bliss is ephemeral.51 Mira is discovered writing poetry and subsequently dismissed: No farther – Yes, a little higher, pray: At yon small Door you’ll find the Beams of Day, Where the hot Leads return the scorching Ray. Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish’d Eye: Meads, Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie. From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl’d And drags down Mira to the nether World. (102–8)



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In ‘Crumble Hall’, Mary Leapor presents the reader with another perspective on the pastoral. In opposition to Aemilia Lanyer, Leapor places her emphasis on issues of class, and not of gender. Unlike the poetic persona in ‘A Description of Cooke-ham’, Mira is locked into a one-dimensional existence as an ‘alienated insider’, as a maid.52 The possibility of subjecthood as a writer that is available to Lanyer is a short-lived illusion for Mira. What the neopastoral mode brings to utopianism is the dialectic between an idealized simple life away from court and politics, a life that redefines nobility and the foundation of absolute monarchy, and a critical view on social and political contentions of that period. In this dialectic, the hope is invested in a possible future that brings about change, in a ‘Not-Yet’ that is located both in the mythical past and future. Whereas the classical early modern utopia is characterized by the domination of nature through urbanity, science and technology, the pastoral utopia celebrates a natural sociability and existence. Wroth’s and Weamys’ pastoral romances offer specific criticisms. Both are, if in different ways, concerned with arranged marriages, women’s free will and their possibility for self-determination. In Wroth, we see the emergence of a negative utopia where the hyperbolic metonym of castles and palaces (as an emblem of women’s lack of freedom and autonomy) is effectively contrasted with the iconography of Paradise as a feminocentric Eden. *** I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First; and although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like. (Margaret Cavendish. The Blazing New World)

Margaret Cavendish’s epistle is well-suited for an introduction to women’s utopianism. Her work, especially the prefatory material, authorizes her writing and publishing enterprises in the light of a hostile culture that attached a well-documented stigma to her writing, but even more to the publication of original work by women. Cavendish vindicates a writing strategy that defies any gendered discourse of writing and rhetoric. But far from this being a mere ‘practice … of aesthetization’, as Robert Appelbaum suggests, ‘of making utopian ideas into a utopian feeling, and of using this feeling not as a strategy for changing the world, but of adjusting to it,’ Cavendish critically intervenes in the classical model of utopia.53 The motto ‘I made a world of my own’ echoes that kind of expansionist vision by Robert Burton: I will yet, to satisfy and please myself, make an Utopia of mine own, a New Atlantis, a poetical commonwealth of mine own, in which I will

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freely domineer, build cities, make laws, statutes, as I list myself. And why may I not? … For the site, if you will needs urge me to it, I am not fully resolved, it may be in Terra Australis Incognita, there is room enough (for of my knowledge neither that hungry Spaniard, nor Mercurius Britannicus, have yet discovered half of it), or else one of these floating Islands in Mare del Zur, which, like the Cyanean Isles in the Euxine Sea, alter their place, and are accessible only at set times, and to some few persons; or one of the Fortunate Isles, for who knows yet where, or which they are? There is room enough in the inner parts of America and northern coasts of Asia.54

The voyage utopias of More, Foigny, Neville and Vairasse did not provide an adequate model for seventeenth-century women’s utopianism.55 We have seen that Mary Wroth follows her own advice when Veralinda advises Pamphilia that she should ‘bee the Emperess of the world commanding the Empire of your owne mind’. The Empire that Pamphilia imagines is a feminocentric paradise, rewriting the conventional pastoral paradigm. In contrast, Margaret Cavendish intercedes in the philosophical utopia of Bacon and, with her Blazing New World (1666) in the popular genre of celestial utopias put forward by John Wilkins, Francis Godwin and in France, Cyrano de Bergerac. However, if these latter writers exploit the lunar voyage for Baroque allegories and Swiftean satires, Cavendish creates utopian societies in which female agency is at the heart of the matter. Particularly in The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World, Cavendish moves away from utopia arcadia as a model of paradise to the celestial city within which the female ruler fulfils her capacities for learning and politics. Margaret Cavendish’s fantastic tale The Description of a New World Called The Blazing World was published in 1666, as part of a larger work, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. The scientific project in the Observations is taken up several times in The Blazing World. In fact, the two parts frequently cross-reference details and incidents. Cavendish originally planned to complement these two works with a play, now called ‘A Piece of a Play’, which was published in the 1668 edition of Plays Never Before Printed. The final work of the Observations cum The Blazing World cum play would therefore have consisted of three different but complementary genres with analogies and cross-references throughout the book. The Blazing World itself is a curious generic mix of travel narrative, celestial utopia and fairy tale, interdispersed with a long section on seventeenth-century natural philosophy and finally, a Royalist utopia. It begins with the abduction of a young lady by a merchant who takes her onto his ship. Sailing to the northern hemisphere of this world, a storm surprises them and blows them to another world. Only the young lady survives, and she drifts helplessly through the new world until she encounters its strange inhabitants. Animal-men rescue the lady and bring her to the capital where the Emperor makes her Empress and absolute ruler of the world. In order to learn



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and reform, the Empress discourses with the native scientists and philosophers on every subject which seems of importance to her. When the Empress desires a companion, she finds her in her alter-ego, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle. The women are true soul mates and platonic lovers, communicating literally as free spirits, moving through countries and bodies together. They not only reform the Civil War-ridden England, but also the kingdom of the Blazing New World to their own wishes and political wisdom. The legitimate transferral of power from the Emperor to the Empress results in the establishment of a much more stringent absolute monarchy based on principles of perfectibility, stability and ‘reasonable’ harmony. The Blazing World is precisely about the process of this political and social reform. The Empress evolves with her growing wisdom in political theory and natural sciences, developing a second nature congruous to the ideal social order she is advocating. Cavendish does not seek to counter conventional political theories with an essentialist celebration of a female monarch. Indeed, her text is fundamentally Baroque as it revises and reinvents notions of unity and harmony by allowing the singular and the individual to be the essence of being.56 However, through the act of writing, the statement of her singular creativity, Cavendish (re)claims political clout for herself and other women writers. This is particularly evident in her earlier utopian text, Inventory of Judgment’s Commonwealth, the Author cares not in what World it is established (1655). Margaret Cavendish closes her Inventory with the unusual request to acknowledge the importance of the poets for society, who should be ‘esteemed with Respect, or enriched for the Civilizing of a Nation, more than Contracts, Laws or Punishments, by Soft Numbers, and pleasing Phansies; and also guard, a Kingdom more than Walls or Bulwork, by creating Heroick Spirits with Illustrious Praises, inflaming the Mind with Noble Ambition’.57 Calling for the recognition of all ‘Natural Poets’, Margaret Cavendish demands the acknowledgement of those poets and writers whose inspiration is not artfulness, but nature – a theme that recurs throughout Cavendish’s writing. In the Observations upon Experimental Philosophy Cavendish opposes contemporary notions about gender, reason and understanding. But she goes further and argues that women have an ‘artless’ intellect and hence a deeper understanding of truth. To follow through this argument, women therefore can participate in the public sphere in the role as writers and poets, by stabilizing the Kingdom with the imagery of the heroic. So, if Cavendish laments the common assumption that ‘Man is made to Govern Common-Wealths, and Women their privat Families’, she also defines an important civic duty for women, in their specific capacity as writers and poets, to contribute to the cultural and intellectual property of the country and to ‘bring forth the Fruits of Knowledge’ for the advancement of society. If, in the CCXI Sociable Letters, Cavendish reveals the civic impotence of women, who neither hold authority nor contribute to civil society in war and

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peace, she also proposes that as writers, poets and indeed philosophers, women can reclaim their status as citizens of the commonwealth.58 This reclaiming of the civic status goes beyond the contemporary argument that women fulfil social and civic responsibilities in their roles as mothers of future generations. But the poetic conception of the heroic spirit is not the only way that women can achieve sovereignty: it is the creative act itself which turns women into heroes. As Cavendish declares in The Blazing World, her ambition is ‘not only to be Empress, but Authoress of a whole world’. The act of authorship, and the ensuing publication of the work turns politically and socially impotent women into important members of civil society. The apologetic waiver at the beginning of The Blazing World, lamenting that ‘I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second … and … I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet, rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own’, not only justifies Cavendish’s creative work, but also raises it to the level of significant political writing as part of the utopian discourse of the time. The Blazing World is an intriguing world. It is joined to Earth at the pole by a narrow one-way channel through the ice. The New World functions as a kind of mirror world. However, the mirror image is not a mere reversal of the status quo, but a complex rewriting of Earth’s social and political characteristics. Typical of utopian fiction and fantastic travel narratives, the Blazing World is completely isolated. It is a fantastical world in the truest sense since it is beyond ‘optic perception’. The two worlds: do not exceed their tropics, and although they should meet, yet we in this world cannot so well perceive them, by reason of the brightness of our sun, which being nearer to us, obstructs the splendour of the suns of the other worlds, they being too far off to be discerned by our optic perception, except we use very good telescopes, by which skilful astronomers have often observed two or three suns at once (126).

Again, the city, Paradise, is hidden by ‘high rocks, which seemed to touch the skies; and although they appeared not of an equal height, yet they seemed to be all one piece, without partitions’ (130). Escorted by her guides, the protagonist enters the city of perfect harmony, ‘for there was but one language in that world, nor no more but one Emperor, to whom they all submitted with the greatest duty and obedience, which made them live in a continued peace and happiness, not acquainted with other foreign wars, or home-bred insurrections’ (130). At a closer look, the imperial city is not one solid city structure but is distributed over several islands, connected by bridges and canals: [T]he city itself was built of gold, and their architectures were noble, stately, and magnificent, not like our modern, but like those in the Roman’s time; for our modern buildings are like those houses which children use to make of cards, one storey above another, fitter for birds, than men;



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but theirs were more large, and broad, than high; the highest of them did not exceed two storeys, besides those rooms that were under-ground, as cellars, and other offices (131).

Contemporary readers would recognize the idealized image of Venice in this description – a city which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was mythologized as città felice. It was not only its geographical beauty and architectural splendour, but also the esteemed political order of Venice which provoked this idealization. Especially in English political theory in the seventeenth century, the Venetian mixed government of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy was celebrated as a successful and reasonable political system. Venice was further elevated to the Nuova Gerusalemme. The special and potent position of the Doge as the representative of Christ on Earth, and therefore a competitor to the Pope, and respective Christian interpretations, including one that suggested Venice was founded on the day of the incarnation of Christ, supported the claim that Venice was the New Jerusalem, a postapocalyptic Paradise. The central Piazza San Marco which includes San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale and the Procuratie Nuove, was, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, interpreted as following the ground plan of the actual Templum Salomonis. For centuries then, the Golden City was glorified as ‘the most Christian and the most perfect republic’.59 This complex and multiple mystification of Venice continues in Cavendish’s Blazing World with the description of the Emperor’s palace: The Emperor’s palace stood upon an indifferent ascent from the imperial city; at the top of which ascent was a broad arch, supported by several pillars, which went round the palace, and contained four of our English miles in compass: within the arch stood the Emperor’s Guard, which consisted of several sorts of men; at every half mile was a gate to enter, and every gate was of a different fashion; the first, which allowed a passage from the imperial city into the palace, had on either hand a cloister, the outward part whereof stood upon arches sustained by pillars, but the inner part was close: being entered through the gate, the palace itself appeared in its middle like the aisle of a church, a mile and half long, and half a mile broad; the roof of it was all arched, and rested upon pillars … . (131–2)

Just as Venice was mythologized as a political and Christian ideal throughout the centuries, so had the Jewish Temple of Solomon been a potent symbol in Jewish and Christian mythology in the domain of political utopias. The first structure was believed to have been built by King Solomon between 965 and 928 BC. It was destroyed and then reconstructed first by Zerubbabel about 500 BC and then by Herod I. Many scholars attempted to reconfigure this sacred structure. Their interpretations were partially based on textual sources, but were at times heavily blurred by historical misunderstandings and respective idealizations of the architectural structure. One medieval interpreter believed,

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for instance, that the al-Aksa mosque was the Templum Salomonis, ignoring the fact that the mosque was basically an Islamic structure. This resulted in a large range of pictorial representations of the Temple as a centrally built edifice. Later reconstructions were heavily influenced by contemporary architectural theory and fashion. More realistic reconstructions started in 1540 with an edition of the Bible, printed in Paris in 1540. This design was based on studies by Francois Vatable (d. 1547) and depicted the Temple as a rectangular edifice with two courts. The Hebrew Bible does indeed describe Solomon’s Temple as having a rectangular ground plan, divided up into three main courts: the Ulam as the forecourt, the Hekal and the Debir with the Ark of the Covenant. The roof was supposed to be flat and the entrance to the forecourt was famously ornamented with two oversized bronze columns. A contemporary design by Benito Arias Montanus (1527–1598) also favoured a rectangular structure, but had a series of very large courts. A far-reaching and influential reinterpretation was made by the Spanish Jesuits Hieronymo Prado (1547–1595) and Juan Bautista Villalpando (1552–1608), who also returned to the rectangular ground plan of the Temple with its different courtyards. Prado and Villalpando in their book In Ezechielem Explanationes (1594–1605) not only drew inspiration from Ezekiel’s visions of the Temple (593–571 BC), but also from the palace of the Escorial and, most important for our context, from Venice. Their radical vision of the Temple was very significant for later models of the sacred building. This interest in Solomon’s Temple was maintained in the seventeenth century. In England, it was particularly Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon (Templo) of Amsterdam (1603–1675) who disclosed the merit of Jewish architectural thought to the Jewish and Christian public of mid-seventeenth century.60 His engravings and his models were vital for later Freemason’s architecture and contemporaries such as Isaac Newton (1643–1727).61 A teacher, a rabbi and an architectural designer, Leon became famous for his compelling and immensely popular models and subsequent etchings of Solomon’s Temple (Fig. 2.1).62 It is documented that in 1642, Henrietta-Maria visited Leon’s exhibition in Amsterdam. She was so enthusiastic that Leon was encouraged to exhibit his models again in London in 1675. Leon’s contribution to the cultural history of Solomon’s Temple is not only that he offered a new historical and aesthetic interpretation which later influenced other architects but that he popularized this emblem of holiness, aesthetic perfection and purity that was applied to architecture and literature. But the vision of the Temple was not confined to aesthetic and religious contexts. Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) replicates the symbolic meaning and architectural structures of Solomon’s Temple (Fig. 2.2). Three concentric squares situated on a small island called Caphar Salama, form the actual city of Christianopolis. The city is divided into four strategically well-placed production areas. Additional farming land, woods



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Fig. 2.1: View of Solomon’s Temple, his palace and the Fortress Antonia. Jacob Judah Leon, Retrato del Templo de Selomoh, Middelburgh: Heeren Staten van Zeeland, 1642 (BL Shelfmark C183149)

and a moat for fish are placed outside the city walls. The extremely rationalized production process moves from the outward square towards the manufactures and workshops in the inner squares. At the centre of Christianopolis is the College. ‘Here religion, justice, and learning,’ asserts Andreae, ‘have their abode, and theirs is the control of the city; and eloquence has been given them as an interpreter.’63 The education system is utilitarian and compulsory. The curriculum emphasizes science as a means to acquire true knowledge about the world and God. Its achievements and progress provides the basis for rationalistic social engineering and thus a superior society. The college houses different faculties and departments for primary, secondary and vocational schooling. Although there is a separate ‘shop for pictorial art’, natural history collections and laboratories with specific exhibits and libraries, the whole city is a canvas for natural history and philosophy. The spatial and symbolic placement of the College in the centre of the city speaks of the main purpose of the society: to educate the utopian subject. This autocratic placement of an educational elite at the heart of a utopian society is echoed in Francis Bacon’s fragment New Atlantis (1627).64 Here, Solomon’s House or the College of the Six Days’ Work as the intellectual and political heart of its utopian community of Bensalem – a clear antidote to the misguided exclusivity of the Tower of Babel. The reader learns that it was founded to research ‘the true nature of all things’. This knowledge is not acquired for knowledge’s sake, but to improve human society. In the narrative, the quest for infinite knowledge is sanctioned

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Fig. 2.2: Bird’s eye view of Christianapolis. Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianapolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Felix Emil Held. New York: Oxford University Press, 1916

by biblical command. Knowledge has to be used within the Bible’s moral and ethical values and for the ultimate betterment of the human condition. The scientists, inventors and natural philosophers are the definite political leaders and are treated as demigods. In fact, Bensalem is an elaborate technocracy, supplanting earlier utopian notions of organic communities. The quest for an ideal religious and political leadership in New Atlantis is symbolized in the name of Solomon. Cavendish’s description of the Emperor’s Palace and the earlier version in Assaulted and Pursued Chastity reflects the image of Solomon’s Temple as perceived by her contemporaries. A visual reconstruction of the Palace in The Blazing World in fact reveals significant similarities to Leon’s designs which Cavendish most certainly had access to when she accompanied Henrietta



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Maria as a maid of honour into exile in 1641 (Fig. 2.3).65 The high outer wall, ornamented with significant pillars encloses a set of cloisters or courtyards with the actual Palace in the centre. The Imperial room within the Palace surpasses all worldly splendour and clearly holds ‘the Holy of Holies’: Amongst the rest, the imperial room of state appeared most magnificent; it was paved with green diamonds (for in that world are diamonds of all colours) so artificially, as it seemed but of one piece; the pillars were set with diamonds so close, and in such a manner, that they appeared most glorious in sight; between every pillar was a bow or arch of a certain sort of diamonds, the like whereof our world does not afford; which being placed in every one of the arches in several rows, seemed just like so many rainbows of several different colours. The roof of the arches was of blue diamonds, and in the midst thereof was a carbuncle, which represented the sun; the rising and setting sun at the East and West side of the room were made of rubies. (132)

Cavendish herself was aware of the symbolical meaning of Solomon’s Temple in the context of the acquisition and proper usage of knowledge and wisdom. In her Observations she praises the Temple as follows: How many proud and stately Buildings and Palaces could ancient Rome shew to the world, when she was in her flower? The Cedars, Gold and other curiosities which Solomon used in the structure of that Magnificent Temple … were as safely fetch’d and brought to him out of foreign places, as other commodities which we have out of other Countries either by Sea or Land. (2)

Here, the ‘Magnificent Temple’ is not only an elaborate architectural structure, but also the emblem of scientific investigation and invention. Thomas Sprat in the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ of his History of the Royal Society declared the new scientists as Gods.66 His contemporary Joseph Glanvill proposed in his Scepsis Scientifica of 1665 that Bacon’s ‘Salomon’s House in the NEW ATLANTIS was a Prophetick Scheam of the ROYAL SOCIETY and repeated this comparison in his supplement to Bacon’s New Atlantis.67 His essay ‘Anti-fanatical Religion, AND Free Philosophy: In a Continuation of the NEW ATLANTIS’, depicts Solomon’s House as a Royal Society, ‘erected for Enquiries into the Works of God’. 68 Solomon’s House thus gained recognition not only as a Christian and political symbol within a utopian sense, but also as the ‘House of Knowledge’ of New Science. However, it is not a coincidence that the original name of the Royal Society was ‘The Invisible College’, accessible only to a chosen minority of the population. Modern scholars have confirmed the slow elimination of the general public and traditional professionals, including women, from the scientific discourse of the mid-seventeenth century.69 Nothing represents this regendering of science better than the title of Francis Bacon’s early and initially unpublished writing The Masculine Birth of Time (publ. 1603), which marks the end of centuries of unfruitful scientific research and the birth of an active,

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Fig. 2.3: Patrick Devlin. © Reconstruction of the Palace in The Blazing New World (1666)



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virile and productive science.70 In this unfinished essay which is written as a monologue addressed by an older man in authority to a younger man, Bacon rejects a whole tradition of philosophy claiming that the path to knowledge is blocked by idols and misconceptions and vanity. This idolatry which prevents the acquisition of true knowledge is of course further explained in the later The Advancement of Learning (1605) where Bacon sees the light of knowledge obstructed by the ‘Idols of the Tribe’, the ‘Idols of the Palace’ (or ‘MarketPlace’), the ‘Idols of the Cave’ and the ‘Idols of the Theatre’.71 The human mind has to be cleansed of ‘false preconceptions’ in order to make it receptive to the true knowledge and teaching. The birth of the masculine science is the death of the ‘effeminate’ science of Antiquity and what is left of the traditional iconography is the domination of the female body of nature, illuminated by the light of masculine science. Although the Royal Society was not a homogenous group of scientists, professionals and philosophers with uniform methods of scientific enquiry, the official historiographic account by Abraham Cowley and Thomas Sprat regarded the Society as the true follower of Bacon. Margaret Cavendish enters this early scientific discourse with a number of scientific tracts and uses contemporary methodological disputes as a vehicle to vindicate her own concerns. In 1666 she published the already mentioned Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. Other works were Philosophical Fancies (1653), Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655) and the Ground of Natural Philosophy (1668). These works were part of a larger project to critique of the prevailing experimental method. Recognizing basic failures of the method, especially concerning the larger methodological problem of transdiction, Cavendish challenged the very definition of objectivity promoted by the Royal Society and its members, proving that the knowledge derived from experimentalism is as flawed as the ancient superstitions. Margaret Cavendish thus not only wrote unconnected, singular scientific treatises but also aimed to create an overall scientific and philosophical methodology. Just as Margaret Cavendish intruded on 30 May 1667 into the Royal Society, attracting great public attention, the Empress in The Blazing World intrudes into the Temple of Knowledge, replacing the oligarchy of scientists and adviser with her absolute monarchy. The Empress appropriates the symbolic space of the Palace/Temple and resignifies its meaning and the whole iconography around political power. She becomes ‘the most wonderful sight in the Blazing World, a reversal marked by her ritual blazoning and representation as Empress, newly attired in the literally blazing costume of power’, nostalgically celebrating the femmes fortes: Elizabeth I, Henrietta Maria, Queen Christina and the Medicis.72 All her ‘blazing’ virtues, namely ‘artless’ wisdom and reason is dedicated to the pursuits of arts and sciences to create a true ‘Commonwealth of Learning’ (Observations, 10). The different peoples of the Blazing World are at a very advanced level of science and technology, but, despite their knowledge, are in

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constant disagreement with each other and create a discordant state within the state. The Empress sees the need to dissolve some societies and to unify the scientists, so that their pursuit of knowledge ‘may be beneficial to the public’ (Blazing World, 155). The perfect state seems to be complete when the Empress converts the inhabitants to her religion by reason and peaceful measures. Although ruling as an absolute monarch, the Empress seems open-minded, following principles of self-improvement and perfectibility, a dedication which she shares with her alter-ego, Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. However, this tolerance denies the Empress’ desire for uniformity: I am much troubled at it; especially there are such contentions and divisions between the worm-, bear- and fly-men, the ape-men, the satyrs, the spidermen, and all others of such sorts, that I fear they’ll break out into an open rebellion, and cause a great disorder and the ruin of the government … . (201)

Margaret Cavendish, the protagonist, quickly advises: to introduce the same form of government again, which had been before; that is, to have but one sovereign, one religion, one law, and one language, so that all the world might be but as one united family, without divisions; nay, like God, and his blessed saints and angels … . (201)

As an outsider, the Empress seems particularly well suited to reform and change the Blazing World. Her epistemological alienation is turned to her advantage and endorses her self-fashioning as judge and ruler of the New World. But this sits at odds with the particularly fierce conquest of the Civil War-ridden England at the end of the second volume. The Empress turned Amazonian warrior – ‘some said she was an angel; others, she was a sorceress; some believed her a goddess’ – declares herself not only ‘a great and absolute princess and empress of a whole world’ but the former subject of England ‘which is but a small part of this world’ (211, 210). Her position of power and her political convictions fuel her military campaign against the revolutionary forces to reinstall the monarchy and political unity. She might not be ‘Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second’, but as Empress of the New World she does indeed conquer the world ‘as Alexander and Caesar’ did. This is indeed an inverted imperialism as the Empress takes control of her former home, a utopian colonialism that betrays, like More’s Utopia, a critical vision of England. Expansionism is hidden under the veil of enlightened rule and reform. The architecture of paradise is allegorical. It targets, as we have seen, the gendered quality of specific representational spaces (the palace, the castle, Arcadia) that traditionally are used to limit women’s agency. The texts by Mary Wroth and the Duchess of Newcastle create different conceptual spaces where masculinity and femininity, agency and subjectivity are redefined. The division of internal and external space, of activity and passivity, of political and emotional economy, in fact, of place and space, are thus questioned. This



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critical conception of spatial resistance corresponds to the poetics of the texts. We have seen that the principles of poetic negotiation are explored by women writers in order to resolve the complex relationship between literary canon and utopian impulse. Whilst seventeenth-century female utopias have depicted the retreat to an allegorical space as a strategy of resistance, we will now turn to early attempts to ‘house’ female communities in domestic environments. Notes 1 McClung suggests that the quest for Paradise is expressed in two iconographic models: as a garden (Eden) or a city (Jerusalem); two models that dominate utopian architecture. See William Alexander McClung. The Architecture of Paradise: Survivals of Eden and Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 2 Lorenzo de’Medici, quoted in Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter. Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. 80. 3 See Valerie Traub. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 4 On somatopias, see Darby Lewes. Nudes from Nowhere: Utopian Sexual Landscapes. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 5 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories II, 1987–1990. London: Verso, 1990. 47. 6 Cornelius Agrippa. Female Pre-eminence; or, The Dignity and Excellency of that Sex above the Male. London: T. R. and M. D., 1670. 10, 11. Moderata Fonte in her Il Merito delle donne (1592) echoes this idea about women’s superiority. The Worth of Women wherein is clearly revealed their Nobility and their Superiority to Men. Ed. and trans. by Virginia Cox. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 60. 7 Raymond Williams. The Country and the City. London: The Hogarth Press, 1993. 13–34; James Turner. The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry 1630–1660. Cambridge: Blackwells, 1979. 8 Annabel Patterson. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 139. See also Norbert Elias. Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie. Neuwied/Berlin: Luchterhand, 1969. 364–93, on d’Urfé’s Astrea. 9 Andrew V. Ettin. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984. 12. 10 Northrop Frye. ‘Varieties of Literary Utopias’. Utopias and Utopian Thought. Ed. by Frank E. Manuel. London: Souvenir Press, 1973. 25–49 (40). 11 Philip Sidney. The Defence of Poesy (1595). Selected Writings. Ed. by Richard Dutton. Manchester: Fyfield Books, 1987. 102–48 (122). 12 George Puttenham. The Arte of English Poesy (1589). Introd. by Baxter Hathaway. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970. 53. 13 Edmund Spenser. ‘To the Right noble, and Valorous, Sir Walter Raleigh Knight (1589)’. The Faerie Queene. Ed. by A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 1977. 737–8 (737). 14 Joshua Sylvester. The Divine Weeks. II.ii.3.756, quoted in Alistair Fowler. The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-century Estate Poems and Related Items. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. 3.

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15 Aphra Behn. Poems upon Several Occasions; With A Voyage to the Island of Love. London: Francis Saunders, 1697. 1–12. 16 Lady Mary Hamilton. Munster Village (1778). London: Pandora Press, 1987. 78. 17 See also William Hodges’ (1744–1797) paintings from Cook’s second Pacific voyage (1772–1775) that transpose the classical iconography of Arcadia to the Pacific. 18 Timothy Morton. ‘The Plantation of Wrath’. Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830. Ed. by Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 64–85 (85). 19 Donna Landry. The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain 1739–1796. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 13. 20 Virgil. Eclogues. Trans. by David Ferry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. 29. 21 Tom Moylan. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. 49. 22 Ernst Bloch. Geist der Utopie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1964. 1–4. 23 Michael Drayton. ‘Nimphidia’ (1627). The Works of Michael Drayton. 5 vols. Ed. by J. William Hebel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1932. III, 133. 24 Lady Mary Wroth. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. Ed. by Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. xx. 25 See Gayle Rubin. ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’. Towards an Anthropology of Women. Ed. by Rayna Reiter. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. 157–210. 26 See Ann Rosalind Jones. The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 27 See Constance Jordan. ‘The Household and the State: Transformations in the Representation of an Analogy from Aristotle to James I’. Modern Language Quarterly 54.3 (September 1993): 307–26. 28 Roberta Gilchrist suggests that medieval castles housed separate and selfcontained female households. Roberta Gilchrist. Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women. London: Routledge, 1994.168. 29 For the genesis of the Old and New Arcadia, see ‘Introduction’. Sir Philip Sidney. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Ed. by Maurice Evans. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. 9–50. Other continuations are: Gervase Markham. The English Arcadia (1607–1613); Richard Beling. A Sixth Book to the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1624). 30 Helen Hackett. Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 104. 31 ‘Utopia the Good Breast: Coming Home to Mother’, Utopias and the Millennium. Ed. by Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann. London: Reaktion Press, 1993. 107–29 (110). Kathleen Komar argues similarly in her essay on literary space in women’s contemporary fiction. She argues that women writers use two ‘strategies in the treatment of space’. She writes: ‘First, women writers identify female spaces in the external world – or indeed they project female spaces onto this outside world. And second, women authors use an opposite strategy for defining and affirming their female selves; they exploit and interior space that is not merely biological (although it is often graphically so) but also psychological. This interior female space is eventually reexteriorized in the form of the literary text, not simply because the women write their stories, but because the space of the text eventually becomes



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the site of definition and affirmation of the female within and against a maledominated social structure’. Kathleen Komar. ‘Feminist Curves in Contemporary Literary Space’. Reconfigured Spheres: Feminist Explorations of Literary Space. Ed. by Margaret R. Higonnet and Joan Templeton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 89–107 (90–91). 32 Anna Weamys. Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1651). Ed. by Patrick Colborn Cullen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. 33 Pearl Hogrefe. ‘Legal Rights of Tudor Women and the Circumvention by Men and Women’. Sixteenth-Century Journal II.1 (April 1972): 97–105. 34 Anne Clifford. The Diary of Anne Clifford 1616–1619: A Critical Edition. Ed. by Katherine O. Acheson. New York: Garland, 1995. 83. 35 Charlotte Lennox. The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella. In Two Volumes. London: A. Millar, 1753. II, IX. 306–7. 36 Mark Girouard. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 13–80. 37 Julie Sanders. ‘“The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of “Private” Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Ed. by Stephen Clucas. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 127–42. 38 Richard Flecknoe. ‘On the Duchess of Newcastle’s Closet’ (1666), quoted from Fowler, 179–80 (179). 39 Lisa Jardine. Reading Shakespeare Historically. London: Routledge, 1999. 126–7. 40 See Martin on this. 41 Gary Waller. The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. 279. 42 Naomi J. Miller. ‘“Not Much to be Marked”: Narrative of the Woman’s Part in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 29.1 (Winter 1989): 121–37 (130). 43 Aemilia Lanyer. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611). Ed. by Susanne Woods. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 44 The number of dedications varies depending on the editions. 45 Barbara Lewalski. “Of God and Good Women: The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works. Ed. by Margaret Patterson Hannay. Kent: Ohio State University, 1985. 203–24 (207). I borrow the insight on admiratio/imitatio from Friederike Hassauer that arose in a discussion at the conference Querelle des femmes at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt in November 2003. 46 See Woods, 30. 47 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. ‘The Lady of the Country-House Poem’. The Fashioning of the British Country House. Ed. by Gervaise Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin and Elizabeth Blair McDougal. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1989. 261–75 (268). 48 Kari Boyd McBride. ‘Engendering Authority in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 1994. 14–15. 49 Kari Boyd McBride. Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 110. 50 Mary Leapor. Poems on Several Occasions. 2 vols. London: J. Roberts, 1748. II, 111–22.

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51 Leapor’s other poem ‘Epistle to Artemisia on Fame’ explains the conflict between Mira and her superior Sophronia over her liter­ary pursuits which eventually led to her dis­missal. See Leapor. 74 (n. 3). 52 Rumbold, Valerie. ‘The Alienated Insider: Mary Leapor in “Crumble Hall”’. British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19.1 (Spring 1996): 63–76 (63). 53 Robert Appelbaum. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 208. 54 Robert Burton. The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). 3 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1932. I, 97–8. 55 Priscilla Cotton’s A Briefe Description by Way of Supposition (1659) is located in an exotic setting but it does not advocate colonialism as a main constituent of utopianism. 56 On the aspect of the Baroque in Cavendish’s work, see Nicole Pohl. ‘“Of Mixt Natures”: Questions of Genre in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World’. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Ed. by Stephen Clucas. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 51–68. 57 Margaret Cavendish. The World’s Olio. London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye, 1655. 205–12 (212). 58 Margaret Cavendish. CCXI Sociable Letters. London: William Wilson, 1664. 59 Cornelia Limpricht. ‘Der Salomonische Tempel als typologisches Modell’. Salomos Tempel und das Abendland. Ed. by Paul von Naredi-Rainer. Köln: Dumont, 1994. 235–90 (258). 60 See Naredi-Rainer; A. L. Shane. ‘Rabbi Jacob Judah Leon (Templo) of Amsterdam (1603–1675) and His Connections with England’. Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 25.10 (1977): 120–36. It is important to mention that Templo differed from Vallalpando in his interpretation of the Temple’s façade. Whilst Villalpando translated the biblical reference into a three-storeyed façade, Templo created a tall but one-storeyed front. 61 Naredi-Rainer traces the influence to the designs by Sir Christopher Wren (1632– 1723), John Wood (1704–1754) and Otto Wagner (Naredi-Rainer, 116–199). 62 According to the guide book of 1778, An Accurate Description of the Grand and Glorious Temple of Solomon, the wooden model was 3 1/2 ft long, 7 ft wide and 1 1/2 ft high (Shane, 129). They have now been destroyed. Templo published Retrato del Templo de Selomoh and Afbeeldinghe van den Tempel Salomonis in 1642 as guide books and historical accounts for his exhibition. 63 Johann Valentin Andreae. Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century (1619). Trans. by Felix Emil Held. New York, Oxford University Press, 1916. 173. 64 See also Nicole Pohl. ‘“Passionless Reformers”: The Museum and the City in Utopia’. The Architecture of the Museum: Symbolic Structures, Urban Contexts. Ed. by Michaela Giebelhausen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. 127–43. 65 The delineation of space in Cavendish’s description is limited. Nevertheless, a visual interpretation and reconstruction of the text is possible. Patrick Devlin’s sketch for the Palace is based on the following particulars which Cavendish provides in the text: 1) the proportion given of the palace is in its middle 1 1/2 miles long and half a mile wide; 2) the arched roof rests on pillars;



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3) the lodgings for attendants are placed between the outward and inward parts of the cloister; 4) there is no enclosure for the Emperor’s apartments; 5) walls are mentioned for the first time in the description of the Emperor’s bedchamber, though it may, perhaps, be assumed that they also enclose the attendants’ apartments.

Lisa Hopkins argues that the description of the Emperor’s apartment is inspired by the Star Chamber of Bolsover, one of the properties of the Cavendishs. See Lisa Hopkins. ‘Margaret Cavendish and the Cavendish Houses’. In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 9.1–2 (2000): 63–75. 66 Thomas Sprat. History of the Royal Society. Ed. by Jackson J. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958. xii. 67 ‘An Adress to the Royal Society’. Joseph Glanvill. Scepsis Scientifica. London: E. Cotes, 1665. Cv. 68 Joseph Glanvill. Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion. London: John Baker and Henry Mortlock, 1676. 2. 69 Carolyn Merchant. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1983; Londa Schiebinger. The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. 70 Benjamin Farrington. ‘Temporis Partus Masculus: An Untranslated Writing of Francis Bacon’. Centaurus 1 (1951): 193–205. 71 Francis Bacon. The Advancement of Learning (1605). Ed. by G. W. Kitchin. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973. 72 Kate Lilley. ‘Introduction’. Margaret Cavendish: New Blazing World. ix–xxxi (xxv).

Chapter Three

‘An Emblem of Themselves’: The Country House as Utopia The question I have hence pursued in the first chapters of this book is how women as social agents have speculated upon radically different spatial arrangements and if these new spatialities offer very different ways of being. To continue this exploration, I will focus on the country-house ethos as an illustrative case in point for thinking about gender, utopia and the production of (social) space. Inasmuch as earlier visions of female spaces in texts such as Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ conceive of pastoral gardenstates as feminized spaces to avoid the gendered spatiality of masculinist architecture, later texts such as Eliza Haywood’s The British Recluse and Scott’s Millenium Hall appropriate this space and redefine its metonymic meaning. The gap between representational space and representation of space, between conceived and lived space is closed in these narratives. Whilst the symbolic appropriation of spaces is situated in already existing spaces, places or architectures, the invention of an architectural practice starts anew. Lady Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village serves as an illustration for female patronage and architectural practice that is committed to reform and transformation. I should like to begin this discussion with a brief exploration of its manifestation in country-house literature throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than reading the different literary manifestations of the country-house ethos as ideological and/or a simplistic mirror of socio-political changes in history, I propose that country-house literature is fundamentally public, a literature that is concerned with social transformation and change. Hence, I suggest country-house literature as utopian.1 What follows therefore is not the generic history of the country-house poem but the history of a utopian discourse. To unravel the implications of this argument, Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ shall serve as a special case study in this brief overview. This poem has produced a rich and predictably contentious account of the multifaceted relationship between country-house literature and historical reality. The readings oscillate between regarding ‘To Penshurst’ as a conservative reaction to the complex social and political changes at the beginning of the seventeenth century and as ideologically implicated with mainstream culture. *** In 1956 G. R. Hibbard published his seminal article ‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century’, where he catalogued a ‘homogenous body of poetry’ in the seventeenth century, united by common ideals of

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simplicity, responsible use of wealth and property, good housekeeping and hospitality.2 Hibbard identifies Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (1616), his ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ (1616), Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ (1640) and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1681) as the first phase of this literary mode but acknowledges a continuation of the country-house ethos into the eighteenth century in the poetry of Alexander Pope. Since Hibbard’s article, literary scholars have rewritten the history and socio-political context of the country-house poetry tradition and have expanded the range of texts and its literary forms, finally acknowledging contributions by women poets such as Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Leapor.3 The poetic forms include verse epistles, elegies (Lanyer’s ‘To Cooke-ham’), valedictions, and encomiastic epigrams such as Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ with clear roots in Martial, Horace, Statius and Virgil’s Georgics to Pliny’s Epistle II, 6.4 However, it is the early modern dissension between the country and the city/court, the change from a feudal to a monetary land ownership partially fuelled by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the emergence of ‘possessive individualism’, accompanied by the introduction of the representational Palladian building styles for country houses that determined the formation of this distinctive literary tradition.5 In his article, Hibbard focuses on the symbolic function of the country house, and more specifically its architecture, as the centre of an organic, harmonious community. We recall Jonson’s praise of Penshurst: Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold: Thou has no lantern whereof tales are told, Or stair, or courts; but standst an ancient pile, And these grudged at, art reverenced the while. (1–6)6

In this poem, Penshurst, the historically specific place is blended with Penshurst, the mythologized social model. By the time Jonson wrote the poem, Penshurst was more than a humble medieval Hall. In 1594, state rooms and the Long Gallery were added to the original structure and Jonson’s contemporary, Robert Sidney, planned to turn Penshurst into a ‘prodigy house’. Rathmell argues that Jonson perhaps warned Sidney not to become a proud owner of an ‘ambitious heap’.7 This warning is also echoed in the hyperbolic sponte sua motif which reminds Sidney of his commitment to hospitality and generosity: The purpled pheasant, with the speckled side: The painted partridge lies in every field, And, for thy mess, is willing to be killed. (28–30) … Bright eels, that emulate them, and leap on land Before the fisher, or into his hand. Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. (37–40)



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Indeed, the negative formula, ‘Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show’ clearly undermines the traditional sycophantic flattery of epideictic poetry and allows for a more satiric reading of Jonson’s epistle.8 The evolution from the archaic Old Hall to the Palladian country houses of the seventeenth century ‘suggests many metaphors and analogies: from communities to the individual, from anonymous to idiosyncratic design, from utility to display, from timelessness to “modernity,” and stylistically, from horizontal to vertical thrust’ (McClung, The Country House, 90). This shift from the ‘organic’ growth of a communal Hall to the individualistic act of commissioning private and representational buildings corresponds to the decline of the ‘natural bond between lord and tenant’, now replaced by a more mercantile relationship within the community that has developed since the sixteenth century. Henry Wotton’s Elements of Architecture (1624) takes the virtue of English hospitality as an incentive to rethink the traditional Palladian architecture and to adapt it to English conditions and requirements: ‘yet by the naturall Hospitalitie of England, the Buttrie must be more visible; and we neede … a more spacious and luminous Kitchin … .’9 The whole estate serves as a ‘Theater of Hospitality’, ‘the Seate of Selfe-fruition, the Comfortablest part of his [master’s] own Life … Nay, to the Possessor thereof, an Epitomie of the whole World’ (82). Henry Vaughan’s Golden Grove Moralized (1600) quite clearly links greediness, ambition and the loss of hospitality with a specific architecture: ‘for sooner shall we see a gentleman build a stately house than give alms and cherish the needy’.10 And James I reminds the nation: Let us in God’s name leave these idle foreign toys, and keep the old fashion of England: For it want to be the honour and reputation of the English nobility and gentry, to live in the country and keep hospitality.11

In Sidney’s Arcadia, Cecrophia’s castle is juxtaposed with Kalander’s house: They perceived he was not willing to open himself further, and therefore without further questioning brought him to the house; about which they might see (with fit consideration both of the air, the prospect, and the nature of the ground) all such necessary additions to a great house as might well show Kalander knew that provision is the foundation of hospitality and thrift the fuel of magnificence. The house itself was built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness. (Arcadia, 71)

But the critique of particular socioeconomic relationships goes beyond the microcosm of the estate or country gentry. Indeed, an idea of national identity is located in the metonymic quality of estate architecture. Palladianism was seen as alien to English culture and tradition. Jonson’s eulogy of Penshurst that was built in the ‘Albion’ style of architecture with a great hall and some smaller estate buildings clustered around it, was therefore also a celebration of a powerful, self-sufficient nation in the light of growing globalization through

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trade.12 Vita Sackville-West makes the same points in her history of Knole where she reads the house as an emblem of Englishness: It [Knole] is not an incongruity like Blenheim or Chatsworth, foreign to the spirit of England. It is, rather, the great relation of those small manorhouses which hide themselves away so innumerably among the counties, whether built of the grey stone of south-western England, or the brick of East Anglia, or merely tile-hung or plastered like the cottages. It is not utterly different from all of these. The great Palladian houses of the eighteenth century are in England, they are not of England, as are these irregular roofs, this easy straying up the contours of the hill, these cool coloured walls, these calm gables, and dark windows mirroring the sun.13

Such is the case for Jonson’s Penshurst. However, it may be possible to read Jonson’s poem less as an idealistic celebration of ancient hospitality than an oversimplification of feudalism which ignores existing economic structures; in short, as an expression of ‘the familiar hyperboles of the aristocracy and its attendants’ (Williams, 33). Raymond Williams, who sought to unveil the idealism of English pastoral literature to expose the economic structures underlying it, provides this reading.14 According to Williams, Jonson’s hyperbolic evocation of Virgil’s Georgics merely obscured rent obligations from tenants to their lords: But all come in, the farmer, and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make The better cheeses, bring’em … . (48–53)15

Whilst Jonson’s celebration of feudal values might, at first sight, have served as a critique of the emerging mercantile economy and capitalist agriculture, Williams suggests that Penshurst, Saxham and the other estates from the country house tradition were already part of the new economic and social order. Central to Williams’ argument is his understanding of residual and emergent cultural practices: the country-house poem is situated between the residual ideology of an organic feudal community and the emerging, seemingly more democratic, bourgeois ideology. However, the egalitarian possibility inherent in the latter, would ultimately be erased by ‘the substitution of one form of domination for another: the mystified feudal order replaced by a mystified agrarian capitalist order, with just enough continuity, in titles and in symbols of authority, in successive compositions of a ‘natural order’, to confuse and control’ (Williams, 39). Don Wayne’s study draws on Williams’ important work but manages to provide a perhaps more nuanced reading of the economic shift at the beginning of the seventeenth century, indicating that the country-house ethos legitimized



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a ‘new aristocracy’ and concealed the boundaries between ‘old’ and ‘new’ nobility: This was a “new aristocracy” in a double sense … Although they continued to employ the imagery of the chivalric ideal, the members of this new aristocracy … constituted an agrarian capitalist class with strong links to the trading community, and with investments in incipient mining and manufacturing enterprises and in the earliest colonialist ventures in the New World. Protestantism, with its emphasis on the domestic environment as the center of religious training and discipline, and on the doctrine of predestination … enabled these aristocrats to view themselves as providential administrators of ‘Nature’ in the form of land, households and tenants.16

The aspect of the ‘new aristocracy’ is also taken up Kari Boyd McBride who rightly points out that the Sidneys themselves ‘were social arrivistes whose tenure dated only from Edward VI’s reign … The Sidneys, like many others, needed both to link themselves to the history of the country house and the noble status engendered there and to discount the unique valorization implicit in the estate’ (McBride, Country House Discourse, 49–50). With increasing commercialization of the economy and the growing importance of trade and capital against land ownership and the increasing numbers of country houses that were given to the owners as gifts or grant-purchases by the Crown, countryhouse poetry credited the ‘new aristocracy’ with authority and legitimacy. Isabel Rivers pursues a slightly different train of thought in The Poetry of Conservatism. She places Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ within the context of early seventeenth-century conflict between the country and the city and suggests, in a way similar to Wayne, that: Jonson is appealing to the feudal past but trying to provide an alternative pattern for the dangerous tendencies of the present. Some of the houses built in this period had no domestic, only a symbolic function; they were built at enormous expense to receive the sovereign on progress. It is against this background of a contemporary relationship between Crown and great subjects that threatened to be mutually destructive, rather than with a sense of subversion of old social values, that we should construe the easy reciprocity of ‘To Penshurst’. (50)

This change of attitudes is addressed more clearly and without the evocative implications of Jonson’s poem in what Mary Ann C. McGuire identifies as a subgroup of the country-house poem: the Cavalier country-house poem which includes Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’, and Richard Lovelace’s ‘Amyntor’s Grove’.17 In short, Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and the Cavalier poems dominated the first phase of the country-house poetry. Whilst critics offer different readings of Jonson – the divergence is located in an understanding of the country-house literature as ideology or critique – and rightly point out differences between

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Jonson and authors like Carew and Herrick, it is still possible to argue that this phase is united by a specific interest in good housekeeping, hospitality, good stewardship and balanced power structures between the country and the court. The country house signifies as an economically self-sufficient, socially stable (therefore hierarchical) microcosm within which the aristocratic owner dominates as governor and patriarch. As such, it also seeks to negotiate and, more importantly, stabilize the profound social and economic changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The country-house ethos re-evaluates ancient feudal power and at the same time, legitimizes the ‘new aristocracy’ by constituting their authority through the discourse of good stewardship, hospitality and benevolence. The point to be made then is that the countyhouse ethos is situated between ideological compliance and critique: ‘Utopia brings its critical energies to bear on those very contradictions, breaking open that which is ideologically replete to make room for the work of building a radically different world’ (Moylan, Scraps, 90). What follows is a necessarily shorter overview of the manifestations of this utopian impulse from the Civil Wars to the eighteenth century. The second phase, framed by the Civil Wars and the Restoration, experiences a shift in the metonymic use of the country house. Given the political upheavals of the period, it is perhaps not surprising that the theme of retirement prevails. The image of the country house as a political microcosm, hence actively involved in local and national politics is replaced by the country house as private and contemplative retreat away from disruption. The most prominent example is of course ‘Upon Appleton House’. Like ‘To Penshurst’, Marvell opens his poem with a celebration of the building itself: Within this sober frame expect Work of no foreign architect, That unto caves the quarries drew, And forests did to pastures hew: Who of his great design in pain Did for a model vault his brain, Whose columns should so high be raised To arch the brows that on them gazed. (1–8)18

Lord Fairfax’s return to the estate is represented as a move from political upheaval and discord to peace and naturalized order. However, this is not a nostalgia to any period of the past – before the family’s acquisition of the estate in 1518, the house saw another period of cataclysm as a nunnery: ‘Though many a nun there made her vow,/ ’Twas no religious house till now’ (279–80). The estate is not only a symbol of Fairfax’s virtue and wisdom, but traces the family’s history within the context of the Protestant reformation and then the Civil Wars.19 Like Jonson’s poem however, Marvell has not composed an unambivalent eulogy on Lord Fairfax and his family:



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A stately frontispiece of poor Adorns without the open door: Nor less the room within commends Daily new furniture of friends. The house was built upon the place Only as for a mark of grace; And for an inn to entertain Its Lord a while, but not remain. (65–72)

The ‘stately frontispiece of poor’ is mere decoration, not a symbol of actual lordly virtues and responsibilities and Jenkins argues that ‘“Inn” refigures hospitality not as something permanent and natural, but rather temporary and mercantile … .’20 The understanding of the estate as an inn certainly clashes with the idea of the country house as a private retreat, as a refuge and home from politics and the world. The third phase of the country-house poetry that follows on from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century is much more complex and varied than the earlier periods. The profound political changes that resulted from the Civil Wars and more so, the Revolution of 1688–1689, led to what Michael McKeon calls the ‘destabilization of social categories’ through the gradual political and economic disfranchisement of the nobility and the emergence of a moneyed class.21 Changing attitudes towards property complicated these issues. The institution of the Bank of England in 1694 became symbolic of the shift from a mercantile economy ruled by the principle of state regulation and ‘balance-ofpayments’ to commercial capitalism with no restrictive regulation of domestic industry, growth of competition and a system based on credit.22 Within this framework, property was redefined from an understanding of property as land, manorial rights and social responsibility to a mere commodity. McBride would go so far to call it the simulacrum of the country house, ‘a representation of a representation, a fungible commodity in an emerging capitalist economy that can be displayed and exchanged more readily and conspicuously than a landed estate’ (Country House Discourse, 138).This period also sees an appropriation of the country-house ethos by conflicting parties and an expression in different genres other than the country-house poem itself; travel literature and architectural tracts – both on the rise in the eighteenth century – acquire increasing importance in this debate. Both Fowler and Kenny identify this stage as a period of retreat and redemption in the light of new wealth and mercantile economy.23 The dictum of Horatian simplicity shaped contemporary perception. Roger North already comments on the increased building and rebuilding activities of the ‘new aristocracy’ when he observes that ‘[n]othing is more discernable, than an upstart citizen, or mechanick in his house.’24 Those upstarts waste their money and resources ‘to have a seat equall to or beyond any in our clime’ and often

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end bankrupt in their vain endeavours (North, 9). North was also concerned with functionality and simplicity that, to his mind, divided urban from rural architecture: Nay the evil spreads, so that country gentlemen of value and fortune, in their new erected seats, creep after the meanness of these town builders and order their houses in squares like suburbs of dwellings than which noting is more unfit for a country seat, as may be shewed more fully in proper place. (26)

Implicit in this censure is the broken correlation between wealth and social responsibility which conservative critics of the nouveaux riches grieve for. John Loveday of Caversham was particularly distraught by Robert Walpole’s plans for Houghton Hall (1731) which destroyed traditional rural communities for the sake of a fashionable landscaped garden: ‘The Gardens plain, much like those at Blenheim; Sir Robert has removed about 20 houses of the Village to a considerable distance and he proposes to remove the rest. The new Buildings they call Newtown.’25 The country house became a customary destination for local travellers. Guide books and travel diaries described in detail architecture and design of larger and smaller estates but took the liberty also to make a moral judgement in the vein of the now-familiar discourses. John Byng (later 5th Viscount of Torrington) remarks about the house of George Milbourn that the ‘parlour was (ill) furnish’d in the modern taste with French chairs, festoon’d curtains, and puff’d bell ropes; this and his keeping in bed [until 10 o’clock] informed me that the gentleman was no master of his own house.’26 John Evelyn regretted the refurbishment ‘à la moderne’ of Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire by Inigo Jones: ‘Garden & Stables agreable, but the avenue ungracefull, & the seate naked; return’d that Evening’.27 Sarah, Duchess of Malborough was particularly disparaging about the excessive Palladianism that she observed on her travels: I think the best advice I can give you as to finishing any house, is to look upon the buildings of my Lord Herbert’s of Burlington’s, the last of which I think is yet more ridiculous than the first, because his cost an immense sum of money and has nothing in them either handsome or of any use.28

The display of wealth through grand architecture became acceptable as long as it is founded on principles of taste and morality. Anne Finch unashamedly praises ‘[t]he real splendours of our famed Long-leat,/ Which above metaphor its structure rears,/ Though all enchantment to our sight appears:/ Magnificently great, the eye to fill’ (46–9).29 Whilst Penshurst represented a social microcosm through the metonym of the virtue of its owner, the iconography Finch uses for Longleat is rather different. It is not the virtue or talent for husbandry that is described here but, as a mark of nobility, the owner’s taste. Still, the symbolism



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is carried onto the larger context of the nation: the magnificence of Longleat also represents the wealth of the nation: ‘our nation’s boast’ (52). The relation between taste and true nobility is of course the subject of Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ (1731) which contrasts the Palladian edifice of Burlington with Timon’s extravagant villa:30 At Timon’s Villa let us pass a day, Where all cry out, ‘What Sums are thrown away!’ So proud, so grand, of that stupendous Air, Soft and Agreeable come never there. Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. (91–6)

Pope breaks the metonymic correlation between the owner and his building: To compass this, his Building is a Town, His Pond an Ocean, his Parterre a Down: Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees? A puny Insect, shivering at a breeze. (97–100)

Pope continues in his poem to describe Timon’s false taste which is not only exemplified in architecture but in his collection of books, music and paintings. Even his hospitality is mere ‘charitable vanity’ (164). In contrast, great men like Burlington not only ‘erect new wonders’ but ‘These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,/ These are Imperial works, and worthy kings’ (184, 195–6). Pope’s comparison between Burlington and Timon is a complex juxtaposition and perhaps reconciles the conservative values of property as unalienable rights that come with social responsibility, stable and hierarchical social relations, good government and principles of simplicity and an understanding of civic virtue as a proactive economic and political engagement. The notion of a good citizen evolved from the position of the disinterested, sovereign landed gentry to the polite, sociable, self-interested commercial man. A similar point is made by Samuel Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison in a Series of Letters (1753–1754). Sir Charles Grandison’s nobility is expressed in the aesthetics and management of the ancient Grandison Hall, ‘furnished in an elegant, but not sumptuous taste’ within an estate of plantations, orchards and landscaped garden.31 Grandison is particularly praised for his management of the servants and housekeepers whom he houses and treats well. He ‘studied Husbandry and Law, in order, as he used to say, to be his Father’s steward; the one to qualify him to preserve, the other to manage, his estate’ (VII, 45). In a sense, the servants’ library summarizes the ethos of Grandison Hall: it houses shelves of books on ‘divinity and morality; Another for housewifery: A third of history, true adventures, voyages, and innocent amusement’ (VII, 41).32 Daniel Defoe, who in a whole range of his writings legitimizes the commodification of property, supplies the other side of the political spectrum.

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In The Compleat English Gentleman (1729) he endorses an understanding of nobility – born or bred – that is based on ‘vertue, learning, a liberal education and a degree of naturall and acquir’d knowledge’.33 Interestingly, he picks up on the country-house topos by likening the husbandry of an estate to the management of any business: both require learning, responsibility and knowledge of good housekeeping – Sir Charles Grandison is indeed a prime example for this new breed of gentlemen. Like in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), Defoe recounts manifold examples of ancient estates lost through imprudence and irresponsibility and contrasts them to the estates either founded or saved by merchants of London. The restoration of an old estate, fallen into disarray, signifies the restoration of true noble values by the bred gentleman: and all these things are done with a magnificence suitable to his fortunes, and to the figure he intended to live in, and get with a prudence and frugality as too the manner of it that was admir’d by every body; there was no want of any thing, and yet no needless simple profusion or ignorant weak extravagance; and particularly he took care that ready money was always paid for everything that was brought, and that all the workmen were punctually pay’d their wages. (271)

The last point made in this quotation is particularly interesting. Defoe counters Tory accusations of the new paper economy being unstable and exploitative – the prime example being the ‘South Sea Bubble’ events in 1720 – with the implication that the aristocratic system of patronage results in economic and social dependency. In fact, the whole system of landownership and patronage resulted in an intricate system of credit between the landowners and his dependants in the larger county society. Feudal lordship was based on the actual and moral ownership of the land but did not result in lucrative cash flow. Most prominent for the Whig appropriation of the country-house ethos are the characters of Sir Andrew Freeport and Sir Roger Coverley in The Spectator (1712–1715). The theme of retreat as withdrawal from urban depravity is echoed in Sir Andrew Freeport’s resolve to retire to the country to charitable work in the rural community and ultimately to return to a knowledge of self, possible only in rural simplicity and innocence.34 However, The Spectator No. 27 questions retirement as simplistic and insincere means for virtue: It is therefore a fantastical way of thinking, when we promise our selves an Alteration in our conduct from change of Place, and difference of Circumstances; the same Passions will attend us where-ever we are, till they are Conquer’d; and we can never live to our Satisfaction in the deepest Retirement, unless we are capable of living so in some measure amidst the Noise and Business of the World. (I, 149)

The balance of ideas is such that, in opposition to late seventeenth-century discourses on retreat, responsibilities towards society, one’s civic duty must



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correspond to Horatian principles of country life, simplicity and husbandry. Mere disinterested retreat into the country will not serve the nation.35 It is not surprising that the Royal Exchange is described in terms of the country-house ethos: They [Merchants] knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great. (I, No. 69, 395–6)

The only way to lead an interested responsible life without retreating into the self-containment of a country community is either to retreat to the country as recreation only or to live in suburbia – indeed, as recent historians pointed out, in the period between 1550 and 1850 there was no distinct divide between the country and the city due to a constant migration between the two localities.36 John Pomfret’s The Choice (1700) is one of the few texts that celebrate the villa suburbana, the private seat near a town that profits from both places.37 The historical reality makes the metonymic iconography of the country house in the eighteenth century only more distinct: the country estate serves as a proxy for topical social and political debates about ideas of social responsibility, the right use of wealth and political power. It is not surprising that the metonymic country-house ethos is made to extend to the colonies and its gentlemanly capitalist structures. When Mrs Trapes advises the nouveau-riche Ducat in John Gay’s Polly (1729) about his responsibilities and duties, she harks back to the country-house ethos: ‘Though you were born and bread [sic] and live in the Indies, as you are subject of Britain you shou’d live up to our customs … . Your luxury should distinguish you from the vulgar. You cannot be too expensive in your pleasures.’38 But it is again Daniel Defoe who provides the most extensive examples for the bourgeois quest for nobility, distinguishing opportunist possessive individualism as illustrated in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722) and The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (1720) from the genuine country-house ethos as most notably realized in The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner (1719). Kenny sees Robinson Crusoe as indicative of how the country-house ethos in the eighteenth century was shaped: ‘self-mastery that can be gained in retirement linked with manorial propriety, which is in turn, developed into the suggestion of kingship and hence to national expansion through trade’ (102). It is evident that the country-house poem is a public poem: it communicates – if in a complex and paradoxical way – urgent political and social conflicts of its time. Indeed, country-house literature maps the dialectical process that permeates all historical experience. As such it carries a profoundly utopian dimension. In his long chapter on the country-house utopia, Lewis Mumford does concur that the country-house ideal is an ‘idolum’, ‘a collective utopia’ that ‘by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend[s] to

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perpetuate and perfect that [existing] order’.39 The point at stake here is of course the correlation between utopia and ideology which must be left to a different study than mine. Mumford’s arguments in favour of the positive aspects of utopia rest upon an understanding of utopia as a social myth: ‘[w]e are rather interested in those myths which are, as it were, the ideal content of the existing order of things, myths which, by being consciously formulated and worked out in thought, tend to perpetuate and perfect that order’ (194). Indeed, he specifically classifies the country-house ideal as a social myth. However, myths, according to Mumford, do not only perpetuate the existing order but are at the same time a motivating force for social and political change. Alistair Duckworth expands this last point. Through ‘the logic of the metonym’, writes Duckworth, ‘the country house stands for a critique of the individualistic approach to property and the consequential loss of genuine “lordly virtues”.’40 Indeed, as James I’s appeal suggests, the country house is not only a metonym for the virtues of the landlord, but, as a political microcosm, stands for the state and ultimately for the nation. But these descriptions of the country houses and gardens ‘exist and have meaning in relation to an intertextual field of available fragments that both constrain and enable fictional expression’ (Duckworth, 306). By calling upon mythological resonances such as the Golden Age, Arcadia and Albion as ‘a hortulan Eden’, the estate becomes a mythical place ‘in which dwelling is the relationship with others, without denial or deprivation of one’s own being, and of such a place as a model for human relationships on a larger social scale’ (Fowler, 3; Wayne, 173). The poetry’s metonymic and mythical quality accounts for why it is perpetuated beyond the seventeenth century with manifestations in Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816) and Mansfield Park (1814), Vita Sackville-West’s The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946), Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Ian McEwan’s recent Atonement.41 In the framework of metonym, myth and collective utopia, a straightforward correlation between the country-house ethos and political change is then perhaps not the crucial question. Indeed, as Frederic Jameson has suggested, ideology and utopia are essentially dialectically connected, ‘the effective ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian.’42 Another way to approach this problem is then to focus on the critical potential of utopias. Ruth Levitas’ understanding of utopia as desire and Lyman Tower Sargent’s formulation of utopia as ‘social dreaming’ makes it possible to include the country-house ethos into the framework of utopianism. It does inspire readers ‘to work towards an understanding of what is necessary for human fulfilment, a broadening, deepening and raising of aspirations in terms quite different from those of their everyday life’.43 It is the capacity to generate attentiveness to the socio-political status quo and the yearning for a different kind of life and society that lies at the heart of the country-house ethos.



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*** The country house is a metonymic space that negotiates conflicting and changing social, political and economic ideologies with specific focus on continuity and community. Its metonymic and mythical function however was based, if in a rather complex way, on actual material culture. Poets like Jonson or Marvell not only dedicated their poems to patrons and owners of country estates but quite clearly commented on actual plans to build or rebuild existing estates. Architectural treatises were equally complicit in establishing a symbolic function of the country estate. The country estate was, as we have established, a sociogramm of a family but more so of a social system that was determined by ideologies of gender and class. In the context of my brief remarks on the country-house ethos, an obvious question arises: how is the gendered social map defined in country-house literature? Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century household manuals explicitly separated the world of politics and public engagements from world of domesticity and reproduction, thus made a distinction between the ‘inner’ household and the estate as a whole.44 Whilst women were given a range of quasi-professional tasks, the seventeenth-century congruence of oeconomia and monarchia firmly placed the master of the estate firmly at the head of the household and of the women.45 Gervase Markham writes for instance in 1623 that the ‘perfit Husbandman, who is the father and master of the family, and whose office and imployments are ever for the most part abroad, or removed from the house’, and that the ‘Hous-wife, who is the mother and Mistris of the family … hath her most generall imployment within the house …’.46 Patrick Hannay in 1618 emphasizes that as ‘it befits not Man for to imbrace/ Domesticke charge, so it’s not Womans place/ For to be busied with affaires abroad’.47 Again in 1761, Lady Pennington stresses that the ‘Management of all Domestic Affairs is certainly the proper business of Woman’ and suggests that ‘’tis certainly not beneath the Dignity of any Lady, however high her Rank, to know how to educate her children, to govern her Servants, to order an elegant Table with her Œconomy; and to manage her whole Family with Prudence, Regularity and Method.’48 However, the management of the household required extensive skills in medicine, cookery, home economics and bookkeeping and, in the case of the absence of the gentleman, extended to the management of the whole estate and its staff, too. Lady Anne Constable, wife of Sir Marmaduke Constable of Everingham, Yorkshire, demanded in 1672 that: he [Sir Marmaduke Constable] should declare that she had not prejudiced his estate by her management of it during his absence or at any other time; and that if he should absent himself again, he should give full authority to her and his steward, George Constable, to manage his estate

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or alternatively appoint his own manager, paying her an appropriate maintenance allowance.49

Others got actively involved in the actual building or rebuilding of their estate: Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham (1631–1704) supervised the rebuilding of Weston Park, Staffordshire and its church with the help of Palladio’s First Book of Architecture.50 Lady Elizabeth Winwood was instrumental in rebuilding and extending Ditton Park with special attention to the water supply of the house, its gardens and orchards and Elizabeth Griffin, Countess of Portsmouth (1691–1762) worked closely with the architects Phillips and Shakespear on the redesigning of Audley End.51 On the other hand, Lady Grace Milday (1552– 1620) took only little part in the management of the estate and was more interested in devotional activities.52 This kind of division of labour clearly differed from a nineteenth-century domesticity and became an essential part of the quasi-professional identity of gentry women as housewives, mistresses of estates and business women who sold their medicines and potions to the community.53 Lord Halifax in his Advice to a Daughter (1688) made it very clear that the wife’s domestic responsibility was not merely a reflection on her character and hence her husband’s reputation but essential to the husband’s financial standing: ‘The Art of laying out Money wisely is not attained to without a great deal of thought; and it is yet more difficult in the case of a Wife, who is accountable to her Husband for her mistakes in it: It is not only his Money, his Credit too is at stake … .’54 Thus, Hester Chapone compared the management of a house and family with the government of a Commonwealth and called for equality between men and women to guarantee prudent housekeeping and estate management. This gap between ideal and social practice also appears in the design and use of the domestic environment. The formal house of the seventeenth century echoed the medieval tradition of separating men from women at the dinner table and at night time. The latter resulted in the design of two symmetrical apartments on the first floor with closets and servants’ quarters for husbands and wives. Roger North refers to the habit of keeping two separate dressing rooms ‘so that at rising each may be two separate dressing rooms, for husband and wife’, but at the same time discovers the practice of ‘retrenching the dressing room, or rather [delegating] it to the use of the man who most needs it, because of the roughness of his service and dressing, and the lady keeps the possession of the bedchamber …’ (134–5). The formal ground plan with the apartment system was finally abandoned in the eighteenth century in favour of a more flexible and intimate design for family and guest with perhaps one or more ‘public’ rooms – the saloon and the dining room (‘eating room’) – for social entertainment, the common parlour for the daily uses of the family and segregated quarters and work spaces for staff.55 The relationship of the rooms to each other and the location within the house according to function was a common concern: passages and



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corridors needed to connect the servants’ rooms to the private quarters, kitchens were often placed facing north and/or in the basement, and, curiously, as Batty Langley suggests, the ‘Chambers of Delight’ (perhaps bedrooms?) to the East (Langley, 130). Few architects such as Anthony Bromley, Robert and James Adam, Humphrey Repton and John Crunden specified ‘female’ rooms.56 More attention was given to flexibility according to lifestyle and budget – especially in London, where space was expensive: I have not set down the Uses and Distributions of the Apartment of any Structure; because every different Room may be, by every new Inhabitant, converted to a different Use; so that what an Architect may design for a Parlour, may, by another, be metamorphosed into a Bedchamber, a Stable I have known changed into a Kitchen; and many other apartments to have underwent as many Transmutations as are represented in Ovid. (Morris, ‘Preface’)

What is certain, however, is that social convention and etiquette shaped the function and use of architecture and space, that they constituted rooms of high or low ‘categoric importance’ and created spaces of ‘social solidarity’ or exclusivity (Frank E. Brown, 578; Hillier and Hanson, 158). Drawing rooms in the eighteenth century were used by women after the meal to retire to whereas the men remained in the dining room amongst themselves. Lord Lyttleton went so far as to separate the dining room and drawing room by a gallery at Hagley because ‘Lady Lyttleton wishes for a room of separation between eating room and the drawing room, to hinder the ladies from the noise and talk of the men when left to their bottle, which must sometimes happen, even at Hagley’ (Girouard, 204). Robert and James Adam’s plans for refurbishment of Sion House for the Duke of Northumberland in 1762 also specified a ‘splendid withdrawing room for the ladies” placed next to the “great eating room’ but indicate that it is ‘however, finished in a style to afford great variety and amusement; and it is, for this reason, an admirable room for the reception of company for dinner, or for the ladies to retire after it … .’57 It is perhaps more useful to consider economics as the decisive factor here. The common law in the early modern period and the eighteenth century denied women the possibility of civic virtue, citizenship, and actually any legal status at all because all these were largely based on the ownership of land. Married women could not enter into contractual agreements or even file suit against their husbands: ‘She can’t let, set, sell, give away, or alienate any thing without her husband’s consent.’58 With exception of the jointure, the husband lawfully appropriated the property that women owned before marriage. Therefore they had no legal rights to the space they were living in. These property arrangements, however, set up by common, ecclesiastical, manorial and equity law varied from region to region and depended on the individual settlement and became more restrictive towards the eighteenth century. Jointure was one route

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of owning property but could also be, as the cases of Anne Clifford and Lady Mary Wroth have shown, the reason for marital disputes. Widowhood enabled middle- and upper-class women to use their income independently, although again, the legalities depended on the marriage contract. Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (1527–1608), was widowed several times, and used her vast inheritance to build Hardwick Hall whilst her last and estranged husband, Sir William Cavendish, was still alive. The New Hall, ostentatiously decorated with her initials on the rooftops, was placed next to the Old Hall to symbolize the marital split and her independence. The women in Clara Reeve’s The School for Widows (1719), Thomas Amory’s semi-fictional Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755) and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall also enjoyed the comfortable state of widowhood in affluence and independence in their own homes. Frances Burney’s heiress Cecilia recognized that her self-determined existence as benefactor and reformer presupposed ‘a house of her own, and the unlimited disposal of her fortune’.59 In short, to rewrite Catherine Ingraham, the owning of property and land was essential to the owning of identity.60 An excellent early example is again Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’, which not only celebrates the ‘ancient pile’ of Penshurst as the essence of Robert Sidney’s true nobility but clearly domesticates his wife, Lady Barbara Sidney, such that her virtue amalgamates with the physical space of the estate. In Jonson’s poem, Lady Sidney is not portrayed in her own right, but solely as a good housewife and hostess who honours her domestic duties: On thy good lady, then! who, therein reaped The just reward of her high housewifery: To have her linen, plate, and all things nigh, When she was far; and not a room but dressed As if it had expected such a guest! (84–8)

But these duties were not unchallenged either. Whilst Barbara Sidney did supervise the estate successfully, especially during her husband’s absences, the growing financial pressures on the estate forced Robert Sidney to consider drastic measures. As McBride recounts, Sidney wanted to bring in an estate manager, implying that his wife’s home economics were not efficient and effective enough (Country House Discourse, 68–9). Robert Sidney’s response to his wife’s protestations demonstrates how unstable women’s domestic authority was: neyther is it anyway my meaning to take any authoritie of the hous from you; but all things shall still be commaunded by you: onely the steward shall take directions from you and yeald accounts to you, and doe those things which inded is unfitt for you to trouble yourself withall. For I would have you bee mistress and not put yourself to those things which indeed belong to servants.61

Barbara Sidney was however more than the ‘mistress’ of the household. In her capacity as a faithful wife, she guaranteed the property for the future lineage



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and finally, as a mother, she educated the future generation in the right and devoted manner: These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all. Thy lady’s noble, fruitful, chaste withal. His children thy great lord may call his own: A fortune, in this age, but rarely known. They are, and have been taught religion: thence Their gentler spirits have sucked innocence. Each morn, and even, they are taught to pray, With the whole household, and may, every day, Read, in their virtuous parents’ noble parts, Thy mysteries of manners, arms, and arts. (89–98)

Wayne highlights a prevalent theme here: the depiction of a ‘natural’ chain of events, where ‘the land gives of itself, animals give themselves, ripe daughters give of themselves, ladies give of themselves to lords, lords give of themselves to kings’ (75). Indeed, the daughters of the farmers are, like ripe plums and pears in a full basket, ready to be exchanged and consumed: By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend This way to husbands; and whose basket bear An emblem of themselves, in plum, or pear. (53–6)

‘Moreover’, Wayne continues, ‘the giving is voluntarily and constitutes an equivalent exchange in kind, hence, nothing and no one is exploited’ (75). However, Lady Sidney’s own experience is contrary to this. She, as Wayne has shown himself, was married off quickly after the death of her father to secure her huge Welsh inheritance. By her peers, like Sir Walter Ralegh, Lady Sidney was perceived as an uncontrolled commodity that had to be transferred to the rightful proprietor: Her Majestye hath nowe thrise caused letters to be written unto you, that you suffer not my kinsewoman to be boughte and solde in Wales, without her Majesties pryvetye, and the consent or advise of my L. Chamberlayne, and my selfe … . (Sir Walter Ralegh to Sir Edward Stradling, 26 September 1584; quoted in Wayne, 69)

Once married, appropriated and domesticated as wife, mother and hostess, Lady Sidney is portrayed as chaste and noble. Her wealth and her sexuality, dangerously mobile before her marriage, have been secured in the liaison with Robert Sidney. She and her daughters have become part of the estate and are described as such. They are the natural assets of the manor, inseparable from the physical space. Thus, with her marriage, Lady Sidney finally is firmly ‘housed’ within patrilinear culture. This discourse permeates into Restoration drama and specifically the eighteenth-century novel which portrays the house as a site of pornographic fantasies. Nourse compares the country house to a seraglio, ‘where they

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[Women] pass their Time in all manner of Sensuality, or Beastiality rather’ – a fantasy that is acted out more prominently in De Sade’s Les cent vingt journées de Sodome; ou, L’école de libertinage (1785), La Nouvelle Justine; ou, Les Malheurs de la Vertue (1797).62 Imprisonment, deception, rape and abduction of innocent female victims are the themes in Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis (1709), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1747–1748), and the Gothic novels by Ann Radcliffe.63 The special interrelation between material history and text, between space and place in country-house literature must result in an obvious conclusion: ‘the country-house genre was gendered at its inception.’64 Given women’s representation in traditional country-house literature as domesticated into one-dimensional existence, women writers of the period under investigation create poetic utopian spaces that release women from the confinement within home/place. Their spatial imagination creates pastoral ‘rooms of their own’, where women are able to develop their full potential. These poetic visions prepare the ground for a feminocentric country-house culture as developed in eighteenth-century women’s novels. Writers such as Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood and Elizabeth Singer Rowe make first attempts to renegotiate and redefine the gendered spatiality of the country house in order to devise an alternative social and economic space represented in Sarah Scott’s novel Millenium Hall (1762). By appropriating the metonymic space of the country estate, these writers demystify and remystify the country house in order to make it their own space. This utopian desire however ends with a subordination of class equality to the stability of the larger social entity. In the true vein of eighteenth-century discourses of sensibility, social harmony and middle-class philanthropy, inferiors are locked into utopian communities as content and grateful dependents. Those who do not belong to its history and tradition thus sustain certain aspects of the country-house ethos. *** In 1709, Delarivier Manley published her notorious roman-à-clèf Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes. From the New Atalantis, An Island in the Mediterranean. Written Originally in Italian.65 Exposing the secret lives of contemporary politicians and courtiers, the book was received with enthusiasm by the general readership but was obviously judged unfavourably by the people portrayed in it.66 Nevertheless, it proved so popular that writers like Eliza Haywood copied its formula in Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia. Written by a celebrated author of that country. New translated into English (1725) and its successor The Mercenary Lover; or, The Unfortunate Heiresses. Being a True, Secret History of a City Amour, in a certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia.



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Written by the author of Memoirs of the said Island. Translated into English (1726).67 New Atalantis’ frame narrative is the story of two goddesses, Virtue and Astrea who, guided by Lady Intelligence, are initiated into the island’s aristocratic society and manners. Although the text is set up as an imaginary travel narrative and a romance, Manley makes it quite clear that she sets out to write a social satire: What is most essential, and the very soul of satire, is scourging of vice, and exhortation to virtue. Satire is of the nature of moral philosophy. He, therefore, who instructs most usefully will carry the palm. And again, ’Tis an action of virtue to make examples of vicious men. They may and ought to be upbraided with their crimes and follies both for their own amendment, if they are not yet incorrigible, and for the terrors of others, to hinder them from falling into those enormities, which they see are so severely punished in the persons of others. The first reason was only an excuse for revenge. But this second is absolutely of the poet’s office to perform. (132)

One episode stands out significantly amongst the series of stories about deception, rape and violence: the ‘new cabal’. This separatist and quasicommunist community is ruled by other elements than interest and cupidity, money or sex.68 The women of the community are introduced into the text in a favourable manner: Astrea inquires about three coaches occupied by rather cheerful women and enviously wonders how any persons [can] be more at their ease? Sure these seem to unknown that there is a certain portion of misery and disappointments allotted to all men, which one time or other will assuredly overtake ’em. The very consideration is sufficient, in my opinion, to put a damp upon the serenest, much more a tumultuous joy. (153–4)

Lady Intelligence is eager to satisfy this curiosity and explains that these women belong to a separatist community, reviving the ‘vices of old Rome’ and are hence strongly censored by their contemporaries (154). And she explains: Oh how laudable! how extraordinary! how wonderful! is the uncommon happiness of the Cabal? They have wisely excluded that rapacious sex who, making a prey of the honour of ladies, find their greatest satisfaction (some few excepted) in boasting of their good fortune, the very chocolatehouse being witnesses of their self-love where, promiscuously among the known and unknown, they expose the letters of the fair, explain the mysterious and refine about the happy part, in their redundancy of vanity consulting nothing but what may feed the insatiable hydra! The Cabal run no such dangers, they have all the happiness in themselves! Two beautiful ladies joined in an excess of amity (no word is tender enough to express their new delight) innocently embrace! For how can they be guilty? They vow eternal tenderness, they exclude men, and condition that they will always do so. What irregularity can there be in this? (154)

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This circle of women is not a Society of Friendship in Katherine Phillips’ sense of a creative community without any fixed base. The women in New Atalantis have acquired property: They have taken a little lodging about twelve furlongs from Angela in a place obscure and pleasant with a magazine of good wine and necessary conveniences as to chambers of repose, a tolerable garden and the country in prospect. (155)

But this property does not privilege women above others: In this little commonwealth is no property; whatever a lady possesses is, sans ceremone, at the service and for the use of her fair friend, without the vain nice scruple of being obliged. ’Tis her right; the other disputes it not, no, not so much as in thought. They have no reserve; mutual love bestows all things in common, ’twould be against the dignity of the passion and unworthy such exalted, abstracted notions as theirs. (161)

In the depiction of the ‘new cabal’ we have the utopian vision of a quasicommunist, lesbian and separatist as well as aristocratic commonwealth. Manley’s vision has developed one step further from Lanyer’s paradisical female community: it is not deprived anymore from a place to set up their communal experiment but has found their place of bliss equipped with house, gardens and culinary pleasures at their service. Whilst the cabal is ruled by the ethic principles of ‘mutual secrecy … natural justice and … mutual constancy’, it also has a strong commitment to pleasure and passion, distinguishing itself clearly from the contemporary monastic visions of Mary Astell who proclaims a strong dedication to education, religious principles and celibacy (155). Given the scandalous outset of the book, the depiction of passionate lesbianism presents only slight competition to the tales of sexual encounters in the rest of the book. Consequently, Astrea, the goddess of Justice, leaves the place with the deduction that there are other possibilities for female existence than ‘to adorn the husband’s reign, perfect his happiness, and propagate the kind’ (161). Another writer who contributes to the unveiling of double social standards and who attempts to provide survival strategies for women is the prolific Eliza Haywood, the third of the ‘fair triumvirate of wits’. I have already mentioned her Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia and The Mercenary Lover as novels in the tradition of Manley’s New Atalantis. For the purpose of this chapter, I want to turn my attention to The British Recluse: or, Secret History of Cleomira Supposed Dead (1722), a sentimental novel about two women, Belinda and Cleomira, who meet in London wounded by the same fate. Cleomira, baptised ‘the British Recluse’, lives a withdrawn life until Belinda joins the boarding house: The meeting of these two Ladies was something particular of Persons of the same Sex; each found, at first sight, so much to admire in the other, that



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it kept both from speaking for some Moments. The Recluse consider’d Belinda, as indeed she is, one of the most lovely Persons on Earth; and Belinda found the Recluse so far beyond the Landlady’s Description, something so Majestick, and withal so sweet and attractive in her Air – such a Mixture of the most forceful Fire, and most enchanting softness in her Eyes, that she became wholly lost in speechless wonder; till the Recluse … broke Silence in these Words.69

After this emotional and somewhat erotic meeting that decides their future, the women exchange their experiences of betrayal of love and seduction by, as it later turns out, the same man. Nothing up to this point really distinguishes this plot from the contemporary novels of seduction except that the refuge for both women is London, traditionally the place of vice and crime. In this novel the capital offers anonymity whereas the countryside, on the other hand, is the place of seduction, rape and betrayal.70 Following on from their initial strong bonding, the women decide to spend their lives together – an ending, which is delivered rather surprisingly to the reader: in a short time, both their resolutions of abandoning the World continuing, the Recluse and she [Belinda] took a house about seventy Miles distant from London, where they still live in a perfect Tranquillity, happy in the real Friendship of each other, despising the uncertain Pleasures, and free from all the Hurries and Disquiets which attend the Gaieties of the Town. And where a solitary Life is the effect of choice, it certainly yield more solid comfort than all the publick Diversions which those who are the greatest Pursuers of them can find. (138)

The British Recluse falls into the third phase of the history of the country-house ethos, which I characterized earlier as a phase of Horatian simplicity and retreat from ‘publick Diversions’. Eliza Haywood offers her protagonists an actual country home where they are allowed to live in ‘a perfect Tranquillity’ and ‘happy in the real Friendship of each other’. They develop an ‘intersubjective space’ which is based on mutual respect, integrity and friendship (Pfaelzer, 159). Similar to Manley’s New Atalantis the women in The British Recluse chose to redefine the economic structures of their estate. The basis is not a feudal economy or early capitalism but a benevolent economy where property and responsibilities are shared amongst (class) equals. Sarah Scott’s novel A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent Together with the Characters of the Inhabitants and such Historical Anecdotes and Reflections as May excite in the Reader proper Sentiments of Humanity, and lead the Mind to the Love of Virtue by ‘A Gentleman on his Travels’ (1762) takes the appropriation of space further than her predecessors. By establishing a separatist community on a working estate, Sarah Scott extends the traditional role of women on country estates. Instead of being just wives, hostesses and genteel women in retirement, the women of Millenium Hall are responsible landowners and proto-industrialists. Economic power is expanded: all land and

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material goods are held in common. As such the women do not merely inhabit the space of the country estate but they truly appropriate it by demystifying and remystifying its architectural form, function and metonymic meaning. Traditionally, as we have seen, the country estate is an exclusionary sociopolitical microcosm. Millenium Hall expands this idea of the microcosmic oikos into an emancipatory and liberating space for women. After its publication in 1762, A Description of Millenium Hall went through four editions by 1778.71 It is a fictional account of a group of wealthy ladies, who, disillusioned with society and with men, establish a separatist retreat in the tradition of secular convents. The community consists of two main houses where women from the upper middle classes and aristocracy live according to principles of Protestant ethics, qualities of self-help and self-discipline. Closely connected to the main houses are cottages for poor and handicapped people, a carpet and rug workshop as well as a productive forest and farming land. The frame narrative consists of an epistolary travel account by Sir George Ellison to a male friend, a publisher. Although the traveller remains anonymous in Millenium Hall itself, the companion volume to this book, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766) reveals his identity and provides some further background information on the ‘Gentleman on his travels’. Sir George Ellison and his fellow traveller Mr Lamont tour through England to restore their spiritual and physical health. They proceed ‘as far as Cornwall’ when their chaise breaks down. Trying to find help in this unpopulated and rural countryside, the travellers are lucky to discover an avenue of trees which leads to a house. Quite taken by the surrounding land, Sir Ellison writes: When we had walked about half a mile in a scene truly pastoral, we began to think ourselves in the days of Theocritus, so sweetly did the sound of a flute come wafted through the air. Never did pastoral swain make sweeter melody on his oaten reed. (56)

The travellers finally reach the secluded and dreamlike Millenium Hall which appears to them as ‘earthly paradise’. This millennial vocabulary continues when the house slowly reveals itself to the two protagonists: We approached the house, wherein, as it was the only human habitation in view, we imagined must reside the Primum Mobile of all we had yet beheld. We were admiring the magnificence of the ancient structure, and inclined to believe it the abode of the genius which presided over this fairy land, when we were surprised by a storm … . (emphasis mine, 58)

The frontispiece of the first edition of Millenium Hall gives an impression of this idealized pastoral setting for the country house which is so greatly appreciated by the wayfarers (Fig. 3.1). The main architectural elements of the house – the strong horizontal divisions, the pedimented gables, the round-headed door and what appear to be Venetian windows in the piano nobile – all derive from



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Fig. 3.1: Frontispiece of Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent, by a Gentleman on his Travels (1762), London: J. Newberry, 1762

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Neo-Palladian buildings from the 1720s onwards and could have reached the provinces as a fashionable building style as late as the 1740s. The description of the interior by the travellers as having a large hall which leads to another reception room overlooking the garden is also characteristic of the layout of houses of the early to mid-eighteenth century. Its functional structures bear no resemblance to old manor houses or old halls. On the contrary, the women in Millenium Hall have redesigned the rooms of the house. The Saloon or grand reception room, traditionally a formal room for the entertainment of guests and the display of wealth and status has become a room for the intellectual pursuits of the community members: If we had been inclined before to fancy ourselves on enchanted ground, when after being led through a large hall, we were introduced to the ladies, who knew nothing of what had passed, I could scarcely forbear believing myself in the Attick school. The room where they sat was about forty-five feet long, of a proportionable breadth, with three windows on one side, which looked into a garden, and a large bow at the upper end. (emphasis mine, 58–9)

The three main objects in the room signify the intellectual and educational endeavours of the female community. ‘Over against the windows’, we are told, ‘were three large bookcases, upon the top of the middle one stood an orrery, and a globe on each of the others’ (59). Not surprisingly, therefore we find the women pursuing these sciences and arts: At the lower end of the room was a lady painting, with exquisite art indeed, a beautiful Madonna; near her another, drawing a landscape out of her own imagination; a third, carving a picture-frame in wood, in the finest manner; a fourth, engraving; and a young girl reading aloud to them; the distance from the ladies in the bow-window being such, that they could receive no disturbance from her. (59)

Sir George Ellison clearly misinterprets Millenium Hall’s symbolic meaning in accordance to his own frame of mind. His account of the community is ‘filtered through a voyeuristic paternalism’ which echoes the contemporary economic iconography of woman as civilizing and feminizing influence on capitalist commerce.72 He emphasizes the elaborate social and benevolent system of the female community but does not recognize the issue that the community is also ‘a rebuke to the conventional idea of a solitary woman living for and through men, attaining citizenship in the community of adulthood through masculine approval alone’.73 Scott however has devised a utopia where women transcend their own alienation, be it social, economic or cultural. Millenium Hall is based on the principle of property and patronage, a system of ‘vertical friendship’ that unites the household, tenants, the wider family and villages as a hierarchical but stable social unit.74 But Sarah Scott does not merely replicate eighteenth-century country politics which celebrated



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the disinterested country gentleman as charitable, sensible, responsible, in short, natural leader.75 In Millenium Hall, Scott transfers the lordly virtues of benevolence, hospitality, social responsibility and, atypically, communal land ownership, to the community of women. However, she also advocates the Protestant principles of introspection, self-discipline and self-help. The charity work in Millenium Hall does not only keep every member of the estate in their place but more importantly, helps the poor and disadvantaged to provide for themselves. The women in the almshouses, for instance, sew, spin, and cook for the benefit of the whole community with the understanding that everyone contributes as best as they can. The genteel women of the main houses manage and teach to the best of their knowledge and abilities. This Anglican and mercantile understanding of philanthropy, class and commerce is set against a critique of social mobility through commerce as the story of Millenium Hall’s neighbour illustrates: I could not help observing the various fate of this mansion, originally the seat of ancient hospitality; then falling into the hands of a miser, who had not spirit to enjoy it, nor sense enough to see, that he was impairing so valuable a part of his possessions, by grudging the necessary expenses of repairs; from him devolving to a young coxcomb, who by neglect let it sink into ruin, and was spending in extravagance, what he inherited from avarice; as if one vice was to pay the debt to society which the other had incurred; and now it was purchased to be the seat of charity and benevolence. (emphasis mine, 221–2)

The sister community of Millenium Hall saw itself particularly justified in appropriating this mismanaged estate and returning it to its traditional purpose without being restrained by the gendered doctrine of sociability and sentimentality as remedies against exploitative capitalist alienation. Millenium Hall also critiques the sheer commercialism of eighteenth-century society that is driven by self-interest and greed. The community’s carpet and rug manufactory is highly profitable, but instead of squandering the profit or even trusting outside managers, the women take over the enterprise, reinvest the revenue, increase the wages and found a ‘fund for the sick and disabled’ (247): But as they feared an enterprising undertaker might ruin their plan,

they themselves undertook to be stewards; they stood the first expence, allowed a considerable profit to the directors, but kept the distribution of the money entirely in their own hands: thus they prevent the poor from being oppressed by their superiors, for they allow them great wages, and by their very diligent inspection hinder any frauds … As the ladies have the direction of the whole, they give more to the children and the aged, in proportion to the work they do, than to those who are more capable, as a proper encouragement, and reward for industry in those seasons of life which it is so uncommon. (243–4)

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The community’s economic strategy is long-term investment in land and social capital. The latter is embodied in interpersonal relationships and not monetary profit-making enterprises. Social capital replaces conventional economic principles with an intricate exchange system of obligation and expectation.76 Millenium Hall’s economic reform programme is reinforced by the narrator’s own story. Sir George Ellison returns to England after a long stay in Jamaica where he owned and managed a plantation. While ‘I increased my fortune’, writes Ellison, ‘I gradually impaired my constitution; and though one, who like me, has dedicated all his application to mercantile gain, will not allow that he has given up the substance for the shadow, yet perhaps it would be difficult to deny, that I thus sacrificed the greater good in pursuit of the less’ (Millenium Hall, 54–5). The encounter with the community at Millenium Hall is thus a revelation. Already as a successful owner of a plantation in Jamaica, Ellison took his paternal responsibilities seriously. He provided his slaves with a basic education, a small portion of land, abolished corporal punishment and in general improved working conditions for them. Ellison turned the plantation into another English country estate, regarding his slaves as ‘free servants, or rather like my children, for whose well-being I am anxious and watchful’. ‘[G]ratitude and prudence’ is the innovative tie between master and slave.77 This approach is quite profitable: His [slaves] were, therefore, able with ease, to do so much more work, that he might have diminished their number; if compassion had not prevented him. To keep them in sufficient employ, he made such improvements, both as to the beauty and profit of his estate, as were little thought of by others; at the same time, that he was careful to give his slaves, as much ease and amusement as they could enjoy, without being corrupted by the indulgence; sensible that the greater their happiness, the more they would fear incurring his punishments. (Sir George Ellison, 17)

Profit remains the focus of Ellison’s enterprise. When one tenant of the almshouses explains the community’s dedication to raise and educate the children of neighbouring families, Ellison is impressed but more concerned about the time investment which would reduce the possible profit of the small cottage industry. In the end, as the main narrative illustrates, the narrator is enlightened and converted. He acquires an estate in Dorset and sets up similar charitable projects. Ellison’s relationship with the tenants and subjects in Dorset echoes the one with his slaves: Sir George Ellison remains the sole proprietor of the estate and although he shares the surplus of his income and wealth, he is controlling and deciding as an individual.78 Millenium Hall promotes a classical and humanist understanding of economy and society, an economic and political discourse that emerges in the eighteenth century as country politics. Millenium Hall is based on a system of property and patronage and seeks to maintain the bond between property and social



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obligation against the contemporary movement towards commercial alienation of land. However, it does not hark back to a pure form of feudalism. Scott’s commitment to Anglican ethics and qualities of self-help and self-discipline, leads her to champion a form of primitive industrial capitalism based on social capital. *** In 1778, Lady Mary Hamilton published her most successful novel, Munster Village.79Analogous to Millenium Hall, it depicts the foundation of a utopian community in rural England. The town in Munster Village uses highly differentiated architectural language, consolidating an eclectic neoclassicism with a more universal architectural symbolism. The purpose of this architecture is to establish and maintain social stability by incorporating the utopia of the country house with urban reformism. We have seen that architectural theory and town planning developed in England strictly from the late seventeenth century onwards with the main focus on the building and rebuilding of country estates. Town planning concentrated on the rebuilding or extension of existing towns and cities, that is, London after the Great Fire, Bath, Tunbridge Wells, Cheltenham and Edinburgh. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, industrial villages were founded near ports, fishing harbours or mineral deposits such as the failed Montaguetown on the south coast (to rival Southampton), Lowther Village (Westmoreland), Blanchland (Northumberland, built for lead miners) and Nenthead (run by the London Quaker lead Company). In his Ferme Ornée (1795), John Plaw designed a model village for lead miners, set around a rectangle with semidetached cottages and their gardens.80 Similar plans were realized in Scotland where a large number of ‘clearance towns’ were build from the 1750s well into the nineteenth century, and where the fishing and wool industry also led to the establishment of industrial villages and towns. However, the rise in estate building and the rebuilding of existing estates according to architectural fashions led to the establishment of a significant number of model villages and model farms in the second half of the eighteenth century marrying a utopian and reformist agenda with architectural aesthetics.81 In some ways, these model villages and model farms pre-empted the Garden City designs of the early twentieth century in their concern to unite successfully work and natural environment. John Wood the Younger’ s book A Series of Plans of Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer (1781) is one of the first study to deal specifically with the provision of workers’ housing. He argued that whilst the estates themselves shone in splendour and luxury, the cottages for the workers were in a deplorable state. He concludes ‘that a palace is nothing more than a cottage improved’ and that ‘these habitations of that useful and necessary rank of men,

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the LABOURERS’ were as important as the estates and country houses of their patrons.82 Sir John Soane followed Wood’s argument with plans ‘on a smaller scale, consisting of cottages for the laborious and industrious parts of the community’.83 In the 1790s, he collaborated with Lord Hardwicke of Wimpole Hall (Cambridgeshire) on a model farm, the Home Farm, which united the architectural picturesque in the thatched working units and best architectural practice that encouraged the growing of new crops and the introduction of more efficient farming practices. But already in the 1760s the Adam Brothers were commissioned by Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, to remodel the village of Lowther – a spectacular plan based on a Greek cross that was never completed. William Chambers and Capability Brown assisted Joseph Damer, later Earl of Dorchester to plan and build Milton Abbas (Wiltshire) between 1773–1786. Interestingly, the new village of Milton Abbas was not based on a regular plan but followed the natural shape of the valley into which it descends. In 1805, John Sinclair extended the concept of experimental farms to a whole circular village with cottages, schools, workshops, a public room and gardens for each cottage – clearly pre-empting the reform villages of the nineteenth century.84 Another interesting community is A La Ronde in Devon. It was built in 1795 by the cousins Jane and Mary Parminter as the centre for their The-Point-ofView Trust. This all-female community was designed to educate impoverished Jewish women and children and to convert them to Christianity. The community consisted of the actual building of A La Ronde, as well as the later built church, four poor houses for ‘spinster ladies’ and a school for six female orphans. The building and interior design of A La Ronde is clearly inspired by the years of travels which the Parminters conducted together although the actual architect of the building remains unknown.85 The centrally planned architecture derives its sources from more plainly structured Early Christian buildings such as the Mausoleum as a simple round building and the Baptistery, both of San Vitale in Ravenna, as an octagonal structure. Their centralized type of building was not only their own living quarter but also the chief visual focus of a project which was devised for conversion and hence baptism. The reasoning behind these model villages and experimental farms were the same as for town and city plans: to give an adequate representation of the state of the Arts in Britain, to inspire and thus morally improve, to reform the inhabitants (especially the labouring classes) through beauty, order and simplicity in lifestyle and environment.86 What is at stake here is the relationship between moral philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Architecture, then, was more than a mere construction of a building, but a moral, political and social practice. Munster Village is the prototype of such an ideal place where architecture serves a distinct social and political purpose. The novel depicts the charitable life of the main protagonist, Lady Frances. After the death of her father, she inherits the entire family estate. She decides



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that this inheritance demands social commitment and responsibility and founds a large charitable and intellectual community on the family estate grounds. This decision prompts her to decline the marriage offer from a passionate and faithful lover. Instead she dedicates her life and assets to the community of Munster Village. Munster Village is a geometrically planned town. Its centre is a circular or semicircular building, a tribuna, which houses an academy with its public library, an observatory, a painting and sculpture gallery, and further exhibition rooms for natural history and antiques. The city’s streets originate from the centre and accommodate a hundred buildings. These lodgings decrease in size and ornament from the centre. In addition to the hundred homes, the city houses a hospital, a botanical garden and manufactures to the highest technological standards. Integrated are profitable farming land and hunting grounds (Fig. 3.2). Progress springs from the centre of the community, the spatial as well as intellectual heart. In the tribuna 200 male and 20 female scholars are educated, ‘from the first elements of letters, through the whole circle of the sciences; from the lowest class of grammatical learning, to the highest degrees in the several faculties’ (Munster Village, 24). The education of the men and women is segregated. The academies for men and women are placed within different wings of the tribuna, however the ultimate purpose of the education is consistent for both sexes: ‘Every man finds in himself a particular bent and disposition to some particular character; and his struggling against it is the fruitless and endless labour of Sisyphus’ (24). Professors of the academy judge the natural dispositions and abilities of the scholars and then decide on the further improvement of these qualities. The education of the male scholar is clearly aimed at some future benefit for civil society – illustrated in the exemplary education of Lady Frances’ nephew who spends some time in Holland to become a merchant. Hamilton does not elaborate in such detail on female education – suffice it to say that she seeks to educate women beyond mere decorum and turn them into respectable and useful members of society – moreover, education prepares women for a ‘companionate’ marriage based on affection, companionship and domesticity. As an interesting reference to Millenium Hall, preference is given to women ‘who labour under any imperfection of body – endeavouring, by increasing their resources within themselves, to compensate for their outward defects’ (25). The library and the museum are public but their holdings seem, as the following quote shows, to be more aimed at visitors and foreign scholars than at the rest of the population of Munster Village: This library is open at stated times, (like that of the Vatican, and the French king’s) with every proper accommodation to all strangers. This was greatly wanted in this kingdom. London, after so many ages, remains without any considerable public library. The best is the Royal Society’s: but even that is inconsiderable; neither is it open to the public; nor are the necessary conveniences afforded strangers for reading or transcribing. (23)

Fig. 3.2: Patrick Devlin.© Reconstruction of Munster Village (1778)



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Munster Village clearly attempts to consolidate the problems of the country and the city, of a rural and an early industrial economy and of wealth and poverty in the second half of the eighteenth century. Munster Village is both a country estate and model village of the kind we encountered earlier. The typical conflicts of an early industrial economy are mediated by an architecture which, on the one hand, enforces hierarchical structures within the community and, on the other, reflects and naturalizes its social and cultural values. The intersections between architecture and social behaviour, according to Ernest Green, occur in three major areas: First, the physical lay-out and the buildings may reflect cultural values and thus come to hold major symbolic meaning for community residents. Second, architecture may provide a basis for social control to channel both attitudes and behaviour into approved forms. Third, architecture may reinforce social organization or social structure. (2–3)

It is the last point I particularly want to focus on. Though Lady Frances designs the city herself, she has two collaborators. The landscape garden is conceived with the help of the contemporary garden designer Lancelot Brown, ‘who found great capabilities in the situation: under his direction it is now one of the finest places in England’ (21–2). Another associate in this project is the acclaimed Mr Adams who advises Lady Frances on the architectural of the city. Both Lancelot Brown (1716–1783), better known as ‘Capability’ Brown and James and Robert Adam (1730–1794; 1728–1792) were of course prominent representatives of new aesthetic styles in mid-eighteenth-century Britain: the neoclassical and the picturesque. All three worked on the intimate aesthetic alliance between a country house and its surrounding landscape in their function both as landscape and architectural designers. The landscape garden as advocated by Capability Brown was the preferred setting for an architecture maintaining the strict geometry of the Palladian country house. Whilst the term ‘picturesque’ was later defined more precisely in works by Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque, Richard Payne Knight’s poem The Landscape and Humphrey Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, all written in 1794, the earlier understanding of picturesque in Edmund Burke’s terminology, of ‘movement’ in architecture and landscape and the notion of the picturesque whole were vital to the work of both Adam and Brown. In a letter to Humphrey Repton in 1792, William Mason recapitulates precisely this aesthetic concern of Lancelot Brown and Robert Adam: Brown … was ridiculed for turning architect, but I always thought he did it from a kind of necessity having found the great difficulty which must frequently have occurred to him in forming a picturesque whole, where the previous building had been ill-placed, or of improper dimensions. (emphasis mine)87

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The picturesque whole, according to Lancelot Brown and Robert Adam is expressed in a diversity in space and ambience and ultimately in a partnership with nature.88 It is significant that Lady Frances employs one of the most famous designers and architects of her time for her urban structure when their actual designs were confined to individual buildings and estates, or, at the most, street blocks and urban squares. Her urban vision of an ideal city, though named Munster Village, corresponds to the ‘“Enlightenment dialectic” on architecture’ and urban design (Tafuri, 3). Manfredo Tafuri and John Archer suggest that eighteenth-century designers and architects treated the new urban structures as part of nature and thus negated the artificiality and the economic potency of cities and towns. Urban planning was confined to the design of ‘garden cities’, cities which, in their design and architecture, were artificially integrated into the natural surroundings. The aesthetic ideology which created this ‘urban naturalism’ was the picturesque: Urban naturalism, the insertion of the picturesque into the city and into architecture, as the increased importance given to landscape in artistic ideology all tended to negate the now obvious dichotomy between urban reality and the reality of the countryside. They served to prove that there was no disparity between the value accredited to nature and the value accredited to the city as a productive mechanism of new forms of economic accumulation. (Tafuri, 8)

This contrived relationship between nature and urban reality describes precisely Lady Frances’ Munster Village. Although its heart, spatially and ideologically, is the central academy, the economic support for the city comes from the surrounding farming lands, hunting grounds and the manufactures. Clearly, a sophisticated and urban architecture is combined here with ideas of a working estate or farm. The knowledge generated in the academy is theoretical as well as practical, establishing and maintaining home industries to avoid expensive imports of goods which endanger the self-sufficiency of the community and finally, the nation. The experimental farm uses oxen as work forces since they are stronger and cheaper to maintain, India corn and rice and cork oaks are successfully grown to work the land more efficiently and to be self-sufficient. The workshops are modern factories which use the latest technology to produce their goods. The economy developed in Munster Village is truly proto-industrial and aimed at exploiting all available resources. Lady Frances ‘leaves nothing unattempted which has a chance of becoming useful‘ (33). The production of goods, the mercantile professions are highly valued. Through the geometrical city structure and the neoclassical architecture, the factories are, however, not signified as industrial buildings. They are part of the architectural whole, ‘calculated to ornament the grounds’ (28). Their function is not symbolically displayed. Their architectural language is neoclassical, based on an essential antique typology. The Adam brothers rejected contrived



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and strict rules in favour of basic aesthetic principles which ‘naturalize’ architecture within a picturesque whole. The inspiration came from Greek and Roman architecture. In fact, the Adam brothers established a link between those two architectural styles, which, at that time, was a novel interpretation of neoclassical architectural sources. However, the naturalization of architecture within the principles of the picturesque does not imply a ‘democratization’ of architecture. The Adam style is eclectic because it uses classic references like the classical orders. Its symbolism is thus not evident to every beholder. Although Lady Frances cooperates with one of the Adam brothers on the design of the city, she attempts an architecture and a general urban design which is more transparent. This is already apparent in the combination of historical symbolism of the orders and the more transparent signifier of status expressed in the size of the buildings: The streets, which were built on each side of the Tribuna, were uniform, and the houses ornamented with emblematic figures of the different trades intended for the possessors … The size of the houses decreases gradually from the centre of every street … The different orders succeed each other from the Corinthian to the Tuscan, according to the size of the houses. (27)

The notion of a more universal architectural symbolism was developed by theorists such as Germain Boffrand (1667–1754), Jacques François Blondel and in England, by Thomas Whately. 89 In two lectures of 1734 and 1745, Germain Boffrand presented a novel approach to architecture.90 In both books he introduces the functionalist concepts of caractère and architecture parlante which are so essential for the later ‘revolutionary architecture’. Hanno-Walter Kruft summarizes Boffrand’s new theories as follows: According to Boffrand, every house should, from its external construction to its internal furnishings, clearly express the caractère of its builder. In his above-mentioned lecture on the application of Horatian poetic ideas to architecture, Boffrand goes even further, requiring that every building should express its function: ‘Different Buildings should, by their arrangement (disposition), their construction, and by the way in which they are decorated, proclaim their destination to the observer.’ A building should express the caractère of the occupant or its function. Architecture has an effect, it speaks to the observer. (History of Architectural Theory, 145)

In 1750 Jacques-François Blondel launched a series of public lectures on architecture, later published as Cours d’architecture in 1771. Here he developed Boffrand’s concept of architectural character, linking its origins to the science of physiognomy. As much as the face is directly representing the moral character of the human being, the ‘face’ of architecture is signifying its function and moral worthiness of its owner. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux evolved

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this notion of le caractère expressive radically in his L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs, et de la législation (1804). Not only does he develop an even more transparent and expressive architectural vocabulary in his writing and own architectural designs, but he grants architecture a didactic function which reaches every beholder. Architecture becomes transparent and an important moral agent. Lady Frances uses a similar architectural symbolism to create the social and architectural network of Munster Village. Uniformity and regularity are the ruling principles of the city structure. The geometrical plan reflects the carefully planned and organized society where every member has a specific function in the greater order. Women, men and different social classes have all allocated social and economic functions. Although the houses are not differentiated as such, they decrease in size from the centre outward. Size is a basic geometrical principle to visualize importance, accessible to every beholder – a principle that is used in Paltock’s description of the capital of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti. Here, within a geometrical ground plan, class not only determines the neighbourhood but also the design of the houses; ‘it is as easy to know as by a Sign, where a great Man lives, by the Grandeur of his Entrance, and lavish Distribution of the Pillars, Carving, and Statues about his Portico.’91However, Munster Village adds another layer of architectural symbolism. The emblematic ornament on the façade reveals the profession of the inhabitants of the houses that determines the status of the citizens within the larger social community. Interestingly, this symbolism was later developed and radicalized by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in his plans for the ideal city Chaux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la Législation.92 Here, the woodcutter’s house is constructed of horizontal logs, the maison du caissier is ornamented with statues representing the merit and worthiness of the inhabitant. The aesthetic make-up of the houses in Munster Village is equally functional and symbolic: it very clearly reveals the situation and importance of the inhabitants to the beholder. The ordering principle is trade and profession, implying modern socio-economic categories of social difference. This functional symbolism is complemented by the classical orders which vary within the size of the houses – a feature of neoclassicism. The smallest houses are ornamented with twisted columns which ‘convey an idea of weakness’ (27). With the increasing size and thus importance of the houses and their residents, the eclectic classical orders from the Corinthian to the Tuscan orders are used for the exterior columns, following classical aesthetic principles. The grading of the houses within the city structure, the professional emblems and finally, the twisted columns are part of a transparent architectural vocabulary which speaks to every observer. The classical orders and the generally neoclassical architecture assume a more elaborate aesthetic awareness. Architecture not



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only speaks of the social and economic positioning of the inhabitants of the houses but it secures their important position within a larger context. Further, architecture teaches basic principles of refined aesthetics and taste to the lesser educated. Architecture becomes a social collaborator in Munster Village. Although Lady Mary Hamilton mentions Adam and Capability Brown as collaborators in the utopian project, her architectural vision of the Enlightenment town transgresses the limitations of the Adam style and the picturesque and integrates Enlightenment theories of architecture. Munster Village is therefore not only an Enlightenment project in terms of a modern education of future generations but the usage of aesthetics and architecture make it a forerunner of modern schemes like Chaux. However, Munster Village is not a revolutionary project. Munster Village represents a progressive version of the country-house ideal – what Gary Kelly calls ‘gentry capitalism’. Its economic strategy is long-term investment in land and social capital to secure individual as well as national independence. Like in Millenium Hall, social capital is embodied in interpersonal relationships. The paradox between equality and dependence is addressed by Hamilton herself: All men are by nature equal: their common passions and affections, their common infirmities, their common wants, give such constant remembrances of this equality, even to those who are most disposed to forget it, that they cannot, with all their endeavours, render themselves unmindful of it. They cannot become insensible, how unwilling soever they may be to consider, that their debt is as much their demands, as they owe to others as much as they reasonably can expect from them … . Gratitude is the surest bond of love, friendship, and society. (21)

In this paradigm, society is based on a mode of interaction at once economic and politely social. Munster Village promotes a fundamentally classical and humanist understanding of economy and society, an economic and political discourse that transpires in the eighteenth century as country politics. It is based on a system of property and patronage and seeks to maintain the bond between property and social obligation against the contemporary movement towards commercial alienation of land. It signifies an epistemic shift from a (fundamentally republican) understanding of civic virtue as a primarily public and political quality to a ‘privately oriented civic virtue, that is, a quality that disposes to behaviour beneficial to the public but not for publicly oriented reasons’ (Burtt, 10). The trajectory of civic virtue depicts a society that passes ‘directly from a republican politics based on an all-encompassing emotional engagement with the polis to a liberal society peopled by economically active, politically passive interest-maximizers’ (Burtt, 13). The notion of a good citizen evolves from the position of the disinterested, sovereign landed gentry to the polite, sociable, self-interested commercial man or, more interestingly in this case, woman. Although Munster Village is based on principles of education and

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perfectibility, it denies social mobility to those who pursue trade or commerce. Whilst there is schooling provided for a selected few of the population, there are no schools for factory or agricultural workers and there is no clear curriculum for women. The architecture in Munster Village constructs a regulative space where gender and class hierarchies are naturalized. The geometric regularity of the town – crowned by the tribuna in the centre – assures social cohesiveness whereas the hierarchical taxonomy of housing indicates a fixed social axis. The social theory that underpins this utopian community is based on a revised version of the ‘Great Chain of Being’. Women have always felt the need to imagine other places and spaces which transcend their own alienation, be it social, economic or cultural. This female utopian desire manifests itself in all the texts discussed in this chapter. However, both Millenium Hall and Munster Village also illustrate the exclusiveness of polite utopias. Experiments in polite sociability, elevating learning, virtue and philanthropy to the basis of civic virtue, they nevertheless retained principles of social privilege and conservatism. Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

For a different position, see Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller who label the ‘villa’ and the related country house ethos as ‘negative utopia’, an aristocratic utopia that is opposed to the true principles of ‘positive utopias’: equality and civil liberties. Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller. The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture. Trans. by Tim Spence and David Craven. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992. G. R. Hibbard. ‘The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956): 159–74 (159). See particularly Alistair Fowler. The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. Fowler rejects the identification of the poetry as ‘countryhouse’ poetry and suggests the term ‘estate poetry’ to include those poems and texts that do not specifically mention the architecture of the country house but are nevertheless promoting the values of the country house ethos (Fowler, 1). In addition to these formal divisions, Fowler suggests definite subgenres which include: 1) invitations; 2) welcomes; 3) entertainment poems; 4) appreciations; 5) retirement poems; 6) park poems; 7) closet and gallery poems; 8) building or reconstruction poems; 9) hunting poems; 10) satires (Fowler, 15–16). I borrowed the term ‘possessive individualism’ from C. B. Macpherson. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. In Fowler, 53–62. Both Fowler and McClung have disputed Hibbard’s very specific reading that Palladian architecture as representational and opulent was in fact the object of criticism in poems such as ‘To Penshurst’. William A. McClung. The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.



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7 J. C. A. Rathmell. ‘Jonson, Lord Lisle and Penshurst’. English Literary Renaissance I (1971): 250–60 (256–8). Malcolm Kelsall indeed suggests that ‘Thou art not’ ‘carries with it a sense of “Thou shalt not”, as if the house were a Biblical commandment reified’. Malcolm Kelsall. The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 35. 8 On this point, see Heather Dubrow. ‘The Country House Poem: A Study in Generic Development’. Genre 12 (1979): 153–79 (161). 9 Henry Wotton. The Elements of Architecture (1624). Ed. by Frederick Hard. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968. 71. 10 Henry Vaughn. The Golden-Grove, Moralized in three Bookes: A Worke very necessary for all such, as would know how to governe themselves, their houses, or their country. London: Simon Stafford, 1608. II, 26 [n.p.]. 11 Quoted in Isabel Rivers. The Poetry of Conservatism 1600-1745: A Study of Poetry and Public Affairs from Jonson to Pope. Cambridge: Clarendon Press, 1973. 6. 12 See Lucy Gent. ‘“The Rash Gazer”: Economies of Vision in Britain, 1550–1660’. Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660. Ed. by Lucy Gent. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. 377–93. 13 Vita Sackville-West. Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1976. 33. 14 Charles Molesworth pursues a similar reading in ‘Property and Virtue: The Genre of the Country-house Poem in the Seventeenth Century’. Genre I (1968): 141–57. McClung however suggests ‘to discount economic history as a tool in the analysis of estate poems’ (McClung, 21–2). 15 Fowler discounts this reading when he writes: ‘rent in kind would have been anachronistic in 1612, when commutation to financial payment had long been completed in Kent’ (Fowler, 11). 16 Don E. Wayne. Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History. London: Methuen, 1984. 24–5. 17 Mary Anne C. McGuire. ‘The Cavalier Country-house Poem: Mutations on a Jonsonian Tradition’. SEL 19 (1979): 93–108. 18 Quoted in Fowler, 281–301. 19 For a different reading of the nunnery section, see Chedgzoy. 20 Hugh Jenkins. Feigned Commonwealths: The Country-house Poem and the Fashioning of the Ideal Community. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998. 30. Interestingly, Fairfax himself echoes this point in his short verse, ‘Upon the New-built House at Apleton’ (1650–1671): Think not, O man that dwells herein, This house’s a stay, but as an inn, Which for convenience fitly stands, In way to one not made with hands; But if a time here thou take rest, Yes think, eternity’s the best (quoted in Fowler, 328). 21 Michael McKeon. The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. 131. 22 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications, 1982. 13.

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23 Fowler, 21–4; Virginia Kenny. The Country House Ethos in English Literature 1688–1750: Themes of Personal Retreat and National Expansion. Brighton: Harvester, 1984. Chapter 2. 24 Roger North. Of Building: Roger North’s Writings on Architecture. Ed. by Howard Colvin and John Newman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. 9. 25 Sarah Markham. John Loveday of Caversham 1711–1789. The Life and Tours of an Eighteenth-Century Onlooker. Salisbury: Michael Russel, 1984. 88. 26 C. Bruyn Andrews, ed. The Torrington Diaries Containing the Tours through England and Wales of the Hon. John Byng (Later Fifth Viscount Torrington) between the years 1781 and 1794. 4 vols. London: Methuen, 1970. I, 23. 27 John Evelyn. The Diary of John Evelyn. Ed. by E. S. de Beer. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. III. 133–4. 28 Gladys Scott Thomson, ed. Letters of a Grandmother 1732–1735. London: Jonathan Cape, 1943. 41. 29 Anne Finch. ‘To the Honourable the Lady Worsley at Long-leate, Who Had Most Obligingly Desired My Corresponding with Her by Letters’ (1702), quoted in Fowler, 399–403. 30 Alexander Pope. The Works. 2 vols. London: J. Wright, 1735. II, 39–49. 31 Samuel Richardson. The History of Sir Charles Grandison in a Series of Letters. 7 vols. London: Printed for Mr Richardson, 1753–1754. VII, 21. 32 Lovelace’s character in Clarissa was measured against his quality as an estate holder. Early rumours have him keeping no estate at all, later friends (and Clarissa herself) defend his character through an appraisal of his estate management. See Richardson, Clarissa, 49, 59, 357. 33 Daniel Defoe. The Compleat English Gentleman (1729). Ed. by Karl D. Bülbring. London: David Nutt, 1890. 5. 34 The Spectator. 8 vols. London: S. Buckley and J. Tonson, 1712–1715. VIII, No. 549. See also II, No. 114; I, No. 15; VII, No. 544; III, No. 174. 35 A drastic allegory on the consequences of idleness and disinterestedness is James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence (1748). 36 Gerald McLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward. ‘Introduction’. The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850. Ed. by Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 1–24 (5–6). 37 [John Pomfret]. The Choice: A Poem. By a Person of Quality. London: J. Nutt, 1700. 38 John Gay. Polly: An Opera, Being the Second Part of the Beggar’s Opera (1729). Ed. by Oswald Doughty. London: Daniel O’Connor, 1972. 7–8. The civilizing effect of the country house ethos is also expressed in contemporary paintings, for instance William Hodges’ ‘Natives Drawing Water from a Pond with William Hasting’s House at Alipur in the Distance’ (1781). 39 Lewis Mumford. The Story of Utopias. New York: Viking Press, 1963. 11, 193. 40 Alistair Duckworth. ‘Gardens, Houses, and the Rhetoric of Description in the English Novel’. The Fashioning of the British Country House. Ed. by Gervaise Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for The National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1989. 395–417 (306). 41 Virginia Kenny therefore talks about the country-house ethos as a general term, McBride as the country house discourse.



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42 Frederic Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. 286. 43 Ruth Levitas. The Concept of Utopia. London: Philip Allen, 1990. 122. 44 Hester Chapone. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind: Addressed to a Young Lady (1773). Dublin: Printed for the United Company of Booksellers, 1777. 81, 86. It is conspicuous that the 5th Earl of Northumberland excluded his wife completely from the household management of his estates. See Thomas Percy, ed. The Regulations and Establishment of the Household of Henry Algernon Percy, the Fifth Earl of Northumberland at his Castles of Wresill and Lekinfield in Yorkshire. Begun Anno Domini M.D. XII. London [n. publ.], 1768. Percy was in vast financial troubles with a yearly income of c. £2,300 and £1,500 household expenses but, as Alice Friedman speculates, his marital troubles led him to take over the estates and their management. See Alice Friedman. House and Household in Elizabethan England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 45 Irmintraut Richarz. ‘Oeconomia: Lehren vom Haushalten und Geschlechterperspektiven’. Geschlechterperspektiven: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. by Heide Wunder and Gisela Engel. Königstein: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 1998. 316–36. 46 Gervase Markham. Country Contentments; or, The English Housewife. London: By J. B. for R. Jackson, 1623. 1–2. 47 Patrick Hannay. A Happy Husband; or, Directions for a Maide to Choose her Mate as also a Wives Behaviour towards her Husband after Marriage. To Which is adjoined the Good Wife …, By R. B. London: Richard Redmer, 1618. C3v. 48 Lady S. Pennington. An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters: In a Letter to Miss Pennington. London: S. Chandler, 1761. 27. 49 J. T. Cliffe. The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England. Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1999. 73. 50 Ernest R. O. Bridgeman and Charles G. O. Bridgeman, eds. History of the Manor and Parish of Eston-under Lizard, in the County of Stafford. William Salt Archaeological Society, Collections for a History of Staffordshire: 1899. II, 142, 307–8. 51 Elizabeth McClure Thomson, ed. The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626. London: John Murray, 1965. 184; Rosemary Baird. Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses 1670–1830. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003. Chapter 9. 52 Linda A. Pollock. With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620. London: Collins and Brown, 1993. 10. 53 Amada Vickery. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 127–60. 54 Lord Halifax. The Lady’s New Years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter. London: Randall Taylor, 1688. The Whole Duty of Woman by A Lady. Written at the Desire of a Noble Lord (1695). London: R. Baldwin, 1764, makes a similar point (76). 55 Rawlins, Plaw and Langley were particularly concerned with the separation of offices and living quarters: Thomas Rawlins. Familiar Architecture; Consisting of Original Designs of Houses for Gentlemen and Tradesmen, Parsonages and Summer-Retreats, etc. Together with Banqueting-Rooms, Churches, and Chimneypieces. London: Printed for the Author, 1768; John Plaw. Rural Architecture; or, Designs from the Simple Cottage to the Decorated Villa; including some which have been executed (1785). London: J. and J. Taylors, 1794; Batty Langley. The Builder’s Chest-Book; or, A Complete Key to the Five Orders of Columns in Architecture. London: John Wilcox, 1727.

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56 Anthony Bromley. A Philosophical and critical History of the Fine Arts, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. 2 vols. London: For the Author, 1793; The Builder’s Magazine; or, A Universal Dictionary for Architects, Carpenters, Masons, Bricklayers, &c. As well as for every Gentleman who would wish to be a competent Judge of the elegeant and necessary Art of Building. 2 vols. London: E. Newbery, 1788; John Crunden. Convenient and Ornamental Architecture, Consisting of Original Designs, for Plans, Elevations, and Sections: Beginning with the Farm House, and regularly ascending to the most grand and magnificent Villa; calculated both for Town and Country and to suit all Persons in Every Station of Life. London: Printed for the Author, 1770; Humphry Repton. Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. London: J. Taylor, 1803. 57 Robert and James Adam. The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam. Ed. by Robert Oresko. London: Academy, 1975. 49. 58 The Laws Respecting Women as they Regard their Natural Rights, quoted in Linda Colley, Britons, 238. 59 Frances Burney. Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress (1782). Ed. by Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 1999. 56. Another interesting case is of course Richardson’s Pamela. 60 Catherine Ingraham. ‘Missing Objects’. The Sex of Architecture. Ed. by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway and Leslie Kanes Weisman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. 29–40 (38). 61 Letter from Viscount Lisle to Lady Lisle, 29 September 1609, quoted in McBride, 68–9. 62 Timothy Nourse. Campania Foelix. London: Thomas Bennet, 1700. 339. 63 Karen Harvey discusses a range of gendered spaces in her analysis of eighteenthcentury erotica and focuses particularly on the pastoral location for erotic fiction. It would be worth to extend this study to the country house as a space for erotica and pornography and explore the precise nature of these sexualized locations, that is, the study, the chamber, the walled garden. Karen Harvey. ‘Gender, Space and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century England: A Place Called Sex’. History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 158–79. 64 Marshall Grossman. ‘The Gendering of Genre: Literary History and the Canon’. Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Ed. by Marshall Grossman. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998. 128–42 (131). 65 I will be quoting from Delarivier Manley. New Atalantis (1709). Ed. by Ros Balaster. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. 66 Manley was arrested nine days after the publication of the second volume of the book. It has to be pointed out that the first edition had a separately printed key which reveals the protagonist’s real identities. Hence the secretive enthusiasm of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu promising the key to the volumes to Mrs Frances Hewet (12 November 1709): ‘I am very glad you have the second part of the New Atalantis; if you have read it, will you be so good as to send it to me? and in return, I promise to get you the Key to it. I know I can’. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Ed. by Robert Halsband. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–1967. I,18. 67 By 1736, New Atalantis had been reprinted seven times. In her own novels, Memoirs of a Certain Island and The Mercenary Lover, Eliza Haywood chose the location of world ‘adjacent to the island of utopia’, not to portrait her world as a utopian world but, as I argue, picking up on Manley’s depiction of the Utopians in the second volume of New Atalantis.



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68 For an interesting discussion of this community, see Catherine Gallagher. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 3. 69 Eliza Haywood. The British Recluse; or, The History of Cleomira, Suppos’d Dead. A Novel. London: D. Brown, W. Chetwood, J. Woodman and S. Chapman, 1722. 10. 70 On the use of the pastoral in Haywood, see David Oakleaf. ‘“Shady Bowers! And purling streams! – Heavens, how insipid!” Eliza Haywood’s Artful Pastoral’. The Passionate – Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on her Life and Works. Ed. by Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 283–99. 71 The full title reads, A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent Together with the Characters of the Inhabitants and such Historical Anecdotes and Reflections as May excite in the Reader proper Sentiments of Humanity, and lead the Mind to the Love of Virtue by ‘A Gentleman on his Travels’. In the following, citations are from the edition Sarah Scott. A Description of Millenium Hall. Ed. by Gary Kelly. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995. 72 Susan Lanser. Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. 226. See also Betty A. Schellenberg. The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Chapter 6. Schellenberg complicates Lanser’s interpretation of Scott’s formal devices in Millenium Hall. 73 Nina Auerbach. Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. 5. 74 Harold Perkins. The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 48–51. 75 See Shelley Burtt. Virtue Transformed: Political Argument in England, 1688–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 16–19, for a differentiation of the country interest in the eighteenth century. 76 On the principle of social capital, see James S. Coleman. ‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital’. American Journal of Sociology 94 (Supplement, 1988): S95–S120. 77 [Sarah Scott]. The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). Ed. by Betty Rizzo. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996. 14. 78 The other, more radical conversion takes place with Ellison’s companion, Lamont, the epitome of the feminized gallant who reads Millenium Hall in terms of contemporary fashionable society. Another utopian attempt to reform slavery on a Jamaican plantation can be found in Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777) and Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Shenstone-Green; or, The New Paradise Lost (1779). 79 Lady Mary Hamilton, née Leslie (1739–c. 1818), was the youngest daughter of Elizabeth Monypenny and Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven and Leville. In 1762 she married Dr James Walker who subsequently abandoned her with four young children. She turned to writing and wrote Letters from the Duchess of de Crui and others, on Subjects Moral and Entertaining, Wherein the Character of the Female Sex, with their Rank, Importance, and Consequence is stated, and Their Relative Duties in Life are enforced (1776); Memoirs of the Marchioness de Louvoi. In Letters (1777); Munster Village. A Novel (1778). She remarried Robert Hamilton and lived in France for an extended period. 80 John Plaw. Ferme Ornée; or, Rural Improvements. London: J. and J. Taylor, 1795. Plate XXXIII.

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81 One should however not forget the planned villages by religious communities such as the Moravians and the Quakers that provided examples for later model and industrial villages such as New Lanark, Saltaire and Bourneville. 82 John Wood. A Series of Plans of Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer. A New Edition. London: J. and J. Taylor, 1792. 83 John Soane. Sketches in Architecture Containing Plans and Elevations of Cottages, Villas and Other Useful Buildings. London: Taylor, 1793. Introduction. 84 John Sinclair. Proposals for Establishing by Subscription, a Joint Stock Farming Society, for Ascertaining the Principles of Agricultural Improvement. Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts. Ed. by Arthur Young. Bury St Edmunds: Printed for the Editor, by J. Rackham, Angel Hill, 1800. 360–93. 85 In 1902, Rev. Oscar Reichel transcribed a fraction of the travel diary by Jane Parminter, which dated from 1773–1789. The diary was destroyed in 1942. His edition presents travel account from the summer 1784 when Jane Parminter, Mary Parminter, Elisabeth Parminter, the younger sister of Jane and maybe two more female companions went from London to France. They took the conventional postroute from Calais to Paris and then continued to Dijon, a common route to Italy. The entries are short and factual but in the tradition of contemporary travel writing are not only dedicated to the cultural sights of the French towns and villages but are also concerned with charitable institutions, convents and hospitals. See Rev. O. J. Reichel. ‘Extracts From a Devonshire Lady’s Notes of Travel in France in the Eighteenth Century (Read at Bideford, July, 1902, reprinted from Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art)’. Topographical Tracts 1891–1903 [n. pl., n. pub., n. d.]. 86 Joseph Gandy in his Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms, and other Rural Buildings; including Entrance Gates and Lodges. London: John Harding, 1805, makes the latter point specifically. 87 Quoted from Roger Turner. Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985. 58. 88 In their Introduction to The Works of Architecture (1773–1778), Robert and James Adam frequently employ the terms novelty, variety, diversity. See David King. The Complete Works of Robert and James Adam. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991. 1. 89 John Whately. Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). Already Stephen Riou reflects on the representation of class and architecture in a newly built area (he planned a New Street in the City of London). He suggests that the width of the houses and the number of windows should indicate social class, preserving both diversity and regularity in the façade. Stephen Riou. The Grecian Orders of Architecture. London: J. Dixwell, 1768. 90 Dissertation sur ce qu’on appelle le bon goust en architecture (1734) and his Livre d’architecture (1745). 91 Robert Paltock. Peter Wilkins (1750). Ed. by Christopher Bentley. Oxford: Oxford Classics, 1990. 316. 92 L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la Législation. Tome Premier. Paris: De L’Imprimerie de H. L. Perroneau, 1804.

Chapter Four

‘In this Sacred Space’: Convents and Academies Wherefore, in order thereto, I will take so many Noble Persons of my own Sex, as my Estate will plentifully maintain, such whose Births are greater then their Fortunes, and are resolv’d to live a single life, and vow Virginity: with these I mean to live incloister’d with all the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawful; My Cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them. Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure1 Happy Retreat! which will be the introducing you into such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited, where you shall feast on Pleasures, that do not like those of the World, disappoint your expectations, pall your Appetites, and by the disgust they give you put on the fruitless search after new Delights, which when obtain’d are as empty as the former; but such as will make you truly happy now, and prepare you to be perfectly so hereafter. Here are no Serpents to deceive you, whilst you entertain your selves in these delicious Gardens. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal2

Convents provide ideal sites for an enquiry into the social production of space. In the above quotes, both Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell appropriate the traditional preconceptions about enclosed and all-female spaces and project their own visions of freedom, intellectual perfectibility and sensual pleasures onto the sequestered spaces of convents. Like the harem, the convent has consistently figured as an imaginary space in early modern and modern literature. Indeed, like the harem, writers and scholars have either idealized convents and nunneries as sanctuaries, as places of devotion and chastity or labelled them as a space of libertinage, insanity and debauchery, indicative of male fantasies of female sexuality.3 Convents, like harems and other separatist female spaces, became the proxy for contemporary anxieties about social order particularly in relation to categories of difference like race and gender. Note the violent erasure of the convent in Tony Morrison’s Paradise (1999) that so aptly summarizes the fate of female monastic spaces: Once, the Convent had been a true if aloof neighbor, surrounded by corn, buffalo grass, clover and approached by a dirt track barely seen from the road. The mansion-turned-Convent was there long before the town, and the last boarding Arapaho girls had already gone when the fifteen families arrived … [W]omen who, when they came, one by one, were obviously not nuns, real or even pretend, but members, it was thought, of some other cult. Nobody knew. But it wasn’t important to know because all of them, each in her turn, and like the old Mother Superior and the servant who used to, still sold produce, barbecue sauce, good bread and the hottest peppers in the world … Strange neighbors, most folks said, but harmless.

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More than harmless, helpful even on occasion. They took people in – lost folks or folks who needed a rest. Early reports were of kindness and very good food. But now everybody knew it was all a lie, a front, a carefully planned disguise what was really going on … A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons … The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women.4

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church exercised control over convents and nunneries: ‘The Fourth Lateran Council (1214) and the Council of Lyons (1274) enacted decrees which required future founders of religious institutes to adopt one of the four established Rules (St Basil, St Augustine, St Benedict or St Francis).’5 The fate of the Oblates of Tor de’Specchi, the Ursulines and of Mary Ward’s Institutes, but more so of anchorites or hermits, speak of the struggles of women to live an autonomous spiritual existence as alternative to matrimony or ecclesiastical institutionalization. Prompted by Protestant criticism of the contemplative life and accusations of corruption and immorality, the Counter-Reformation, specifically on the Continent, resulted in an increased enforcement of the clausura and a general disenfranchisement of female orders:6 ‘The property, the political authority, and the independence of female monastics was the chief target and the chief victims of these reforms.’7 Handin-hand with these measures went strict prohibition of ‘special’ friendships amongst nuns, even of, as Laven has shown, friendship based on unavoidable kinship ties that existed amongst Venetian nuns (100). Whilst the habitus that was created in medieval monastic culture promised ‘sexual equality in salvation through acceptance of a code of social inferiority and subordination of women within Creation’, the price to pay was the effective desexualization and regulation of the female body, disciplined internally by the vow of chastity, devotion and physical enclosure.8 The other strand of representation speaks of uncontrolled or misguided female sexuality that roams wildly in a separatist, homosocial space. Texts such as Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (1796), [Jean Barrin], Venus in the Cloister; or, The Nun in her Smock (1725) or Fatal Friendship: A Novel in Two Volumes, by a Lady (1770) associated pornographic fantasies of female sexuality in convents with anticlericalism, and particularly in English literature of the eighteenth century, with anti-French nationalism bound up with antiCatholicism.9 This trope referred back to post-Reformation literature that depicted ‘the Catholic Church as a sexually transgressive woman who seeks to entice the faithful into “spiritual fornication” despite being the “foulest and filthiest harlot that was ever seen”’.10 The novel The American Fugitive; or, Friendship in a Nunnery (1784) thus warns on its title page:



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Those who to Covents fly, will sadly find, That danger, vice, and wo’ of every kind, Are surely met with there, not left behind.11

The practice of forced vocation was also seen as one of the main contributing factors for corruption and sexual deviancy as the women did not enter convents of their free will. The Counter-Reformation authorities thus monitored strictly the entry of women into convents (Laven, 26). Fortified architecture, hidden passageways, curtains, screens and underground corridors evoked these misdemeanours of sex and violence that were epitomized so uncompromisingly in the Gothic novel and the works of the Marquis de Sade and Laclos.12 ‘Conventual buildings’, suggests Hills, represented nuns’ bodies ‘metaphorically and metonymically’.13 But, as I will show in the work of Margaret Cavendish, the convent also affirms the female community as a viable alternative to marriage and castimony, a female sexuality that whilst being non-reproductive and virginal, embodies lesbian desire and pleasure or simply friendship. Implicit in this yearning is the ambivalent construction of the convent as sanctuary from a confining and threatening environment. Convents were partially organized as households (familiae) and certainly, before the enforced clausura, maintained a more permeable and open contact with their kin and parochial or urban congregations. Because of the social make-up of convents, the role that convents and nunneries played in controlling women economically and sexually, and because of the pastoral care provided for the congregation and in general, hospitality offered to travellers and the poor, the lived space in nunneries and convents functioned like gentry households with parlours, galleries and guest-halls. Comparing the ground plans of monasteries for men and women, Gilchrist argues that similar to comparable gentry households, spatial gender segregation dominated the use of spaces but furthermore, the allocation of space symbolized the gender matrix: ‘In nunneries the dormitories were located in the deepest space, whereas male communities were equally, and sometimes more likely to reserve the deepest space for the chapter house – the heart of monastic community and daily routine’ (166). However, the originally semi-public/semi-private and thus permeable character of convents and monasteries was broken down with the edicts of the Council of Trent where the active life of nuns and the contact with the community at large was prevented. Nevertheless, as Hills argued for convents in Naples, the post-Reformation cloistering of the nuns provided different freedoms: ‘What we see here, then is a paradox: women, marginalized by their sex, exploit the advantage of their religious enclosure and economic privilege to articulate a new and bold identity for themselves.’14 In a sense, Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (1577) symbolizes the escape from the monastery as a prison at its extreme. Spiritual enlightenment will finally liberate the soul from its interior and exterior incarceration:

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Considering the strict enclosure and the few things you have for your entertainment, my Sisters, and that your buildings are not always as large as would be fitting for your monasteries, I think it will be a consolation for you to delight in this interior castle since without permission from the prioress you can enter and take a walk through it at any time.15

In England, the Reformed church under Henry VIII had its own mechanisms to suppress nunneries. The Greater Monasteries Act (31 Henry VIII.c.13) of 1536 abolished most religious communities in general, but at the same time awarded royal licenses to 47 monastic orders.16 Convents and nunneries were, as all other monastic institutions, expropriated and again tales ‘of the immorality and financial incompetence of nuns served as an excuse to transfer their income to these ambitious [noble]men’ (McNamara, 423–4). But, as King suggests, ‘the nunneries both lost population and waned in moral commitment and intellectual verve during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, well in advance of the Protestant Reformation.’17 Perhaps this was because, as historical evidence seems to suggest, that the perpetual enclosure of nuns in medieval monasticism was not valued as constructive ‘alternative female communities’ by aristocratic women.18 In the end, only 18 nunneries survived the Greater Monasteries Act as – in opposition to the Continent – most nuns in England came from less well-endowed families that could not financially support the convents and nunneries (McNamara, 424).19 Paradoxically, the dispossessed nuns had still to adhere to the vow of chastity (Six Articles of 1539). It was only in the seventeenth century that religious communities began to be re-established. With the exceptions of the attempts made by Mary Ward and Nicholas Ferrar, the majority of English institutions were founded on the Continent. These new institutions housed nuns in ancient orders, such as the institutions by the Poor Clares, the Benedictines or the Carmelites and followed the original preReformation models of the convent. In addition to a strict religious life and worship they offered education and guidance to women. Other orders, such as the Beguines, sought to establish institutions for women without the rule of enclosure. All these projects inspired the literary imagination even long after the dissolution of the monasteries and convents as a (nostalgic) space of refuge, emancipation and self-determination. A woman’s desire for a female community was seen as disruptive and unnatural as she withdrew from the patriarchal authority within the family and political life. More so, as in the case of the enforced clausura, it is ‘her usurpation of male prerogatives’ that are, as Traub suggests, ‘the transmission of property and wealth through the body of legitimate heirs’.20 This is the food of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature that establishes the convent as a prison where forced vocation or mere incarceration of the female protagonist seeks to secure this control and legitimacy – the alternatives women were given was either forced marriage or forced vocation.21 Ana Acosta points towards a strand of ‘convent’ novels



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published from 1760s onwards that, as I would add, complement the concerns of Penelope Aubin or Eliza Haywood early in the period and pre-empt the Gothic novel in their concerns about domestic patriarchal despotism.22 The equation of domestic despotism with political despotism in Catholic countries echoes contemporary discourses on Oriental autocracy (see Chapter 5) and need to be read in the context of English xenophobia against non-Protestant countries. What is at stake here is religion bound up with national identity and economic supremacy. Anne Fuller’s novel The Convent (1786), the anonymous Anecdotes of a Convent (1771) or The American Fugitive negotiate in a more stringent way than contemporary novels by Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, or Frances Burney, the paradigmatic shifts from the early modern patriarchal family that demands absolute filial obedience and the heterosocial companionate family model.23 The enforced cloistered life though creates friendships that resist the phallic authority of the Mother Superior or Abbess much like the resistance to the authority of the Eunuchs in contemporary harem literature. The totalitarian character of nunneries and convents is revealed through juxtaposition with true intentional communities – voluntary communal attachments based on principles of friendship or comradeship. However, these associations are mostly temporary. Under the guise of comedy, A Midsummer’s Nights Dream (1594), As You Like It (1599), Twelfth Night (1602) and indeed A Convent of Pleasure allow for lesbian desire only within the context of the conventional and rather unconvincing ending of heterosexual marriages. The ‘convent novels’ as well as the Gothic novels end with happy marriages replacing sisterly friendship with marital companionship and domesticity. The female community represents a powerful and consistent social vision of utopian potential that engages with contemporary discourses of gendered domesticity. We have seen that these communities were imagined in a rich diversity of spaces ranging from convents and nunneries, through boarding schools and academies, to palaces and harems. In this chapter, however, I want to focus on the representation of the convent and the academy as both educational institutions and intentional communities that provide a viable alterative to marriage, enforced vocation or single life. *** Margaret Cavendish was a prolific writer. Apart from the already mentioned works on natural science, philosophy, poetry, biography and autobiography, she also composed two volumes of plays. The first was written in the 1650s and published in 1662 as Playes. The second volume, Playes, never before Printed was published in 1668.24 These plays occupy a special place within the English history of drama. The first volume of plays was written during the Interregnum

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when theatres were closed and thus performance was highly unlikely. Elaine Hobby suggests that Cavendish created ‘a kind of closet drama, intended to be recited aloud by a reader in privacy of her (or his) own home, and they consist of a series of possible roles to try out for size … Writing drama when the theatres are closed, she can also reject the genre’s rules and conventions when they do not suit her needs.’25 And indeed, Cavendish experimented with dramatic conventions to the point that critics found them ‘confused’, ‘undramatic’ and ‘intolerable’. These problems were also encountered with the later volume of plays which were expected to be performed. Despite the disclaimers that Cavendish herself placed in the prefaces of most of her volumes, acknowledging the unrefined language and imperfect structure of all her writing, she elsewhere declares that her ‘artlessness’ and ignorance is in fact liberating and ultimately more creative: Give Mee the Free and Noble Stile, Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild, Though It runs wild about, It cares not where; It shewes more Courage, then It doth of Feare. Give me a Stile that Nature frames, not Art: For Art doth seem to take the Pedants part And that seemes Noble, which is Easie, Free, Not to be bound with ore-nice Pedantry.26

Underlying these calls for a free and unprejudiced mind is a deep scepticism towards social and cultural conventions that exclude women from nearly all domains of contemporary society including creative writing. This scepticism emancipates Cavendish from generic conventions in her literary oeuvre and the result is a complex and highly experimental work. Also, her closet dramas have, as Linda R. Payne suggests, a surrealistic and cinematic quality which makes them perhaps more appealing ‘to the modern imagination than they did for her time’.27 Cavendish’s plays, especially The Convent of Pleasure and The Female Academy complement The Blazing New World (see Chapter 3) and Bell in Campo, in search of female agency and spatial control. Despite the transitory achievements in The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure, these plays are an important mark in female utopian thought.28 Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure was published in 1668 as number four of Plays, Never Before Printed. It clearly demonstrates contemporary anxieties around all-female spaces and homoerotic desire as the conventional ending of marital alliance seems to eradicate the Rabelaisean staging of female autonomy. As an heiress, Lady Happy is faced with dire future prospects: marriage, prostitution or monastery: Put the case I should Marry the best of Men, if any best there be; yet would a Marry’d life have more crosses and sorrows then pleasure, freedom, or happiness: nay Marriage to those that are virtuous is a greater restraint then



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a Monastery. Or, should I take delight in admirers? they might gaze on my Beauty, and praise my Wit, and I receive nothing from their eyes, nor lips; for Words vanish as soon as spoken, and Sights are not substantial. Besides, I should lose more of my Reputation by their Visits, then gain by their Praises. Or, should I quit Reputation and turn Courtizan, there would be more lost in my Health, then gained by my Lovers, I should find more pain then Pleasure; besides, the troubles and frights I should be put to, with the Quarrels and Brouilleries that Jealous Rivals make, would be a torment to me; and ‘tis only for the sake of Men, when Women retire not: And since there is so much folly, vanity and falshood in Men, why should Women trouble and vex themselves for their sake; for retiredness bars the life from nothing else but Men. (9)

Lady Happy does not consider monastic retirement an attractive option and thus decides to invest her money into a quasi-secular convent, or, more precisely, a country retreat. Interestingly, it is Madame Mediator who describes the actual space whereas Lady Happy is more concerned with the domestic arrangements and designs: Mediator:

… Also, her House, where she hath made her Convent, is so big and convenient, and so strong, as it needs no addition or repair: Besides, she has so much compass of ground within her walls, as there is not only room and place enough for Gardens, Orchards, Walks, Groves, Bowers, Arbours, Ponds, Fountains, Springs, and the like: but also conveniency for much Provision, and hath Women for every Office and Employment: for though she hath not above twenty Ladies with her, yet she hath a numerous Company of Female Servants, so as there is no occasion for Men. (14)

Kathleen Jones reminds us that Cavendish is overtly anti-monastic and antiCatholic in the World’s Olio (1655) – a sentiment, that provoked Du Verger’s pamphlet Humble Reflections on Some Passages of the Marchioness of Newcastle’s Olio (1657) where he vigorously defends the integrity of the Catholic Church and of monastic life.29 Clearly Cavendish draws on another contemporary literary trope: pastoral retirement literature that turned the political impotence and exile of Royalists during the Interregnum into a voluntary retreat from the public sphere:30 Mediator:

But surely you will not incloister your self, as you say.

Lady Happy: Why, what is there in the public World that should invite me to live in it? (9)

‘The first consequence of this, ‘ suggests Chalmers, ‘is that royalist defeat leads to a period of respectful nostalgia for the feminocentric Caroline court culture which underpins Cavendish’s plays’ – especially the préciosité of Henrietta Maria’s court life (87). The iconography of the femme forte and the Amazonian

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female community provided inspiration to contemporaries of Henrietta Maria – played out in pastoral romances and an idealization of platonic friendships. Implicit in the celebration of the femme forte was of course the mythology of female rule, epitomized in Catherine de Medici, Marie de Medici and Henrietta Maria herself as well as the effective thus heavily satirized political interventions by Civil War women.31 However, Henrietta Maria had also a different interest in retired life. She acquired a property previously owned by the Marshal de Bassompierre, in Paris in 1651 and turned the estate into a nunnery, subscribing to the monastic rules of the Order of the Visitation, an order founded by St Frances de Sales specifically for gentlewomen.32 Though enclosed like a passive cloister, Cavendish’s convent is more an intentional community for gentlewomen than a convent in its stricter sense.33 Cavendish proposes that the active choice of women to denounce the society of men does not have to be libertine or evil, but can be blissful and gratifying, as indeed the courtly circle of Henrietta Maria was labeled a homoerotic ‘Commonwealth of Amazons’.34 The convent becomes a place of friendship and intellectual, sensual and culinary pleasures. In this context, the retirement which ‘bars the life from nothing else but Men’, is not a fraught retreat into exile but a different form of privacy, as Julie Sanders suggests, ‘a potentially empowering locale’.35 ‘My Cloister’, exclaims Lady Happy, ‘shall not be a Cloister of restraint, but a place of freedom’: Men are the only troublers of Women; for they only cross and oppose their sweet delights, and peaceable life; they cause their pains, but not their pleasures. Wherefore those Women that are poor, and have not means to buy delights, and maintain pleasures, are only fit for Men; for having not means to please themselves, they must serve only to please others; but those Women, where Fortune, Nature and the gods are joined to make them happy, were made to live with Men, who make the Female sex their slaves; but I will not be so inslaved, but will live retired from their Company. (11)

Cross-dressing and homorerotic relationships are imagined within the context of pastoral masques that were performed at the Convent especially when Lady Happy falls in love with the Princess and asks: ‘But why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?’ (25). To enhance the homoeroticism of the scene, Tomlinson suggests that against early modern stage conventions, Cavendish envisaged an actress playing the Princess.36 However, Cavendish cannot pursue the ultimate consequence of her utopian vision: gender separatism. But her ideological reversal is a complex one, carrying paradoxical messages. The princess whom Lady Happy falls in love with is a cross-dressed man, feigning female virtues and blessings better than any other woman. He quickly is celebrated as an essential member of the community. He woos Lady Happy to the point that she begins to question her



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own sexuality, as the above quotation has shown. However, when discovered, the ‘new man’ reverses to a more traditional character: Prince

But since I am discover’d, go from me to the Councillors of this State, and inform them of my being here, as also the reason, and that I ask their leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms. (34)

From this point onwards, Lady Happy disappears as a free-acting agent in the play. The Prince has decided to marry Lady Happy, with or without the use of force. Lady Happy on the other hand does not make this conscious decision herself. Margaret Cavendish has resolved this traditional dramatic conflict of role reversal with the re-establishment of conventional gender roles. Lady Happy’s utopia ceases to exist, she is silenced and the last words are spoken by the victorious Prince.37 By creating a social and economic enclave within the walls of a convent, the women of The Convent of Pleasure create an intentional community. This community supports and enhances the fundamental principle of female friendship. It promises ‘rich and unusual fulfilment for women, frightening those outside by their potential for upheaving the social order’ (Payne, 27). Whilst intrusion from the outside is made impossible, not only by the architectural structure of the convent itself but also by the convictions of the community members, the enemy can still strike from within. With the intrusion of a man into the convent, social and political resistance is suppressed. Lady Happy abandons the convent in favour of marriage and the acquisition of a new political power: being the Princess of an empire. But this time, unlike in The Blazing World, the Princess is silent and conforming. Seventeenth-century writers such as Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Poulain de la Barre, Marie de Gournay and Mary Astell continued Cavendish’s (and the querelle des femmes’s) inquiry about the ‘character’ of women and amalgamated Cartesian and protofeminist discourses on gender. Rejecting the inequality of the sexes as cultural prejudices, they promoted a Cartesian biology that proved a gender equality based on sameness – ‘the mind has no sex.’ Education and the notion of perfectibility came thus to fulfil a ‘utopian’ function in a time where secular and religious concerns converged. The space that was imagined as a reformist institution was the secular or Anglican convent and, developing from there, the female academy. *** The secular convent inherited a long and complex history of nunneries and shared, with the phenomenon of the femme forte, a history of hyperbolic sexualization of a female existence that is learned and sovereign. We can trace

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the representation of the femme savante as unnatural, cross-gendered and thus monstrous from the period of the querelle des femmes onwards to de Quincy’s verdict on the Bluestockings in 1852 as a ‘feeble minority’ of mannish women, ‘not simply obsolete, but even unintelligible to our juniors’.38 Cavendish’s The Female Academy struggles again with these representations. It was published in the 1662 edition of Playes and was, as Hero Chalmers suggests, influenced by William Cavendish’s play The Varietie (first performed between 1639–1642) (82).39 It depicts a female academy where a company of young gentlewomen under the guidance of some matrons live and study together until a group of enraged men conquer the premises. The idea of a specifically female educational institution was not new in Cavendish’s time. After the Reformation, women had fewer educational institutions available to them than under Catholicism, since convents and nunneries had not only provided a shelter for single or widowed women but offered education and intellectual improvement. The reestablishment of convents and nunneries as an important social service was controversially discussed in the seventeenth century as part of the greater discourse on the education of women. There was no public school system for women and intellectual women such as Margaret More and Anna Maria van Schurman were given private tuition under the auspices of their fathers. Early modern educational reformers advocated secular convents or female academies as ideal places for the education of women. However, these plans were highly functional and limited. If Juan Luis Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman (1540) was an important early plea for the education of woman, it was nevertheless constraining since it aimed at educating women solely for the purposes of becoming good wives and mothers. Later plans by Mary Ward, Mary Astell or Bathsua Makin tried to de-functionalize female education. They saw education being vital to the development of a woman’s subjectivity and fought for the establishment of female academies and educational institutions. Margaret Cavendish’s plan for a female academy is not free from the limitations of the contemporary educational debate. The academy is ‘a house wherein a company of young ladies are instructed by old Matrons; as to speak wittily and rationally, and to behave themselves handsomly, and to live virtuously’ (653). The women are tutored by direct teaching and regular discussion groups where prescribed subjects are debated. The method of Platonic dialogues is developed in more detail in Cavendish’s Orations of Divers Sorts (1662). Twice a day, the female academicians convene to discuss the status of women in English society as well as broader subjects such as virtue, vice, friendship, honesty, literature and theatre. The recording of these debates is dispersed by short dramatic fragments about the excluded men who are plotting to invade and conquer the Academy and by sketches of women discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the Academy. The reader learns that some men have founded a less successful, male counterpart to the female academy. The men



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conclude after a long debate that ‘those Women, which restrain themselves from the company, and use of men, are damned, being accused by Men, judged by Nature, and condemned by the Gods’ (659). The male opposition serves as a comic device in the play, a device reused later in The Convent of Pleasure. The male academy turns into a ‘counter-revolutionary’ enclave where the men scheme to conquer the female academy. Last, but not least, they determine to march into the academy, blowing trumpets around the grounds and finally triumph over the women. Although Margaret Cavendish depicts a successful all-female space in The Female Academy, advocating the necessity of education and intellectual stimulation for women, some aspects in the play itself seem inconsistent with this underlying endeavour. Whilst the space devised for the academy is a separatist retreat, it can nevertheless be surveyed and finally conquered by men. A grate in the convent allows visual penetration and control by the male spectators and indeed, the women stage themselves as prospective wives. As the matron explains, ‘these Ladies have not vowed Virginity, or are they incloystred; for an Academy is not a Cloyster, but a School, wherein are taught how to be good Wives when they are married’ (679). Although at first sight, the female academy endeavours to develop the intellectual faculties of its members for their own sake, the grate proves that the academy remains a conventional space. Controlled and scrutinized by the male spectators, it serves as a space where women stage themselves not only as objects of desire but in the end as ideal wives and mothers. This design clashes conspicuously with the long orations on the value of female education and intellect. The academy is a separatist space where women experience intellectual self-fulfilment and perfectibility. This intellectual and ultimate moral improvement is functional: it serves to produce better wives and mothers. Although the space of the academy is enclosed and excludes men, it can be surveyed by them through a grille. This controlling male gaze is appropriated by the academicians who display themselves and their intellectual progress only to attract future husbands. The liberating potential of the separatist space is therefore undermined by the functionalization of women’s education. The initial attempts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to justify the establishment of women’s educational institutions bear testimony to this conflict and are marked by issues of control and surveillance. As learning weakened women’s ‘sinful tendencies’, the function of female education for most pamphletists and reformers was thus moral education and the channeling of female sexuality.40 One of the earliest schemes for female academies and secular convents was proposed by Robert Burton. Due to the rising social problem of poverty and spinsterhood, Burton felt it necessary to advocate ‘a monastical college for old, decayed, deformed, or discontented maids to live together in, that have lost their first loves, or otherwise mismarried, or else are willing howsoever to lead a single life’ (II, Pt 3, Sect. 2, 224). His proposition

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was to provide a social support system for single women or impoverished widows. Education did not play a significant role in Burton’s proposition though he found the wish to lead a virginal life (for both men and women) perfectly acceptable if not more desirable than marital commitment; ‘’tis twenty to one thou wilt not marry to thy contentment: but as in a lottery forty blanks were drawn commonly for one prize, out of a multitude you shall hardly choose a good one: a small ease hence, then, little comfort’ (II, Pt 3, Sect. 2, 221). Edward Chamberlayne was inspired by the Protestant convents in Germany. In a letter to a friend of 31 January 1670, he sketches out a plan for a college that was to be devoted to the education of upper-class women under the ‘government of some grave matrons, who shall resolve to lead the rest of their dayes in a single retired religious life’. He continues, that ‘for at first there will only need a house with good gardens well secured with walls, and a constant salary for a Chaplain … .’41 Whereas Chamberlayne acknowledges the need for educational facilities for women, he makes it very clear that although the college would be governed by women themselves, a chaplain would have to provide religious and moral guidance. The chaplain would seem to be part of the fortification of the college where walls would keep the intruders out and the chaplain would protect the residents from themselves and secure the moral standards within the community. Ruth Perry sums up this urge for fortification, which recurs in other expository writings by men on this subject, as follows: ‘It is worth noting that whenever men imagined such a retreat for women, they invariably thought of it as a target for designing men where the breach was sure to be attempted and which therefore stood in need of protection’.42 In his later publication An Academy Or Colledge, Chamberlayne elaborates on the plan and calls for possible investors as well as for possible students for his college which would be situated near London.43 He also explicates the necessity to have a similar college for pensioners and unprovided elderly men, resembling Chelsea College. Chamberlayne’s contemporary Clement Barksdale provided a more elaborate and less incarcerating seminary for women in A Letter Touching A Colledge of Maids; or, A Virgin Society, written August. 12, 1675. Barksdale sees the College as a reform of the traditional nunneries and convents in that they provide intellectual and moral instruction: As for the Religious Orders of Virgins in the Roman Church, though some of those very great abuses have crept in; yet I think’t were to be wish’d, that those who supprest them in this nation, had confin’d themselves within the bounds of a Reformation, by choosing rather to rectifie and regulate than abolish them. (Postscript)44

Pre-empting Astell, Barksdale seeks to further ‘both the Divine and Humane (with moderate Recreation) in a convenient House, where they may have Lodging and Diet together, and be under Government, somewhat like the



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Halls of Commoners at Oxford’. The financial exclusivity of the College is balanced by an employment scheme for 10 poor women who are to serve the twenty gentlewomen. In a constitution reminiscent of the later Millenium Hall, Barksdale specifies the curriculum and suggests that if ‘some of them are capable and well-affected to studies of Philosophy, especially Natural and Moral; and delighted with making some of the easier Experiments in Natural Things’, the curriculum could be extended to history, natural history, poetry, foreign languages, music, dance, philosophy and experimental science. ‘The End (for that is first to be considered)’, writes Barksdale, ‘is to improve ingenuous Maids in such qualities as best become their Sex, and may fit them both for a happy Life in this, and much more in the next world’. Like his predecessors, George Hickes struggled with the problem of single women and the issue of the education of women. Whilst he enthusiastically recommends the establishment of schools or colleges for women in a Sermon of 1 April 1684, in the light of the deficient education that is provided for women, he is more concerned about exercising control in a later piece: ‘… Liberty in its full latitude is a greater Nuisance than Slavery; and to be at freedom to do any thing, is no less prejudical to Society and Manners, than a Power to do nothing. Vertue consists in a Mean; Ladies must not be mew’d up like Nuns on the one side, nor must they wander about like Vagabonds on the other.’45 In the end, he recommends home schooling for women. Schemes such as the aforementioned and especially Mary Astell’s proposition inspired a wide range of Protestant convents and female academies in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. Whilst the ‘Arminian nunnery’ at Little Gidding was an exceptional experiment, the short-lived ‘Order of Intellect’ founded by Mary North (1638–1662) was an interesting attempt to combine the academic with the communal.46 Mary North congregated the female members of her extended family into a female academy.47 Her brother remembers the female society being at work together (as the use of that family was) with rehearsing by heart prolix romances, with the substance of speeches and letters, as well as passages; and this with little or no hesitation, but in a continual series of discourse, the memory of which is to me, at this day, very wonderful. (III, 288)

The order had its own logo: a sun with a circle touching the rays, and upon that, were wrote ατρkηs [autarkes] in the proper Greek characters, which her father suggested. Divers of these were made in silver and enamel, but in embroidery plenty, which were dispersed to those wittified ladies who were willing to come into their order; and for a while they were formally worn, till the foundress fell under the government of another and then it was left off. (III, 288)

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The ‘government of another’ was the marriage of Mary North to Sir William Spring – a development reminiscent of Lady Happy’s disintegrating Convent of Pleasure – the ‘always about to be betrayed’ fate of female communities.48 Bridget Hill quotes Lady Lettice, Viscountess Falkland as perhaps one ‘of the first women to express the idea of a “Protestant nunnery”’.49 ‘It seems’, writes her biographer, ‘that the ideal which the domestic life at Great Tew Manor followed during Lady Falkland’s widowhood was the standard of that at Nicholas Ferrar’s “Protestant Nunnery” at Little Gidding (a much-criticized but beautiful endeavour to revive the professed religious life).’50 Thus, Lady Falkland’s plan was to establish at Burford Briory a place ‘for the education of young Gentlewomen, and for the retirement of Widows … hoping thereby that learning and religion might florish more in her own Sex than heretofore, having such opportunities to serve the Lord without distraction’ (29). Unfortunately, Lady Falkland was prevented by the Civil Wars from establishing her retreat. Mary Ward (1585–1645) was an important Roman Catholic example of a woman who crusaded against the Catholic Church to provide institutions for women seeking education and recluse amongst their sisters. Her conflict illustrates the historical controversy between the Church of Rome and any alternative female religious group that wanted to break free from the Church and its patriarchal dictate. Following an early spiritual revelation Mary Ward decided, against the wishes of her parents, to move in 1606 to St Omer – one of the main continental sites of exiled monasteries and nunneries – and join the order of the Poor Clares. She left the convent after a year, realizing that her own commitment and conviction was to found a religious institution for exiled English women, which would follow the constitution of The Society of Jesus and ultimately would provide the opportunity of a mixed life for the members. This was the beginning of a lifelong struggle against the Catholic Church and The Society of Jesus. In Mary Ward’s case, The Society of Jesus did not approve of any female adaptation of their institution and protested ferociously against Mary Ward’s enterprises, claiming that Saint Ignatius himself was opposed to female Societies of Jesus. She nevertheless began to establish her own institutes in different locations and was consequently persecuted and eventually imprisoned. In her first plan of the School of the Blessed Mary, Mary Ward specifies the purpose of her institution. She advocates a ‘mixed life’ in the convent, which accordingly she names an ‘Institute’: so that in this way we may more easily educate maidens and girls of tender years in piety, in the Christian virtues and liberal arts so that they may be able thereafter to undertake more fruitfully the secular and monastic life, according to the vocation of each.51

The choice of academic subjects, following the classical-medieval curriculum of the artes liberales, is typical for the rules of Saint Ignatius de Loyola, but



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unusual for contemporary education for girls and women: ‘He [Saint Ignatius] desired to stimulate those students, through self-activities, to a well-balanced perfection of their faculties or powers … .’52 Lowell Gallagher suggests that Ward’s curricula, were, one might say, ‘bi-gendering’, in the sense that the Institute fashioned a cadre of ‘virgins and young girls’ equipped not only to ‘profitable embrace either the secular or the religious state’ but to move with ease between the prescribed female and male spheres of expertise as well.53

Ward’s Second Plan of the Institute of 1616 presses for the break with the monastic tradition ‘with insistence on freedom from enclosure, an “ordinary” manner of life, that is, no regular practice of external penances, nor the wearing of a habit’ (Orchard, 43–4). Mary Ward defended the right of women to choose freely their own destiny and, contrary to contemporary practice, defines marriage as only one of many choices men and women have in life: ‘And if it were wrong to force any private man to marry a wife whom he cannot love, much more must be the election of everyone’s vocation of this kind be free’ (Orchard, 70). Ward’s contemporaries opposed this freedom of choice. The 1622 petition by the English Seminary to Gregory XV sums up the objections against Mary Ward. They objected to the undue mobility of her and her sisters, travelling through Europe and Great Britain to found new institutes as well as seeking support. The English Seminary also disputed the freedom of enclosure that Mary Ward demanded and lastly contested ‘the power to speak of spiritual things’ (Orchard, 69). This reaction was similar to the response by the Bishop of Ypres to Mary Ward’s request to establish a new community on a country estate near Gravelines in 1607. Mary Ward managed to found several institutes all over Europe. In 1639, after 30 years of exile, she returned to England, encouraged by the reign of Henrietta Maria. She founded a school in London for Catholic girls, who would otherwise have missed out on a Catholic upbringing. She had to leave London in 1642, for political reasons, and fled with her school to Yorkshire, continuing her project until her death in 1645. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the economic gap between women and men was growing. As Ruth Perry pointed out, the wars as well as the consequent emigration diminished the number of men, at least in London, and women were increasingly unprovided for (103). This becomes obvious when examining the demographics of Chelsea during the second half of the seventeenth century. This borough housed many single women who lived as lodgers with affluent families or were able to hold their own property. Chelsea also had a number of girls’ boarding schools and therefore provided employment opportunities for these women. It is therefore no coincidence that Mary Astell moved to Chelsea and chose it to be the place of her charity school which she established in 1709 with the financial and active help of her affluent friends. This school complemented Chelsea College and helped the children of

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the Out-Pensioners to obtain an education. The girls in particular were advised to become learned and were taught the necessity of providing for themselves. What made Astell’s school unusual was not this call for independence for the girls, or the placing of the school within a community which provided financial help as well as voluntary helpers, but that she stipulated that the school was ‘always to be under ye Direction of Women’ (quoted in Perry, 242). The establishment of her school was a logical consequence of her own philosophical thinking and writing. Early seventeenth-century schemes for women’s seminaries or academies were all, in their variations, petitions for a just and extensive educational system for women and for the freedom of choice. These writings on education focused on the development of reason and virtue in womankind that would not only be beneficial for the microcosm of family and marriage, but also ultimately would be advantageous to society as a whole. The agenda of the ultimate equality of women was tamed by contemporary notions of femininity that limited women’s sphere to motherhood and housewifery. The promise of Cartesian rationalism was not kept and even ‘radical’ thinkers such as Poulain de la Barre contemplated essentialist ideas about women. This undercurrent of prejudiced essentialism also surfaced in the writings of pamphleteers such as Chamberlayne who sensed the subversive danger in an all-female community and arranged for its surveillance. This assumption was undermined by writers such as Mary Astell whose writings precisely create a paradox between the educational discourse of their time and her own vision of a female paradise where womanhood is viewed outside motherhood and housewifery. In 1694, Mary Astell anonymously published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest with a second part of 1697, Part II: Wherein a Method is offer’d for the Improvement of their Minds.54 Her scheme is the most intricate in the history of the schemes for secular convents, and is consciously in dialogue with earlier communitarian projects. This was recognized by contemporaries, such as John Evelyn, who clearly saw Astell as one instance of a long history of secular convents and directly linked her to the project of Little Gidding.55 The argumentative core of A Serious Proposal is the establishment of a ‘Religious Retirement’ to provide women with fundamental education for their worldly and spiritual sake. It is a separatist retreat, but flexible in its statutes since it allows women to leave whenever needed. Clearly, Astell tries to consolidate the contemporary debate around women and education with her own conviction that a separatist space is the ultimate solution to women’s worldly and spiritual happiness. Although the second part takes back some of the radicalism of these ideas, the satirical reactions to her writings, which are reminiscent of the Reformation tracts against convents, prove that the idea of a separatist space uncontrolled by the Church or other male institutions would be threatening and completely



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unacceptable.56 On the other hand, the first part went through five editions between 1695 and 1701 and therefore proved extremely popular. Drawing liberally on the tradition of ladies’ conduct books, Mary Astell makes her argument more accessible and plausible to a wider range of women than the short drafts on educational projects presented earlier. She begins the first part of A Serious Proposal with an address to the female readers to consider her book as another form of advice, to secure beauty and charm: ‘I therefore persuade my self, you will not be less kind to a Proposition that comes attended with more certain and substantial Gain; whose only design is to improve your Charms and heighten your Value, by suffering you no longer to be cheap and contemptible’ (Serious Proposal, 3–4). Female beauty and charm should be independent of fashion, trends and last but not least, the approval of men. It should be an inner beauty springing from reason and understanding. Mary Astell redefines the subjectivity of woman in these passages. Instead of being mere objects of lust and desire for men, they can attain selfhood by developing their intellectual capacities. This education of self is not only a necessity within Christian doctrine but also results in the reformation of marriage and motherhood as well as, ultimately, society. The concept of perfectibility and its conclusive aims, though, are more complex in Astell’s writings. In the first part of A Serious Proposal she attempts to reclaim subjectivity and selfhood for women based on the assumption that God makes no difference between reason and understanding in men and women. Astell continues to maintain that the perfectibility of women is not an individual affair, but directly affects the social microcosm of the family and the macrocosm of society. She crosses the division of the public and the private through the construction of civic motherhood. Women can participate in the public sphere by raising their children in a responsible and moral way. To fulfil this duty, women therefore have to work on their own intellectual and moral education. Astell maintains that the extension of wisdom and knowledge of women is within controlled limits when she writes: We pretend not that Women shou’d teach in the Church, or usurp Authority where it is not allo’wd them; permit us only to understand our own duty, and not to be forc’d to take it upon trust from others; to be at least so far learned, as to be able to form in our minds a true Idea of Christianity… . (56)

At first sight, Astell’s justification of the establishment of a female academy is mainly based on a Christian notion of duty and social responsibility. However, her direct invitation of the female reader to join the retreat adds another aspect: Happy Retreat! which will be the introducing you into such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited, where you shall feast on Pleasures, that do not like those of the World, disappoint your expectations, pall your Appetites,

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and by the disgust they give you put on the fruitless search after new Delights, which when obtain’d are as empty as the former; but such as will make you truly happy now, and prepare you to be perfectly so hereafter. Here are no Serpents to deceive you, whilst you entertain your selves in these delicious Gardens. (44–5)

This is a much more sensual invitation to a Paradise of Women, a community founded on the principles of ‘Noble, Vertuous and Disinteress’d Friendship’ (46). Astell’s plan of a college founded on female friendship and devotion, not only implies that life outside patriarchal systems is edenic, but also that it is necessary for the true fulfilment of the female self. Astell replaces the concept of marriage in the traditional sense with the concept of a moral marriage between women which is based on equality, true devotion and (platonic) desire. In her Letters concerning the Love of God, between the Author of The Proposal to the Ladies and Mr John Norris (1695) and A Serious Proposal, as well as in her poetry, Mary Astell speaks of this propensity to female friendship which she shares with her female companions: But I intend by it [friendship] the greatest usefulness, the most refin’d and disinteress’d Benevolence, a love that thinks nothing within the bounds of Power and Duty, too much to do or suffer for its Beloved; And makes no distinction betwixt its Friend and its self, except that in Temporals it prefers her interest. (Serious Proposal, 92–3)

As Ruth Perry concludes, ‘she describes female society as a kind of prelapsarian world where piety is as natural as eating or breathing and where ennui is unknown. It is a paradise such as that in which “Mother Eve” once lived, a garden without serpents’ (Perry, 146). It is only natural for women to share their lives. Any other form of living would imply personal sacrifice for women. This explains the fundamental rhetorical difference between the beginning of the Serious Proposal and the passage quoted above. A woman entering marriage sacrifices her own self for the civic duty of wifehood and motherhood; a community of women is not only edenic but also natural to women and emancipates their selves from patriarchal oppression. These thoughts become very clear in Mary Astell’s later writing, Some Reflections upon Marriage of 1700. Although she still maintains that women are not physically and intellectually inferior to men, she believes that the power of the patriarch as a continuation of the power of the king and ultimately the power of the Church demands ultimate obedience. This hierarchy results in the submission of the wife to the authority of the husband, a submission which is her civil duty. If the marriage is founded on reason and friendship, it will be to the advantage of both husband and wife. If the marriage is based on greed and vanity, then the marriage must be a challenge to the virtue and character of the wife whose role it is then to maintain the peace within that relationship. ‘The Christian Institution of Marriage’, Astell sums up, ‘provides the best that may be for Domestic Quiet and Content, and for



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Education of Children; so that if we were not under the tye of Religion, even the Good of Society and civil Duty would oblige us to what that requires at our Hands’ (Reflections upon Marriage, 97). The proper education of women and the ultimate reform of men and society might, in Astell’s view, result in a redefinition of the basis of marriage, but the hierarchical structure within this relationship remains fixed. Whilst her ideological framework for a female academy is elaborately developed, her practical plans in A Serious Proposal are only sketchy: Suffice it at present to signify, that they will be more than ordinarily careful to redeem their Time, spending no more of it on the Body than the necessities of Nature require, but by a judicious choice of their Employment and a constant industry about it, so improve this invaluable Treasure, that it may neither be buried in Idleness, nor lavish’d out in unprofitable concerns. For a stated portion of it being daily paid to GOD in Prayers and Praises, the rest shall be employ’d in innocent, charitable, and useful Business; either in study in learning themselves or instructing others, for it is design’d that part of their Employment be the Education of those of their own Sex; or else in spiritual and corporal Works of Mercy, relieving the Poor, healing the Sick, mingling Charity to the Soul with that they express to the Body, instructing the Ignorant, counselling the Doubtful, comforting the Afflicted, and correcting those that err and do amiss. (59–60)

The society will be founded on friendship, benevolence, devotion to God and a £500 fee. Ergo, it is clearly aimed at an affluent part of the female population. But, as she claims, the investment is worthwhile: Whereas a wise and good Woman is useful and valuable in all Ages and Conditions: she who chiefly attends the one thing needful, the good part which shall not be taken from her, lives a cheerful and pleasant Life, innocent and sedate, calm and tranquill, and makes a glorious Exit; being translated from the most happy life on Earth, to unspeakable happiness in Heaven; a fresh and fragrant Name embalming her Dust, and extending its Perfume to succeeding Ages. (119)

Mary Astell negotiates existing political and social conventions with her radical critique of the status of women in society which results in her idealization of female bonding. Her concern with the status of women, however, is deeply rooted in the personal conviction that women can only find their true fulfilment in the company of female friends – a companionship that is founded on spiritual and physical support in the light of Christian duties. Her writings speak of the conflict between the wish to reform women and return to them a sense of responsibility and civic duty in the context of marriage and the deeper, more emotional conviction that ultimately, female friendship and a separatist way of life is the only solution to women’s suffering. Mary Astell’s own life speaks of this true emotional and idealistic commitment to female bonding, but

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without the radical consequences that occur in A Serious Proposal. With the friendship and love of Lady Catherine Jones, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Ann Coventry and Elizabeth Hutcheson, she not only founds and maintains her charity project in Chelsea but also fulfils her own dream of a secular convent; ‘Theirs was a Protestant nunnery without walls or vows, a community without a charter, one which developed over the years a sense of strongly shared purpose’ (Perry, 281). Although Astell’s project was criticized and ridiculed, the discussion about female colleges did not cease. *** Daniel Defoe, in his Essay upon Projects of 1697, dedicates a whole chapter on ‘An Academy of Women’.57 He argues in a similar manner to his predecessors: I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the world, considering us as a Civiliz’d and a Christian Countrey, that we deny the advantages of Learning to Women. We reproach the Sex every day with Folly and Impertinence, while I am confident, had they the advantages of Education equal to us, they wou’d be guilty of less than our selves. (282)

Women and men have the same intellectual capacities and it is detrimental not only to women but also to society to leave women uneducated. Defoe distances himself even more than his fellow-thinkers from the establishment of a convent. The academy will be an academic institution based on public schools for men. Women decide voluntarily when to enter the college and when to leave it. The teaching includes music, dance, literature, history and conversation – quite a polished education in comparison to the earlier schemes. The ultimate aim is to prepare women for marriage and future social duties: ‘But, in short, I wou’d have Men take Women for Companions, and Educate them to be fit for it’ (302–3). Defoe sees the establishment of female academy as a beneficial and necessary project and foresees the establishment of one college per county and ten academies in London only. Despite his objections to convent culture, Defoe borrows one aspect from the tradition of passive cloisters that men were not allowed to enter the academy. In addition to this closure of the institution, surveillance is a major concern to Defoe: The Building shou’d be of Three plain Fronts, without any Jettings, or Bearing-work, that the Eye might at a Glance see from one Coin to the other; the Gardens wall’d in the same Triangular Figure, with a large Moat, and but one Entrance. (287)

It is conspicuous that Defoe specifically chooses a triangular shape for his project. In the passage quoted above he clearly underlines the aspect of



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surveillance, when he says ‘that the Eye might at a Glance see from one Coin to the other’ in the triangular courtyard. Surveillance and control of the enclosed space, as well as security against outside intruders, are Defoe’s key concerns. Although contemporary architectural treatises consider the triangle itself as an unsatisfactory building shape for civil architecture, they acknowledge the traditional usage of the shape in fortifications. Since the sixteenth century, the elaborate development of firearms and the artillery-led strategies of attack questioned the usage of the square as the dominant architectural form. Based on contemporary investigations into ballistics, polygonal layouts with triangular corner bastions were advocated to ensure ultimate security. The same justification of unlimited control and best possible surveillance has been applied later in the context of another type of fortification; prison architecture, where the triangle is an important geometrical shape, too. Whereas initially the radius of the projectile was the central principle of fortified architecture, the radius of the controlling gaze became the focal rationale of reform prison architecture. One of the earliest examples is James Elmes’ designs for prisons in his Hints for the Improvement of Prisons (1817) where the triangle precedes the radial control of Bentham’s Panopticon.58 The desire to provide a fortified space as a female academy also echoes the increasing enclosure of female monasteries after the Reformation – a gendered architecture of fortification that rendered nuns invisible. On the one hand, the enforced clausura changed liturgical rituals so that the religious iconography in convent churches along with their actual architectural organization enhanced the separation of the nuns from the lay community and the altar.59 On the other, a sublime ‘rhetoric of fortification’ dominated the interior and exterior design of the institutions (Hills, ‘Cities and Virgins’, 34): Pronounced rustication on portals, narrow entranceways reached through cast iron gateways and up steep flights of stairs, heavy wooden doors flanked by wheels (ruote) which obviated the need for contact between human beings while allowing goods to pass to and from the convent, set up a clear sense of policed and controlled boundaries and apertures. Inside, bars, grilles, screens, curtains and choirs not only separated nuns from laity, but served to draw attention to that separation … Architectural attention focused on the elements symbolic of enclosure. (Hills, ‘Architecture as a Metaphor’, 78)

These discourses on fortification and spatial control not only dominated the convents and monasteries in early modern Italy and France but spilt over to wider social policies. Philip F. Riley has suggested that similar strategies of social control were applied to female prisoners during Louis XIV’s ‘Great Confinement’ in Paris. Here institutions such as the Salpêtrière ‘more closely resembled that of a convent than a prison’ as religious not secular authorities were responsible for the management of women’s prisons.60 Again, what was

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policed in Paris at the time was not crime or deviancy in general but female sodomy, sorcery, transgressive sexuality – indeed, any sins of the flesh. John Bender suggests that being a spy and a government agent, Defoe is very much concerned with prisons, confinement and social authority in his novels. He not only describes in minute detail the experience of his protagonists in prison or in confinement but he also shows ‘how, in confinement, the internal forces of psychological motivation fuse dynamically with the physical details of perpetual experience. Here is the penitentiary imagined as the meeting point of the individual mind and material causes.’61 This fusion of the individual and its surrounding material condition is the basis of Defoe’s control system for the female academy in his Essay upon Projects. In fact, Defoe’s construction ensures an extensive control when he writes: When thus every part of the Situation was contriv’d as well as might be for discovery, and to render Intrieguing dangerous, I wou’d have no Guards, no Eyes, no Spies set over the Ladies, but shall expect them to be try’d by the Principles of Honour and strict Virtue. (288)

Surveillance is thus externalized and internalized. Social control is facilitated by the architectural structure – the triangle – where everyone can police everybody else. This preliminary stage to the Panopticon has already surpassed Bentham’s idea of control and surveillance by introducing the internalization of ideology and dogma. ‘The penitentiary, which uses the material instruments of architecture and daily regime to recreate the convict’ corresponds to Defoe’s female academy where the material world in the guise of the triangular building and the spiritual world in the guise of intellectual instruction reform the students, so that they become their own and each other’s wardens (Bender, 50). Only then are they fit to become companions to their husbands and mothers to their children. In creating this highly policed and surveilled academy, Defoe displays deep anxieties and fears about the controllability of spaces. He seeks to prevent the growth of a possible place of resistance by inducing the inmates to the internalization of patriarchal authority. *** Whilst these three authors struggled with the preservation of male authority, the working model of the academy/secular convent was developed further by pamphletists, reformers and novelists of the eighteenth century.62 Against the ‘gynaecopolitcal satires’ of the seventeenth century that tried to discredit utopian visions of commonwealths of women, the eighteenth-century novel integrated but at the same time depoliticized the potentially radical agenda of secular convents or female academies by celebrating female sensibility, domesticity and benevolence. Sensibility’s allure as a foundation upon which



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communities of ‘like-feeling’ individuals could be built clearly contained a new utopian promise. A new domestic ideal – the woman who orders and shapes the home, the arbitress of values enclosed within and protected by domestic authority, the guarantor of charity and benevolence – offered a form of utopia as surely as the more apparently egalitarian and progressive hopes of later utopian thinkers. Sarah Fielding’s novel The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759) portrays the noble case of Mrs Bilson who, after a long history of suffering and exploitation, uses her own inheritance to found an institution for ‘Gentlewomen, who either had no Fortune, or so little that it would not support them’.63 Clara Reeve’s lesser-known novel, The School for Widows (1791) complements her educational writing and advocates the mutual support of widows by sharing property and income. Thomas Amory’s semi-fictional Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755) praises Mrs Harcourt’s establishment where ‘persons of quality’ (that is, women) were provided with ‘everything the heart can wish for’. This involved not only a scholarly retreat where outsiders were not admitted, but the supply of ‘an elegant table’ with the ‘best meat’ and ‘wine of every kind’.64 The deposit again was £500 which was invested in the foundation for the good of the whole community. William Law recommended ‘little societies’ as a way of restoring piety and faith to society: If therefore persons of either sex, mov’d with the life of Miranda, and desirous of perfection, should unite themselves into little societies, professing voluntary poverty, virginity, retirement, and devotion, living upon bare necessaries, that some might be reliev’d by their charities, and all be blessed with their prayers, and benefited by their example … such persons would be so far from being chargeable with any superstition, or blind devotion, that they might be justly said to restore that piety, which was the boast and glory of the Church, when its greatest saints were alive.65

Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and indeed her own lifestyle seems an attempt to realize the endeavours of Astell, Defoe and Fielding: My sister rises early, and as soon as she has read prayers to their small family, she sits down to cut out and prepare work for 12 poor girls, whose schooling they pay for; to those whom she finds more than ordinary capable, she teaches writing and arithmetic herself … They have a very pretty house in Bath for the winter, and one at Bath Easton for the summer, their houses are adorned by the ingenuity of the owners, but as their income is small, they deny themselves unnecessary expenses. My sister seems very happy … Lady Bab Montagu concurs with her in all these things, and their convent, for by its regularity it resembles one, is really a cheerful place. (emphasis mine)66

In The History of Miss Indiana Danby (1765), Clara Freemore praises a Protestant Convent as ‘a little Eden’ that provides genteel and single women with the ‘joys of friendship’ and a female community as family based on

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principles of friendship, support and respect.67 Interestingly, though a Protestant institution, the commitment to the community is described as absolute: ‘for I determined’, explained the founder, ‘that we would so far imitate the convents abroad, as to vow a single life, and confinement to one fixed habitation; and this because the mind is changeable, that we could expect no regularity without such a restraint … here we fixed for life, never going without the bounds of our garden walls, except upon acts of necessity and mercy’ (98–9, 100). Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754) also gives support to the foundation of a Protestant Nunnery. Grandison acknowledges the necessity to establish ‘in every country, Protestant Nunneries; in which single women of small or no fortunes might live with all manner of freedom, under such regulations as it would be a disgrace for a modest or good woman not to comply with, were she absolutely on her own hands; and to be allowed to quit it whenever they pleased’ (IV, 140). ‘[S]uch a society’, it is proposed, ‘as this, all women of unblemished reputation, employing themselves as each (consulting their own genius) at her admission, shall undertake to employ herself, and supported genteelly, some at more, some at less expence to the foundation, according to their circumstances, might become a national good; and particularly a seminary for good wives, and the institution a stand for virtue’ (IV, 141). Indeed, Grandison even suggests a reformed scheme for Catholic nunneries: ‘Let them have liberty at the end of every two or three years, to renew their vows, or otherwise, by consent of their friends’ (VI, 12). The contemporary anxieties about female economic and social agency are diffused here by a new configuration of femininity. This chapter explored the construction of emancipatory spaces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The convent and academy are imagined as educational and reformist institutions for women to repair the damage of a long-standing neglect of education. In addition to its specific function, these are also historically and politically determined spaces, on the one hand, woven into the controversial history of nunneries and on the other hand, ideologically linked to the historical debates about education, sexuality and the role of women in society. They therefore become sites of ideological conflicts oscillating between contemporary assumptions about gender and space and early feminist discourses. On a material level, projects such as Cavendish’s and Astell’s projects show the characteristics of contradictory spaces which clearly establish a friction between the symbolic architecture of the convent and the actual usage of the space. Their emancipatory endeavours result in more architecturally specific schemes by Chamberlayne and Defoe. The architectural space guarantees that the function of the secular convent as a reforming and educating institution within the ‘discourses of patriarchy is performed. Although frequently brought together in the history of educational institutions, these projects imagine quite different models of female communities.



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Notes 1 Margaret Cavendish. The Convent of Pleasure: A Comedy (1668). Ed. by Jennifer Rowsell. Oxford: Seventeenth Century Press, 1995. 11. I will be quoting from this edition. 2 Mary Astell. A Serious Proposal. London: R. Wilkin, 1696. 40. 3 See Robert Thompson. Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic, Obscene, and Bawdy Works written or Published in England in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979. 4 Toni Morrison. Paradise. London: Penguin, 1999. 10–11. 5 Emmanuel Orchard. Till God Will: Mary Ward through her Writing. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. 28 (n. 13). 6 On the aspect of Counter-Reformation reforms, see also Mary Laven. Virgins of Venice. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003; Carol Baxter. ‘Repression or Liberation? Notions of the Body Among the Nuns of Port-Royal’. Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. Ed. by Christine Meek. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000. 153–71; Francesca Medioli. ‘An Unequal Law: The Enforcement of Clausura Before and After the Council of Trent’. Women in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe. 136–52. However, Claire Walker makes the point that the clausura was virtually broken by the nuns through their extensive correspondence with family and friends. Claire Walker. ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the World”: Letter-Writing in Early Modern English Convents’. Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Ed. by James Daybell. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. 159–76. 7 Jo Ann Kay McNamara. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 417. 8 Roberta Gilchrist. Gender and Material Culture: The Archeology of Religious Women. London: Routledge, 1994. 14–15. See also McNamara who traces the failure of syneisactism and the increasing erosion of female autonomy in convents and nunneries especially from the late fifteenth century onwards. 9 In addition, these convent pornographies are part of a tradition that uses libertine pornographia as political satire. See James Grantham Turner. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630– 1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 10 Kate Chedzoy. ‘“For Virgin Buildings Oft Brought Forth”: Fantasies of Covent Sexuality’. Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities. Ed. by Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl. Basingstoke: Macmillan. 53–75 (55). 11 [Phebe Gibbes (attr.)]. The American Fugitive; or, Friendship in a Nunnery containing a Full Description of the Mode of Education and Living in Convent Schools, both on the low and high Pension; The Manners and Characters of the Nuns; The Arts practiced on Young Minds; and their Baneful Effects at large, by a Lady. London: A. Pope, 1784. 12 Brenda Tooley suggests that it is particularly Ann Radcliffe who explores the advantages and perils of the utopian conventual retreat. Brenda Tooley. ‘Gothic Utopia: Heretical Sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian’. Utopian Studies 11.2 (2000): 42–56. 13 Helen Hills. ‘Architecture as Metaphor for the Body: The Case of Female Convents in Early Modern Italy’. Gender and Architecture. Ed. by Louise Durning and Richard Wrigley. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, 2000. 67–112 (98).

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14 Helen Hills. ‘Cities and Virgins: Female Aristocratic Convents in Early Modern Naples and Palermo’. Oxford Art Journal 22.1 (1999): 29–54 (52). 15 Teresa of Avila. The Interior Castle. Trans. by K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodrigues. New York: Paulist Press, 1979. 195. 16 See Peter F. Anson. The Call of the Cloister: Religious Communities and Kindred Bodies in the Anglican Communion. Ed. by A. W. Campell. London: SPCK, 1964. 2–15. 17 Margaret L. King. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. 84. 18 Barbara J. Harris. ‘A New Look at the Reformation: Aristocratic Women and Nunneries, 1450–1540’. Journal of British Studies 32 (April 1993): 89–113 (112). 19 In opposition to McNamara, King suggests that there were only 13 houses left in 1534. 20 See Valerie Traub. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 181. This was the case for all isolated societies for women. 21 On this point, see Kate Ferguson Ellis. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 22 Ana M. Acosta. ‘Hotbeds of Popery: Convents in the English Literary Imagination’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 15.3–4 (April–July 2003): 615–42. 23 Anne Fuller. The Convent; or, The History of Sophia Nelson. In two volumes. By a Young Lady. London: T. Wilkins, 1786; Anecdotes of a Convent. By the Author of Memoirs of Mrs Williams. In Three Volumes. London: T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1771. 24 London: A. Maxwell, 1668. 25 Elaine Hobby. Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88. London: Virago Press, 1988. 105. 26 Poems, and Fancies. 2nd edn. London: William Wilson, 1664. 110. 27 Linda R. Payne. ‘Dramatic Dreamscape: Women’s Dreams and Utopian Vision in the Work of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle’. Curtain Calls: British and American Women in the Theatre 1660–1820. Ed. by Mary Anne Shofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991. 18–33. 28 It must suffice to briefly mention her other modes of experimenting with utopian spaces: the liminal spaces Bell in Campo (1662) and Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656). In both texts, Cavendish situates her utopia in a space that is devoid of feminine spatial signifiers – the battlefield and exile – offering agency, mobility and control over geographical (and thus textual) territories. The nomadic existence of the female warriors in Bell in Campo and of Travellia in Assaulted and Pursued Chastity provides truly liberatory spaces that are set against the domestic spheres of the garrison town or indeed the home. The spatial paradigms of space/place, mobility/stasis, discovery and territorialization/enclosure are again regendered in Cavendish’s work. They are essentially political, challenging contemporary notions about the social and cultural position of women in society. 29 Kathleen Jones. A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673. London: Bloomsbury, 1988. 123. 30 Hero Chalmers. ‘The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure’. Women’s Writing 6.1 (1999): 81–94 (86–7). 31 On political satires on femme forte mythology, see James Grantham Turner, Chapter 3.



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32 See Quentin Rone. Henrietta Maria: Queen of the Cavaliers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. 239–40. 33 On the overlap between religious communities and intentional communities, see Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh. Out of the Cloister: A Study of Organizational Dilemmas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977. 34 Richard Flecknoe, quoted in Turner, 104. 35 Julie Sanders. ‘“The Closet Opened”: A Reconstruction of Private Space in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish’. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Ed. by Stephen Clucas. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. 127–42 (135). 36 Sophie Tomlinson. ‘“My Brain The Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’. Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760. Ed. by Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss. London: Routledge, 1992. 134–63 (157). 37 Another female protagonist, Isabella, is silenced under similar circumstances in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (performed 1604). 38 Thomas De Quincy. Autobiography. Quoted in Sylvia H. Myers. ‘Learning, Virtue, and the Term “Bluestocking’’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 15 (1985): 279–88 (286). 39 London: J. Martin, J. Allestrye and T. Dicas, 1662. I will be quoting from this edition in the following. 40 ‘[C]ette étude cause des distractions qui affoiblissent les penchans vichieux’. Article Femme (Anthropologie) in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des science, des art et des métiers (1751–1780), quoted in Liselotte Steinbrügge. The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 33. 41 J. Wickham Legg. English Church Life From the Restoration To the Tractarian Movement Considered in some of its Neglected or Forgotten Features. London: Longmans, 1914. 282–3. 42 Ruth Perry. The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. 131. 43 The full title reads: An Academy Or Colledge: Wherein Young Ladies and Gentlewomen May at a very moderate Expence be duly instructed in the true Protestant Religion, and in all Vertuous Qualities that may adorn that Sex; also be carefully preserved, and secured, till the day of their Marriage, under the Tuition of a Lady Governess, and grave Society of Widdows and Virgins who have resolved to lead the rest of their lives in a single retir’d Religious way, accordingly to the Pattern of some Protestant Colledges in Germany. London: Printed by Tho. Newcomb, 1671. 44 Clement Barksdale. A Letter Touching A Colledge of Maids; or, A Virgin-Society, written August, 12, 1675. St Cyrian, Bishop and Martyr, Of Discipline, Prayer, Patience. London: Sam Keeble, 1675. 45 George Hickes. A Sermon Preached at the Church of St. Bridget, on Easter Tuesday, being the first of April, 1684. Before the Right Honourable Sir Henry Tulse, Lord Mayor of London and Honourable Court of Alderman, Together with the Governors of the Hospital, upon the Subject of Alms-giving. London: W. Kettilby and R. Kettlewell, 1684. 26–7; The Gentleman Instructed, in the Conduct of a Virtuous and Happy Life. In Three Parts Written for the Instruction of a Young Nobleman. To Which is added A Word to the Ladies, by way of supplement ot the First Part. London: E. Smith, 1716 (6th edn.). 168. 46 Nicholas Ferrar: His Household and his Friends. Ed. by T. T. Carter. London: Longmans: Green and Co, 1892. 93.

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47 Roger North. The Lives of the Norths. Ed. by A. Jessop. 3 vols. London: Gregg, 1972. III, 288. 48 Valerie Traub. ‘The (In)sigificance of “Lesbian” Desire in Early Modern England’. Queering the Renaissance. Ed. by Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. 62–83 (62). 49 Bridget Hill. ‘A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’. Past and Present 117 (November 1987): 107–30 (111). 50 John Duncon. Lady Lettice, Viscountess Falkland. Ed. by M. F. Howard. London: John Murray, 1908. 27. 51 Emmanuel Orchard. Till God Will: Mary Ward through her Writing. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. 35. 52 Ignatius of Loyola. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Trans. by George Edward Ganss. St Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970. 187 (n. 1). 53 Lowell Gallagher. ‘Mary Ward’s “Jesuitresses” and the Construction of a Typological Community’. Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. Ed. by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 199–220 (200). 54 Quotes from Part II are from Bridget Hill, ed. The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell. London: Gower/Temple Smith, 1986. 55 John Evelyn. Numismata: A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern. Together with some Account of Heads and Effigies of Illustrious, and Famous Persons, Sculpts, and Taille-Douce of whom we have no Medals extant, And of the use to be derived from them. To which is added A Digression concerning Physiognomy. London: Benj. Took, 1697. 265. 56 See Tatler. 32 (12–13 June 1709); 63 (1–3 September 1709), Donald F. Bond, ed. The Tatler. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. I, 237–41, 434–41. 57 Daniel Defoe. Essay upon Projects. London: R. LR., 1697. 58 The first edition was published in 1814. The full title reads: James Elmes. Hints for the Improvement of Prisons, for their better Regulation, and for a more oeconomical Management of Prisoners; Partly Founded on the Principles of the late John Howard, Esq. F.A.S. Embracing all the Practical Benefits of that Illustrious Philanthropist and other subsequent Writers, particularly the Recommendation and Suggestions of the Select Committee of the Honourable The House of Commons, etc. London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co, 1817. 59 See also Caroline A. Bruzelius. ‘Hearing is Believing: Clarissan Architecture, ca. 1213–1340’. Gesta 31.2 (1992): 83–91. 60 Philip F. Riley. ‘Michel Foucault, Lust, Women, and Sin in Louis XIV’s Paris’. Church History 59 (1990): 35–50 (41). 61 John Bender. Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. 43. 62 See: Priscilla Wakefield. Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement. London: J. Johnson, 1798; Clara Reeve. Plans of Education; With Remarks on the System of Other Writers. London: T. Hookham and J. Carpenter, 1792. 63 Sarah Fielding. The History of the Countess of Dellwyn. 2 vols. London: A. Millar, 1759. I, 207–8. 64 Thomas Amory. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain: Interspersed with Literary Reflexions; and Accounts of Antiquities and Curious Things. In Several Letters. London: John Noon, 1755. 416.



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65 William Law. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Adapted to the State and Condition of All Christians. 2nd edn. London: William Innys, 1732. 135. 66 MO 6731, Letter from Elizabeth Montagu to Dr Gilbert West, 16 October 1755. 67 The History of Miss Indiana Danby. In Two Volumes. London: J. Dodsley, 1765. I, 95, 97.

Chapter Five

Fatima’s House: Oriental Voyage Utopias Thus, you see, these people [Turks] are not so unpolished as we represent them. ’tis true their magnificence is of a different taste from ours, and perhaps of a better. I am almost of opinion they have the right notion of life; while they consume it in music, gardens, wine, and delicate eating, while we are tormenting our brains with some scheme of politics, or studying some science to which we can never attain, or, if we do, cannot persuade people to set that value upon it we do ourselves. Lady Mary Wortley to Abbé Conti, 19 May [1718] These savages, and who have reduced the wants of human nature to a mere nothing give a most wonderful example of mental and physical strength. … I hope that no sensible unprejudiced person will think money ill spent in having acquired a knowledge of a people who command the whole tract of country, in conjunction with the Wahabees, which extend from the borders of Syria to the Persian gulph, and from the istmus of Suez to the Straits of Bab el mandeb; which appears to me to be equally interesting to the moral & natural philosopher, to the statesman & the soldier. Lady Hester Stanhope

For centuries, the Orient has been ‘Europe’s collective day dream’ and nightmare at the same time.1 Earthly paradise, Oriental wisdom, despotism, terror and abundant sexuality are well-documented elements of the imaginary geography that projected political and erotic fantasies onto the East.2 Edward Said’s seminal work, Orientalism (1979) and the subsequent discussion of his work had unveiled the complexity of the iconography of the Orient – or better, Orients – that prevailed in European literature and culture from the Middle Ages.3 Whilst Said posited a hegemonic and binary system of power that dominated the cultural and political relationship between the Orient (in its many incarnations) and the Occident, critics have revisited and revised this thesis. Said cites utopias, moral and imaginary voyages as precursors to modern Orientalism (116). However, the speculative quality of voyage utopias is more complex and paradoxical than Said perhaps permits. In the following, I will turn to the issue of the ‘feminotopia’ in women’s Orientalist literature that idealizes ‘worlds of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure’.4 Texts such as Lady Mary Worrley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters, Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas (1790), Elizabeth Craven’s Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) and Lady Hester Stanhope’s letters are complex and fascinating examples of eighteenth-century Oriental paradigms. Thus, the boundaries between the categories of fiction and nonfiction are blurred as the texts themselves do not only record contemporary and conflicting anxieties about gender, class and Empire. These texts were also

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shaped by a utopian impulse that projected the writers’ individual desires and dreams of personal agency and freedom onto the unknown and foreign. *** The Turkish Empire, according to the primitive and fundamental Constitution of the Government, is absolutely and entirely Despotic; that is, a Supreme and Arbitrary Power is lodged in the Person of the Emperor, whose Will is the only Law by which he Rules, and who acknowledges no other Maxim of Government than Sic volo, sic jubeo. He is not curbing’s by any written Law or Custom, and those whom he Oppresses have not so much as a right to complain.5

What do we make of this quotation? What is at stake here of course is the ‘Orientalization’ of the Orient. Since Antiquity, the Middle East, as Edward Said suggested, has been ‘less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics’ to dominate the Islamic world (177). The equation of Muslim empires with despotic figures as a dominant concept in eighteenthcentury representations of the Orient, epitomized in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748) and Lettres persanes (1721) but also in conjectural anthropologies such as John Millar’s The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks (1781) and William Alexander’s The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time (1779) that take patriarchal domestic authority as a measure for the standard of civilization achieved.6 Thus, Oriental despotism was positioned between savagery and Western civilization. ‘There are two objects of curiosity’, remarks Samuel Johnson, ‘– the Christian world, and the Mahometan world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous.’7 The seemingly arbitrary power of the Sultan in Montesquieu reminded Europeans of the once powerful and expansionist Muslim empires and of the dangers of the abuses of absolute monarchy in Europe itself.8 Interestingly, the contemporary editor of Montesquieu’s fictional rendering of De l’esprit des lois, Arsace et Isménie (1783), accuses Montesquieu of having overplayed his critique of despotism to defend: ‘la monarchie tempérée, qui luit semblait le gouvernement naturel des François’ to the point of it being ridiculous.9 Post-1688 English texts were also concerned with the limitations of monarchical power and the establishment of an independent Parliament. Penelope Aubin thus prefaces her romance, The Noble Slaves, with the following words: In our Nation, where the Subjects are born free, where Liberty and Property is so preserv’d to us by Laws, that no Prince can enslave us, the Notion of Slavery is a perfect Stranger.10

Whilst political structures were the point of departure for a comparison with Western governments, that is, monarchy and the republic, the actual paradigms of despotism that emerged in Montesquieu’s and Millar’s discussion were slavery,



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polygamy and the domestic sphere (the harem). Indeed, as Reina Lewis points out, the harem ‘figured as a polygamous space animated by different forms of tyranny (from despot to women, from eunuchs to women, from mistress to slave, from favourite to rival)’.11 The imaginary space of the harem was read as microcosmic replica of Muslim empires, reproducing the symbolic division of male and female spaces and social and political structures.12 The harem defined Oriental domestic relations in the context of a European understanding of house and home. But in a wider context, the domestic rule of the Sultan was closely tied to political empire. The legitimacy of his patriarchal power was read against principles of natural or rational authority – issues that were debated a century earlier by Hobbes, Locke and Filmer. Dumont, quoted above, makes a very clear connection between despotism, the abuse of political power and polygamy when he labels the Sultan’s rule as a ‘Chimerical Show of Grandeur and Power’ and states that there ‘is no Slavery equal to that of the Turkish Women’ (234, 268). Montesquieu condemned the enslavement of women in the serail as it served no justifiable purpose: ‘il faut que l’esclavage soit pour l’utilité, et non pas pour la volupté. Les lois de la pudicité sont du droit naturel, et doivent être senties par toutes les nations du monde.’13 Samuel Johnson echoes this in his, if incorrect, definition of the seraglio as a ‘house of women kept for debauchery’.14 According to Dumont, the domestic power that the Sultan yielded over the harem was unlawful and irrational and eventually had to lead to the decline of his authority. Eliza Haywood’s The Fair Captive (1721) charted the decline of a Sultan’s court where the Vizier governs and yields mere ‘arbitrary power’ for a Sultan who has ‘Grown old in Power, now nods upon the Throne,/ And holds, with such a slack and Weaken’d Hand,/ The Reigns of Empire …’.15 The unfettered sexual despotism of the Grand Vizier was an indication for the loss of domestic and thus political power of the Sultan so much so that it became a common emblem of domestic and sexual tyranny at home, especially for early defenders of women’s rights. Judith Drake claimed that ‘it is now in all the Eastern parts of the World, where the Women, like our Negroes in our Western Plantations, are born slaves, and live Prisoners all their Lives’ and similarly, Mary Wollstonecraft launched into her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) with description of the legal and social disenfranchisement of English women as ‘the true style Mahometanism’.16 James Lawrence’s Oriental utopia, The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women (1811) contrasts the matriarchal state of the Nairs where sexual freedom and gender equality reigns, with the tyrannical government of Islamic harems and the European marriage convention:17 O ye, who boast of your benevolent feelings, whose humanity urges you to unshackle the captive African, or to unfurl on Sierre – Leona the white banner of liberty, why should ye fly so far from the polished world in quest of objects of pity? Rather rescue your sisters and manumit your wives from an oppressive yoke. (26)

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Excessive and transgressive sexuality linked to abuses of domestic and political sovereignty was also a familiar trope in eighteenth-century historiography. The environmental determinism of Montesquieu, Ferguson and Millar validated different stages of cultural and political evolution in terms of geography and climate.18 This moral topography opened the doors for a wide range of pornographic and somatopian literature that conceptualized male Oriental sexuality (in conjunction with polygamy) as abundant and desirable – both Lovelace and Macheath imagined themselves as Sultans and Grand-Signors – but at the same time, decadent and emasculating, that is, sodomitical.19 The reclusive nature of the harem evoked monstrous and absurd representations of female sexuality; indeed it represented the female body that was hidden, secluded and holy at the same time and had to be explored, penetrated and conquered. A passage from Ottaviano Bon epitomizes the complexities of this iconography: Now it is not lawful for any one to bring aught in unto them, with which they may commit the deeds of beastly and unnatural uncleanness; so that if they have the will to eat radishes, cucumbers, gourds, or such like meats; they are sent in unto them sliced, to deprive them of the means of playing the wantons: for they being all young, lusty, and lascivious wenches, and wanting the society of men, which would better instruct them, and questionless far better employ them; are doubtless of themselves inclined to that which is naught, and will often be possess’d with unchaste thoughts.20

Clearly it was Bon’s own and rather common pornographic desire that projected these fantasies of ‘oriental sapphism’ onto the harem – a fantasy that Alexander Pope happily paraphrased a century later in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu when he described Turkey as ‘the Land of Jealousy, where the unhappy Women converse with none but Eunuchs, and where the very Cucumbers are brought to them Cutt’.21 However, the other point made here is that polygamy leaves women sexually unsatisfied and makes them unruly and rebellious.22 As Aaron Hill’s Epilogue to The Fair Captive – himself a selfdeclared authority on the Ottoman Empire – points out (tongue in cheek): But, when Night comes, how pure, how pious they! Who go to Bed – to sleep! – and rise – to pray! Blest in full Chastity, and unbroke Slumber, They owe a Spotless Purity – to Number. Slow must five hundred Womens Virtue fall, Who have but one poor Man t’undoe ‘em all.23

It is not only the geographical and climatic predestination to an uncontrolled and lascivious sexuality, but the absence of patriarchal control through sexuality in the polygamous harem that leads to ennui, frustration and finally domestic and political rebellion personified in the historical figure Roxelana.24 Laura



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Brown and Felicity Nussbaum have argued that beyond the obvious political metaphor that equates Oriental despotism with the abuses of any autocratic power, accounts of Oriental despotism, polygamy and the harem serve to reinforce women’s complicity in conspicuous consumption, domesticity and colonialism.25 ‘The Englishwoman abroad’, writes Nussbaum, ‘finds in the Other something that aids her in granting herself an identity and thus contributes to the now suspect liberal feminism – so closely bound up with monogamous marriage and motherhood – of the latter part of the century’ (93). Hence, monogamy and domesticity is frequently re-enacted in the Oriental romance where the Sultan or Grand Vizier is reformed by the exemplary nature of the Christian and feminine virtue that resists all threats of rape and violation.26 ‘I am your Slave, by Heaven’s Permission;’ exclaims the incarcerated Maria in Aubin’s The Noble Slaves, ‘but my Soul is free, and can’t consent to such a hateful Deed’ (28). And Aubin closes her play with a powerful appeal to Christian virtue and courage: It is in Adversity that Men are known: He is only worthy the name of a Christian who can despise Death, and support even Slavery and Chains with Patience; whom neither Tortures or Interest can shake, or make renounce his God and Faith … The Gentlemen in this Story will deserve our Imitation; the Ladies, I fear, will scarce find any here who will pull out their Eyes, break their Legs, starve and chuse to die, to preserve their Virtues. The Heathens, indeed, shew’d many Examples of such heroick Females; but since the first Ages of Christianity, we have had very few … ’Tis well in this Age if the fair Sex stand the Trial of soft Persuasions; a little Force will generally do to gain the proudest Maid. (201–2)

Implicit in this quote is a specific understanding of femininity, the Orientalization of the non-virtuous, non-domestic, sexual woman.27 In their progressive and conjectural histories of civilization, Montesquieu, Millar and Alexander evaluated the different stages of social and political advancement (from the hunter/gatherer societies to the polite, commercial European society of the eighteenth century) in terms of the status of women. In De l’esprit des lois, Montesquieu wrote that ‘la servitude des femme est très conforme au génie du gouvernement despotique, qui aime à abuser de tout’ but rather discouragingly suggests that since the climate determines the political government, ‘le gouvernement populaire’ which would give women civil liberties, ‘a toujours été difficile à établir en Orient’ (XVI, IX, 503). William Alexander has a slightly different stance on the subject. He writes that in ‘savage countries’, women’s purpose: consists mostly in performing the task of labour assigned them; in yielding the most abject submission to their husbands; and taking proper care of the children they have by them. In the East, it consists in resigning themselves with a seeming alacrity to confinement; being perfectly skilled in all the arts of pleasing, and avoiding, with the utmost circumspection, every

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cause of jealousy. In Europe, it is more unlimited; it consists in goodnature, sensibility, delicacy, chastity, the domestic virtues, and a thousand other qualities; which, when joined to a competent share of beauty and female softness, are almost sufficient to soothe the most rugged nature, and change the cruelest temper into gentleness and humanity.28

As the study of gender developed over the last two decades, studies have shifted away from relying on a prescriptive gender ontology as the rationalization of gender inequalities in the eighteenth century. We acknowledge now that the categories of gender serve as proxy for contemporary anxieties around commodification, colonialism, conspicuous consumption and mercantile economy. Gender, and more specifically femininity, becomes a utopian space in which these anxieties are negotiated and temporarily appeased. Indeed, as Harriet Guest suggests, eighteenth-century fiction frequently expresses the ‘desire to return to an imagined golden age of stable [gender] differences’, perhaps a golden age of a good and stable society.29 Male and female ideals of the feminine as the benevolent, domestic, sentimental, sociable and asexual testify to this utopian desire. Women’s ‘closeness to nature’, their emotion and innate compassion, mark them as at once intellectually lesser and morally greater than men. At the same time, precisely this construct of the femme naturelle invokes the corresponding construct of a destructive female nature that must be controlled and managed, a trope that is developed into a colonial sexual geography. Richard Burton gives the Qu’ran as a source for the ‘naturalization’ Oriental women: Mulieres vestræ terra vestra, arate sicut vultis, Mahomet in his Alcoran gives this power to men: your wives are as your land, till them, use them, entreat them fair or foul, as you will yourselves. (Pt 3, Sect. 3, Mem. 2, 283)

Nature in this context is simply the corrupt, the undomesticated, and the savage. Whilst symbolic femininity provides a space in which eighteenth-century anxieties were negotiated, it also serves as a potential site for resistance where women writers (as well as men) appropriate prescriptive gender constructions to configure a variety of feminist utopian discourses. In utopia, ‘femininity’ is one of the most important topoi.30 This is also apparent in Orientalist literature as reports about the seraglio and harem mostly were based on hearsay, speculation and a few textual sources that were copied again and again.31 William Alexander, like Penelope Aubin, suggests that women easily submit to the despotic domination and indeed aim at ‘being perfectly skilled in all the arts of pleasing’.32 James Dallaway is skeptical about this essentialist conceptualization when he writes: 33 Throughout Turkey, in every rank of life, the women are literally children of a larger growth, as trifling in their amusements, as unbounded in their desires, and as absolutely at the disposals of others, being considered by the men, merely as created for the purposes of nature, or sexual luxury.34



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And Aaron Hill appeals to his readers that ‘when you see this strange Account of the Fair Sex in Turkey, ’tis not Nature, but the Rules of Education, which inspire the most accomplish’d Chastity with purer Notions; and if the rude and barbarous Ignorance, wherein the Turkish Women are oblig’d to live, has sacrific’d their Honour to the warmth of their Desires, rather pity, than condemn their want of Vertue …’ (A Full and Just Account, 116). Women’s education became one of the rallying points and one of the common denominators of female utopian writing in the eighteenth century. Margaret Cavendish and Bathsua Makin, in the seventeenth century, and Mary Astell, Judith Drake, Clara Reeve, Sarah Scott, Priscilla Wakefield and Mary Wollstonecraft built upon the ground cleared by Descartes and his philosophical adherents who posited the supremacy of the mind over the body, the residence of the ‘self’ in a mind for which the body serves as a mechanical vehicle.35 These authors advocated the development of woman’s intellect and claimed not only that education was in the interest of and even a natural right of the individual but also that women’s education would ultimately benefit society. Arguments for female education converge with the concept of ‘perfectibility’ to underpin utopian projects and fiction in the late seventeenth century. We have seen in Chapter 4 that secular and religious aspirations for women’s education prompted a nascent utopian tradition that envisaged secular or Anglican convents and, the ‘female academy’. Besides the overt connection between the convent, the female academy and the harem – in fact any female separatist space – that was made by seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury pornography and satire, contemporaries idealized the harem as a space governed by feminized principles of social harmony, chastity and exclusive fellowship, a sociability that served as an exemplum for the rest of society, ‘où on ne s’applique pas tant aux sciences qu’à observer la tempérance et la modestie’.36 Racine’s popular The Sultaness (translated and adapted in 1717 for the Drury Lane theatre) defending the positive portrayal of the Turkish hero, proclaimed in the Epilogue: ‘They are not quite so bad as you believe,/ You talk of Vertue, but they virtuous live./ Even the Seraglio, stock’d with Royal Game,/ Is not so vile in Practice as in Fame;/ … That Place – believe me Christians, ’tis most true,/ Is chaster than a Nunnery with you.’37 James Porter could but echo this assessment: I have heard it averred by a person of great veracity, who had lived for some years in a Sultan’s Harem of the blood-royal, that it was impossible for women to behave with more decency and modesty than the Turkish ladies did, and that they treated each other with the greatest politeness.38

His contemporary Charles Perry also emphasizes the careful management of the Seraglio in that the ‘slaves educated and nourished in the Seraglio at his [Sultan’s] own Expence and care, are generally the Persons preferred: But then,

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such of these are preferred, as appear to excel in Virtue and Capacity, and these Persons, as they owe their Everything to the Grand Signiore, are doubless more attached to the Person; and Interest of their Lord and Master’ (24). Ottaviano Bon already confirms this in his account of the Topkapi Seraglio in 1605–1607 in his description of the non-Muslim slaves are taken into the harem, ‘where they go to school, to learn to speak and read if they will, the Turkish tongue, to sew also, and to play on divers instruments’ (47). This is the context in which eighteenth-century women writers contributed to Oriental utopias. Exoticism, despotism, uncontrolled female sexuality, chaste sociability, female learning – these are all elements of an Orientalism that projected political and erotic desires onto the East and more specifically onto the space of the harem. Given the divergence between the actual historical space of the harem and Western representations, women writers were able to ‘recode’ the symbolic space of the harem for their own utopian purposes. *** It would be superfluous, to give you an account of our voyage, since nothing worth repeating happen’d to us; for we were neither taken by Pirates, nor swallow’d by waves; we escaped both storms, and the Grand Signior’s Seraglio.39

Dismissing abduction, imprisonment and seduction as clichés, Mary Davys’ disparaging comment above indicates the conventionality of the Oriental romance in the first half of the eighteenth century. Since the first translation of the semi-authentic collection of tales Les Mille et une nuits by Antoine Galland in 1704 (–1717), the Oriental tale became one of the most popular genres in eighteenth-century English and French literature.40 Guellette emphasizes the well-documented overlap between romance, history and anthropology when he writes that as ‘Romances require in a great Measure, the same Ornaments with true History … the Manners, Customs, and remarkable Points of History in well known Nations must be described by a Romance Writer, with as faithful and as judicious a Pen, as if he were writing an authentic Narrative … .’41 However, the division between the exotic/romantic and the philosophical/ satirical cannot be applied to women’s fiction. The function of the Oriental tale as political commentary is apparent in Montesquieu, George Lyttleton, Diderot but should be also noted for women’s Oriental romances. Ros Balaster suggests that eighteenth-century amatory fictions ‘attempt to articulate sexual and party political interest simultaneously, with reference both to the struggle for a specifically female authority in sexual and party political representation and to the more general struggle to resolve ethical and epistemological crises in the social order through narrative form’.42 Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaii, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) is thus not only a satire on Robert Walpole



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but recounts the political education (enlightened monarchy, republicanism, political and domestic despotism) and emancipation of the Princess Eovaii.43 Clara Reeve’s History of Charoba, Queen of Ægypt (1785) depicts the reign of an enlightened and charitable virgin Queen Charoba, founder of Alexandria, and an emblem of eighteenth-century charitable femininity. Reeve, Delarivier Manley in Alymyna; or, The Arabian Vow (1707) and Penelope Aubin in The Noble Slaves (1722) condemn forced marriages as a despotic practice, indicating the contemporary shift from an extended family model based on property and patronage in the early modern period to a more exclusive understanding of family (the nuclear family) based on affection, companionship and domesticity. Instead, they celebrate solidarity and sisterhood in the harem as an emblem of female community. Because of the difficult political climate in the 1790s, Hannah Cowley felt it necessary to preface her play, A Day in Turkey (1791) with an advertisement denying that her ‘comedy is tainted with POLITICS. I protest I know nothing about politics: – will Miss Wolstonecraft [sic] forgive me – whose book contains such a body of mind as I hardly ever met with – if I say that politics are unfeminine?’44 Ironically, that which Cowley commended in her play is precisely Wollstonecraft’s ideal of femininity and citizenship, so apparent in Lauretta’s praise of the French Revolution: ‘At least they have made themselves free AT HOME! And who knows, but, at last, the spirit they have raised may reach even to a Turkish harem, and the rights of women be declared as well as those of men’ (69). The contextualization of these texts highlights what S. Aravamudan has named ‘levantizations [that] enable subjects to fashion their agency from unpromising materials’.45 Orientalist literature by women not only idealizes the female separatist space as autonomous, empowering and pleasurable – this is where fictions of the harem and the convent overlap – but at the same time indicate the complex negotiations of natural and legal rights, of the public and private, and of discourses of femininity and masculinity in the eighteenth century. Ellis Cornelia Knight’s tale Dinarbas (1790) is one of those fictions that have been sadly neglected by eighteenth-century utopian studies. Classified as a lesser sequel to Johnson’s philosophical tale Rasselas (1759), it nevertheless offers an interesting model of female solidarity and replaces the futile antiutopianism of Johnson with pragmatic feminism. In her book, she presents a challenging pedagogical argument against the gender-exclusive options of Enlightenment thought and eighteenth-century utopianism and offers a new moment of transformance, analysis and action. According to John Hawkins, Johnson’s biographer, Samuel Johnson ‘had meditated a second part [of Rasselas] in which he meant to marry his hero, and place him in a state of permanent felicity’.46 Ellis Cornelia Knight attempted to continue Johnson’s tale which ‘shall be found to afford any consolation or wretched traveller, terrified and disheartened at the rugged paths of life’.47

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Contemporary and modern critics were, with some exceptions, not impressed by Knight’s ‘continuation’ and imitation of one of the most skilful writers of the eighteenth century.48 The restless search for some abstract notion of happiness and the final acceptance of Providence in Johnson is superseded by a sense of responsibility and action in Knight: ‘[I]nactivity is generally the source of crime’, ‘the fault lies not in the state of life, it depends on the manner of acting’, and finally ‘conscious virtue, divine fortitude, the balm of sympathy, and submission to the Divine Will’ are the leading principles that Knight advocates (113, 210). In a sense, it is perhaps what Johnson intended his readers to grasp: ‘the discharge of religious and social duties will afford their faculties the occupation he wanted, and the well-founded expectation of future reward will at once stimulate and support them’ (Hawkins, 156–7). Structurally, Dinarbas duplicates Rasselas. However, and more importantly, some of Dinarbas’ chapters (Chapter 19, Chapter 46, and Chapter 49) directly correspond to their equivalents in Johnson’s tale, and thus revise and rewrite the main narrative, and often return to the conventional Oriental romance configuration that Johnson wanted to avoid.49 Lengthy philosophical discussions that dominate Johnson’s text are reduced to a few chapters, being replaced by a series of conventional adventures and complications that are, in the end, only resolved, by the reinstatement of the rightful Emperor and a double wedding. Empiricism, sensibility and duty take the place of rationality and abstract philosophy. Chapter I seamlessly links Rasselas and Dinarbas: ‘Are we then,’ said Rasselas, ‘no wiser than when we set out; or have we only learned, that all enquiries after happiness are vain, and that a state of mere vegetation is the highest degree of felicity which mortals are permitted to obtain in this world?’ (109)

But they have become wiser. The ‘state of vegetation’ is replaced by a fulfilment of duty and responsibilities and again self-knowledge. Rasselas is drawn into military service to help defend his father’s country, and even in confinement, he does not give in to resignation and fatalism: ‘He felt applause in his own mind for this new acquired patience, as for a victory gained over himself and the exultation of conscious merit gave new strength to his resolutions’ (131). In the end, as a true romance hero, he becomes the Emperor of Abyssinia, marries Zelia and reforms the government and judiciary system. His aim is to be an invisible monarch ‘who govern[s] with sufficient justice, and who, if [he does] not prevent crimes, at least may reform errors’ (203). Knight’s Rasselas echoes Johnson’s scepticism about ‘ideal speculations’ and isolated utopian experiments: ‘who look only here for happiness, have ever been and ever will be disappointed: it is not change of place, nor even the unbounded gratification of their wishes, that can relieve them’ (Hawkins, 156–7). Instead, Knight’s Rasselas values experience and pragmatism over idealism. These



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considerations also filter into Knight’s rewritings of Johnson’s ‘domestic’ agenda in an interesting way. Johnson is particularly concerned to demystify and satirize Orientalist themes in contemporary popular imagination. The Edenic Happy Valley is unveiled as a space of unhappiness and degeneration. Formulaic Oriental romance figures such as the sage, the hermit, the sultan and the philosopher do not hold the key to happiness and wisdom. Clichéd themes such as the Orient as a hegemonic space (we encounter Abyssinia, Egypt and Turkey as very different places), Eastern despotism, the harem and abundant sexuality are revealed as Orientalizing fictions – fictions that ‘begin to operate as realities’ (Rasselas, 85). One of the most familiar commonplaces was of course the sexualization of women and here Johnson is meticulous to counter the idea of the erotic Oriental woman. Rasselas’ sister, Nekayah, is not the emblem of excessive Oriental sexuality, on the contrary, her education and intelligence make her an icon of the learned woman: She desired first to learn all sciences, and then purposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old, and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence and patterns of piety. (Rasselas, 98–9)

Nekayah’s utopian proposition comes at the end of her long pilgrimage, after she has encountered a range of diverse social and political models and ideologies. Interestingly, as her experience of these models – hedonism, life of reason, pastoral retreat and a ‘life led according to nature’ – is gendered as she is to specifically investigate the domestic sphere to find the secret of happiness, her final vision excludes all forms of domestic life. The freedom of choice that is promised to Rasselas at the beginning of their journey is restricted for Nekayah even at that point: The daughters of many houses were airy and cheerful, but Nekayah had been too long accustomed to the conversation of Imlac and her brother to be much pleased with childish levity and prattle which had no meaning. She found their thoughts narrow, their wishes low, and their merriment often artificial. Their pleasures, poor as they were, could not preserve pure, but were embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation. (Rasselas, 48–9)

Nekayah’s critique of her fellow sisters reveals an idea of self based on reason, scientific scepticism, educability and progress. Her comments are more than mere observations on marriage and domesticity. Her findings and Rasselas’ experiences, for instance at the court of the ill-fated Bassa, complement each other, forging the familiar analogy of domestic and political despotism; ‘if a kingdom be, as Imlac tells us, a great family, a family likewise is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions’ (50). But Nekayah is unable to find an existing model of marriage that satisfies all partners and

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families and that is not based on inequalities, oppression or emotional torment. Acknowledging that celibacy is not the answer, Rasselas’s main concern is to establish a politically stable structure on a macro- and micropolitical level: If marriage be best for mankind it must be evidently best for individuals, or a permanent and necessary duty must be the cause of evil, and some must be inevitably sacrificed to the convenience of others. (Rasselas, 56)

In the end, Rasselas and Nekayah are unable to come to a satisfactory agreement as their conceptualizations of the public and private are incompatible. Whilst Rasselas accepts some faults in the practice of marriage and sees it fit to reform, he insists on it as the basic guarantee for procreation and the common greater good without specifying how to fit women into the complicated nexus of familial and political spheres. Nekayah is much more interested in domestic authority and sexual inequality based on a psychological level – an argument that Wollstonecraft later pursues so vigorously in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Another unsuccessful model of domesticity is discussed when Pekuah is abducted and enslaved in an Arab’s harem. Again, Johnson plays with readers’ imagination. However, the harem is a place of boredom, frustration and discord that does not even satisfy the Arab’s needs and wishes. As before, Johnson’s directs his readers towards the issue of the education of women: Nor was much satisfaction to be hoped from their [harem women] conversation: for what could they be expected to talk? They had seen nothing; for they had lived from early youth in that narrow spot: of what they had not seen they could have no knowledge, for they could not read. They had no ideas but of the few things that were within their view, and had hardly names for any thing but their cloaths and their food. (Rasselas, 77)

Rasselas makes a weak attempt to defend the Arab who as ‘a man of more than common accomplishments’ must get some pleasure in his harem. ‘Are they exquisitely beautiful?’ Johnson again sets straight Oriental romance conventions by describing the women with ‘that unaffecting and ignoble beauty which may subsist without spriteliness or sublimity, without energy of thought or dignity of virtue’ (77). For all the emphasis on education and perfectibility, what underlies Johnson’s tale is an unattainable idea of femininity as polite, sociable and asexual. It is their education and socialization that in the end alienate Johnson’s women from utopian possibilities but also the realities of ordinary life. Thus it is that Knight changes the fate of the main protagonists. In Dinarbas, Rasselas, Pekuah and Nekayah are quickly separated and allocated to very different gendered spheres. Rasselas and Dinarbas pursue the active life of military leaders: ‘Of what avail had been in this citadel your literature and



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philosophy, if your activity and courage had not added to these endowments the honours of military service?’ (Dinarbas, 117) The women remain imprisoned in a fortress, lamenting their ‘total inability of being useful to the emperor’ (148). They use their time to converse with Elphenor, whose Latitudinarian views were the target of Hester Thrale’s ardent critique: Indeed this dainty Method of finding out that we are all happy, in all situations; tend as far [as] I can see but to a very dangerous Conclusion – viz: the Denial of Original Sin; & Doubts of four first Parents’ Lapse. Such Doctrines can only end in modern Infidelity; for if we are so capable of Virtue & Felicity in this World, what need is there to hope for any other.50

Reforms that particularly concern women are associated by Knight with the duties that women are to perform in society – motherhood and education of the young. Consequently, Pekuah and Nekayah revise their previous decisions in Rasselas to either retire into a convent or a female academy. Retirement for Knight is a relinquishment of one’s social responsibility and individual perfectibility. ‘I believe’, Nekayah says, ‘however, we may venture to affirm that they who condemn themselves to irrevocable retirement, are greatly deceived in their expectations, and if their repentance is not manifest, it is because pride will not allow them to own it’ (202). A rational and public education is crucial to Knight’s proposal, based on sciences, history and – in opposition to Johnson – poetry to teach ‘the knowledge of the heart’ and to develop ‘the power of the imagination’ (196). Like Wollstonecraft, Knight engages in an astute criticism of eighteenth-century discourses on femininity which she views as cultural constructs. Johnson’s futile anti-utopianism is replaced by pedagogic optimism. For Knight, as for many contemporaries, the catalyst for self-transformation was the effective application of a reason refined by education. Eighteenth-century educational theories were, on the one hand, based on assumptions about the inherently progressive nature of humanity in knowledge and moral understanding, and, on the other, Locke’s postulate of the absence of ‘innate ideas’ and the notion of the human mind as a tabula rasa. Knight argues that women as rational beings deserve to develop their rational senses, virtue and autonomy. But as mothers, they have the duty to do so: The first impressions are difficult to efface, and the first impressions are given by women; their mistaken tenderness has formed cowards, and their capricious anger has reared up tyrants. (198)

Education is here the key to a utopian way of life. In opposition to Johnson and Wollstonecraft, Dinabas accords women a secure but restricted identity, ‘sited in a triple sense: anthropologically as the “ruler” in the sphere of human reproduction; socially as a (bourgeois) housewife and mother; morally as a chaste person living in seclusion whose destiny (to love) manifests itself solely

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in the family sphere’ (Steinbrügge, 32). The romance form with its happy endings and the focus on individual happiness and a Christian life enhances the idea of domesticity and companionate marriage, the gendering of the public and private. Though set in a distinctly exotic locale, Knight is not criticizing European society or projecting a utopian vision onto an imaginary Orient. Her philosophical tale is a reformist, domestic utopia and presents a perceptive comment on a late eighteenth-century ‘choice of life’ for women. *** What surprises me so much is the extreme civility of the Turks to a Christian, which they detest much more here [Syria] than in any part of the Sultan’s dominions. A Woman in man’s clothes, a woman on horseback – everything directly in opposition to their strongest prejudices, and yet never a smile of impertinence, let me go where I will. If it was as it is in England, it would be quite impossible to get through with it all. (Lady Hester Stanhope)51 Upon the Whole, I look upon the Turkish Women as the only free people in the empire. The very Divan pays a respect to ‘em, and the Grand Signor himselfe, when a Bassa is executed, never violates the priveleges of the Haram (or Women’s apartment), which remains unsearch’d and entire to the Widow. (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar, 1 April [1717])52

Unlike Knight, both Lady Hester Stanhope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu projected their fantasies of female autonomy onto the East. In their letters, the unknown and foreign provide an imaginative resistance to the domestic confinement at home. Whilst we need to acknowledge the century and the culture that divides Stanhope’s and Montagu’s experiences, we find a similar investment in Oriental culture that offered at least aristocratic women a social and sexual freedom that was denied them in England.53 Indeed, both conceive of feminotopias that are located in a semi-imaginary Orient.54 More important than the authenticity of their reports – of which both women assure the readers heartily – are the themes and concerns each raise. Lady Mary Wortley’s posthumous Turkish Embassy Letters is the first Oriental travel narrative by a woman in English.55 The provenance of the letters is complicated as the original letters were lost. The established text is a quasiepistolary novel with fictive letters addressed to partially fictive recipients – the frequently repeated phrase ‘’tis true’ points towards the thin line between fact and fiction.56 The Letters account for the period between 1 August 1716 and 1 November 1718 when Montagu accompanied her husband Edward Wortley Montagu to his short-lived post as ambassador extraordinary of George I to Sultan Ahmet III. Critics have focused in detail on the different poetic personae – the objective traveller, the Orientalist, the obedient subject (to the Princess



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of Wales), the feminist, the poet (in the correspondence with Pope) and the romance writer which are defined by different literary styles and themes. Lew calls attention to the literal and metaphorical bilingual quality of the letters as they use Latin and French extensively but at the same time seek to translate a woman’s experience of the exotic into a familiar domestic context.57 Most famously, of course, Montagu sought to complement and revise the existing canon of Oriental travel literature – she frequently refers to Rycaut, Dumont and Aaron Hill but also to Galland’s Arabian Nights – providing information ‘not to be paralleled in the narrative of any male Traveller’.58 To Lady – on 17 June [1717], she writes: Your whole Letter is full of mistakes from one end to ‘tother. I see you have taken your Ideas of Turkey from that worthy author Dumont, who has writ with equal ignorance and confidence. ’Tis is a particular pleasure to me here to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far remov’d from Truth and so full of Absurditys I am very well diverted with ’em. They never fail giving you an Account of the Women, which ’tis certain they never saw, and talking very wisely of the Genius of the Men, into whose Company they are never admitted, and very often describe Mosques, which they dare not peep into.

Particularly in the letters addressed to Lady Mar, Montagu’s sister, Sarah Chiswell, Jane Smith, Lady Bristol and Lady Rich are the domestic lives of Ottoman women explored. Whilst she intermittently confirms despotic and arbitrary governmental structures in the Ottoman Empire, Montagu also uses the travel narrative to offer a rather Swiftean critique of contemporary England: I am also charm’d with many points of the Turkish law, to our shame be it Spoken, better design’d and better executed than Ours; particularly, the punishment of convicted Lyars (Tryumphant Criminals in our countrey, God knows). They are burnt in the forehead with a hot Iron, being prov’d the Authors of any Notorious falsehood. How many white foreheads shou’d we see Disfigur’d? How many fine Gentlemen wou’d be forc’d to wear their Wigs as low as their Eyebrows? were this Law in practice with us (To [Anne] Thistlethwayte. 4 Jan [1718]).

The focus of Montagu’s letters however is the refutation of the canonical iconography of Muslim women as overtly sexual and immodest beings. When famously describing the women in the bagnio of Adrianople, Montagu replaced the traditional male gaze with female voyeurism: The first sofas were cover’d with Cushions and rich Carpets, on which sat the Ladys and on the 2nd their slaves behind ‘em, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any Beauty or deffect conceal’d, yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest Gesture amongst ’em. They walk’d and mov’d with the same majestic Grace which Milton

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describes of our General Mother. There were many amongst them as exactly proportion’d as ever any Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian … (To the Lady –. 1 April [1717]).

Plainly, Montagu creates her own iconography of Ottoman women that aestheticizes the harem as an Edenic feminotopia – a paradisiacal vision that even transcends worldly life: ‘this paradise will be a separate place from that of their husbands; but I fancy the most part of them won’t like it the worse for that; and that the regret of this separation will not render their paradise the less agreeable’ (To Abbe Conti, February [1718]). Whilst Melman argues that ‘harem literature’ provides a ‘resistance to the essentialist topos of the sensual Orient and the mythically libidinous orientale’, a closer reading of Montagu’s description of harem women confirms a homoerotic interest within ‘male literary and rhetorical models’ and ironically, inspired later painters such as Ingres’ Le Bain turc, 1862 (Melman, 16–17; Lowe, 48). Especially, the ‘artless’ beauty of Fatima caught Montagu’s eye: I never saw any thing so gloriously Beautifull, nor can I recollect a face that would have been taken notice of near hers. She stood up to receive me, saluteing me after their fashion, putting her hand upon her Heart with a sweetness full of Majesty that no Court breeding could ever give … I was so struck with Admiration, that I could not for some time speak to her, being wholly taken up in gazing. That surprizing Harmony of features! that charming result of the whole! that exact proportion of Body! that lovely bloom of Complexion unsully’d by art! the unutterable Enchantment of her Smile! But her Eyes! large and black, with all the soft languishment of the bleu! every turn of her face discovering some new charm! (To the Countess of Mar. 18 April [1717]).

As a contrast, Elizabeth Craven, who travelled to Russia, Turkey and Greece in 1785 and 1786 and overtly criticized Montagu’s idealization, going so far as to claim that Montagu never was in Turkey, was not impressed by Oriental women at all:59 ‘I have no doubt but that nature intended some of these women to be very handsome, but white and red ill applied, their eye-brows hid under one or two black lines – teeth black by smoaking, and an universal stoop in the shoulders, made them appear rather disgusting than handsome’ (225–6). Lowe and Boer have extended Melman’s argument to emphasize Montagu’s investment in the harem as a utopic space. Lowe argues that for Montagu, the harem ‘is also a possibility of an erotic universe in which there are no men, a site of social and sexual practices that are not organized around the phallus or a central male authority’ (48). The freedom of movement of women that is made possible by the veil and strict laws of behaviour within the harem encompasses their sexual freedom and autonomy. In her reading of Montagu’s description of the baths of Adrianople, Boer suggests that the bonding between the women in the baths, symbolized beautifully in the braiding of hair, is not



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a mere opting-out of sexual and social contact with men. To her mind, the harem provides ‘possibilities for women’s empowerment and pleasure that strikes at the heart of the relation between master and women as perceived in traditional male Western representations’.60 In the following, I want to redirect the focus away from the feminotopic space of the harem as defined by Melman and others to issues that concern the social positioning of women in England in the eighteenth century. It is worthwhile to quote again Montagu’s famous statement that, despite their differences, was echoed even by the sceptical Elizabeth Craven at the end of the century: ’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have … Upon the whole, I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire: the very Divan pays a respect to them; and the Grand Signior himself, when a pasha is executed, never violates the privileges of the harém (or women’s apartment), which remains unsearched and entire to the widow.61

In addition to the celebration of sexual freedom and autonomy, one may infer from this quote knowledge of the social production of space that excludes eighteenth-century English women from a uniquely autonomous sphere. We have previously discussed the complex ideological negotiations of the Habermasian public and private spheres in the eighteenth century that distinguish a public sphere of state authority, an authentic public (that is, sociable and polite) sphere and the private realm (Habermas, 29–30). As problematic and opaque as this division is, we have seen that an ideal social mapping of space in the eighteenth century still inscribed conventions of gender and class onto space and place. The point Montagu is making here is that female ‘space in England was “encompassed and penetrated” by men in ways female space in Adrianople or Istanbul was not’ (Lew, 446). But there is another implication in the above quote. As recent histories of the Ottoman Empire, especially of the period of the so-called ‘Sultanate of Women’ (1520–1656) have documented, Ottoman women were given a widening administrative and public responsibility. First, the Haseki-Sultan Hurrem marked profound changes during the reign of Suleyman I (1520–1566). The popular iconography of Roxana or Roxelana as a slave who rebelled against the Sultan’s authority was based on Suleyman granting his slave Hurrem her freedom before marrying her.62 More interestingly though, Hurrem did not adhere to the tradition to follow her son to the provinces but moved from the Old Seraglio to the Topkapi-Seraglio – formerly the habitation and school for male administrators and eunuchs. Consequently, Hurrem excelled as Suleyman’s adviser and political informer and paved the way for other women such as Safiye, mother of Mehmed III (1595–1603) who was in correspondence with Elizabeth I (Kürsat-Ahlers, 44). Second, the institutionalization of primogeniture in the mid-sixteenth century and the refashioning of the Sultan’s role itself from a military and expansionist

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leader to an administrator under Murad III (1574–1595) elevated the ValideSultan (the mother of the Sultan) to the position of head of the household.63 ‘Over time’, Peirce writes, ‘her political power was so routinized that it came to be viewed as an office with a title … Yet, while she might be only one of several contenders in the political arena, at the same time she had the capacity to assume a suprapolitical role that enabled her to represent the dynasty as a whole’ (229). In this newly established hierarchy, the harem thus was positioned in the intersections between public and private.64 The increasing political influence by women was taken by Turkish and European contemporaries as one of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Whilst Bon commented on the grotesque role reversal that made the ‘Sultanas, the Bashaws wives … for the most part, their husbands’ masters’, Rolamb highlighted and somewhat exaggerated the crisis around the establishment of primogeniture when he blamed the harem women for the turmoil at Sultan Ibrahim’s (1640–1648) assent to the throne (Bon, 53; Rolamb, 691–701). The political influence of the Valide-Sultan, and the growth of the bureaucratic structure of the harem in the seventeenth century meant also financial independence, unknown to their British counterparts, for the family elite.65 As a rare exception from the general coverage on harems, James Porter called attention to this: The Harem, or ladies of the Seraglio, have vast revenue assigned them for their support and maintenance: this consists in large districts of land, and considerable towns, in Europe and Asia, and is called the Haremai. The absolute independent government and direction of these revenues, which amount to those of a Kingdom, were entirely in the disposition of the black Kislar-Aga [kizlar ag˘asi]. (I, 118)

In opposition to the English custom of femme couverte, the hanim (wife) remained a legal person in all respects – a social code that, speculates William Alexander, is either based on custom or religion (I, 296). Nevertheless, suggests Alexander, ‘in spite of this seeming veneration, this sacredness of person the women of Asia are, in general, only a kind of ciphers, held up to be the sport of fortune … deprived of personal liberty; sold, or given away in marriage, without a power of refusal’ (I, 291). However, he later concedes that their position is not significantly different in ‘civilized’ countries. Divorce was at least theoretically possible for both men and women in the Ottoman Empire. Women again were able to retain their property after the proceedings, a point that also the sceptical Elizabeth Craven makes: ‘the wife whose wretched husbands earns subsistence by carrying water, or burthens, sits at home bedecked with jewels, or goes out as her fancy directs, and the fruits of his labour are appropriated to her use’ (Journey, 1814, 233). On her way to Turkey, Montagu spent some time in Vienna where, in the same vein as her Embassy Letters, she reported on local customs, politics and high society. Interestingly, she was fascinated by the ‘sub-marriages’ of the Viennese women: ‘’Tis the establish’d custom



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for every Lady to have 2 Husbands, one that bears the Name, and another that performs the Duties’ (To Lady R –. 20 September [1716]). This reversal of Oriental polygamy – known in Italy as cicisbeism – went hand in hand with a legal and financial empowerment of Austrian aristocratic women: ‘These submarriages generally last twenty years together, and the lady often commands the poor lover’s estate even to the utter ruin of his family’ (loc. cit). Again with admiration, she reported that Austrian women ‘have neither occasions for Beauty, money, or good conduct, to get them Lovers and Husbands: ’Tis true, as to money, ’tis seldom any advantage to the Man they marry. The Laws of Austria confine a Woman’s portion not to exceed 2000 florins, about £ 200 English, and whatever they have beside remains in their own possession and disposal (To Mrs . 26 September [1716]).

When Nussbaum suggests that ‘liberty for the aristocratic Montagu is equated with sexual freedom to conduct intrigues rather than with Enlightenment principles of political liberty and equality’, I would argue that Montagu demands social equality in addition to, as Kostova suggests, an egalitarian expression of sexuality and sensuality beyond a domestic discourse on femininity (Nussbaum, 91; Kostova, 24). Indeed, Montagu is concerned about the cult of motherhood in the harem as a limitation of femininity – a subject that she later addresses in her essays: ‘in this country, ’tis more despicable to be marry’d and not fruitfull, than ’tis with us to be fruitfull befor Marriage’ (To [Anne] Thistlethwayte. 4 January [1718]). However, what Montagu ironically ignores is that female authority in the Ottoman Empire was partially based on age and status – ‘postsexual’ women played a key role in the royal household (Peirce, ix). Montagu’s representation of Oriental women is not uncomplicated. Whilst she asserts ethnographic and geographical objectivity, Montagu’s Turkish and Viennese women serve as a proxy for English inequality and misogyny. In that, she opposes and at the same time resonates with dominant European Orientalist discourses. In her writing, the harem is a true ‘no-place’ and ‘good-place’. *** Lady Hester Stanhope (1776–1839) left Britain in 1810 after she found herself insufficiently provided for. She writes to her doctor Charles Lewis Meryon that ‘a poor gentlewoman, doctor, is the worst thing in the world. Not being able to keep a carriage, how was I to go out ?’66 The fate of insolvent eighteenthcentury genteel women is now familiar to us through novels (and lives) by Sarah Scott, Frances Burney, Sarah Fielding and Clara Reeve amongst others. Whilst these novelists advocated female friendship and patronage as an alternative to marriage or life-long dependency on male relatives, Stanhope

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travelled to Greece, Turkey and Jerusalem with her companions, including Dr Meryon, her later biographer, and her lover Michael Bruce, shipwrecked off Rhodes in 1812, and finally retired in Lebanon. The final retirement was partly motivated by Stanhope’s growing spirituality and religious faith as she settled amongst the Druze, a religious community found in Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Jordan, and became increasingly interested in astrology and mysticism.67 In Dar Djoun, Mount Lebanon, she established her own ‘Ottoman court’ with herself as the Sultan, her companion Miss Williams as her Grand Vizier and a gynæceum – a retirement not unlike Margaret Cavendish’s maxim: ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second … I have made a world of my own.’ An eminent autocrat (‘I am an aristocrat, and I make a boast of it. We shall see what will come of people’s conundrums about equality’), she was involved in local politics – she incited the Druze to resist an Egyptian invasion – and was seemingly well respected: ‘I am a queer animal, it is true, but very popular amongst the Turks at least’ (Meryon, II, 23; Cleveland, 116). Her fame grew as she was the first Christian woman to enter Queen Zenobia’s Palmyra in 1813, fulfilling the prophecy that ‘she would go to Jerusalem, spend seven years in the desert, and be crowned Queen of the East’.68 Stanhope inserts herself into the popular iconographic tradition that represents Zenobia as a noble exemplum for Amazonian bravery, virtue and integrity.69 Of course, Stanhope’s rank made possible not only her access to the rulers of Turkey, Egypt and Lebanon, but her self-fashioning into an independent and politically influential citizen – she, for instance, procured a range of letters of recommendation for her personal safety from local Grand Viziers or Pashas.70 It was not, despite Cavendish’s claim, ‘in every one’s power to do the like’. Stanhope chose to leave English society and its etiquettes about femininity behind to exploit her status as the eccentric ‘Other’: All I can say about myself sounds like a conceit, but others could tell you I am the Oracle of the place and the darling of all the troops, who seem to think I am a deity because I can ride, and because I wear arms; and the fanatics all bow before me, because the Dervishes think me a wonder, and have given me a piece of Mahomet’s tomb … . (Cleveland 102)

To prepare her trip to Palmyra, she recounts that she ‘had first been alone into the Desert to try the faith of these people; and made myself a regular Bedoween, and was admitted with the rights of one into the King’s tribe’.71 But she herself, like the Romantics, invested a chiliastic hope into Eastern society as she became increasingly disappointed in European politics, especially after the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire: ‘I would sooner die upon the burning sands of Africa’, she writes on 29 July 1819 to Richard Grenville, ‘than add another link to that chain which is now binding justice, honour, Humanity and independence in eternal bondage.’72 Consequently, she resigned her British citizenship in 1838. Stanhope found true values and a primitivist hope of redemption in the societies and landscapes of Syria and the Lebanon:



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I like the fine arts; yet, to say the truth, I am much more interested in the works of God than those of man. These savages, and who have reduced the wants of human nature to a mere nothing give a most wonderful example of mental and physical strength. Besides, the beauty of parts of the Desert in the early spring are [sic] not to be described. Almost all the bulbous plants, we rear with so much care, spring up as if by magic; bloom amongst innumerable unknown odiferous herbs; and fade, nearly as quickly by the great heat of drying winds. I hope that no sensible unprejudiced person will think money ill spent in having acquired a knowledge of a people who command the whole tract of country, in conjunction with the Wahabees, which extend from the borders of Syria to the Persian gulph, and from the istmus of Suez to the Straits of Bab el mandeb; which appears to me to be equally interesting to the moral & natural philosopher, to the statesman & the soldier. (BL Add MS 42057, 33–4)

She thus escapes from a society wherein, as Stanhope herself admits, ‘women should be simple automatons, moved by the will and guidance of their masters’ (Meryon, I, 376). To her relative General Richard Grenville, she writes, ‘Nature formed me in a different mould from the generality of persons, both in body and mind; and God knows best why both are organized as they are’ (BL MS 42057, 30). Stanhope identified the lack of choices for late eighteenth-century women when she claimed that women ‘must be one of three things. Either they are politicians and literary characters; or they must devote their time to dress, pleasure and love; or lastly, they must be fond of domestic affairs’ (Meryon, I, 377). But Stanhope did not find any joy in Oriental polygamy either. In her unpublished Journal to Syria (1812), she provides a lengthy comment on the marriage customs of Sheik Abu Ghosh. Whilst she granted the custom of polygamy absolute propriety, Stanhope identified the lack of liberty and choice that Muslim women had: ‘They do not esteem the women for their moral characters, or look after her as a faithful companion in the pilgrimage, as one who is to partake of their joys & share their sorrows.’73 When she explained to Abu Ghosh Senior the marriage customs of Europe, he ‘then answered that if we were not pleased with our wives we ought to strangle them. When told that for strangling his wife a man would be hanged, he was lost in astonishment, as he could not conceive, why a man should be punished for any indignity that he attend to a woman’ (loc. cit). Stanhope both identified herself with her disenfranchised contemporaries in England and at the same time assumed a masculine role of explorer and Oriental scholar. In her letters as well as in observations by contemporaries, Stanhope’s cross-dressing and masculine lifestyle is superceded by an image of a learned and philanthropic eccentric. Reclining on the musnud, by his side, with crossed legs, à l’Orientale, smoking a long and elegantly mounted nerghila, was a tall and splendid figure … whose appearance … was dignified and majestic. Although the figure was attired in all respects as a man, I at once discovered that it

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belonged to the other sex. Her right hand grasped the stem of her pipe, which ever and anon sent out a thin stream of light blue smoke, which curled upwards like a slender column; and in her left she held a long rosary of amber, the beads of which she let fall one by one in slow succession … She then addressed me with great courtesy and benevolence of manner, in Arabic, which she spoke with great fluency and elegance … .74

However, during the 25 years at Dar Djoun, more and more servants left her, her government pension was eventually withdrawn (despite a drawn-out legal battle) and Stanhope eventually died alone in Djoun, in 1839. Stanhope’s life, biographies and her writing provide a particular example of Orientalist representations overlapping with late eighteenth-century/Victorian rhetoric of gender and class. The nineteenth-century biographies of Meryon and Cleveland, contemporary comments by Buckingham, Lamartine in Souvenirs pendant un voyage d’Orient (1835) and her celebration in Kingslake’s Eothen (1844) and Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross (1898) all involved the production of a national myth emphasizing either the mad eccentricity of Stanhope which in the end contributed to her lonely decline, or her role as an extraordinary explorer and ethnographer. Whilst her letters recorded in the biographies emphasize the personal transformation in her ‘going native’, her Journal to Syria and her equally unpublished Notes upon the Mamelukes are detailed historical, political and geographical accounts of the Middle East, citing contemporary English Orientalists such as Pococke and drawing on Middle Eastern historical and religious sources but avoiding the popular mixture of adventure and imperialism that we find for instance in Richard Burton. In her individualist utopia, Stanhope was living out a form of exilic existence that was essentially androgynous and, ironically, only possible in a patriarchal and despotic environment.75 We have seen many historical and generic variations of feminotopias. As voyage utopias they equally fervently speculate about social and political transformation and at the same time, criticize existing cultural constraints that particularly concern women. Yet, whilst some of these texts are complicit in reaffirming English domesticity and ethnocentricity, what is at stake here is the expansion of women’s spheres. Paradoxically, it is the despotic Orient and in particular, the harem, that provides the space for the imaginative resistance to the existing social economy. As an emblem of patriarchy, it is perhaps not surprising that both male and female writers of the period under investigation and interestingly in modern times too, continue to encode and recode this symbolic space into a realized utopia.76



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Notes 1 Victor G. Kieman. The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 131. On the overlap between ideology and utopia, see Timothy Weiss. Translating Orients: Between Ideology and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 2 Historically, the term ‘Orient’ incorporated the Islamic Orient (that is, the Ottoman Empire and Arabic countries), the Indian subcontinent and the Asiatic East. The literature I will be quoting from is, with some few exceptions, limited to the Arabic world, as I will pay particular attention to the seraglio and harem. However, it should be noted that there were representations Indian harems – the zenana – in art and literature. See Jemima Kindersley. Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies (1787); Eliza Fay. Original Letters from India (1817). 3 Edward W. Said. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. 4 Mary Louise Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992: 155–71; Felicity A. Nussbaum. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Chapter 6. 5 Jean Dumont. A New Voyage to the Levant: Containing An Account of the most Remarkable Curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta and Turkey; With Historical Observations relating to the Present and Ancient State of those Countries (1694). London: M. Villyflower, T. Goodwin, M. Wotton, et al., 1696. 232. 6 Matar makes the following important point here: ‘Western historians find that the only fear in the early modern period was of innocent Europeans who feared the rapacious “Mahometans”, completely ignoring the fear the Muslims had of the European nasara, whose legacy was not only of warfare but of religious persecution’. ‘Introduction’. In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century. Ed. and trans. by Nabil Matar. London: Routledge, 2003. xiii–xlviii (xxvii). 7 Quoted in Linda Colley. Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. 106. 8 See Colley, Chapter 4, and Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton. Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West. London: Reaktion Books, 2000, for a convincing study of the close economic, political and cultural relations between Britain and the Ottoman Empire that defy simple binary opposition of East and West. Colley argues that Britain’s xenophobic attitude towards the Orient was in fact part of a much wider ‘defence mechanism’ as a small, but expansionist colonial power. The xenophobia targeted non-Protestant Europeans as much as it was aimed at Islamic or Asian countries (104–5). 9 Montesquieu. Arsace et Isménie, Histoire Orientale. Paris: Guillaume de Bure, 1783. 5–6. 10 Penelope Aubin. The Noble Slaves, or, The Lives and Adventures of Two Lords and Two ladies, who were shipwreck’d and cast upon a desolate Island near the East-Indies in the Year 1710. London: E. Bell, J. Darby, A. Bettelworth, F. Fayram, et al., 1722. ix. See Rachel Weil for a study of contemporary pamphlets and satires on Charles II whose court was compared to a seraglio and whose reign was likened to Turkish tyranny. Rachel Weil. ‘Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England’. The Invention of Pornography:

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Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800. Ed. by Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books, 1993. 125–53. 11 Reina Lewis. ‘Harems and Hotels: Segregated City Spaces and Narratives of Identity in the Work of Oriental Women Writers’. Gender and Architecture. Ed. by Louise Durning and Richard Wrigley. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. 171–88. 12 See Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 13 Montesquieu. De’Esprit des lois (1748). Ed. by Laurent Versini. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. I, Book XV, XIII. 480. 14 Samuel Johnson. ‘Seraglio’. Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London: W. Straham, 1755. Clearly, this was a familiar fantasy of Johnson, as Boswell reports in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). ‘To hear the grave Dr Samuel Johnson, “that majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom”, while sitting solemn in an arm-chair in the Isle of Sky, talk, ex cathedra, of his keeping a seraglio, and acknowledge that the supposition had often been in his thoughts, struck me so forcibly with ludicrous constrast, that I could not but laugh immoderately’. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Ed. by Peter Levi. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 287. 15 Eliza Haywood. The Fair Captive: A Tragedy. London: T. Jauncy and H. Cole, 1721. 4. 16 Judith Drake. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. Written by a Lady (1696). London: A. Roper, 1697. 22; Mary Wollstonecraft. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Ed. by Miriam Brody Kramnick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 80. 17 James Lawrence. The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women. A Utopian Romance (1811); Claeys. Modern British Utopias. V, 1–328 (10). 18 Montesquieu. De’Esprit des lois. I, Book XIV. 19 Samuel Richardson. Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady (1747–1748). Ed. by Angus Ross. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. 637 (and 762). See also John Cleland. Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) and John Gay. The Beggar’s Opera (1728). The demise of the Ottoman Empire was interpreted on the grounds of sodomy. Hugh Murray. Historical Account of Discoveries and Travels in Asia, from the earliest ages to the present time. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1820. II, 192–3. Paul Rycaut’s book, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, which provided material for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters suggests that polygamy results in sodomitical practices. (London: J. Starkey and H. Brome, 1688. 153.) Major John Taylor also lists sexual corruption and hedonism as reasons for the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Major John Taylor. Travels from England to India, in the Year 1789 by the way of the Tyrol, Venice, Scandaroon, Aleppo, and over the Great Desart to Bussora. 2 vols. London: S. Low, 1799. I, 21– 2. Nabil Matar convincingly argues that the stereotypical denigration of American Indians as barbarians, sodomites, etc., was superimposed onto Muslim nations in the hope of dominating them as much as the American Indians were domesticated and conquered. However, as the relationship between Islam empires in North Africa and the Middle East and Britain was traditionally one of trade (and of course religious antagonism) but not of conquest – either way – the colonial discourse was ‘merely a discourse – without colonialism’. Nabil Matar. Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 17.



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20 Ottaviano Bon. The Sultan’s Seraglio (1625). Intr. by G. Goodwin. London: Saqi Books, 1996. 57–8. 21 Alexander Pope. ‘To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’, 10 November [1716]. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope. Ed. by George Sherburn. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. I, 368. Elizabeth Bohls. Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics 1716–1818. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, allocates the quote to Withers, but Withers distorted Bon’s text in his editions of A Description of the Grand Signor’s Seraglio; or, Turkish Emperours Court (1625, 1650). Richard Burton also quotes this fact in his section on Jealousy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt 3, Sect. 3, Mem. 2. 284. George Sandys however emphasized that the harem women live together in harmony: ‘with no great iealousie, or enuy’. A Relation of Journey begun An:Dom:1610. London: W. Barrett, 1615. 67. 22 Matar is right in emphasizing that for Rycaut, male and female homosexuality was a logical outcome of the gender separation in the Turkish seraglio. He further suggested that Rycaut differed here from his predecessors such as Nicholay (The Nauigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay. Trans. by T. Washington (1585)), who implied that the geographical and climatic conditioning of Oriental women automatically had to result in sexual deviance (Matar, 121–4). 23 In his earlier history of the Ottoman Empire, Hill suggested that Turkish wives have the right to lie with the Sultan one night in seven. Aaron Hill. A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire in all its Branches: With the Government, and Policy, Religion, Customs and Way of Living of the Turks, in General. Faithfully Related from a Serious Observation taken in many years Travels thro’ those Countries. London: John Mayo, 1709. 103. 24 On this point, see also Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Harems of the Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Chapter 12. 25 Laura Brown. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 26 Whilst Colley suggests that the Islamic faith in the early eighteenth century was not entirely condemned I found that popular romances in a period earlier than Colley identified, sought to link the sexual threat posed by Arabic Sultans or Grand Viziers to their religious faith. Therefore, texts such as Penelope Aubin’s The Life of Charlotta Du Pont (1736), The Noble Slaves (1718), The Life and Adventures of the Young Count Albertus (1728) and Eliza Haywood’s Philodore and Placentia; or, L’Amour trop Delicat (1727) read the ‘virtue in distress’ theme as a tale of Christian fortitude and virtue. Colley refers to a later text by Elizabeth Marsh, The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts which happened in Barbary in the Year 1756, written by herself (1769). Because of the stereotyping of Muslims as sodomites (a frequent xenophobic trope used on non-Protestant, non-European peoples), there is also an early modern strand of narratives honoring male Christian martyrs. See for instance A True Narrative of a Wonderful Accident, which Occur’d upon the Execution of a Christian Slave at Aleppo in Turkey (1676). 27 See Nussbaum, ‘Introduction’, for this. 28 William Alexander. The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; giving some Account of almost every interesting Particular concerning that Sex, among all Nations, Ancient and Modern (1779). 2 vols. London: C. Dilly and R. Christopher, 1782. I, 330–31. 29 Harriet Guest. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 47.

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30 See the comparative typology in Bettina Roß. Politische Utopien von Frauen: Von Christine de Pizan bis Karin Boye. Dortmund: Edition Ebersbach, 1998. Appendix, 283–93. 31 Ottaviano Bon’s text, The Sultan’s Seraglio, a document of Bon’s stay in Istanbul between 1607–1609, was corrupted and distorted by Robert Wither’s edition and additions to the text in 1625 and 1650. Charles Perry. A View of the Levant, Particularly of Constantinople, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. In Four Parts. London: T. Woodward and C. Davis, 1743, based his account on Rycaut. Whilst Aaron Hill and George Sandys claimed to have visited seraglios and thus claimed to provide first-hand experiences these were later discarded by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Dumont at least admitted that all ‘the Relations of Travellers are full of Stories and Reflections on this Subject’ but again sought to authenticate his account by adding few details that others, to his mind, missed out (167). See George Sandys. A Relation of a Journey begun An:Dom: 1610. Nicholas Rolamb reiterated the fact that no one had access to the seraglio and filled this lack of first-hand knowledge by quoting Albertus Bobovius. Nicholas Rolamb. ‘A Relation of a Journey to Constantinople.’ A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some now first printed from Original Manuscripts, others now first published in English. In Six Volumes. London: John Walthoe, Thomas Wotton, Samuel Birt, et al., 1732. V, 669–716. 32 See also Dumont: ‘The Turkish Women are the most charming Creatures in the World: They seem to be made for Love; their Actions, Gestures, Discourses, and Looks are all Amorous, and admirably well fitted to kindle a soft and lasting Passion. Since they have nothing else to do, they make it their own Business to Please; which they do so successfully, and in so natural and easy a manner, that few Husbands take the benefit of the law, that allows ’em to divorce their Wives when they please’ (273). 33 See Thomas Laqueur. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. 34 James Dallaway. Constantinople: Ancient and Modern, with Excursions to the Shores and Islands of the Archipelago and to the Troad (1767). London: T. Cadell Junior and W. Davies, 1797. 27. 35 See particularly Poullain De La Barre. The Equality of the Two Sexes. Trans. by Daniel A. Frankforter and Paul Morman. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989; and the translator’s introduction for an overview of De La Barre’s work in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cartesian feminism. 36 Albertus Bobovius. Topkapi: Relation du sérail du Grand Seigneur (1665). Arles: Actes du Sud, 1999. 138. 37 Racine. The Sultaness: A Tragedy. By Mr. Johnson. London: W. Wilkins, 1717. The Epilogue is not in the original play. 38 [James Porter]. Observations on the Religion, Law, Government, and Manners of the Turks. 2 vols. London: J. Nourse, 1768. I, 66. 39 Mary Davys. The Lady’s Tale. The Works of Mrs Davys: Consisting of Plays, Novels, Poems and Familial Letters. Several of which never before Publish’d. 2 vols. London: H. Woodfall, 1725. II, 123–201 (180). 40 Weitzman argues that Galland carefully selected and distorted the ‘authentic’ oral literature to please European readers. Arthur J. Weitzman. ‘The Oriental Tale in the Eighteenth Century: A Reconsideration’. Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century 58 (1967): 1839–55. For a comprehensive list of Oriental tales see Martha Pine Conant. The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1908.



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41 Thomas Simon Guellette. Mogul Tales; or, The Dreams of Men Awake. Being Stories told to divert the Grief of the Sultanas of Guzarat, for the supposed Death of the Sultan. Written in French by the Celebrated Mr Guellette, Author of the Chinese Tales, &c. In two vols. London: J. Applebee, et al. 1736. ix. 42 Ros Ballaster. Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. 16. To expand Ballaster’s argument, one should remember William Beckford’s Vathek (1782), a Orientalist Gothic novel that not only comments on William Pitt’s expansionist policies but at the same time contemplates male homosexuality. 43 See new edition and introduction by Earla Wilputte. Eliza Haywood. Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-Adamitical History. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999. 44 Hannah Cowley. A Day in Turkey; or, The Russian Slaves. A Comedy. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792. On Cowley, see Mita Choudhury. ‘Gazing at his Seraglio: Late Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights as Orientalists’. Theatre Journal 474 (December 1995): 481–502. 45 Srinivas Aravamudan. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. 160. 46 John Hawkins. Life of Johnson (1787). New York: Garland, 1974. 372. 47 Ellis Cornelia Knight. Dinarbas: A Tale. Samuel Johnson. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia and Ellis Cornelia Knight. Dinarbas: A Tale. Ed. by Lynne Meloccaro. London: Dent, 1994. 106. 48 See Robert W. Uphaus. ‘Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas: A Sequel to Rasselas’. Philological Quarterly 65.4 (1986): 433–46. 49 See Richard Braverman. ‘The Narrative Architecture of Rasselas’. The Age of Johnson 3 (1990): 91–111. 50 Hester Thrale. Thraliana. Ed. by Katharine C. Balderston. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951. II, 775. 51 Catherine, Duchess of Cleveland. The Life and Letters of Lady Hester Stanhope. London: William Clowes and Sons, 1897. 110. 52 ‘To Lady Mar’, 1 April [1717]. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Ed. by Robert Halsband. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–1967. I, 329. 53 Melman argues that in Victorian travel writing, the issues of liberty and the public/ private in an Orientalist context are domesticized. ‘For, in contrast to Montagu, the Victorians did not interpret “liberty” as “sexual freedom”, or licence. Indeed, they desexualized liberty. And they depoliticized the term. Their notion of it was broader than the Augustan one and combined economic and legal rights with custom and etiquette that, together, guaranteed to women of different classes, freedom from sexual exploitation’. Billie Melman. Women’s Orient: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 106. 54 See also Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain text from 1905, Sultana’s Dream, where she presents an utopian vision of ‘Ladyland’ with an enlightened rule based on science, reason and peace. The zenana (seclusion of women) is reversed into mardana (seclusion of men). Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Sultana’s Dream: A Feminist Utopia and Selections from The Secluded Ones. Ed. and trans. by Roushan Jahan. New York: The Feminist Press, 1988. 55 There were other earlier female visitors to the Ottoman Empire. See Gerald McLean. The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire 1580–1720. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004. 221–5.

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56 For a detailed history of provenance, see Robert Halsband’s edition. 57 Joseph W. Lew. ‘Lady Mary’s Portable Seraglio’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 432–50 (437). 58 Monthly Review 28 (1763): 392. 59 Elizabeth Craven. A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople. In a Series of Letters from the Right Honourable Elizabeth Lady Craven, to his Serene Highness The Margrave of Brandebourg, Anspach and Bareith. London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1789. There is a second edition of 1814 with some additional letters. 60 Inge E. Boer. ‘Despotism from Under the Veil: Masculine and Feminine Readings of the Despot and the Harem’. Cultural Critique 32 (1995–1996): 43–73 (69). 61 Craven, A Journey (1789): ‘I think I never saw a country where women may enjoy so much liberty, and free from all reproach, as in Turkey – A Turkish husband that sees a pair of slippers at the door of his harem must not enter; his respect for the sex prevents him from intruding when a stranger is there upon a visit; how easy then it is for men to visit and pass for women …’ (205). Craven, A Journey (1814): ‘… and I repeat it, Sir, I think no women have so much liberty, safe from apprehension, as the Turkish – and I think of them, in their manner of living, capable of being the happiest creatures breathing’ (233–43). 62 Roxana features in Racine’s Bajazet (1672), Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (Roxane) and Daniel Defoe, Roxana; or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724), Isaac Bickerstaffe’s farce (Roxalana) The Sultan; or, A Peep into the Seraglio (1787) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues, ‘Monday’: Roxana; or, The Drawing Room (1715). On the history of the ‘Sultanate of women’ and generally, women’s social and economic position in the early modern harem, see Leslie P. Peirce. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. 63 See Grosrichard for a Lacanian reading of the seraglio and the Valide Sultana as a Phallic Mother. Alain Grosrichard. Structures du Serail. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 64 Pierce makes the following point here: ‘The harem is mistakenly seen as a woman’s world – domestic, private, and parochial – an any attempt by women to influence events beyond its walls as “meddling” in an arena to which females have no rightful access. One reason for the persistence of this myth is our frequent failure, when we examine non-Western cultures, to question the relevance or validity of assumptions that have shaped Western thinking about politics, especially about gender and politics. I am thinking here particularly of modern (post-seventeenthcentury) Western notions of a public/private dichotomy, in which the family is seen as occupying private, non-political space’ (6). 65 See Peirce, Chapter 5. 66 [Charles Lewis Meryon]. Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, as related by herself in conversation with her Physician; comprising her opinions and anecdotes of some of the most remarkable persons of her time. 3 vols. London: Coburn, 1845. II, 5. 67 Her papers contain for instance a ‘Sketch of the Wahhabis’, a sect of Muslim Puritans. See Centre for Kentish Studies, Stanhope Papers, U1590/C231–53. 68 Virginia Childs. Lady Hester Stanhope: Queen of the Desert. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. 114. 60 Zenobia was used by Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and Thomas Elyot’s Defense of Good Women (1545). 70 See Centre for Kentish Studies, Stanhope Papers, U1590/C231–53.



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71 Letterbook of Letters from Lady Hester Stanhope to General Richard Grenville 1810–1812. BL Add MS42057. 33. 72 Tresham Lever. The House of Pitt. London: John Murray, 1947. 356. 73 Stanhope Papers, U1590/C248A. 74 Memoirs of a Babylonian Princess, Daughter of Emir Abdallah Asmàr; Written by Herself, and Translated into English. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1844. II, 180–81. 75 The narrative of androgyny in an Oriental context is captured again in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. See Karen R. Lawrence, Chapter 4. 76 See Reina Lewis. ‘Harems and Hotels’; Emily Apter. ‘Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem’. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.1 (1992): 205–24 and the oeuvre of Assia Djerbar, especially Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (2002).

Chapter SIX

Afterword In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous declares that writing entails ‘the very possibility of change, that space can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’.1 Cixous clearly grants literature a utopian function: literature not only reflects on, but ultimately initiates social change. The utopian impulse of writing creates a poetic space where woman becomes ‘at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process’ (250). I have suggested that women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have clearly embraced this transformational potential of writing. Not only have women writers of the period under investigation established poetic spaces where woman has become ‘the taker and initiator, for her own right’. Since Christine de Pizan’s pivotal text The Book of the City of Ladies, women writers have been particularly aware of the relevance of space for ‘the production and reproduction of masculinist societies’.2 Recognizing that identity and space are interdependent, women writers have questioned contemporary politics of space and have developed diverse strategies of resistance which liberate them – at least in their utopian imagination – from specific gendered social maps. Of course, they themselves devised new ones that equally set up paradigms of femininity and masculinity. These strategies are diverse and range from the symbolic recoding of representational spaces to the invention of an innovative architectural practice. Convents, academies, palaces, harems and country estates were the dominant locations of utopian visions in women’s literature of the time. They are the contested sites women’s literature is experimenting with. What is at stake in these utopian narratives are discourses of gendered domesticity. The castle, the convent, the academy, the harem and the country house are ambivalent domestic spheres, enclosing and confining on the one hand (thus the release for Wroth, Langer and Leapor is the ‘unwalled’ Paradise), but emancipatory on the other, as they enclose female communities in the absence of a patriarch. The representations of these recoded spaces during this period overlap. When Lord Byron in his satire on the Oriental romance equated the harem with the salon and denounced Lady Hester Stanhope, the ‘Queen of the Desert’ as ‘that dangerous thing – a female wit!’, he inserts himself into a long satirical tradition that has targeted the femme forte, the learned woman, the Amazon and, last but not least, the Bluestockings: They cannot read, and so don’t lisp in criticism; Nor write, and so they don’t affect the music Were never caught in epigram or witticism, Have no romance, sermons, plays, reviews, –

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In harems learning soon would make a pretty schism! But luckily these beauties are no ‘blues’ …3

Whilst there was indeed an overlap of some of these institutions (nuns such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Marie-Eléanore de Rohan hosted salons and convents and harems functioned as boarding schools), Byron’s disdain points towards some greater phenomenon: the semantically paradoxical iconography of woman. In this semantic system, the representation of woman is symbolic – whilst the topos changes with historical period and cultural context, the function of the symbol ‘woman’ remains the same. The querelle des femmes, Cartesian biology, Enlightenment theories of limitless perfectibility promised, firstly (gender and racial) equality in sameness and then (gender) equality in difference. Whilst the querelle, Enlightenment philosophy and science and social contract theories destabilized one set of notions about femininity, they introduced another set that sought to restabilize gender relations. For instance, eighteenth-century political economy was caught between the landed and the moneyed interests, between the defence of a socioeconomic system based on landed property and patronage against commercial capitalism. Whilst the former allocated woman the role of operational ‘proxy for male acquisition’ and capitalist alienation, the latter endowed capitalist commerce with feminine virtues of sociability and sentimentality.4 This study also suggests that the ‘feminine’ when it occurs within utopian literary discourse is one important avenue through which specific utopian hopes (by men and women) are realized. Notes

1 2 3 4

Hélène Cixous. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. New French Feminism: An Anthology. Ed. by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken Books, 1981. 245–64 (249). Gillian Rose. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 17. Lord Byron. Beppo: A Venetian Story (1817). London: John Murray, 1820. 39. Laura Brown. Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. 19.

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Index Acosta, Ana 98–99 Adam, Robert and James 67, 80, 83–85, 87 Agrest, Diane 9 Alberti, Leon Battista, De Re Aedificatoria 5 The Art of Building in Ten Books 9 Alexander, William, The History of Women 126, 129–30, 142 Amory, Thomas, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain 68 Andreae, Johann Valentin, Christanopolis 40– 42 Anecdotes of a Convent 99 Applebaum, Robert 35 Aravamudan, Srinivas 133 arcadia utopica 18 architecture and utopia 2, 45, 76, 79–88 Archer, John 84 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso 22 Astell, Mary 11, 72, 103, 109–114, 131 Letters concerning the Love of God 112 A Serious Proposal 95, 110–114 Some Reflections upon Marriage 112–113 Austen, Jane, Emma 64 Mansfield Park 64 Pride and Prejudice 64 Aubin, Penelope, The Noble Slaves 126, 129, 133 Avila, Teresa of, Interior Castle 97 Bacon, Francis, The Advancement of Learning 45 ‘Of Building’ 7 The Masculine Birth of Time 44 New Atlantis 3, 7, 41 Baker, Keith Michael 8 Barksdale, Clement, Letter Touching a Colledge of Maids 106–107 Baroque 37 Barre, Poulain de la The Equality of the Two Sexes 103, 110, 131 [Barrin, Jean], Venus in the Cloister 96 Behn, Aphra, ‘The Golden Age’19–20 Oroonoko 3 Bender, John 116

Bergerac, Cyrano de 36 Bloch, Ernst 21,35 Blondel, Jacques François, Cours d’architecture 85 Bluestockings 104, 155 Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus 29 Boer, Inge E. 140, 141 Boffrand, Germain, Livre d’architecture 85 Bon, Ottaviano The Sultan’s Seraglio128, 132, 142 Brathwaite, Richard 22 Brooke, Frances, The History of Emily Montagu 3 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 80, 83, 87 Brown, Laura 129 Burney, Frances, Cecilia 68 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy 35–36, 105–106, 130 Carew, Thomas, ‘To Saxham’ 54 castimony 97 castles 23–26, 35 Cavalier poems 57 Cavendish, Margaret 11, 131 Assaulted and Pursued Chastity 43 Bell in Campo 100 The Blazing New World 1, 35–46 The Convent of Pleasure 95, 99–103, 105 The Female Academy 103–105 Ground of Natural Philosophy 45 Inventory of Judgment’s Commonwealth 37 Observations upon Experimental Philosophy 36–37, 43 Orations of Divers Sorts 104 ‘A Piece of a Play’ 36 Philosophical Fancies 45 Philosophical and Physical Opinions 45 CCXI Sociable Letters 37 Cavendish, William, The Varietie 104 Certeau, Michel de 6 Chalmers, Hero 101 Chamberlayne, Edward, An Academy or Colledge 106, 110 Chambray, Fréart de, Parallèle 7

196

Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

Chapone, Hester, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind 91 città felice 5, 7, 17 Cixous, Hélène, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ 155 Clare, John 20 Clifford, Ann 31, 32 The Diary of Anne Clifford 25 Clifford, Margaret 28, 30, 31,32 Cobbett, William 20 colonialism 4 convents 95–105, 116–118, 131 convent novels 98–99 Cornell, Drucilla 12 Cotton, Priscilla, A Briefe Description by Way of Supposition 50 (n.55) country-house architecture 9, 26, 34, 55, 56, 59–61, 66–68, 74–76 country-house ethos 32, 33, 34, 53–64, 77 country-house genre 31, 53–64 country-house poetry, see estate poetry Cowley, Hannah, A Day in Turkey 133 Craven, Elizabeth 11, 125, 140, 142 Dallaway, James Constantinople: Ancient and Modern 130 Davys, Mary, The Lady’s Tale 132 Defoe, Daniel, Captain Singleton 63 The Compleat English Gentleman 62 Essay upon Projects 114–116 Moll Flanders 63 Robinson Crusoe 63 Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain 62 despotism 99, 126–128, 129, 130, 132, 135 Diderot, Denis, La Religieuse 96 Donne, John 17 Drake, Judith, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex 131,148 Drayton, Michael ‘Nimphidia’ 22 Dumont, Jean, A New Voyage to the Levant 126, 127 Eden 4, 17 Elmes, James Hints for the Improvement of Prisons 115 estate poetry 19, 53–65 Ettin, Andrew V. 19, 21

[Evans, Ambrose] The Adventures and Surprizing Deliverances of James Dubordieu, and his Wife 4 Evelyn, John 7, 20, 60, 110 family 24, 25, 29, 98 Fatal Friendship: A Novel in Two Volumes 96 female academy 105-116, 131, 155 female community 18, 28–31, 53, 70, 71–79, 95, 97, 100-105, 109–114, 131, 133 female education 98, 103–116, 131–132, 137, femme forte 101, 102, 103, 155 Ferrar, Nicolas 98, 107, 110 Flecknoe, Richard, ‘On the Duchess of Newcastle’s Closet’ 26 Fielding, Sarah, The History of the Countess of Delwynn 117 Finch, Anne, ‘To the Honourable the Lady Worsley at Long-leate’ 60 Foigny, Gabriel de, La Terre Australe connue 3, 36 Fowler, Alistair 19, 25, 59 Franklin, Benjamin 20 Friedman, Alice 9 Fuller, Anne, The Convent 99 Galland, Antoine, Les Milles et une nuits 132, 139 Gay, John 32, Polly 63 The Shepherd’s Week 20 Georgic 18 [Gibbes, Phebe (attr.)] The American Fugitive; or, Friendship in a Nunnery 96, 99 Gilchrist, Roberta 97 Glanvil, Joseph, Scepsis Scientifica 43 Godwin, Francis, The Man in the Moone 3, 36 Golden Age 4, 17, 19, 20, 21, 28 Goldsmith, Oliver, The Deserted Village 20 Goodman, Paul and Percival 2 Gothic literature 18, 70, 97 Gournay, Marie de 103 Gowing, Laura 9 Greenblatt, Stephen 31



Index

Gulliveriana 3 Guellette, Thomas Simon, Mogul Tales 132 Guest, Harriet 130 Gwynne, John, London and Westminster Improved 7–8 Habermas, Jürgen 8–9, 141 Hackett, Helen 24, 28 Hamilton, Mary, Munster Village 11, 20, 53, 79–88 Hannay, Patrick, A Happy Husband 91 harem 11, 69, 95, 125–146 Hawkins, John 133, 134 Hayden, Dolores 9 Haywood, Eliza, Adventures of Eovaii, Princess of Ijaveo 132 The British Recluse 53, 72–73 The Fair Captive 127 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia 70, 72 The Mercenary Lover 70, 72 Henrietta-Maria 40, 102 Hibbard, G. R. 53–54 Hickes, George 107 Hill, Aaron 128 A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire 131, 139 The History of Miss Indiana Danby 117 Hillier, B and J. Hanson 15, 67 Hills, Helen 97, 115 Hobby, Elaine 100 household 9–10, 23, 25, 26, 65–69, 74, 76–77, 97, see also family, marriage household manuals 65–67 Howard, Ebenezer 5 Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman 1 Jameson, Frederic 6, 64 Jardine, Lisa 26 Jerusalem 18 New Jerusalem 39 Jones, Kathleen 101 Jonson, Ben, ‘To Penshurst’ 28, 31, 53–57, 68–69 ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ 54 Johns, Alessa 10

197

Johnson, Samuel, Rasselas 133–138 Dictionary of the English Language 127 Kelly, Gary 87 Kenny, Virginia 59 King, Margaret 98 Kitch, Sally 12 Knight, Ellis Cornelia 11, 125 Dinarbas 133–138 Knight, Richard Payne, The Landscape 83 Kostova, Ludmilla 143 Kumar, Krishan 4 Kruft, Hanno-Walter 5 Kürsat-Ahlers, Elçin 141 Land of Cockaygne 4 Landes, Joan 9 Landry, Donna 20 Langley, Batty, The Builder’s Chest Book 67 Lanyer, Aemilia ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ 28–32, 53, 54 ‘Eve’s Apology in Defense of Woman’ 31 Salve Deus Judærum 28, 31 La Roche, Sophie, Erscheinungen am See Oneida 3 Laven, Mary 96, 97 Leapor, Mary, ‘Crumble Hall’ 32–35 Le Corbusier 4 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 4,5 L’Architecture considérée 85–86 Lefebvre, Henri 2, 11, 18 Lennox, Charlotte 25–26 Leon, Jacob Judah 40, 41 lesbianism 17, 28, 95, 96, 97, 128 ‘Levantization’ 133, see also Orientalism Levitas, Ruth 64 Lew, Joseph W. 141 Lewis, Reina 127 Loudon, John Claudius 5 Lowe, Lisa 140 Makin, Batshua 103, 131 Manley, Delarivier 11 Alymyna; or, The Arabian Vow 133 New Atalantis 70–72 Markham, Gervaise, Country Contentments 91

198

Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

marriage 18, 23, 24, 67–70, 81, 97, 98, 99, 112–114, 135–136, 143, see also household, female community Markus, Thomas 5–6 Martin, Christophe 2 Marvell, Andrew, ‘Upon Appleton House’ 54, 58–59 McBride, Kari Boyd 31, 32, 57, 59, 68 McClung, William Alexander 17, 55 McEwan, Ian, Atonement 64 McGuire, Mary Ann C. 57 McKay, George 12 McNamarra, Jo Anne Kay 98 Melman, Billie 140, 141 Millar, John, The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks 126, 129 model villages 79-80, 83 monastic architecture 97, 115 Montagu, Mary Wortley 11, 125, Turkish Embassy letters 138–143 Montaigne, ‘Des Cannibales’ 3 Montesquieu, Arsace et Isménie 126 De l’esprit des lois 126, 127, 129, 132 Lettres Persanes 126 More, Thomas, Utopia 3, 4, 5,7, 36, 46 Morris, Robert, Rural Architecture 67 Morrison, Tony, Paradise 95 Moylan, Tom 12, 58 Mullan, John 3 Mumford, Lewis 63–64 Neville, Henry, The Isle of Pines 36 neopastoral 17, 19, 20,21,35 North, Roger, Of Building 59–60, 66 North, Mary 107-108 Nourse, Timothy, Campania Foelix 69 Nussbaum, Felicity 129, 143 Orientalism 125–146 Oriental Tale 132–138 Palladianism 7–8, 55, 61, 76, 83 Paltock, Robert, Peter Wilkins 86 Paradise 17, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 46, 155 Parminter, Ann and Mary 80 pastoral 17–35, 36 Paterson, Annabel 18 Payne, Linda R. 100 Penn, William 5

Pennington, S., An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters 91 Perry, Charles, A View of the Levant 131–132 Perry, Ruth 106, 112 Phillips, Ambrose 20 Phillips, Katherine 72 Picturesque 83–84 Pigot, Robert 20 Pizan, Christine de, The City of Ladies 1, 29, 155 place 9–10, 46,70, see also household Plato, Critias 4 Plattes, Gabriel, A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Marcaria 3 Plaw, John, Ferme Ornée 79 Pococke, Richard 7 Pomfret, John, The Choice 63 Pope, Alexander 20, 32 ‘Epistle to Burlington’ 34, 61 pornography 69–70, 96, 125, see also somatopias Prévost, Abbé, The Philosophe Anglois 3 Price, Uvedale, Essay on the Picturesque 83 prison architecture 115–116 Puttenham, George 19 querelle des femmes 18, 29, 103, 104, 156 Quincy, Quatremère de, Encyclopédie méthodique 5 Racine, The Sultaness 131 radical pastoral 20 Reeve, Clara, 131 The School for Widows 68 History of Charoba, Queen of Ægypt 133 Relf, Jan 23 Repton, Humphrey, 67 Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening 83 Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa 70 The History of Sir Charles Grandison 61, 118 Pamela 70 Riley, Philip R. 115 Rivers, Isabel 57 Roberts, Josephine 22 Robinsonade 3, 20



Index

199

Rolamb, Nicholas, ‘A Relation of a Journey to Constantinople’ 165 Rosenau, Helen 5 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 20 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer 70 Roxelana 128, 141

Shepherd’s Calendar 19 Sprat, Thomas, The History of the Royal Society 43 Stanhope, Lady Hester 125, 143–146, 155 Journal to Syria 145, 146 Notes upon the Mamelukes 146

Sackville-West, Vita, The Garden 64 Knole and the Sackvilles 56 The Land 64 Sade, Marquis de 97 Les cent vingt journées de Sodome 70 La Nouvelle Justine 70 Said, Edward, Orientalism 125, 126 Sanders, Julie 26, 102 Sargent, Lyman Tower 64 Sargisson, Lucy 12 Schurman, Anna Maria van 103, 104 Scott, Sarah 11, 131 The History of Sir George Ellison 74, 78 Millenium Hall 53, 68, 73–79, 117 secular convent 103–106, see also female academy ‘separate spheres’ 2, 8–10, 26, 27, 32, 46, 97, 135, 141, 142 seraglio, see harem sexuality 69, 96–99, 100, 128, 132, 135, 138, 140, 141, 143, see also lesbianism Shakespeare, William, As you Like It 99 A Midsummer’s Nights Dream 99 Twelfth Night 99 Sidney, Philip, Arcadia 19, 23, 55 Shrewsbury, Elizabeth Countess of 25, 68 Solomon’s Temple 39–40 Soane, John, Sketches in Architecture 80 space 8–9, 141 allegorical space 1, 47 ‘lived’ (‘representational’); ‘conceived’ (‘representation of space’) 2, 6, 11, 53, 56, see also Henri Lefebvre metaphorical space 2, 17, 23 metonymic space 2, 64–65 public/private space 23, 26–27, 66–67, 141 space and gender 5–6, 7–10, 46, 97 The Spectator 62–63 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene 19, 22

Tafuri, Manfred 5, 84 Tasso, Arminta 22 La Gerusalemme Liberata 27 Ticknell, Thomas 20 Traub, Valerie 98 Tschumi, Bernard 10 Turner, James 18 Tyron, Thomas 20 utopia anti-utopian satire 10 celestial utopia 36 classical utopia 3, 4 colonial utopia 3, 4, 21, 22, 46 collective utopia 63, 64 contractual utopia 5, 21 domestic utopia 10–11 educational utopia 10, 41, 45, 72, 81, 87–88, 103 eu/utopia 3, 4 eu/uchronia 3, 4 feminotopia 125, 138, 140, 141, 146 geographical utopia 3 individualist utopia 3 intimate utopia 10 micro-utopia 3 negative utopia 35, 88 (n.1) pastoral utopia 10, 18–22, 23,28,35, 36 philosophical utopia 36, 37 positive utopia 88 (n.1) somatopia 18 sentimental utopia 3, 72 primitivist utopia 3, 19, 20 royalist utopia 36, 37 utopia and gender 10–11 utopia and ideology 6, 64 utopia and myth 21, 64 utopia and space 2–5 voyage utopia 4, 10, 36, 38, 125–146 Vairasse, Denis, History of the Sevarites 3, 36

200

Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800

Valide Sultan 142 Varey, Simon 8 Vaughan, Henry, Golden Grove Moralized 55 Venice 39 villa suburbana 63 Virgil, Georgics 4, 54, 56 Eclogues 20–21 Vives, Juan Luis, Instruction of a Christian Woman 104 Wakefield, Priscilla 131 Wall, Cynthia 8 Waller, Gary 27 Ward, Mary 96, 108–109 Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited 64 Wayne, Don 56–57, 69 Weamys, Anne, Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia 24

Whately, Thomas, Observations on Modern Gardening 85 Wigley, Mark 9 Williams, Raymond 18, 56 Wollstonecraft, Mary 131, 133, 137 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 127 Wood, John, A Series of Plans of Cottages 79–80 Woods, Susanne 30 Wotton, Henry, Elements of Architecture 55 Wren, Christopher 7 Wright, Frank Lloyd 4, 5 Wroth, Mary 11, 36 The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania 1, 21–28 ‘Love’s Victory’ 22 ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ 22