Genre and Women's Life Writing in Early Modern England

Michelle M. Dowd, Julie A. Eckerle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317129363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By taking account of the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing, the essays collected here interrogate the discursive contours of gendered identity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The contributors explore how generic choice, mixture, and revision influence narrative constructions of the female self in early modern England. Collectively they situate women's life writings within the broader textual culture of early modern England while maintaining a focus on the particular rhetorical devices and narrative structures that comprise individual texts. Reconsidering women's life writing in light of recent critical trends-most notably historical formalism-this volume produces both new readings of early modern texts (such as Margaret Cavendish's autobiography and the diary of Anne Clifford) and a new understanding of the complex relationships between literary forms and early modern women's 'selves'. This volume engages with new critical methods to make innovative connections between canonical and non-canonical writing; in so doing, it helps to shape the future of scholarship on early modern women.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle

DOI: 10.4324/9781315584324-1

As growing numbers of Englishwomen participated in manuscript and print culture in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, they produced a remarkable number of autobiographical narratives, or life writings.¹ Historical developments during this period, including the spread of Protestant doctrines about introspection and unmediated relationships with the divine, the political and religious upheavals of the Civil Wars, and the development of experimental science, helped to produce a cultural environment that privileged both self-reflection and an ideologically nuanced approach to individuality that set the stage for women’s unprecedented production and publication of life writings.² These texts took many forms, ranging from the more explicitly autobiographical—such as diaries, letters, and memoirs—to less obvious choices like religious treatises, fictional romances, and even cookbooks. In still other cases, writers combined generic elements from traditional forms in new and creative ways. In the process, they produced rhetorically sophisticated discourses of the self and demonstrated how textual form and the subjectivity it produces are mutually constitutive. Significantly, these life writings were ultimately circulated to a wide variety of readers, and they played an important role in women’s understanding of—and articulation of—female identity in early modern manuscript and print culture.

The essays in this volume, the first critical collection that focuses exclusively on women’s life writings during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England,³ consider the ways in which early modern women made use of formal and generic structures to constitute themselves in writing. By working at the intersection of genre and personal identity, the contributors reveal early modern women’s familiarity with various aspects of an increasingly textual world,⁴ as well as the creativity with which women sought suitable forms for the expression of unique selves. The volume as a whole thus demonstrates how generic choice, mixture, and revision shape the construction of the female self in early modern England. To this end, we have collected essays on a range of female writers, including well-known figures like Margaret Cavendish alongside more obscure ones like Martha Moulsworth, and on a range of textual forms, from the preface to the novel. In other words, we bring together the familiar and the unfamiliar, the now canonical and the noncanonical.

By situating women’s life writings within the broader literary culture of which they were a part, this volume makes an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about early modern women and to scholarship that has attempted to position women’s texts, which are often still marginalized in critical discourse, within a wide range of historical, textual, and social perspectives. Through our focus on genre, we offer a new and illuminating context for reading Englishwomen’s life writings that eschews the tendency to read these texts as unmediated representations of the experiences of “real” women. Our contributors demonstrate that the rich and varied literary tradition of early modern England was as valuable a resource for these writers as were the events and emotions that made up their daily lives. Diarists and letter-writers, for example, could deploy the strategies of romance or chronicle history to produce politically motivated narratives of the self. Women writers could also marshal the seemingly marginal space of the preface or the literal margins of a cookbook to create intimate bonds with their readers or to legitimize their domestic knowledge. In short, by interrogating the discursive contours of gendered identity, our volume suggests new ways to understand the textual production of women’s “selves” in early modern England.

Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England has been influenced and, indeed, made possible by the nuanced historical and theoretical work done on early modern Englishwomen’s life writings in recent years. Scholars have brought these life writings to the public eye; reexamined theories of the self, self-construction, and autobiography that may have inhibited critical attention to these texts before; demonstrated how life writing considerably blurs the distinction between public and private experience; and highlighted the perhaps unexpected diversity and richness of women’s lives in early modern England.⁵ All of this work has helped to break down significant if erroneous assumptions about early modern England’s social landscape and has given new credibility to early modern Englishwomen’s life writing.

Moving beyond traditional approaches to genre, particularly autobiography, has been a crucial first step in the study of women’s life writing from any period. Numerous feminist critics, for example, have critiqued traditional definitions of autobiography, such as those posited by influential theorists James Olney and Georges Gusdorf. In Gusdorf’s foundational essay, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” he asserts that autobiography is simultaneously “a document about a life,” “a work of art,” and most importantly “a work of enlightenment,” for “[t]he author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his individual life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch.”⁶ According to Mary Beth Rose’s useful articulation of this approach, autobiography is “an individual’s struggle to define his or her experience by the narrative creation of a unified personality, through which the author attempts to reconcile the public and private aspects of being, often represented as conflicting.”⁷ However, although Gusdorf’s arguments are more complex than traditionally assumed, Shari Benstock and others have noted that such theories rely on the construction of a cohesive self over time and on an authoritative perspective that consistently controls the presentation of this self, neither of which is realistic or always appropriate to women’s experience. Indeed, Gusdorf seems to assume a mature man of some importance reconstructing his life from a moment of apparent leisure. By contrast, Benstock argues, “The self that would reside at the center of the text is decentered—and often is absent altogether—in women’s autobiographical texts. The very requirements of the genre are put into question by the limits of gender.”⁸ Other critics join Benstock in arguing that gender fundamentally affects the way in which we read autobiography and the “self” it purportedly creates.

In order to challenge the traditional understanding of autobiographical writing, scholars have developed a series of creative approaches to generic categorization. Some distinguish between the forms of “diary” and “autobiography” or propose new terms entirely,⁹ and others highlight the fictionality of the autobiographical act. Perhaps most notably, scholarship on autobiography has emphasized the way in which these texts frequently resist generic categorization altogether. By reconsidering definitions of a variety of forms, as well as juxtaposing texts from multiple genres in order to highlight the indeterminacy of generic labels, scholars have contributed to a new perception of autobiographical texts not as one genre or another but as “an amalgamation of autobiography and/or biography and/or fiction and/or chronicle, thus defying traditional generic classification.”¹⁰ Consequently, literary critics and historians have increasingly turned to the term “life writing,” defined by Marlene Kadar as “a less exclusive genre of personal kinds of writing.”¹¹ This term is particularly useful for describing the writings of early modern Englishwomen since, as scholars have noted, their personal narratives were characterized by numerous subgenres of autobiographical expression, including conversion narratives and diaries. Indeed, Elspeth Graham argues that “[t]he exploration and exploitation of a variety of forms, rather than adherence to a recognised format for articulating the self” is the most significant characteristic of women’s life writings during the early modern period.¹² We thus use the term “life writing” throughout this volume to emphasize the diversity and formal fluidity of these texts.

In whole, by questioning the distinction between the genres of “life writing” and traditional autobiography, investigating subgenres of life writing, and asking why life writing as a genre might appeal especially to women writers, scholarship on this genre—and on early modern life writing in particular—has usefully interrogated the nature of generic categorization.¹³ But it has rarely explored how autobiographical texts intersect and engage with other genres, such as romances, novels, prayer books, or recipes, and it has only recently begun to consider the productive relationship between the “life” or “self” represented in a text and the mechanics of that text.¹⁴ By contrast, Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England shifts focus to the textual, artistic, and rhetorical choices that inform individual texts. Our contributors thus consider not only the genre or genres of each text but also how autobiographical narratives are in dialogue with other textual forms. In unearthing the formal complexity of early modern women’s life writings, the essays in our volume pay homage to the genre’s linguistic roots, demonstrating exactly how, “[i]n the word ‘autobiography,’ writing mediates the space between ‘self’ and life.’”¹⁵

The contributors of the present volume focus their critical energies on personal narratives written by women in the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. This particular period in English history witnessed exciting developments in both the theories and forms of genre and the opportunities for written expression available to women. Influenced by classical texts by Cicero and Quintilian, early modern writers published widely popular and highly influential rhetorical handbooks that attested to the growing interest in wordplay and language theory in the period.¹⁶ These linguistic interests in turn produced a literary culture that was fascinated with genre theory and generic innovation. Rosalie Colie, for example, claims that “literary invention—both ‘finding’ and ‘making’—in the Renaissance was largely generic.”¹⁷ Generic modes were thus not viewed as fixed entities or strict rules for literary production in the period but as flexible guidelines that were constantly evolving and yielding new meanings. This rich literary environment provided “a diversity of narrative models upon which autobiographers could base their textualised self-portraits”¹⁸ and encouraged writers of the period to experiment with various combinations of different forms.

As the essays in our collection demonstrate, the penchant for generic experimentation that characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary production opened up a variety of textual possibilities for those Englishwomen who chose to write about their lives in manuscript or print.¹⁹ Not only were these life writings produced “before the advent of autobiography as a recognized genre,”²⁰ but, as noted above, the experimentation with form was a fundamental characteristic of women’s life writing in early modern England.²¹ In Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660, Nigel Smith argues persuasively that the “generic inventiveness and eclecticism” among seventeenth-century women authors was directly related to genre’s ability to construct identity and to serve as “a means through literary structure of exploring potentials and acknowledging limitations in relation to the world.”²² The categories of genre, gender, and identity were thus mutually constitutive in early modern England. Women such as Margaret Cavendish, Anne Clifford, Dorothy Osborne, and Anne Halkett took full advantage of the wide range of generic and rhetorical models at their disposal, and in the process they produced self-narratives that are more textually (and intertextually) complex than previous scholarship has tended to acknowledge.

Clearly, then, early modern England was a particularly important period in the development of women’s life writings. But we have also chosen to use the phrase “early modern” to characterize the scope of this study because it helps to highlight the historical emergence of new discourses that were significant to women’s personal narratives. The essays in our volume, for instance, point to several historical trends in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that would eventually result in recognizably modern literary, political, and cultural phenomena. As Josephine Donovan’s essay attests, seventeenth-century women’s life writings often experiment with narrative structures that would, by the end of the century, come to characterize the early novel. As Catherine Field and Lara Dodds demonstrate, women’s recipe books and the writings of women such as Margaret Cavendish discursively engage with new scientific developments, particularly the emerging interest in experimentation. The political turmoil of the Civil Wars and the religious and cultural transformations that they produced influenced the writings of Lady Anne Halkett, as Mary Ellen Lamb makes clear in her contribution to the volume. More generally, many of the essays in the collection discuss the significance of the development of print culture during the period as well as the effects of the Protestant Reformation, which encouraged a heightened focus on introspection as a component of personal and religious identity. As a whole, this volume reveals the formal and cultural developments in women’s life writing that were unique to the early modern period.

The essays in the collection differ in their individual approaches to these narratives and in their particular thematic and historical concerns, but they all share methodological interests in feminist, historicist, and formalist inquiry. Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England is committed to a historicist reading practice that insists on situating women’s life writings within their multivalent historical contexts, including the textual. This emphasis stems in part from feminist theories of women’s autobiographical narratives, such as those previously discussed, which understand the self as a socially constructed entity whose coherence or unity is a textual fiction.

But the historicist readings of early modern Englishwomen’s life writings in the present volume also constitute a continuing refusal to essentialize or universalize women’s experience. Literary scholars frequently tend to read the work of women writers—far more so than their male counterparts—in terms of its relationship to the writer’s biography, assuming an important and potentially illustrative connection between the writer’s life and her text. Too often this critical impulse decontextualizes female identit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 “Free and Easy as ones discourse”?: Genre and Self-Expression in the Poems and Letters of Early Modern Englishwomen
• 3 Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing
• 4 “Many hands hands”: Writing the Self in Early Modern Women’s Recipe Books
• 5 Serial Identity: History, Gender, and Form in the Diary Writing of Lady Anne Clifford
• 6 Merging the Secular and the Spiritual in Lady Anne Halkett’s Memoirs
• 7 Prefacing Texts, Authorizing Authors, and Constructing Selves: The Preface As Autobiographical Space
• 8 Structures of Piety in Elizabeth Richardson’s Legacie
• 9 Intersubjectivity, Intertextuality, and Form in the Self-Writings of Margaret Cavendish
• 10 Margaret Cavendish’s Domestic Experiment
• 11 “That All the World May Know”: Women’s “Defense-Narratives” and the Early Novel
• Bibliography
• Index