Episodes from a History of Undoing
Episodes from a History of Undoing:
The Heritage of Female Subversiveness
Edited by
Reghina Dascăl
Episodes from a History of Undoing:
The Heritage of Female Subversiveness,
Edited by Reghina Dascăl
This book first published 2012
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2012 by Reghina Dascăl and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-3611-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3611-1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword ................................................................................................... vii
Unwinding Narratives of Gender and the Weaving of Antistructures
Margaret R. Higonnet
Chapter One: Early Fashionings of Agency and Auctorial Self
Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, and Agency......................................... 3
Dana Percec
A Woman for All Seasons: Christine de Pizan.......................................... 25
Reghina Dascăl
Chapter Two: Feminist Consciousness Coming of Age
“An Island of Dissident Thoughts”: Orwell versus Three Guineas
by Virginia Woolf...................................................................................... 51
Nóra Séllei
Feminist Consciousness-Raising and the Psychotherapeutic Sensibility
of the 1960s: Rethinking the Connection .................................................. 65
VoichiŃa Năchescu
Chapter Three: Re-reading and Re-writing the Past
Herta Müller and Undoing the Trauma in Ceauşescu’s Romania.............. 85
Adriana Răducanu
(Re)Engendering The Past/Recovering Women’s Writings:
The Works of Feminist Criticism in Brazil ............................................. 107
Rita Terezinha Schmidt
(Little) Red Riding Hood: A British-American History of Undoing....... 123
Andreea Şerban
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Four: Undoing Interlocking Systems of Oppression
Power Plays: Two Black Feminist Playwrights (En)counter
Intersectionality ....................................................................................... 137
Amber West
Undoing the History of the Engendered Nation in Three Narratives
of Caribbean Feminism ........................................................................... 153
Izabella Penier
Chapter Five: Challenging the Curricular Canon
English Cultural/Gender Studies: An Eastern European Perspective ...... 179
Nóra Séllei
Loitering with Intent: Gender Studies and English Studies
in the Romanian Academe....................................................................... 195
Reghina Dascăl
Contributors............................................................................................. 209
FOREWORD
UNWINDING NARRATIVES OF GENDER
AND THE WEAVING OF ANTISTRUCTURES
MARGARET R. HIGONNET
UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT
The thread of this volume stretches back into the distant past, spun out
of storytelling through generations of mothers. In a film by Trinh T. Minhha, a Kabyle folksinger unwinds her inherited story: “May my story be
beautiful and unwind like a long thread” (quoted in Trinh 1989:148). As
Trinh explains, “She who works at un-learning the dominant language of
‘civilized’ missionaries also has to learn how to un-write and write anew”
(148). As the singer or griot in an oral tradition reminds us all, a double
process is at work in every act of creation, which demands that we recall
and make anew. To twist a thread–the activity of the woman who recounts
the community’s past–is to gather strands and spin them together into a
new, sustained whole against the weight of the whorl. To create requires
resistance. A step later in the process, the shuttle of the weaver who
creates a textile also runs in two directions, making and reversing; that is a
pattern adopted by early writing, now called boustrephedon, by analogy to
the path of oxen who pull a plough up and down a field, cutting up the
clods, before the seeds can be sown.
Resistance and reversals and cuts are structural themes knotted into
ancient myths about women; these structures knit women’s efforts to write
their own stories and histories together with their struggle to rewrite the
social scripts that organize their lives. Thus while Homer’s Odysseus is
famous as the teller of his own tale to his hosts the Phaeacians, his story is
complemented by that of Penelope, who retains control over the plot of her
own marital choice by weaving and unweaving a tapestry each day and
night. Similarly, Ovid in Metamorphoses (VI, 424–674) recounts the tale
of the swallow and nightingale that has become emblematic of women’s
writing in feminist theory today, in the phrase “the voice of the shuttle,”
viii
Foreword
taken from a lost play by Sophocles. According to this tragic myth of
women’s violation, resistance, and transformation, the repressed story of
Philomela’s rape by her brother-in-law Tereus, who had cut off her tongue
to prevent her from testifying, is nonetheless told to her sister Procne,
when she uses the threads of her tapestry to replace her “stolen tongue.”
Following their own violent act of revenge, the women and Tereus are
transformed into birds in a metamorphosis that endows them with a new
life and gives us the nightingale’s song of lamentation. In her influential
essay on this myth as a prototype for women’s writing, Patricia Klindienst
Joplin comments: “Imprisoned in the plot, just as Philomela is imprisoned
by Tereus, is the antiplot. Just as Philomela is not killed but only hidden
away, the possibility of antistructure is never destroyed by structure; it is
only contained or controlled until structure becomes deadened or extreme
in its hierarchical rigidity by virtue of all that it has sought to expel from
itself. Then antistructure, what Victor Turner calls communitas, may
erupt.” Their story finds echoes in “language stealers” like Christine de
Pizan, who wrote in her adopted language of French, as Reghina Dascăl
explains, to resist the master discourse. Just as Penelope’s name may
signify she who undoes the spindle, the writers whom this volume
addresses include those who undo in order to remake, who adapt and
appropriate as they create anew.
For the feminist, to undo essentialist and hierarchical conceptions of
“Woman” and of a female “nature,” one must imagine possibilities beyond
given structures and undo established frameworks of discourse and
rhetorical forms. She must form new intervals and interstices, creating a
void that enables creativity itself. Sometimes innovation involves the
appropriation of masculinity as a role, a phenomenon of cross-writing that
is traced by several of the essays in this volume. One path of resistance
thus is the proliferation of forms of expression, a tactic to be found in
Queen Elizabeth’s letters, speeches, and poems, through which she
expressed the conflicts among her many roles. She thereby modeled an
innovative multiplication of her implicitly gendered roles as governor of
the church and “king” of England. What Dana Percec discovers here is a
“puzzle” that Elizabeth has bequeathed about her own identity, which she
crafted visually as well as verbally in order to retain power. Undoubtedly
historians will continue to debate her agency as a writer who was
surrounded by advisors who may have collaborated in producing her texts,
as well as by those who appropriated her cultural messages for their own
ends. Similarly, as Reghina Dascăl shows, Christine de Pizan engaged in
“self-fashioning” by producing a range of poetic, polemic, biographic, and
historical works addressed not only to the court but to a broader audience.
Episodes from a History of Undoing
ix
To do so, Christine appropriated not only female subjects from
Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus but also the heroic roles of the male
traveller and narrator from Dante and Virgil. As Ellen Moers pointed out
in Literary Women, like Christine, nineteenth-century women such as
Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, George Sand, George Eliot, or Louisa
May Alcott often entered the new literary marketplace under pseudonyms,
because like any man supporting a household they were driven to write for
money, seeking patronage and an audience. Such performances are both
playful and serious, since they throw open windows of opportunity where
the doorways may be closed.
Among the works by writers like Christine and Mary Robinson we also
often find exemplary literary histories of remarkable, even “virile”
women, whose virtues and strengths prepare readers to become
extraordinary figures like the woman to whom Christine devoted her last
book, The Tale of Joan of Arc. The gender ambiguities of women’s roles,
so evident in Joan’s story, color the language of a succession of later
writers such as Wollstonecraft, who introduces her Vindication of the
Rights of Woman with the wish that women might “grow more and more
masculine” (8), underscoring that “manly virtues” have to do with
gendered education rather than with biological identity. Since gendered
rhetoric may have profoundly misogynist economic repercussions, the
performance of ambiguously gendered roles in the construction of
authorship and narrative voices became almost obligatory in the nineteenth
century. That point was forcefully confirmed by the controversial
reception of the three Brontë sisters’ publications under pseudonyms. In
her preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), her scandalous novel
about a woman artist who left her alcoholic husband, for example, Anne
Brontë was compelled to argue that “if a book is a good one, it is so
whatever the sex of the author may be” (5). The Brontë pseudonyms as
“Bell” brothers permitted the sisters to publish in ringing voices, without
censorship, “anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.”
Critical to such rhetorical challenges to the gender of the writer is their
authors’ recognition that political and social institutions shape identities,
while the strongest tool of resistance in an author’s hand may be the witty
subversion of the maxims on which those institutions are grounded, in
order to authorize their own creations.
An obvious reason for writers like Christine de Pizan or Mary
Robinson to compile literary histories focused on women has been to
counter the erasure of women from the historical record. In the last forty
years, however, the foundation of many women’s presses has afforded
revived access to their previously unavailable texts. Past historical erasures
x
Foreword
were in part compounded by race, as Brazilian feminists like Rita
Terezhina Schmidt have discovered. The imagined community of
Brazilian writers was constructed by historians as “virile” (and white) until
the “Woman and Literature” team recovered and reprinted “an enormous
body of texts” in the three-volume Escritoras Brasileiras do século XIX,
including the first abolitionist Brazilian novel Úrsula (1859), by Maria
Firmina dos Reis, a mulatta whose text undercut the fiction of cross-racial
harmony on which much of Brazilian political mythology has rested.
Tellingly, her sentimental melodrama escapes from genre conventions to
enact a gothic implosion of familial relationships. By splicing together
antithetical narrative structures into an “antistructure,” dos Reis overturned
both an ideological structure and conventional narrative closure.
Hybrid narrative structures like that of Ursula have become central to
our understanding of practices of resistance in relation to the forms or
master plots that govern our imaginary. If Maria dos Reis uses a gothic
structure in her fiction to evoke the destructive genealogy of racism, so too
Nobel prize winner Hertha Müller draws on the gothic, as Adriana
Răducanu explains, in order to distance herself from the traumatic
circumstances of her adolescence and her struggle to become a
professional writer in the face of institutional exclusions. In addition to
creolization as a paradigm proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa for narrative
splicing, decentering and innovation, another paradigm that feminist critics
Linda Hutcheon and Julie Sanders have found useful is adaptation, a term
that refers both to a process of double vision and to an artistic product that
refers to a previous intertext. We can connect this formal concept of
adaptation to the identity issues that are woven throughout this volume,
especially in essays by Andreea Şerban, Amber West, and Izabella Penier.
Carol Heilbrun argued in Reinventing Womanhood that women as social
outsiders have double vision, especially those women who are doubly
outsiders because they stand at an intersection of sexual, racial, and class
identity. Not coincidentally, then, the Caribbean writers addressed by
Izabella Penier live in exile, a perch from which they can revise a national,
postcolonial bildungsroman that had been centered on the male
revolutionary who escapes from his colonial feminization. Similarly, W.
E. B. Dubois wrote in Souls of Black Folk that the Negro possesses a
“double consciousness,” the gift of “second-sight in this American
world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets
him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar
sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's
self through the eyes of others” (10-11). Such double consciousness
enables writers to resist, as Şerban explains, the conventional schema of
Episodes from a History of Undoing
xi
gender and culture that structure narrative forms. In turn, however, the
experimental forms and ironic tropes embraced by self-conscious outsiders
such as Adrienne Kennedy or Ntozake Shange have made their work “hard
to categorize.” The non-verbal motifs of suicide (arguably one way to
write upon one’s own body) and dance (as a way to share pain) become
forms of dramatic resistance that elude conventional interpretative norms,
as Amber West explains.
Among twentieth-century thinkers who experimented with narrative
form Virginia Woolf stands out, both because she subtly explored multiple
and variable gender roles and because she exploded governing codes of
closure. “Writing beyond the ending,” in Rachel Blau Duplessis’s phrase,
enabled Woolf to adapt the experiments of Modernism to the aims of her
own project. In Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf told a story of the
difficulty one encounters in reading a woman’s writing against the grain:
she describes herself struggling to grasp a text by an imaginary Mary
Carmichael, who “is tampering with the expected sequence. First she
broke the sentence, now she has broken the sequence” (85). For this
reason, Nóra Séllei rightly acclaims Woolf as “a more radical thinker”
than George Orwell. For Woolf’s “asymmetrical construction of gender”
deftly questions nation and patriotism, “undoing pivotal notions of
history” through a brilliant deconstruction of distinctions among genres
that exposes political truths as fictions and fictions as a tool of truth.
In their closing essays, Nóra Séllei and Reghina Dascăl underscore the
importance of institution-rebuilding for the historical tasks that this
volume addresses. An institutional analysis of the intersecting forces
governing academic promotion indeed overlaps with the kinds of analyses
that have been applied in the volume’s essays to the production of resistant
women’s literary texts, the narrative structuring of their texts, and the
reception of this body of literature. At the same time, over centuries
women writers have testified to the power of our tools for adapting,
recovering, and renovating history. Already in her history of women and
biographies, Christine de Pizan passed along a legacy of role models and
alternative subjects to the writers who would follow—and who would
compile their own genealogies. In the proliferation of gender roles to be
performed both publicly and in their writing, women from Queen
Elizabeth to Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter have destabilized our
understanding of gender limits, thereby opening up liminal ambiguities
and communitas. They have extended sisterhood across time through
convent scriptoria that preserved manuscripts, or in recent centuries by
establishing women’s or girls’ magazines and publishing houses. Those
venues of publication nurture contemporary writers and keep writers of the
xii
Foreword
past from slipping into oblivion. We welcome this circulation of voices,
whose whispers and witty twists continue our conversations across time,
remaining indispensable for the transformation of the academies where we
teach.
References
Anzaldúa, G. (1999). Borderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.
DuPlessis, R. (1985). Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of
Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Brontë, A. (1993). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. [1848].
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1999). The Souls of Black Folk. H. Gates, Jr. and T.
Oliver (Eds.), New York: Norton. [1903].
Heilbrun, C. (1979). Reinventing Womanhood. New York: Norton.
Hutcheon, L. (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge.
Klindienst Joplin, P. (1984). The voice of the shuttle is ours. Stanford
Literature Review 1: 25-53. Retrieved November 22, 2011 from
http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/ayliu/research/klindienst.html.
Moers, E. (1985). Literary Women. New York: Oxford University Press.
[1976].
Trinh, T. Minh-ha. (1989). Woman, Native, Other. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Wollstonecraft, M. (1988). A Vindiction of the Rights of Woman. Carol H.
Poston (Ed.) 2nd edition. New York: Norton.
Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
CHAPTER ONE:
EARLY FASHIONINGS OF AGENCY
AND AUCTORIAL SELF
ELIZABETH I:
CREATIVITY, AUTHORSHIP, AND AGENCY
DANA PERCEC
Introduction
In the past two decades, feminist studies have redirected focus on
Renaissance writings, making the neglected texts of women writers
accessible to the general public. At the same time, a social and cultural
interpretation of literary texts has caused a revision of the notion of literary
value, and, consequently, the enlargement of the traditional canon. This
new assessment has made the classical boundary between literary and nonliterary creation more flexible and new texts are now considered worthy of
attention and study.
Due to this tendency, the personality of Queen Elizabeth I, formerly
known only as one of the greatest British monarchs and one of the most
prominent historical figures of early modern Europe, has been enriched
with a new side–that of Elizabeth Tudor, the author. Books devoted to the
Protestant sovereign are no longer concerned only with her political role
and historical biography, but also with her writings. Since the age of 10,
until her death, Elizabeth wrote an impressive number of texts belonging
to various genres: letters, translations, poems, prayers, and speeches.
Cultural historians can, thus, evoke the 45 years of Elizabethan reign as a
time when the queen was a prolific letter writer, an occasional poet, and
the author of a number of speeches of remarkable power and beauty
(Marcus, Mueller and Rose 2000:7). A precocious child, a finely educated
humanist, a resourceful intellectual, Elizabeth Tudor is the author of a vast
literary work, which reflects known and unknown aspects of her
personality and biography, her relationship with the men of her time, her
political and religious convictions, and the careful construction of the
Queen’s self-representation (Resh Thomas 1998:3).
The conclusion reached by critics (Archer, Goldring and Knight 2007,
Pryor 2003, Resh Thomas 1998) reading Elizabeth’s productions is that
there is an inseparable connection between her identity as a queen and her
identity as an author. As a woman practicing statecraft in a patriarchal
4
Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
world, exercising supreme authority while remaining intensely feminine,
Elizabeth projected her private image in writing, just as she orchestrated
her public image in the works of art she commissioned (portraits, sonnets)
or in the processions and festivities she enjoyed taking part in. Among the
best known official myths she encouraged, Good Queen Bess, Gloriana
and the Virgin Queen are recurrent. As Good Queen Bess, the sovereign
promised to understand the plight of common people with compassion and
to love her subjects unconditionally, demanding their loyalty in exchange,
like a generous, though authoritarian, parent. Gloriana, Edmund Spenser’s
concoction, was the goddess, dressed in silk and gold, adorned with rich
jewelry and royal insignia–an official image of grandeur, which her court
and ministers also supported, a compensation for her gender. As Virgin
Queen, Elizabeth was the woman who refused to subject herself to any
man, English or foreign, prince or simple courtier, and, thus, to subject her
people to anyone else’s power and will. Married to England, despite the
controversy about her chastity–begun during her lifetime and still
continuing–she was her country’s maiden, celebrated both as the people’s
darling and as the replacement of a devotional figure (the Protestant
woman styled herself as the second maiden in heaven, offering an
alternative to the Catholic Marian cult).
Political and Ideological Agency
Historians have given careful consideration to Queen Elizabeth’s
agency both in exercising her own idea of (feminocentric) statecraft and in
offering the world a polyvalent image of herself. While some see her as a
genuine new Jezebel, with a mind of her own, with a personality and
temperament similar to those of her father, a stubborn woman who took no
man’s orders, others argue that her policy and image were actually dictated
by the statesmen who surrounded her–the Privy Council, her ministers, the
most influential peers of the kingdom, her favourite courtiers and lovers.
According to the second opinion, though she was a good orator and a vain
woman, who enjoyed being admired and flattered, neither her famous
speeches nor the portraits she commissioned were concocted by herself,
but by those in charge of her public image.
One of Queen Elizabeth’s constant preoccupations throughout her
reign was her legitimacy as a ruler, a preoccupation reflected in the laws
she passed and the art she commissioned. Elizabeth’s ascension to the
throne takes place not only in a period when all her European counterparts
were male, but also in a domestic climate of hostility towards feminine
rule, created by John Knox’s vehement and influential work, The
Dana Percec
5
Monstrous Regiment of Women. Written during Knox’s exile in the reign
of the Catholic Mary Tudor, the text, basically a piece of Protestant
propaganda, employs all the Christian, patriarchal, historical and
philosophical weapons available to a scholar to demonstrate women’s
inability to govern: “What wolde this writer [Aristotle] have said to that
realme or nation, where a woman sitteth crowned in parliament amongest
the middest of men” (in Chedgzoy, Hansen, Trill 1998:16). Knox
demonstrates that a woman on the throne did not only subvert natural
order, but also perverted the meanings of monarchy itself. A “softer”
Protestant, Jean Calvin argues, in the same period, that, even if
government by a woman is unnatural in itself, if this woman inherits the
throne and governs by “custom and public consent” (in Chedgzoy,
Hansen, Trill 1998:13), this should not be challenged by her subjects,
since that particular government is ordained by God. In reply, Mary Tudor
passed an Act of Parliament in 1554, declaring that “the Regal Power of
this Realm, is in the Queen’s Majesty as fully and absolutely as ever it was
in any of her most noble Progenitors, Kings of the Realm” (in Chedgzoy,
Hansen, Trill 1998:13). This act illustrates it is legal discourse rather than
religious imagery that ratifies her authority to govern. A successor to Mary
Tudor, Elizabeth will have to face a double challenge: apart from being a
female monarch, like Mary, she was also an heiress whose claims had
often been denied by the Catholics, as a bastard daughter of Henry VIII.
Her efforts, thus, to prove her legitimacy to her subjects would be much
more impressive than Mary’s, and would take the form of iconography–a
more persuasive medium for the masses–rather than the legal form it had
during the life of her predecessor.
The most efficient concept Elizabeth juggled with in order to legitimate
a woman’s presence on the throne was the metaphor, fashionable in the
Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, of the sovereign’s two bodies. A
common analogy related to the hierarchical organization of the world,
coming from the Greek philosophy and filtered by the medieval religious
thinking, this implicit comparison is one between society or the state and
the individual human body–the body politic. A “natural” society–given the
organic structure of the state–is one which functions in a manner similar to
the human body. The early Christian doctrine adds to this pattern that of
the mystical body, the body of Christ that keeps the believers united. Later
in the Middle Ages, the metaphor of the body politic, serving wonderfully
the purposes of the feudal state, develops substantially. Theologians
compare the human body to a city or a kingdom, supporting the political
concept of the existence of the three estates: the clergy are the eyes and the
soul, the knights are the hands and the way the body defends itself from
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
external dangers, and the peasants are the feet that sustain the whole body,
the whole system. Official sermons expand St. Paul’s comments on the
body of Christ to explain the structure and importance of ecclesiastical
institutions. The Church becomes the corpus mysticum et politicum of
which the Pope is the head, while kings and emperors are only members,
in the traditional dispute between these two juridical powers that limit and
influence each other successively (Romanato, Lombardo and Culianu
2005). Saint Thomas Aquinas finds four points of identity which unify
both natural and mystical bodies, and asserts that the supremacy of the
spiritual authority corresponds to the soul’s rule of the body (1993). There
are three responses to such claims: to proclaim the importance of some
other organ, such as the heart, with which a king may be equated; to define
the state as a body distinct from the body of the Church; or to deny the
importance of the papacy by claiming that only Christ can be the head of
the Church. In the late Middle Ages the second alternative, an extension of
the idea of the mystical body, is a convenient illustration of the growing
self-consciousness of the national states. When Henry VIII adopts the title
“Supreme Head of the Church of England”, he adopts none of these
alternatives, but comes up with a new, personal one. Rulers in other
European countries, although not denying the Catholic faith like Henry
Tudor of England, start disputing themselves the title “head” with the
papacy in Rome, invoking it in order to enforce obedience on their lands.
The doctrine of the body politic is intimately connected with that of the
kings’ “two bodies” (Moreau 1991:54): his physical one, subject to natural
laws, and his political one, symbol of an immortal power. In England, the
first text (1159) about the analogy between the state and the human body
is by John of Salisbury (Moreau 1991:56). After identifying the soul with
the clergy, the author discusses in detail the other members of the body:
head-prince, heart-senate, hands-soldiers, stomach-treasury, and feetfarmers. He emphasizes the need for spiritual unity in the state and
proposes cures for various political diseases, including tyranny. At the
beginning of the 17th century, another Englishman–Edward Forset in
1606–defines monarchy as “the best regime for the maintenance of health
in the body” (in Moreau 1991:57). The unifying principle is the perfect
balance between the different parts of the whole (“the due proportion of
the same parts together”), because a body is not only a mere gathering of
organs, but a series of well-defined functions supported by simple
principles such as the predominance of unequal, but complementary roles.
Just as there is a vegetal, animal, rational and spiritual level in the Great
Chain of Being, there are four levels of existence in the human sphere.
According to Forset:
Dana Percec
7
In the Commonwealth (as in a bodie) some parts seeme chiefly vegetable,
caring for nothing more than to maintaine their growth, by their sucking
from all the vaines of the land, the nutriment and provisions of this life.
Some live all sensually […] Othersome […] shape their lives after the
powers rationall and intellectuall, disposing themselves by the rules of
reason, to virtuous actions. (in Moreau 1991:58)
As each organ must stay in its proper place, so must each member of
the society keep his degree. Those inferior in rank should not wish to have
more important positions, nor should those in important positions abuse
the members below them: “Nor head nor heart have any power to do
wrong unto the body”, so tyranny is unanimously condemned as bad and
dangerous for the life of the organism. The consensus among the social
orders must be similar to the correct dosage of the four humours and the
presence of the four main elements in a human organism. When the
quantities are modified, the equilibrium is broken and the political regime
changes. It becomes democratic if the more base and passive elements
prevail, and oligarchic when controlled by the more worthy and active
ones. But even if the political system does not change, the least
disproportion may cause diseases. A demographic decline is compared to
consumption, too much industry and trade for luxury objects becomes a
form of paralysis, whereas a civil war is similar to an epidemic of plague.
Similarly, Sir Thomas Smith in his De Republica Anglorum (1565) writes
that, if the four humours coexist in the living organism, it is desirable that
various types of government should also combine with one another in a
proportion that would avoid despotism because, although the prince is the
head and the authority, the Parliament “hath the power of the whole realm,
both the head and the body” (in Moreau 1991:62). This is only natural
since the Parliament is regarded as the “civil blood” without which no life
can be conceived. Even Robert Burton (2004), in his well-known and
influential 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, preserves the correspondences
between the physical and the social body, considering that, in the
evolution of melancholy, the body’s instability reflects the general disease
of the human society, the sickly body producing an incoherent discourse
about the decline of the social organizations.
This paper will focus on the way in which Queen Elizabeth used the
symbolism of the monarch’s two bodies in her propaganda and on the way
in which these political details are reflected or commented upon in
William Shakespeare’s plays. It is well known that Shakespeare was
extensively preoccupied with the overwhelming figure of Elizabeth Tudor,
the woman who had–among other ambitions–that of proving that
monarchy is not gendered masculine. Queen Elizabeth I shares with the
8
Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
Roman emperor Augustus, Charles the Great, or Louis XIV of France the
rare privilege of having named the century she lived in. Although most of
the data pertaining to her character and historical role are controversial
(the Virgin Queen or a vicious hypocrite, a champion of Protestantism or a
victim of Catholicism, etc.), it was her presence that made the 16th century
a glamorous epoch–glamour ensured by personalities such as Shakespeare,
Marlowe, Walter Raleigh, or Francis Drake. Without reading good Queen
Bess’s personality in a feminist key, all historians agree that the English
Jezebel managed to secure glory and self-esteem to England in an age of
darkness and humiliation for other important European monarchies,
especially France and Spain. Consolidating her public and political
position in a period when women’s roles were exclusively domestic,
Elizabeth carefully perfected the “Tudor Myth” initiated by her father,
Henry VIII, in a manner equalled only by 20th century propaganda.
Starting from the metaphor of the monarch’s two bodies, Elizabeth had
her physical, feminine body obscured by the public, masculine body, her
political travesty remaining a landmark of her rule. There is an impressive
number of portraits that Queen Elizabeth commissioned and approved in
her lifetime (a royal decree prohibited any work that did not present her
realistically), which contribute to a better understanding of the way in
which Shakespeare himself envisaged, for example, the regular crossdresser–as a woman who borrows manly attributes together with the new
attire. In the early modern period, there was a certain anxiety about the
possible change, alongside the political and economic changes already
visible towards the end of the Renaissance and during the Reformation, of
the traditional roles assigned to women by more than a thousand years of
philosophical, medical and theological texts. However, travesty during the
reign of Elizabeth carried a slightly different connotation, being an
implicit comment on the Queen’s unique combination of feminine
physical features and masculine intellectual and psychical attributes.
A first example of the two bodies’ symbolism is a portrait by Nicholas
Hilliard, one of the Queen’s official painters, The Ermine Portrait (1585),
a portrait where Elizabeth combines, in her typical manner, insignia of
royalty, masculinity and femininity. Near her left arm, one can notice a
golden sword as well as a little ermine. They are both dual symbols. The
sword is a martial symbol, traditionally associated with masculine royalty,
but also a sign of chastity. The ermine is, in its turn, a royal symbol, the
animal’s fur being a king’s most traditional garment, but also a symbol of
purity. Legends (caught in an artistic frame by Petrarch in one of his
sonnets or by Leonardo da Vinci in one of his sketches) feature an animal
that would rather die than let itself exfoliated or defiled. The creature has a
Dana Percec
9
positive, moral value and was used, therefore, to decorate the robes of high
officials of the Church or magistrates.
Elizabeth’s passion for virginal imagery is well-known as she had
decided, soon after her coronation, that, by remaining single, she could be
both king and queen, whereas in taking a husband, she would have to limit
herself to being a queen. Although her maidenhood had political
implications, it also helped her a lot in developing the almost mystical cult
she would surround herself with in her later years on the throne. Paintings
like The Phoenix Portrait–again by Nicholas Hilliard–remind the English
people that their sovereign’s refusal to marry is not a whim, but a sacrifice
for their sake, the queen destroying her own body in order to devote
herself entirely to the English people and to the body politic, the extra
body that only rulers had. At the same time, the phoenix–a brooch at the
centre of Elizabeth’s breast–is a symbol of self-perpetuating nature, of
regeneration and continuity, reminding its watchers of the Queen’s
characteristic phrase, Semper eadem (“always the same”), despite all
calamities.
A much earlier painting, The Plimpton Sieve Portrait by George
Gower, 1579, also speculates on the omnipresence of the Queen. The
sieve, which appears in a series of portraits that Elizabeth ordered while
she was still young, reminds the watcher of the monarch’s self-sacrifice
for the sake of her country and her generosity (as the sieve suggests the
gods’ kindness as to spread countless gifts for mortals on earth, according
to the number of prayers and personal merits). Elizabeth’s being married
(only) to England implies the fact that she gave up her personal life and
remained a virgin in order to devote herself to state affairs. The sieve is a
symbol for choice (selecting and separating what is good from what is bad
or useless), in this case the Queen’s choice for the public sphere and her
renunciation to the domestic one. Her virginity is, therefore, political, but
also religious, as she used to represent herself as “the second maiden in
Heaven”, replacing the Catholic cult of Virgin Mary with the Anglican
cult of the Virgin Queen (Duchein 2001). The sieve is associated with
chastity due to the ancient legend about the Roman vestal, who proved her
virginity by carrying water in it. At the same time, the Italian quotation on
the shield at the left of the queen’s body warns that she is beyond the woes
of lovers. Another quotation, at her right, also in Italian, reads: “I see
everything and much is lacking”, reminding of Elizabeth’s colonial
mission: much has been already discovered but there is still much to
discover, colonize, and assimilate.
It is true that the issue of Elizabeth’s chastity was a subject of endless
debate during her life and in the following centuries. Because of her
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
refusal to have a husband, the queen became the target of drunkards’
obscene jokes in London’s taverns–places like Falstaff’s The Boar’s Head,
where ordinary women such as Mistress Elbow suffer similar offense–or
main topic of gossip in the circles of the aristocracy. Anyway, celibacy,
especially for a woman, then especially for a queen, was a very unusual
phenomenon for the 16th century. The Queen of England’s wedding,
moreover, in the context of the European politics in that epoch, had a
crucial significance. No wonder, then, that Elizabeth’s decision was often
criticized by her contemporaries. At the same time, official testimonies of
various ambassadors at the English court indicate the fact that the queen
had a moral conduct and refused marriage not out of an irresistible need
for sexual freedom or a physiological problem (there were rumours about
a possible malfunction of Elizabeth’s genital organs). The Swedish
ambassador writes to King Eric: “I saw in her all the signs of chastity and
virtue and I would be ready to risk my own life as a guarantee of her
maidenhood” (in Duchein 2001:302).
The literary tradition of the Elizabethan period follows the visual one,
with a series of paintings portraying the queen as an allegorical character.
In France, Salic law made it impossible for a female monarch to inherit the
throne. Elizabeth’s position on the English throne was possible, but it does
not mean it was seen as less problematic by many contemporaries. Louis
Adrian Montrose (in Berry 1994:61) explains Elizabeth’s success:
Because she was always uniquely herself, Elizabeth’s rule was not
intended to undermine the male hegemony of her culture. Indeed, the
emphasis upon her difference from other women may have helped to
reinforce it.
Forty-four years of a woman’s reign did not end the patriarchal
structure of the English society, but it changed it radically. This radical
change was perceived even more dramatically at the level of contemporary
literature. Examined through the lens of patriarchal attitudes, which define
history as the sum of actions performed by men, Elizabeth’s refusal to
marry was perceived as something more than a woman’s refusal of the
subordination to a husband. In Elizabethan literature and visual arts, her
unmarried state was idealized, the Queen becoming the unattainable object
of masculine desire.
Critics have defined and explained Elizabeth’s cult in different
manners. If some see it rooted in religious matters, others link it to the
search of European absolute monarchies for a glamorous, imperial image.
The truth is, as always, somewhere in the middle. The idealization of
Elizabeth was clearly linked with her role as a restorer of the “true”,
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Protestant religion. The cult dwells massively upon Elizabeth’s joint rule,
as head of both state and church. The connection between a mythical
Golden Age (or the biblical Eden) and Protestant Reformation is not
accidental. In this context, Elizabeth is compared with Astraea, the
imperial virgin–a cult that was applied to other European rulers, but much
less successfully, as Elizabeth only combined the feminine gender and the
unmarried status (Yates 1993). The figure of Astraea is also a signifier of
Renaissance absolutism, regarded in imperial terms. Elizabeth’s reign is,
after all, the age of the prosperous English navy and of the establishment
of British colonies in the newly-discovered America.
Elizabeth’s cult manages to displace the initial fundamental problem,
that of the ruler’s gender. The Queen is perceived at the same time as more
and less than a woman. She is not a mere woman, but a goddess (be it
Astraea or Diana); at the same time, she is unfeminine because she denies
herself the major role women were traditionally attributed–that of a wife
and, especially, that of a mother. Her role as head of the church (more than
other European monarchs could claim to be) was perceived as even more
unsettling. This role opposes her not just to the conventional figure of the
masculine ruler, but also to the figure of Christ. Sensitive to the Protestant
clergy’s restlessness about her position, Elizabeth decided to nuance her
position, choosing to call herself “supreme governor” rather than “supreme
head” of the English church, as her father, Henry VIII, had done (Berry
1994:66). She uses a neutral noun, a mere denominator of a function,
giving up, the “head”, a part of the body heavily gendered masculine,
connoting with reason, spirituality, equilibrium, etc. At the same time,
Elizabeth made great use of religious imagery to justify her private life:
I have made choice of such state [remaining unmarried] as is freest from
the incumbrance of secular pursuits and gives me the most leisure for the
service of God: and could the applications of the most potent princes, or
the very hazard of my life, have diverted me from this purpose, I had long
ago worn the honours of a bride […]. I have long since made choice of a
husband, the kingdom of England, […] charge me not with the want of
children, forasmuch as everyone of you, and every Englishman besides, are
my children and relations […] (in Berry 1994:66).
The fact that she assigns a masculine gender to the kingdom, her
symbolic husband, is also an interesting point, as both spheres of activity
Elizabeth was involved in (the secular and the religious) were traditionally
not gendered masculine. The concept of the two bodies of a monarchy
featured the mystical and immortal body of the church (ecclesia–feminine)
and the lay institutional apparatus of the state (respublica–feminine). In
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
this spirit, only the union between a male monarch and these feminine
institutions could be claimed to be a natural marriage. Therefore,
Elizabeth’s famous marriage to England can be regarded as ambiguous. At
the same time, however, it may also mean that the Queen’s personality,
just like her sexuality, is self-contained and the feminine rule is seen in a
mystical or symbolic relationship with itself. Dual in terms of being more
and less than a woman, Elizabeth is also dual in terms of being male and
female at the same time.
Although a woman, in her most famous public speeches she calls
herself a “king” or a “prince”, clearly masculine offices unlike the neutral
“sovereign”: e.g., in the Speech at the Dissolving of Parliament, printed in
1615 (Hodgson-Wright 2002:14):
Many princes wiser than myself you have had, but one only excepted, none
more careful over you (whom in the duty of a child I must regard and to
whom I must acknowledge myself far shallow).
In indirectly evoking her father, Henry VIII, but also an entire line of
masculine forerunners, Elizabeth cleverly diverts attention from the issue
of gender difference–essential for the contemporaries and self-evident–by
insisting upon the degree of wisdom in herself and other monarchs–
practically unquantifiable.
The moment of Tilbury 1588 pushes the Queen’s sexual duality even
further. According to Michel Duchein (2001), Elizabeth was invited by
Leicester to address a confused, starved, disorganized and uniformed
army. Given his own lack of rhetorical skills, Leicester was convinced that
the royal presence would increase the soldiers’ enthusiasm. At the same
time, this was a wonderful occasion for Elizabeth to prove that the
common belief according to which a woman was by definition incapable
of fighting or guiding her people through a war–a sovereign’s main
responsibility at the end of the Middle Ages–was only a prejudice. On a
grey day, Elizabeth, surrounded by bright colours (silver helmet and
armour, white feathers, skirt and horse, red tunics for the guards, and gold
for her noble attendants) raises the sceptre in front of an awe-stricken
army. The silvery armour covers Elizabeth’s body. Under the metal
surface, the female body can claim masculine attributes, just like the
Amazon’s body. The suit of armour makes the warrior stronger and less
vulnerable but also deprives him of his identity. In some stories, it is the
absence of the armour that saves the warrior. For instance, when the
Amazon is killed by the hero, this happens because the armour and the
helmet covered her face and body, preventing the male warrior from
Dana Percec
13
recognizing her. When he removes the helmet and sees his victim, the hero
weeps bitterly, realizing that he killed the woman he loved.
It is true that the Queen’s speech at Tilbury was meant only for
rhetorical purposes, as the decisive battle at Gravelines had already taken
place a few days before. Although news travelled very slowly and could
be very confusing in those times and was already known to Elizabeth’s
generals, Gloriana’s oration remains one of the most representative
discourses uttered by her in a very long career:
My loving people, we have been persuaded by some, that are so careful of
our safety, to take heed how we commit our self to armed multitudes for
fear of treachery; but I assure you, I do not desire to live to distrust my
faithful, and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved
myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength, and safeguard
in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects. And therefore I am come
amongst you as you see, at this time, not for my recreation, and disport, but
being resolved in the midst, and heat of the battle to live, or die amongst
you all, to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people,
my honour, and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body but of a
weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of
a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any
Prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm, to which
rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I
myself will be your General, Judge, and rewarder of every one of your
virtues in the field. I know already for your forwardness, you have
deserved rewards and crowns, and we do assure you in the word of a
Prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the meantime my Lieutenant
General shall be in my stead, than whom never Prince commanded a more
noble or worthy subject, not doubting but by your obedience to my
General, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we
shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my
Kingdoms, and of my people. (in Hodgson-Wright 2002:1)
Elizabeth wants to be regarded as the monarch par excellence, a sacred
ruler and a fatherly authority for his/her people at the same time. But the
antithesis she insists upon (“I know I have the body but of a weak and
feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”) for rhetoric
purposes is not the traditional one, woman vs. man, but woman vs. king.
Also, the body parts she picks are heart and stomach–both used on a
strictly metaphorical level, the former for courage, the latter for stamina.
She places herself at the very heart of a discourse that exploits imagery
related to a masculine anatomy and a physical and psychological profile
traditionally associated with the most typical masculine profession, that of
the soldier. The offices she evokes are masculine (General, Judge, Prince,
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
king) as well as the moral qualities. The valour and the other “virtues in
the field” call for an ideal of martial masculinity. Elizabeth I supported the
development of the Tudor myth as an ideology of absolute kingly power,
social and political commitment, popularity of the monarch as the
embodiment of human and even divine perfection.
Related to the idea of legitimacy is the presence of imperial symbolism
in Tudor propaganda, as well as the presence of the symbol of the crown
in the Shakespearean text. The crown (unlike the diadem or the coronet)
signifies England’s imperial ambitions. Although Empire as a concept is
not new during Elizabeth’s reign, imperial imagery is first used by authors
glorifying the Virgin Queen. Henry VIII was the first to introduce the
Empire in the Tudor thought and sensibility, with his Act in Restraint of
Appeals (1533), which lay claim to “this realm as an empire” and in 1547
in his will, where he states that his daughters “shall severally have hold
and enjoye the sayd imperial Crowne” after Edward’s death (Kinney
2006:41). It is during Elizabeth’s reign that the new crown is visually
represented in imperialist terms. The best examples are a series of
engravings that portray the Queen between the Pillars of Hercules
(originally the imperial symbol of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,
afterwards adopted by his son, Philip II of Spain, both rulers who had set
themselves the tasks of sailing “Plus Ultra”, beyond the boundaries of
Europe). Elizabeth will combine this symbol with a naval background,
reminding not only of her naval triumphs against Spain, but also of the age
of the exploration and colonization of the New World, a crucial element in
the English politics of the time. Such engravings include the front cover of
Christopher Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales, 1579 or the Queen’s
graphic evocation in John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563), where he
compares Elizabeth’s early persecution to Mary’s sufferings and her reign
to that of Constantine, the Church’s first emperor. The naval background
is repeated as a motif in The Armada Portrait, and so are the pillars and
the crown she is holding, while the other hand is casually laid on a globe,
all signifying stability, pride, erectness, a solid justification for the
Queen’s colonial exploits.
The Stuart line followed the Tudor introduction to imperialism, James
I organizing his entry into London in 1603 as that of a triumphant Roman
emperor, passing under seven memorial arches, the first one, designed by
Ben Jonson, showing a figure representing the monarchy of Britain sitting
below the crowns of England and Scotland. James was also offered an
accession medal that read “Emperor of the whole island of Britain”. He
was compared to Augustus, creating a direct link to the Roman Caesars.
Dana Percec
15
The grandeur of representation is a characteristic of all Elizabethan
public processions. The beauty of the spectacle, with the monarch present
in person–usually as performer–gives the impression of social and political
harmony. Bristol, addressing the notion of social spectacle during the
Renaissance, quotes from an English Renaissance text describing Queen
Elizabeth I’s public processions as follows:
She passed the streets first […] Likewise Squires, Knights, Barons, and
Baronets, Knights of the Bath […] Then following: The Judges of the Law,
the Abbots… And then followed Bishops, two and two; and the
Archbishops of York and Canterbury; the Ambassadors of France and
Venice, the Lord Mayor with a mace; Master Garter the King of Heralds
[…] Then the Master of the Guard, with the guard on both sides of the
streets in good array; and all the constables well beseen in velvet and
damask coats with white staves in their hand; setting every man in his
array and order in the streets […] …in all her passage [the Queen] did not
only shew her most gracious love towards the people in general; but also
privately, if the baser personages had either offered Her grace any flowers
or such like, as a signification of their good will; or moved her to any suit,
she most gently (to the common rejoicings of all lookers on, and private
comfort of the party) stayed her chariot, and heard their requests. (J.
Nichols in Bristol 1985:60)
As Adina Nanu (2001:51) notices in her study on the body as a social
construct, the VIP (absolute monarch or popular movie star) undergoes a
process of amplification when s/he presents himself/herself in front of the
public. Literally raising one’s position is vital in order to mark the
importance of one’s social rank. The level of the crowd was dominated
with the help of long decorative feathers, impressive gold crowns, huge
wigs–like those worn by Marie Antoinette just before the French
Revolution of 1789. In the pre-modern and early modern period, noble
men and women were the first to wear high heels and soles for their shoes.
They served a double function: to protect the rich garments from the mud
of the streets, and to signal the wearer’s increased prestige in comparison
with the modest public image of a plebeian. The excessive verticalization
of the royal figure is another common propagandistic strategy, used in
many official portraits. The crown and the long robe can easily create this
illusion. Increasing the volume in space on all planes gives maximum
importance to the person and even to his/her social and political role.
Velázquez’s famous portrait of Princess Margaret of Spain Las Meninas in
1656 is a very good example. Although the Princess is only a small girl,
her huge dress, amplified on a horizontal level, must suggest the stability
of the Spanish royal family, as well as the rank of the King’s daughter, her
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
costume occupying the space necessary for at least three adults. Her small
body is framed by the figures of the two maids of honour, much taller than
her, both attempting to diminish their height and look smaller–as fit for an
attendant, lower in rank–by bending their knees and heads.
If a small girl who is not (yet) a monarch is depicted in such a way, no
wonder Queen Elizabeth I is wearing, in her official portraits, the most
impressive wigs, collars and amply embroidered dresses on large hoops.
Pillars are numerous in Elizabeth’s portraits, their vertical line indicating
the upward movement of the British monarchy and of the Protestant faith
and their durability, as well as the Queen’s own Atlas-like stamina.
Thrones served the same purpose, as well as the canopies carried for the
monarch during official processions. Apart from written documents, hints
of what the sovereign’s public appearances looked like are offered by
paintings of the time. Elizabeth in Procession to Blackfriars, an anonymous
painting of 1600, in the style of Peake, portrays a hieratic sovereign,
almost deprived of human shape, with an idealized figure under the weight
of heavy white silk and embroidery, almost literally floating above ground
level as the lords accompanying her hide the presence of the platform that
makes her look taller than both aristocracy and plebeians. The painting
showing Queen Elizabeth dancing the Volta with Robert Dudley (c. 1581)
places the monarch in the middle of a stage, with courtiers and musicians
surrounding her, being lifted above ground level by Dudley. Elizabeth’s
position indicates her centrality and superiority to the Earl of Leicester
himself–it is common knowledge that the sovereign was suspected of
having a romantic affair with her subject–and to all viewers gathered
around (and under) her. The dance reveals her small, delicate feet, in
contrast with the power suggested by her height, as the Queen appears
much taller than all men and women in luxurious clothes, who cannot take
their eyes from the airy figure. In another anonymous painting, representing
Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, probably dating from 1559, Elizabeth is
portrayed in the middle of the troops, men framing her symmetrically on
both sides. She stands out both because she is riding a white horse (most
men are not in the saddle and the existing horses are dark coloured) and
because she is made taller by the huge collar she is wearing above her
silvery armour.
Authority and Authorship
The other form of agency Elizabeth’s biographers consider is her
agency in creating her own texts, though this issue is similar to that
concerning all early modern authors. If, according to traditional criteria,
Dana Percec
17
high literature is that which contains a stabilized body of work, is the
result of individual agency and has universal validity, the great texts of
16th and 17th century drama are part of the canon as much as Elizabeth
Tudor’s poems, letters and speeches. Shakespeare’s plays–written to be
spoken out, improvised, incomplete, with numerous variants, with
multiple possible authors, deeply embedded and dependent on outer social,
political and ideological circumstances–are now regarded as fluid cultural
products, rather than stable, timeless bodies of poetic work, as they used to
be in traditional literary studies. Similarly, Elizabeth’s creation may be the
result of collective work, is responsive to specific historical and personal
contexts, comes in several more or less reliable versions, and is open to
new discoveries.
Firstly, a good deal of the queen’s known work is thought to have been
produced in collaboration with other people, though their identity or
participation cannot be always systematically isolated or quantified
(Marcus, Mueller and Rose 2000:10). When it comes to Elizabeth’s
speeches, for example, they reflect her own personality and beliefs, but it
is not clear if she actually conceived them. They are lively and spirited,
appealing to the ingenious symbolism of the king’s two bodies and to the
memory of the queen’s father, Henry VIII–Elizabeth considering herself
not a mere imitator of the great king, but a true and proud inheritor. On the
other hand, it is a known fact that she didn’t write her speeches beforehand
and often had scribes take them down (they, in turn, often lamented to fail
capturing the sovereign’s speech in its full pungency). In terms of style,
Elizabeth’s political speeches–like her famous Golden Speech–have a
voice which is a formal and collective one, developed by the ruler together
with her secretaries and ministers. The same can be argued about
Elizabeth’s prayers. They reflect the woman’s religious devotion, strong
support of the Protestant faith–as a personal heritage (from her father) and
as a national asset–and political philosophy (that a king’s most important
preoccupation is that of labouring for his soul). Also, an original feature is
that the voice of the praying woman is not humble, but proud and
assertive–a warrior prepared to do her duty to her Lord, rather than a
believer in front of her Creator. However, the auctorial voice of these texts
is mixed. The prayers are a free composition, sprinkled with quotes from
the Scriptures, a form of co-production between an individual voice and
the collective voice of the Church of England, with its accumulated
traditions (Marcus, Mueller and Rose 2000:13).
Elizabeth Tudor’s impressively large correspondence and wide
epistolary range is probably the most interesting example of agency and
auctorial presence. Scholars (Pryor 2003) have noticed the interesting
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Elizabeth I: Creativity, Authorship, And Agency
coincidence of the development of cursive handwriting, the invention of
the print, and the development of portraiture (in the 16th century, it is for
the first time since the Antiquity that recognizable individuals were
depicted from the life). A piece of autograph is equal to a portrait and,
perhaps not accidentally, Queen Elizabeth’s passion for writing letters was
equalled only by her appetite for a personality cult, which emerged mainly
from portraits and public processions. In both circumstances, the symbolism
conveyed a sense of dialogue between the monarch and her subjects, a
negotiation in power and political meaning, and a display of dynastic
continuity and legitimacy (Goldring in Archer, Goldring and Knight
2007:163). Even if the portraits were painted by others, even if the
processions were prepared and directed by others, even if their contents
were (partially) ordered by the queen’s councilors, her personality, her
style, her ideas are transparent.
The letters can be easily divided in two large groups, in terms of
authorship and agency: those signed by the royal princess and those
written by the queen. The first category, written since the age of 10, until
her ascension, in November 1558, are undoubtedly conceived, put down
and signed by Elizabeth herself. Indeed, those letters, and, more often than
not, the answers from her respondents, reflect important aspects of her life.
The very first letter, addressed to Elizabeth’s step mother, Katherine Parr,
whom she loved and trusted, mirrors an essential stage in the future
queen’s maturation. Her exile, her father’s indifference, and her uncertain
status in the dynastic lineage left a clear mark on the girl’s self-image,
explaining the queen’s future obsession with legitimacy and heritage.
Katherine Parr’s answer, inviting Elizabeth to spend some time at the
Court (while Henry VIII was away at war), a rare experience for the little
girl, suggests that this time spent in London, during the king’s absence,
while her step mother was designated Queen Regent, may have influenced
the Virgin Queen’s future idea of court life under a woman’s rule.
The second category of letters, written after 1558, is mainly made up
of state letters. However, Elizabeth’s private correspondence preserves
some of the traits of earlier letter writing habits, such as the letters written
to and the answers received from James VI of Scotland–her nephew and
heir–with whom the Queen had a special relationship. Their letters
faithfully reflect this, as an interplay of sentiment and argument (Marcus,
Mueller and Rose 2000:17). Other letters to close relatives reveal a hidden
side of Elizabeth’s personality: her loneliness and nostalgia for the years
of her youth, when, though exiled and afraid, she was her own mistress.
The official letters, on the other hand, are ambivalent in terms of
authorship. It is true that the Queen insisted on signing all her