Jacobean Women Flashcards
Introduction (Critical x 3, Argument x 1)
Critical:
- Barbara Lewalski argues that the Jacobean era was a ‘regressive period for women’, in which the rule of Elizabeth I was replaced by the patriarchal and homosexual court of James I
- James I ideology laid out in Basilikon Doron and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchie, which placed the female at the subjection of her father and husband and viewed this as an allegory for the citizens’ subjection to their king
- Even after James I’s death, interest in witchcraft continued, with the biggest witch trials taking place in the winter of 1644-45 in which over 100 witches were hanged
Argument:
- Focuses around the projection of women and witches according to monstrous sexuality and anti-maternality (in accordance with James’ anxieties over female authority) and how this was countered in the literature of Anne Clifford.
P1 - Male / James’ anxiety around witchcraft (Critical x 3, Quotes x 2)
Critical:
- Diane Purkiss describes the witch as the ‘male nightmare’
- Catherine Belsey notes that women who tended to receive accusations of witchcraft were often ‘deemed to have too much power, whether domestic or political’
Quotes:
- James I viewed Adam and Eve as magus and witch rebelling against the divine authority of God
- -> Stuart Clark claims that James regularly referred to Eve as ‘the first witch’
- Daemonologie (1597) claimed that ‘rebellion is as the sinne of witchcraft’
Reginald Scott - Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584): ‘At this diaie it is indifferent to saie in the English toong; she is a witch, or she is a wise woman’
P3 - Presentations of monstrous sexuality
Quotes:
Spenser - ‘The Fairie Queen’ (1590): Britomart the chaste and virtuous female knight illustrates the pinnacle of chastity.
- Stands in antithesis in Book III to the Hag of the forest who generates a False Florimell - a symbol of ‘false beauty’ (Charles G. Smith) to satisfy the libidinous desires of her son
- Similarly, another figure of monstrous female sexuality in TFQ is Duessa, who is gifted a 7 headed horse by Orgoglio, which makes her resemble the Whore of Babylon aka The Mother of Prostitutes
- Even the dragon, the pinnacle of evil in the Book I, is overcome by female generative sexuality. It is ‘monstrous, horrible and vast … swolne with wrath, poison and bloudy gore’. Even after its death, people fear that ‘in his wombe might lurke some hidden nests / filled with many dragonets’
- -> Heidi Breuer: Notes the Dragon’s ‘pregnancy’ as the overcoming of the male body by generative female sexuality: ‘grotesque femininity encompasses the masculine body’
- ‘A Bloody Batell’ (1641) on the Ulster Rising describes how Catholic witches ‘ripped open a [mother’s] womb and afterwards took her and her infant and sacrificed in fire their wounded bodies’
- ‘The Witch of Edmonton’ John Ford (1621): Mother Sawyer was ‘revil’d, kick’d and beaten’ for witchcraft set against her neighbour’s ‘babes at nurse’
- -> Equivalently, Old Banks calls her a ‘witch’, a ‘hag’, and a ‘whore’, all with sexual connotations
Historical:
- The ‘Wife’s Sabbath’ involves animalistic familiars coming to suckle on the witch, thus replacing traditional motherhood
Critical:
- Deborah Willis: The act of witchcraft was frequently ‘directed against the children of her neighbours and almost always against domestic activities associated with feeding, nurture or birth’
P3 - Fear of Matrilineal Relationships due to fear of female claims to power
Critical:
- Kristeva: ‘Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power’
- Megan Matchinske: Anne Clifford’s writing depicts her as ‘a woman located within a system of primogeniture’
Historical:
- Arbella Stuart presented a threat to James I’s throne, and was the centre of various plots against Elizabeth / James in the 1590s as well as being implicated in part of a plot by Lord Cobham in 1603.
P4 - Women constructed by society (Clifford x 3, Stuart x 2, Edmonton x 2, Argument x 1)
Quotes:
Anne Clifford:
- ‘Condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreement’
- ‘The Duke of Pembroke and the King’s sollicitor speaking much against me’
- ‘Fearing the King would do me publick disgrace’
Arbella Stuart:
- Lewalski: ‘The external circumstances of her life were firmly controlled by arbitrary royal and patriarchal power’
- Wicked men’s vain designes have made my name pass through a grosse and suttel lawyer’s lippes of late’
- ‘weake body’, ‘travelling mind’, ‘madnesse’
Mother Sawyer:
- The victim of ‘scandalous malice’ from the ‘filth and rubbish of men’s tongues’
- Etta Onat: The playwright’s intentions to ‘place on cruelty and superstition the chief guilt in the process of witch making’
–> Note pronouns in all: anti-regeneration is isolation. Women are isolated relative to the patriarchal order the oppresses them
Critical:
- Donna Stanton claims that early modern female letter writing is exemplified by its ‘alterity and non-presence’
- Shari Benstock writes that the self is ‘decentred’ in letter writing
P5 - Female community as a positive force (Anne Clifford x 2, Arbella Stuart x 2)
Anne Clifford:
- Had a strong female support network that included her mother, Margaret Clifford, her Russell aunts, the Countesses of Bath and Warwick, Queen Elizabeth, by who she was ‘much beloved’ as a child, and Queen Anne, who she was ‘much in the courte with’. Another interesting female connection was Aemelia Lanyer, her mother’s patron, who wrote the 1611 poem ‘A Description of Cooke-Ham’ on the significance of female community and spaces, producing an albeit temporary ‘female Eden’ (Sue Fang Ng) particularly in relation to land and property.
- Anne repeated refers to ‘my women’ throughout her writing
Arbella Stuart:
- Despite Sara Jayne Steen’s claim that Arbella was not a feminist or a believer in strong female community, drawing upon a letter to Andrew Sinclair, in which she compares ‘womanish toyes’ to the ‘serious minde’ of man, she frequently petitions Queen Anne, declaring her the ‘mirrour of our sex’ in the final weeks before her death and had sympathy from many women at court.
- -> ‘Mirrour’ has regenerative connotations
P6 - Anne Clifford’s Matrilineal Championing (Critical x 1, Quotes x 4, Historical x 2)
Critical:
Barbara Lewalski: Anne Clifford ‘consciously took her mother as model, claiming her moral and spiritual heritage from her’
Quotes:
- Describes her ‘saint-like’ mother who was of ‘high spirit’ and ‘gracefull behaviour’
- Describes how her mother allowed her to ‘suck the milk of goodness’ which made her ‘strong against the storms of fortune’ –> Compare to Witches’ sabbath and monstrous anti-maternality
- ‘[She] grose every day more like your ladyship’ (Her daughter, also called Margaret Clifford)
- ‘My chilled, your littel selfe’
Historical:
- Statue erected in Apleby of mother provides an eternality to the figure of mother, one set in the stone that also upholds their property
- Daughter also called Margaret Clifford
P7 - Anne Clifford’s matrilineal heritage expressed through form (Critical x 1, Argument x 1, Quotes x 2)
Critical:
- Megan Matchinske: Anne Clifford’s legal battle largely supported through her letters, that acted as ‘documentary evidence of land transfers’ as well as ‘materials including fines, inquisitions, charters, please, patent rolls, close rolls and exchequer documents’
-Additionally, it is her later Kendal Diary (1650-1675) that presents her as a landed woman, and her written identity performs her status as a landed woman with a line for future female inheritance
Quotes:
- She writes a ‘patent to Mr Thomas Gatlib to be my deputy sheriff for ye county of Westmerland’
- Notes in 1651 during Civil War how she is ‘settled’ in the ‘three ancient houses of mine inheritance’ - Apleby Castle, Brougham Castle & Skipton Castle
P8 - Arbella Stuarts Letters as Regenerative of Self
Critical:
- Shari Benstock argues that the letter writing process enables a discovery of the self as part of the process as well as in the finished result
- Sara Jayne Steen claims that Arbella Stuart’s letters gave her the opportunity to ‘deny the negative vision of herself and replace it with another’
- Helen Wilcox argues that letter writing is ‘performative’ by ‘breaching the public and private divide’
Quotes:
- Despite ‘weake body’, ‘wondering minde’, ‘madnesse’ in early years when confined by Elizabeth and ‘crack’t in her brain’ and ‘far out of frame’, Lewalski claims that like Hamlet, this is a performance
- Arbella conversely presents herself as defiant, claiming that she was ‘deafe to commaundments and dumbe to authority’
- Claims she was ‘unjustly accused’
- She made complex legal arguments including Habeus Corpus
- Emphasised that she ‘must speake in riddles’ to ‘winne my selfe-reputation’ as ‘mine owne woman’
–> Her letter writing generates a plethora of selves, even as her reproductive capabilities are denied as her marriage to William Seymour is rejected
