Writing and constructing the self in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century

John Baker, Marion Leclair, Allan Ingram

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526123350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The injunction, 'Know thyself!', resounding down the centuries, has never lost its appeal and urgency. The 'self' remains an abiding and universal concern, something at once intimate, indispensable and elusive; something we take for granted and yet remains difficult to pin down, describe or define. This volume of twelve essays explores how writers in different domains – philosophers and thinkers, novelists, poets, churchmen, political writers and others – construed, fashioned and expressed the self in written form in Great Britain in the course of the long eighteenth century from the Restoration to the period of the French Revolution. The essays are preceded by an introduction that seeks to frame several key aspects of the debate on the self in a succinct and open-minded spirit. The volume foregrounds the coming into being of a recognisably modern self.

Part I
Early modern selves and the Reason v. Passion debate

1
Anne Killigrew: a spiritual wit

Laura Alexander

The Restoration poet and painter, Anne Killigrew (1660–85), remembered mainly for John Dryden's famous elegy, ‘To the Pious Memory Of the Accomplisht Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew, Excellent in the two Sister-Arts of Poesie, and Painting. An Ode’ (1686), has recently received greater critical attention from scholars, including Margaret J. M. Ezell, Carol Barash, Jennifer Keith, Harriette Andreadis, and Robert C. Evans, who have examined Killigrew's poems in the tradition of seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips, called the ‘Matchless Orinda’ for her well-known virtue and poetic talents. As Barash notes, Killigrew was distinctive among seventeenth-century poets because she was also skilled in painting and often drew attention to her visual artistry in her poems.¹ Her religious paintings depict two biblical scenes: St John the Baptist in the Wilderness and Herodias's Daughter Presenting to her Mother St John the Baptist's Head in a Charger. As is sometimes the case in her posthumously published Poems (1686),² Killigrew features several written works explaining her visual artistry in relation to Christian spirituality, and these poems helped Killigrew to re-define her expressions of poetical wit in relation to her spirituality, which she privileges over secularism. Her poems, ‘St. John Baptist Painted by herself in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him’ and ‘Herodias's Daughter presenting to her Mother St. John's Head in a Charger, also Painted by herself’, accompany the John the Baptist paintings, both currently lost. Anxious to separate her writings from courtly libertine texts, Killigrew looked to religious narratives for inspiration in articulating a self that was both witty and sacred, a unique artistic position in an age when wit became synonymous with irreligious expressions and outrageous libertinism. This chapter examines that ‘self’ – a spiritual wit – in Killigrew's verse and the larger implications for the gendered boundaries that women writing in the period negotiated.

Killigrew's interest in religious subjects was not uncommon for women artists of the time. A maid of honour to Mary of Modena, Killigrew self-fashions a virtuous identity at court in an age where there was overall a ‘gradual shift from religious to secular control of sexuality’,³ particularly for women. While we do not know exactly what the paintings depict, Killigrew's language in her poems idealises John the Baptist and attacks the darkly erotic Salome, the speaker of ‘Herodias's Daughter’. Critics have rightly read Killigrew's poems in relation to the proto-feminist texts that began to emerge in the period and acknowledge that Killigrew has a distinct and often angry voice in her works. Killigrew's self-fashioned identity as a ‘spiritual’ wit sharply contrasted the more secular ‘court wits’, and the vivid poetic imagery of her religious works communicates this identity.

In her recent edition of Killigrew's works, Margaret J. M. Ezell reminds readers that Killigrew distanced herself from licentious women and the court libertines in her verse, often employing historical or biblical figures to do so. Killigrew especially sought to distinguish herself from subversive figures at court in the 1680s, including the Restoration court mistresses, and establish herself as a ‘spiritual wit’ in contrast to the circle of libertine court wits.⁴ Edmund Wodehouse's ‘Anagram on Mistress Anne Killigrew’ indicates how Killigrew perceived her court identity: ‘My rare wit killing sin.’⁵

Killigrew's poems about the John the Baptist paintings indicate a self-styled spiritual affinity with the saint. Like her paintings, the companion poems, ‘St. John Baptist Painted by herself in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him’ and ‘Herodias's Daughter presenting to her Mother St. John's Head in a Charger, also Painted by herself’,⁶ appear to be in dialogue, providing two different perspectives on the saint to show a distinct contrast between good and evil. The language of the poem ‘St. John Baptist’ suggests that the saint represents eternity and light, with the speaker inhabiting a light-filled natural setting, often a virtuous space in Killigrew's art. The second poem and its accompanying painting, ‘Herodias's Daughter’, is more disturbing, with the queen's daughter, the infamous Salome, boasting to her mother that she has had John the Baptist decapitated to protect them both from his righteous condemnation of their lewd influence. Salome's sexual identity is associated in the poem with excesses at court, directly referenced in the poem's last line, and Killigrew collapses Salome's eroticism with her evil murder of St. John the Baptist, whom she plots against with her mother, Herodias.

Killigrew's depiction of Salome and her mother is not uncommon for the time. Similar artistic representations of promiscuous female figures frequently appear in Restoration works by court writers depicting them onstage, in verse, and in erotic fiction. Killigrew's contemporary, Aphra Behn, herself attacked as a ‘loose’ woman writer, wrote some of the first published erotic fiction in England in the 1680s and also features many heroines whose dark sexuality is tied to murderous ambitions or actions. There was a wide spectrum of artistic attitudes towards women's sexuality in the period, and women writers often struggled to articulate a self in their works. Marilyn L. Williamson describes the heroines and perspectives on sexuality appearing in works by women writers, ‘from the pious Mary Astell, who wrote as if the body and desire hardly exist, to Aphra Behn whose central theme was sexuality or Delariviere Manley whose gospel was sexual love’.⁷ Aphra Behn, and later Eliza Haywood, frequently look at the complex negotiation between the body and mind in defining what ‘self’ means in their works. Though Killigrew depicts the salacious Salome in ‘Herodias's Daughter’, she sought to distinguish herself from amatory writers and notorious women writers like Behn and often drew on biblical authority to establish her credibility and express a ‘self’. Killigrew wanted to separate her artistic identity from women perceived as immoral, including women writers, and probably never intended for her verse to be published. Killigrew's father collected, edited and published her papers, originally circulated among friends. Killigrew may have chosen to depict Salome and Herodias as a prudent way to show her distance as an artist from immodest women selected from an infallible source, the Bible.

Killigrew had to take particular care with her reputation as an unmarried woman at court, though she thrived in a family that valued the arts and clearly held proto-feminist views about women's participation in the ‘sister arts’, poetry and painting. While we know almost nothing about Killigrew's formal training as a painter, we do know she was both talented and well regarded in her own time; she may have studied under several well-known painters, including Sir Peter Lely or Mary Beale, a contemporary commercial artist possibly known to Killigrew, who could also have frequented Lely's studio.⁸ She also took care with her art, both written and visual, and painted members of the royal family.⁹ Her portrait of James II, then Duke of York, was hung in the Royal Collection. It was falsely attributed to the most famous of the Restoration portrait artists, Lely, until the twentieth century, when a cleaning of the portrait actually revealed Killigrew as the painter.¹⁰ Reflecting a desire to express a self within acceptable social, moral and religious boundaries, Killigrew usually confined her painting to ‘safe’ subjects, with at least one exception on a classical subject, Venus Attired by the Graces. The painting (reproduced in Ezell's edition of her works) features women with naked and covered bodies.¹¹ The nude figure of Venus, likely modelled after Mary of Modena, appears half-turned from the viewer and hiding her bare chest. Barash explains that Killigrew could not paint nudes, even for classical studies, and she wanted also to distinguish herself from another well-known seventeenth-century female painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, considered as talented but also immoral.¹² In Killigrew's poem, ‘On a Picture Painted by herself, representing two Nymphs of Diana's, one in a posture to Hunt, the other Bathing’, which accompanies the lost painting, Two Nymphs of Diana, one in a posture to hunt, the other bathing, Killigrew is anxious to establish her own virginity. The nymphs are likely not bathing nude in the painting. They chant in the poem, ‘We are Diana's Virgin-Train, / Descended of no Mortal Strain’ (1–2).¹³ Though Killigrew does not overtly connect the pagan goddess Diana or the poem to Christianity, she does emphasise the purity of the women, a group the poet joins in the last line:

Though Venus we transcend in Form,

No wanton Flames our ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Early modern selves and the Reason v. Passion debate
• PART II: Self-exploration in the Age of Reason: division and continuity
• PART III: Romantic wanderings: the self in search of (its) place
• Bibliography
• Index