Early Modern Women's Complaint

Gender, Form, and Politics

Sarah C. E. Ross, Rosalind Smith, Sarah C. E. Ross, Rosalind Smith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030429461
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection examines early modern women's contribution to the culturally central mode of complaint. Complaint has largely been understood as male-authored, yet, as this collection shows, early modern women used complaint across a surprising variety of forms from the early-Tudor period to the late-seventeenth century. They were some of the mode's first writers, most influential patrons, and most innovative contributors. Together, these new essays illuminate early modern women's participation in one of the most powerful rhetorical modes in the English Renaissance, one which gave voice to political, religious and erotic protest and loss across a diverse range of texts.
This volume interrogates new texts (closet drama, song, manuscript-based religious and political lyrics), new authors (Dorothy Shirley, Scots satirical writers, Hester Pulter, Mary Rowlandson), and new versions of complaint (biblical, satirical, legal, and vernacular). Its essays pay specific attention to politics, form, and transmission from complaint's first circulation up to recent digital representations of its texts. Bringing together an international group of experts in early modern women's writing and in complaint literature more broadly, this collection explores women's role in the formation of the mode and in doing so reconfigures our understanding of complaint in Renaissance culture and thought.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. C. E. Ross, R. Smith (eds.)Early Modern Women's ComplaintEarly Modern Literature in Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint

Sarah C. E. Ross¹ and Rosalind Smith²

(1)

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

(2)

Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

Sarah C. E. Ross (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Rosalind Smith

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

OvidModeVoiceCommunityTradition

End Abstract

Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully

What planet ruled at my unhappy birth

That I am thus a burden to the earth?

I never saw Content in any form,

For all my life has ever been a storm.

I wish to find a way to ease my cares

But when I seek am blinded still with tears.

My bluebird eyes may sometimes pity move,

But to prevent the cause, I find not so much love.

With downcast eyes I muse and sit alone,

And often to myself I make my moan,

And think I’m happiest when I’m most alone.

Sometimes I mourn my losses and the dead,

Then the unkindest things the living said

To wound my tortured soul. But ah! It is in vain,

For all these thoughts does but enhance my pain.

To dead and living, my love too lasting for my ease,

No galley slave does seek so much to please.

Farewell those happy days I once did hope to ‘a’ had,

And farewell to those thoughts, for fear they make me mad.

Unhappy Feilding, whose wretched fate is such,

Thou ever thinks too little or too much.

Mount then my troubled soul and hence thy thoughts remove,

Love Him that above all things seeks thy love.¹

“Upon My Lady Desmond’s Reproaching of Me Wrongfully” is written into a commonplace book now held in the Beinecke Library, and is most likely by Frances (Dorothy) Feilding, who also composes poems in the same volume mourning the death of her husband and giving thanks for her narrow escape from death in 1684.² Her poem on this occasion is written in response to a social slight, yet extends to broader discontents using the formal conventions, figures, and structures of the mode of complaint. “Blinded with tears,” the poem’s speaker rehearses her woes “alone,” mourning both her “losses and the dead” as well as the more immediate “unkindest things the living said.” The poem draws on popular traditions of complaint circulating from the sixteenth century onwards in its inclusion of personal, narrative elements deriving from a local social context. It also adopts a conventional series of complaint postures—solitary retirement, meditation on woe, and a final recourse to comfort in God—deriving from traditions of amatory, Ovidian, and devotional complaints. By the late seventeenth century, the probable date of this lyric’s composition, the diverse forms and vocabularies of complaint were immediately available for use by a woman writer in response to loss, grief, or discontent.

Feilding’s poem participates in a long tradition of early modern complaint poetry: religious, political, and amatory, popular and elite, male and female authored. Complaint is a powerful and ubiquitous rhetorical mode in the English Renaissance, as the influential scholarship of John Kerrigan and others has recognised.³ It is very often female-voiced, foregrounding the voice and body of a lamenting woman, but until recently, “female complaint” has been understood almost solely as an act of male literary ventriloquy. Kerrigan describes “female complaint” as very rarely female authored.⁴ Danielle Clarke, in foundational work on women writers’ use of Renaissance rhetorical traditions, suggests that in spite of its experimentation with the female voice, Renaissance complaint is largely “written, translated, and adapted by men for the consumption of men.”⁵ A relatively limited number of studies have focused on writing by Isabella Whitney, Lady Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn,⁶ and some excellent recent explorations of female-authored complaints have begun to expand the discussion.⁷ However, as yet we have no sense of how women writers engaged with complaint collectively and how they used this culturally central mode to give voice to protest and loss.

In part, this is because critical explorations of complaint by male and female early modern writers have centred on the specific legacies of Ovid’s Heroides .⁸ Our sense of the tradition continues to be defined by the secular, amorous, female-voiced complaints of the 1590s by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, William Shakespeare, and others, which are shaped by the Ovidian template of amatory loss and transgression.⁹ These Ovidian models are vital, but Dorothy Feilding’s poem illustrates some of the challenges that complaint texts written by early modern women, including those recently retrieved from the archives, present to a largely Ovidian conception of the forms and capacities of the mode. Emerging in an idiosyncratic manuscript context at the later end of the period, Feilding’s lyric draws on a much broader set of associations, and a range of traditions that both encompass the Ovidian and extend beyond it. Her poem exemplifies just some of the ways in which early modern women engaged with complaint traditions, and points to complaint as a richer cultural and literary resource for women writers than has hitherto been imagined.

This volume is the first sustained interrogation of the ways in which early modern women participated in complaint, the diverse set of complaint models on which they drew, and how our sense of early modern complaint changes when female-authored examples are the focus. It not only uncovers new forms, new texts, and new authors across the early modern period, but also examines known texts by women writers as complaints for the first time, reconsidering how canonical women authors participated in the mode. In doing so, the chapters in this volume expand the definition of complaint, demonstrating its flexibility, breadth, and complexity as well as its significance for early modern expression. They demonstrate that complaint is as freighted and ubiquitous a form for early modern women writers as it is for men, a primary site for the early modern subject to express experiences of grief, protest, and loss. This volume traces the complex and varied history of complaint for early modern women writers, uncovering new kinds of plaint and plainants in its chapters, and providing new readings that promise to reconfigure our understanding of complaint more broadly.

Forms of Complaint: Mode, Genre, Voice

In this volume and in the wider project on early modern women and complaint to which it belongs, we refer to complaint as a mode. This formulation builds upon Alistair Fowler’s suggestion that modes are “adjectival,” extending beyond formal structures to the expression of tone, or what Gerard Genette describes as “feeling.”¹⁰ As Barbara Lewalski notes, “modes seem to have evolved from certain historical genres (heroic from epic, pastoral from idyl and eclogue) and may interpenetrate works or parts of works in several genres.”¹¹ She looks back to Sidney’s identification of eight categories of poetry as defined by modal qualities of tone or effect rather than metre or form: “the lamenting ‘Elegaick’; the ‘bitter but wholesome Iambick’; ‘the Satirick, who … sportingly … make[s] a man laugh at follie’; the ‘Lyricke … who with his tuned Lyre and well accorded voice, giveth praise’.”¹² In John Frow’s summary, modes “specify thematic features and certain forms and modalities of speech, but not the formal structures or even the semiotic medium through which the text is to be realised.”¹³ By contrast, genre is nominative—it signifies a more specific set of textual features, whether thematic, rhetorical, or formal—and sub-genre a more specific set again. If complaint is a mode in the Renaissance, then “female complaint” is a genre within that mode—characterised by a time-bound constellation of thematic, rhetorical, and formal conventions.

This capacious definition of complaint as mode is a modern one. Early modern literary commentators do not refer to “complaint” directly as either mode or genre, although they do discuss complaint within taxonomies of elegy and lamentation. Puttenham identifies writers:

who sought the fauor of faire Ladies, and coueted to bemone their estates at large, & the perplexities of loue in a certain pitious verse called Elegie, and thence were called the Elegiack: such among the Latines were Ouid, Tibullus & Propertius.¹⁴

He later identifies “a certain lover’s complaint made to like effect” in a discussion of the rhetorical device of escalation, auxesis , situating this discussion in a wider context of texts of protest, beginning with one from Carus “inveighing sore against the abuses of the superstitious religion of the gentiles.”¹⁵ This sense of complaint as directed specifically towards the experience of love’s loss and m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Beyond Ovid: Early Modern Women’s Complaint
• Part I. Sixteenth Century
• Part II. Seventeenth Century
• Part III. Restoration
• Part IV. Representing Complaint: New Digital Forms
• Part V. Afterword
• Back Matter