ativeness but for their entertainment value. The world of conceptualization is ignored. Text is divorced from context. The result is a book that passes more readily as a diversion than as an analysis. It is difficult to believe that The Weaker Vessel advances our understanding of the seventeenth century.
SOURCE: "The Bad Old Days," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. II, No. 9, June, 1985, pp. 17-18.
Anyone who investigates the social of cultural history of women is painfully aware of how little of our past is accessible, even the relatively well-documented past of the English speaking culture. Some things are retrievable, including the expressed attitudes of men toward women and the legal and social restrictions imposed by men or women; less well understood are the motives and conditions of men's writing about the nature and position of women, and the actual lives of women themselves. For the England of the Renaissance and seventeenth century, two new complementary studies shed welcome light.
Linda Woodbridge, a literary scholar, uses literary and historical evidence to analyze the sense of threat that men in the Renaissance apparently experienced from women—especially from aggressive and vocal women, from female dominance in love and marriage, and from female, friendships—and investigates the cultural expression of and reaction to men's fears, particularly through a study of the stock literary figure of the "woman-hater." [In The Weaker Vessel] Antonia Fraser, biographer and historian, depicts the general condition of women in seventeenth-century England through an account of the economics of marriage, the role of love (negligible for the most part), the wifely virtues (chastity, silence and obedience), widowhood, attitudes to the old and ugly (always in danger of charges of witchcraft), and women's education.
Fraser finds one moment, during the Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, when women's institutionalized inferiority briefly diminished. During the Civil War women were often less restricted: the Puritan women of Lyme, for example, joined the men in attacking the Royalist forces, and destroyed their complex fortifications. Several women, both Puritan and Royalist, commanded castles and withstood sieges while their husbands were away. Wives of dissidents, such as Leveller John Lilburne's Elizabeth, heroically held together homes while their husbands were imprisoned, and spent years in the complex (male) legal world, petitioning for the release of their husbands and relief of family financial distress.
But like the short-lived intellectual liberalism of the Jacobean stage, the freedom and authority of Civil War women faded quickly; with the Restoration in 1660 all the brave women, the "Rosie the Riveters" of their day, gave back their independence in the name of stability and right order. From then through the reign of Queen Anne with which her book concludes, Fraser describes a situation that grew, if anything, to be more confining than it had been in 1600.
Both Woodbridge and Fraser hunt for examples of self-directed women in the chokingly repressive atmosphere of the period. Neither lingers long at the accommodationist fountain of Maybe It Wasn't So Bad, though Fraser looks harder than Woodbridge for mitigating attitudes and personal heroisms. What both authors inevitably encounter are the undeniable longings of women for full (meaning, in this period, largely manlike) dignity in the face of institutionalized and internalized oppression. Their work serves to underscore the extent of that oppression even as it searches for the challenges.
By the seventeenth century, as both writers make clear, the arguments for or against woman's character were already cliches. Aristotle had called her an imperfect man; Tertullian and Jerome had blasted her as the cause of the fall and there-fore of Christ's terrible suffering and death; her representatives were traitorous Delilah, destructive Helen of Troy, murderous Medea, and (under an assortment of names) the shrewish scolding wife and the lustful widow out to capture yet another unsuspecting husband to dominate and cuckold.
To men nature hath given puissance in members, braveness hard and consolidate, the skin thick, and perchance more bones … to sustain outward labours…. To women she hath given the contrary … that her debility should make her more circumspect, in the keeping at home such things as her husband, by his puissance, hath gotten.
What do comments like these and the many others that Woodbridge cites from the "woman controversy" of the age have to do with life as it was lived? Woodbridge rightly claims that in The Defence of Good Women Elyot is offering a "piece of literature, written out of a long literary tradition which it modifies but whose conventions it nonetheless observes," and she emphasizes the need for great care in reading any reference to actual historical incidents or people into such literary exercises. The Renaissance was a bookish age, and the display of wit through the use of conventional materials was indeed a common entertainment. But Woodbridge is in fact wrong to disconnect Elyot's book from historical events. Elyot dedicated it to Queen Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of Henry VIII, on the occasion of her wedding. For whatever intellectual enjoyment The Defence of Good Women was intended, it was also a politic wedding gift from one of the king's resident humanists. It is hardly far-fetched to suggest that its conventional praise of obedience to one's husband was well-meant advice to the new wife of a king who had already divorced one queen and buried two more.
Woodbridge does agree that literature inevitably bears a relation to life (the dichotomy itself is a tricky one), though that relation may be complex. Seldom are correspondences between book and event so simple, or readily identifiable as Elyot's gift to Anne. More often, as Woodbridge stresses, such treatises and their fictive counterparts in romance, poetry, and drama are motivated by society's fears about the groups to whom they are directly or indirectly addressed. Their admonitions and instructions have a discernible, if unspecific, impact on human attitudes and behavior.
And she adds wryly that, "An anthology of antimasculist humor would be among the world's shortest books."
This sort of deft reading, analysis and observation is the strongest element of Woodbridge's book. Her treatment of the wider historical context is less convincing: for example, she notes the decline of the jest tradition in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and suggests that "one might ascribe Jacobean suspicion of jest to the humorlessness of advancing Puritanism or the gloom of impending civil war." Puritanism in this period was by no means always humorless, and it is doubtful if anyone felt an impending civil war in the Jacobean period. James died in 1625; hostilities did not break out until 1642.
Or again, in explaining Jacobean distress at women who dressed in fashionable imitation of men (broad-brimmed hats with feathers, French doublets, bobbed hair, and swords), Woodbridge probably errs in attributing James I's own documented irritation to his open homosexuality and fear that women in man's clothing touched too closely on his and his male courtiers' effeminacy. James' misogyny was no worse than the norm for his day, and effeminacy was by no means associated with homosexuality in this period. Woodbridge herself cites Sidney's Arcadia, where Pyrocles dresses as an Amazon to be near his adored Philoclea and is admonished by his friend Musidorus: "This effeminate love of a woman doth so womanish a man that, if you yield to it, it will not only make you a famous Amazon, but a launder, a distaff spinner." Effeminacy was associated with being too much under the sway of women, not too little.
Woodbridge's point, however, is that art is more liberal than life; her astute reading of subversions inherent in the literature is put to good advantage. Strong women appear commonly in English plays of 1610-20, "exactly contemporary with the height of the controversy over women in male attire." Unlike James and the preachers who railed against such women, literature in the same period "rejoices in assertive women."
Fraser is unsurprisingly stronger than Woodbridge in historical matters, though more credulous in interpreting literary materials and even a shade conciliatory about the misogyny inherent in the entrenched doctrines of masculine superiority. Her lack of literary sophistication leads her to treat, or at least appear to treat, conventional literary materials as historically literal, precisely the pitfall Woodbridge so carefully avoids. Fraser takes as a useful biographical source John Batchiler's The Virgin's Pattern (1661), for example, though it is actually a Protestant hagiography romanticizing the story of Susanna Perwick, who died at 24 without ever having married. It is likely that Batchiler's book has not much more to do with the real Susanna Perwick than John Donne's Anniversaries have to do with the real Elizabeth Drury (which is to say, some, but related as didactic treatise to exemplar, not as biography to subject).
Those who endured this common aspect of woman's lot ranged from Charles I's Queen Henrietta Maria ("pregnant almost without intermission from the autumn of 1628 until January 1639") and Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland (who "produced five children in as many years during the very height of her ascendancy" over Charles II) to those whom Fraser calls the "humbler sisters" of these eminent ladies.
Fraser vividly illustrates much of what we vaguely know, and some of what we may never have