Theatre as tournament: Gendered gaze – arbitration or participation? (2/2)

Continued from previous post.

In January 1669 Lady Castlemaine bribed Elizabeth Corey, an actress in the King’s Company, to play the part of Sempronia in Jonson’s Catiline in imitation of an enemy at court, Lady Elizabeth Harvey; it is said that when the line was uttered, ‘But what’ll you doe with Sempronia?’, Lady Castlemaine, wishing on her enemy the fate of her ambassador husband, Sir Daniel, cried out, ‘Send her to Constantinople!’ The actress was duly imprisoned, then released at Lady Castlemaine’s bidding; when the play was given again she repeated the performance only to have oranges flung at her by men hired by Lady Harvey. (Roberts 97)  

Observation turns to participation.  Castlemaine and Harvey enter the field from the boxes and tilt in public with the audience as their arbiters; or perhaps we could say, more conventionally, that the ladies select and observe their champions.  But one champion remains spatially in the audience, while the other is herself female.  As the lady assigns a knight her colours, Castlemaine blurs the line between herself and Corey when she hires the actress to play her part (as it were); but more so when she herself enters the lists, while remaining in the audience, by throwing her own voice into the fray. 

At the same time, the effectiveness of the insult involves eliding Corey/Sempronia’s identity with Harvey’s, metaphorically drawing her onto the stage herself – perhaps with an implicit slur on her virtue, given the reputation of theatrical women.  And while Harvey does retain her own physical distance from the stage, she nonetheless is drawn into it, to strike against Castlemaine as embodied in the actor/champion – who paradoxically bears Harvey’s own ‘colours’, and, incidentally, her Christian name. Like Lancelot, Corey allows herself to appear to disadvantage and suffer the consequences, day after day – and like Lancelot, she is rescued from shame and receives due reward from that lady. Like Guenevere, however, she languishes in captivity until rescued by her gallant. 

The movement in this case between the roles of knight and lady, performer and spectator, has a fluidity that makes such conventional divisions very problematic – at least as they relate to gender. And yet the savour of the tournament field remains: the determination of all three women to maintain their dominance of that socially central space insists on it as an essential site of ongoing social jockeying and proof.  Yvain could relate.
I said “gender” in the post title, but have said very little specific to masculinity.  I mentioned earlier the idea of masculinity as the true trophy of a tournament, embodied in a woman; but despite the jostling of literary shoulders for social acclaim, despite the ongoing ‘duels’ between various figures in which the pen stood in for the sword, despite the occasional eruption of stage competition into physical violence (as Kinaston and Dryden’s battered sides could attest), I think it would be driving the analogy too far to suggest that proving masculinity was the central concern of the Restoration stage.

But why wasn’t it? Perhaps, in part, because the gender roles it offered for assertion were more ambiguous.  As a masked woman could be a noble lady, a prostitute or an actress (who might herself be the mistress of a duke, or a king), a man in the theatre might be anything from a poet, to a discerning (or foolish) cit, to a lord and rake – or a poor actor who mimics one and is (in his own person or his assumed one) cuckolded to the laughter of the public.  Cross-dressing (in both genders) and the effeminisation of fops further blurred gender lines, as Marsden points out (188).

Certainly, as a spectacular public space, the theatre was potentially as perfect a vehicle for assertion of a public-centric identity as the tournament field. Is that it, perhaps? that identity was becoming less invested in the public? In qualities of the mind rather than the body?  Or more in the everyday reputation than the spectacular proof?


Cited:
Marsden, Jean. “Rape, voyeurism and the Restoration stage.” Broken boundaries: Women and feminism in Restoration Drama. Ed. Katherine M. Quinsey. Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1996. 185-199.
Roberts, David. The Ladies: Female patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Theatre as tournament: Gendered gaze – arbitration or participation? (1/2)

The poet now the ladies help does crave,
That with a smile or frown can damn or save.

The actor speaking the epilogue to Thomas d’Urfey’s Trick for Trick (1696) turns to that homogenous, genteel mass known as the fair sex, begging their (its?) intercession for a humble stage-bound suppliant. Lifting his hands, possibly, in the direction of the boxes, addressing the best exemplars of that type, he recalls in  attitude the erring knight before a court of women, a suitor gazing up hopefully at a face in a tower – or, of course, a knight in a tournament awaiting the arbitration or favour of one or more women up in the stands. While a woman’s judgement is permitted – indeed requested – in most of these cases it is to be conveyed by the gaze and the expression that surrounds it, rather than through speech or action.  She responds with the grace of her eyes to the action of a man’s body on the tournament field, or the action and speech of a man on the stage, without initiating any independent speech or action of her own.  She observes – she does not participate. 

Now, there are a few immediate and obvious flaws with that, as this constructed “she” in the Restoration audience would not be responding to the actions and speech of a man only, but to a mixed-gender cast.  “She” is also not a “she” but a “they”, and “they” are by no means guaranteed not to intervene in the action of the stage, either by verbal interjection during the performance or by influence out of it (patronage, donations, authorship). In addition, in the case of d’Urfey’s epilogue, the actor does not plead for himself: rather, the playwright pleads through the actor. Just as the action of Lancelot’s body can prove the fact of Guenevere’s guilt or innocence[1], the actors become ‘champions’ of the author, their identity eliding with his as they speak the words prepared by him.  But potentially, either playwright or actor (or both) might now be a “her”.

The conventional gender roles a tournament assigns are familiar. Women are inactive and elevated above the action, but their downwards gaze validates the action as chivalric and romantic – the latter potentially in the modern sense, given the emphasis on winning female favour (“a smile or frown”). By this logic, they are also in their own body both judge and reward, and, theoretically at least, justification.  They do not, however, set the terms of the game: it is a game of war, defined and enacted by men, with masculinity the true trophy (even if embodied in a woman – hence Yvain’s confusion).

Yet even here, there is some ambiguity as to the extent of female participation.  The gaze cannot have a single direction: the woman’s gaze must inevitably meet its reverse, if it is to have effect. If a knight wears a woman’s sleeve into battle, to what extent is she imagined as existing on the field herself? or altering, by instruction or inspiration, the outcome of events?  Certainly Guenevere’s command to Lancelot to lose in the tournament compromises the field as a sphere of purely masculine endeavour. 

While gaze in the theatre is theoretically as monodirectional as it is (theoretically) in a tournament, the limits of this theory are the subject of ironic play in themselves. Those treading the board feign not to see the audience, feign to exist in a world removed from trappings and scene and “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire”, but regularly turn this very pretence to effect, engaging their audience actively through irony, acknowledgement in direct address, contemporary references and arbitration.

However, the audience constructed in the address of prologues and epilogues can be as artificial as any costumed character. Roberts observes that the audience addressed was male by default, and that when women – or rather, “the ladies” – were addressed, it was not as individuals with differing opinions and tastes but as an undifferentiated single party who approved or rejected en masse (28-29, together with most of that chapter).  Marsden points out (195) the paradox and difficulty for female members of an audience when the action and dialogue onstage is designed to invite titillation at the sexual regard, or even the rape, of female characters onstage.  The assumption of a male audience is essential for the success of the common stage devices and plots that Marsden describes, in contrast to the conventionally feminised audience of a tournament. May the difference be derived (in part) from the other aspect of the stage, the literary and poetic? The interlocutors in literary debates had long been assumed to be male, although change was grinding slowly into motion here as well. 

The increasing popularity of masks among women, literally effacing individual identity, attracting the gaze while seeming to deflect it, can only have assisted a group characterisation. As such a fashion acknowledges, the ladies in a Restoration audience were themselves theatrical objects of view.  The gaze was not only reversed from stage to audience, but turned by the audience on itself.  It is a rare theatre-visit for Pepys when he does not leave in his diary an impression that the audience around him were as interested in each other as the stage. 

And sometimes they did more than look…

Continued in next post.



[1] Despite the fact that the action of Lancelot’s body has already effected Guenevere’s guilt.



Cited:
Marsden, Jean. “Rape, voyeurism and the Restoration stage.” Broken boundaries: Women and feminism in Restoration Drama. Ed. Katherine M. Quinsey. Kentucky: UP of Kentucky, 1996. 185-199.
Roberts, David. The Ladies: Female patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Theatre as tournament: Making earnest of game

Show dichotomy between real and not real, serious and not serious, leisure and occupation in both theatre and tournament.


Of course, the crucial difference between theatre and tournament as regards actual wars, themes of national import, is that those on the tournament field will usually or potentially be players in the field of war; but the majority of those in the theatre have little chance of even influencing the political aspects of the conflict, and are unlikely to be physically present in war themselves, let alone in a position of command.  However, the theatre can sway and express public opinion (for a given value of ‘public’), and by this time that must be allowed rather more weight than it ever had in the High or Late Middle Ages.  While the middle and lower classes gathered in the theatre may not have any prospect of affecting the war directly, yet they are present, as they would not have been (or not have been acknowledged to be) four hundred years before; and their opinions are allowed or sought about the action and words on the stage.  They may even mount the stage themselves.


Politics as intersection of game and war? Serious effects of tournament – for Erec and Yvain of not participating, of injury or death in mock-combat.  Cf. the trouble Kynaston and Dryden got into, both the subject of physical assaults as a result of powerful people taking offence to their activities onstage; or the effects of Buckingham’s satire on Dryden’s reputation. Dryden becomes Bayes – unable to reappropriate his colours/arms?


Blurring of actual identity through the ‘play’ publically observed – eg, tournament knight with his lady’s colours, identified only by his own colours or the colours of his team; potential for disguise,  or usurpation of another’s identity (to whatever end).  Actor assuming character, playing recognisably in the manner of some public figure, wearing clothes donated by / borrowed from lord/lady, etc.  Even cross-dressing: effeminate fops, breeches-clad actresses, boys/men in women’s roles, etc.


The Restoration also seems to foster a deliberate cultivation of the mystique of the actor, until Colley Cibber could not only acknowledge but reasonably expect the fascination of the audience with who an actor is “when in no body’s Shape but his own”,

and whether he, who by his Profession had so long been ridiculing his Benefactors, might not, when the Coat of his Profession was off, deserve to be laugh’d at himself; or from his being so often seen in, the most flagrant, and immoral Characters; whether he might not see as great a Rogue, when he look’d into the Glass himself, as when he held it to others. (Cibber 3-4) 

There is an irony here – intentional or unintentional, though Cibber seems unable to ever quite refrain from (defensive?) irony. The introduction to his autobiography is far too self-conscious in its construction of the ‘real’ Cibber to be anything but another performance.  Which begs the question – does any real interior self remain to the actor after years on the stage? Is he or she only to be found in the mirror? If the knight is so easily effaced – if Lancelot kills his beloved Gareth, unmakes the knight he made, because he does not recognise him out of armour - is he, in fact, anything but his colours?






Cited:
Cibber, Colley. An Apology for the life of Mr Colley Cibber, Comedian, and Late Patentee of the Theatre-Royal.  With an Historical View of the Stage during his Own Time. Written by Himself. 2nd ed. London: John Watts, 1740.

Theatre as tournament: Dryden’s bullfight

NB: This is a series of posts that I drafted some months ago, then got too busy to complete.  I just found them again and decided to patch together and posts what’s there, as I’m too interested in other things right now to complete them but they do contain thoughts I’ll probably want to return to at some point.  Incomplete sections are italicised and summarised in note form.

To the theatre, and there saw, “Argalus and Parthenia”, where a woman acted Parthenia, and came afterwards on the stage in men’s clothes, and had the best legs that ever I saw, and I was very well pleased with it. (Pepys’ diary, October 28 1661)

There is an account, in the very opening scene of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, of a bullfight on a grand scale.  Local colour for a trendy Spanish setting, sure – but as I very much doubt Dryden had ever been Granadawards or seen an actual bullfight, it is essentially vibrant foreign colour painted onto an English imaginative concept, the tournament.
[talk through description of bullfight, including features like ladies’ gaze,equestrian skills, focus on individual heroic combatants and arbitration that remind of romance tournament descriptions, and the combination of war (background and present against bulls)/danger with game, as well as the political jostling/favour/power implied by that]
We do not actually see this tournament – rather, it is described to us in retrospect by the characters.  It is therefore mediated through their perception, and our reaction to a certain extent controlled by it – appropriately, as these men are the leaders of the land, busily engaged in projecting a show of absolute control that is about to fall to pieces in the disruption of civil war.  controlled by men, male arbiters, just as men decide and control the rules and world of tournament even if women are important in other ways. Literary antecedents more obviously recognisable by presenting it in a literary manner rather than representing it.
Now, bear with me, because I want to extend this beyond a solitary example in a solitary play.  There are correlations between romance’s tournament and the reported bullfight, between the theatricality of the fight and the theatricality of the Moors’ presentation of it, between the power structures evidenced in the fight and in the world of the play as a whole. And I would argue that all the points noted in common between the tournament and the bullfight are also held in common with the Restoration theatre itself.  This may not be deliberate on Dryden’s part, though I wouldn’t put it past him, but as corresponding vehicles for public spectacle, in which power dynamics are given the name of entertainment (or game), I think there are grounds for valuable comparison. 
I intend (but probably won’t manage) to primarily keep to note/question form, because there are some very large issues here that would require a major research project to do them justice.  Similarly, work may have been done on this already – I haven’t looked at either primary or secondary sources beyond notes I already have, as this is just a series of thoughts of my own, which I may develop at a later date.  And if I started, I wouldn’t stop – and a new semester is beginning. [NB: this is exactly what happened.]
Nevertheless, this has already grown into three posts to follow, grouped loosely around the following ideas:
- Play and war – making earnest of game.
- Gender dynamics – gaze and arbitration.
- Idealisation of the observed body.
Analogy can be a problematic critical tactic, as humanities researcher mentioned in a recent article; but this is not a paper, nor do I have a line of argument to present.  I will therefore move with little notice from considering the relationship only an externally imposed analogy from the present day; to considering both theatre and tournament as individual cultural phenomena that fulfil similar societal needs in their own times; to considering (aspects of) Restoration theatre as formulated more or less consciously around seventeenth-century reception and development of the idea of the tournament. Let us see which model of anachronism is most fruitful!

Anger management in ‘Evelina’

Or rather, Evelina.  But apparently post titles cannot handle italics. 

This is the first draft of a paper I’m preparing for our local English grad conference, on Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina: or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World.  I think it needs trimming – not so much in length (it’s currently 10 pages, 12 pt double-spaced, so doable) as in extra ideas. It has too many, and it’s probably rather too distracting for an aural format.

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In the course of Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina falls under the care of three older women in turn. Each provides the protagonist with a foil and potential model, complementing and commenting on her behaviour. The most intriguing parallels, however, are in relation to the most vividly painted and repellent of the three, Madame Duval. Both the young woman and the older enter the London social scene as outsiders, conscious themselves of the difference and making it apparent to others by (usually) small transgressions of local codes of behaviour. In a series of paired incidents, Burney suggests that the difference between the two women in this regard is not the type of error, but their reactions to it. While both women are faced with comparable impertinences – sometimes provoked by their own errors – the extent to which these incidents disrupt the smooth, unruffled pool of social interaction is largely determined by their experience and expression of potentially the most transgressive of all emotions, anger. Evelina’s mastery of social forms is synonymous with her mastery of her own feelings, and her ability to eliminate anger from even her internal vocabulary is what fits her finally for civilised society.

From the very first letter in the novel, Burney establishes anger as both socially disruptive and a signal of alterity. It is Madame Duval’s inappropriate rage that immediately and irrevocably casts her as ‘other’ in Lady Howard’s letter. The “violent, sometimes abusive” letter to which Lady Howard responds (13), being an extravagantly negative behavioural model and a threat to orderly social interaction, initiates the action of the novel. An external force disrupting the orderly, enclosed, retired life at Berry Hill, Madame Duval’s anger creates the possibility for novelistic narration – just as, years earlier, her “wrath and violence” and “inexorable rancour” were the direct cause of the ruin of Miss Anville’s life (18). This alterity is emphasised when we meet Madame Duval by her affected foreignness and abrasive manners, making her in writing and person an effective external threat to the smooth running of orderly society. Her altercations with Captain Mirvan repeatedly cause uncomfortable and troublesome situations for the rest of the company. They even create real physical danger for Evelina, as those quarrels more than once leave her stranded with Sir Clement Willoughby without a protector (78-79, 182-84). Perhaps more seriously, they provide a model of behaviour for Evelina that she cannot possibly emulate. Evelina’s grandmother thus becomes a means for Burney to explore the over-expression of resentments that her protagonist cannot admit to feeling, never mind express, if her story is to end happily.

The relationship between Evelina and Sir Clement Willoughby, like that between Madame Duval and Captain Mirvan, is built around a series of provocations and responses. The essential elements of the pattern all appear with the first meeting of each pair. At the ridotto in London, Evelina is addressed by “a very fashionable, gay-looking man” (48) who requests the honour of a dance. She informs him that she is previously engaged, but, her artifice being unequal to the lie, her unwelcome new acquaintance sees through her. Blithely setting aside unspoken social limits in retaliation, Sir Clement Willoughby attaches himself to her side and proceeds to torment her with a steady stream of provocations too eloquent and smooth to be repulsed, yet jarring enough to ordinary patterns of social interaction to cause Evelina severe consternation. The very next day (and in the very next letter) her grandmother makes an acquaintance similarly outrageous, according to her own terms. Reacting first against Madame Duval’s foreignness, then against her manners, Captain Mirvan launches into an attack which recalls that of Sir Clement Willoughby’s in its persistence, its affront to regular patterns of acquaintance and familiarity, and its clear intention to drive his target beyond anger into helplessness.

The similarities are too marked to consider either scene in isolation. While Sir Clement Willoughby lays sly insinuations against Evelina’s origin and manners - “why where could you be educated?” (54) - Captain Mirvan abruptly insults Madame Duval’s - “then go to the devil together, for that’s the fittest voyage for the French and the quality” (62). Both men are determined to persist in their behaviour despite attempts by both Mrs Mirvan and Evelina to change the subject, overriding the mildness of good manners with the force of bad. Most importantly, although we observe the second scene more dispassionately as outsiders, the emotional core is the same. Sir Clement Willoughby’s goading and Captain Mirvan’s persistence equally create a sense of helpless frustration, which only grows with each woman’s increasingly desperate attempts to deflect her opponent.

The primary difference between the first scene and its mirror is in the violence of the second. Here is no pretence of civil masks. Madame Duval’s open resentment of the Captain’s impertinences contrasts with Evelina’s useless attempts at retreat. Where Evelina chooses silences and ‘Sir’s for her responses, her grandmother raises her voice and hurls a new synonym for ‘unmannered’ at the Captain in almost every utterance. As a result the scene escalates much faster. Sir Clement Willoughby goads Evelina for five pages before she is driven to agree to a dance, and a further five before she bursts into tears. Within two pages of their first exchange, the violence of the older pair becomes physical, as he “seiz[es] both her wrists” to emphasise his threats (63). On their next encounter, both go further: Madame Duval “dash[es] the candle out of his hand, stamp[s] upon the floor, and, at last, sp[its] in his face”. This triggers a violent response in the Captain, as his amusement is “converted into resentment” and he shakes her “violent[ly]”, in turn begetting further “passion” (81-2). Their behaviour traps both characters in an escalating cycle of violence from which neither can (or is willing to) escape, regardless of the harmful effects of their quarrelling on the remainder of the company.

Madame Duval, in her “grossness” (64), not only articulates but seems to embody the frustration implicit in Evelina’s experience at the ridotto and elsewhere. Nowhere in her confrontation does Evelina admit to feeling anger herself, aloud or in writing – even, it seems, in her own head. The anger of Madame Duval and Captain Mirvan is described without hesitation, in vivid, non-euphemistic terms that remain associated with displays of anger throughout the novel, not one of which is applied to Evelina in the preceding scene. Captain Mirvan addresses Madame Duval “surlily” and is bent on “quarrelling” (61); they speak with “vehemence”, “swearing” in “fury”, both too governed by “passion” to respond to cool reason (62-3)[1]. But Evelina has no language in which to articulate her own negative emotional response to Sir Clement Willoughby’s provocation. It seems not to exist – our only proofs of it, despite the first-person narrative, are its external manifestations: inarticulateness, blushing, confusion, tears. Whatever it is that she feels, the parallel with Madame Duval suggests an analogy with anger, but not an equation: Evelina’s experience of her own emotion appears to be completely different.

This reticence on the part of author or narrator in providing terms for discussion of Evelina’s hypothetical anger also has its parallels in the continued development of the two stories throughout the first volume. Madame Duval’s responses to Captain Mirvan continue to function as a comment on Evelina’s to Sir Clement, and the exaggerated emotional displays in which the older woman indulges as a potential (and dangerous) model for her granddaughter’s imitation. They also serve, however, to highlight a crucial difference in focus between the battlegrounds on which each pair contests.

Just as Madame Duval’s emotions are performed and labelled, given unambiguous exterior form, so is her conflict with Captain Mirvan centred on her outward appearance and the means she uses to effect it. He tips her into the mud and laughs at her appearance, mocks the ruin of her “new Lyons silk” (77-8), and targets her clothes, head-dress and rouge both in tipping her into the ditch and in mocking her for it later (186). But Captain Mirvan is not alone in his blindness to all but the external[2]. Madame Duval’s first concern, on emerging from the mud puddle, is also “to save [her silks] from being stained by the wet” (77), and she continues to resent the Captain primarily for the ruin of her silks and wigs.

This is of a piece with her usual priorities: as even Evelina cannot help but notice, “the labour of the toilette seems to be the chief business of her life” (195). Her decision to abandon mourning when she came to England, with her husband “but three months” dead, is on the grounds that “nobody here could tell how long she had been a widow” (66), a justification that calls attention to her inability to draw a connection between outward appearance and interior feeling or motivation. So far as Madame Duval is concerned, the only reason to remain in mourning is social censure, against which is set the (equally external) siren song of fashion. Her preferred – or only – mode of self-construction is visible, public, and repeatedly emphasised as incongruous: characters from Evelina to Captain Mirvan all comment on the grotesque extravagance of her dress and manners.

Evelina, by contrast, constructs herself almost entirely internally throughout the first volume. She is close to inarticulate in public, spends little time at her toilette (and wastes next to no ink writing about it) and is intensely uncomfortable under the gaze of strangers[3]. She is initially so unsuccessful in creating a public image that even Lord Orville – later her truest reader – receives a first impression of her as simply “a poor weak girl” (42). Left to herself, however, Evelina shapes herself with increasing skill in the civilised, private form of the letter. Appropriately, then, where Captain Mirvan targets Madame Duval’s external accoutrements, Sir Clement Willoughby’s assaults on Evelina aim both towards disruption of her outer calm (and thus exposure or alteration of her inner self), and towards the physical intrusion of rape.

There is a (possibly tongue-in-cheek) echo of this distinction in Burney’s use of the repeated coach motif: Captain Mirvan repeatedly tries to eject Madame Duval from coaches, while Sir Clement Willoughby repeatedly traps Evelina inside them. At their first meeting, Captain Mirvan is reluctant to allow Madame Duval into his coach, then threatens to throw her out into the mud (61, 63); on departing for Howard Grove he hauls Monsieur Du Bois forcibly out of the carriage to spite her (147); in their “highwaymen” trick, he pulls her out of the carriage and tumbles her into a ditch in disarray (182-83). Madame Duval values control of the coach’s social functions – its movement, toward places of social power (Howard Grove, Justice Fielding), and its theatrical value (especially when it belongs to a lord). For Evelina, however, the power game is turned on its head, as the space itself becomes a trap with Sir Clement Willoughby controlling the reins. Thus, Evelina and the baronet struggle for possession of the inner space, while Madame Duval’s concern is for the appearance of the carriage from the outside.

This is not to say that Evelina’s social persona does not concern her or does not constitute an element in her perception of her own identity. She is excruciatingly aware at the ridotto of the appearance her awkward manners make, and how they make her seem, but at the same time her language emphasises the disjuncture between appearance and reality. She hangs her head “like a fool” (37), accidentally assumes “seeming airs” (38) though conscious of the “ridiculous part [she] had [her]self played” (39) and makes a determined effort to rally herself and “appear less a fool” (41) (emphases mine). Never once does she make a direct causative correlation between her appearance and her inner self. Rather, the reverse is true, or should be: her inner qualities ought to affect her outward show, and her challenge throughout the book is to bring each into closer alignment with the other. Her conversation with Lord Orville at the ridotto – or rather, Lord Orville’s gallant attempt to draw out more than monosyllables – is far from the last occasion on which Evelina will find her voice unequal to the task she would wish on it. But this works in both directions: not only must she learn to express herself rather than dwelling wholly inwardly, she must also learn to moderate what she feels and thinks, even to herself, according to the modest show of ideal femininity on the outside. If she must learn to say what she feels, it is also necessary to feel no more than she may say, or she risks becoming her grandmother.

Patricia L. Hamilton observes that “according to early-century conceptions of politeness, external behaviour should spring from and be congruent with inner moral virtue” (419). Lord Orville, she argues, is the epitome of this ideal. His manners, decorum and generosity – Hamilton’s three main components of male politeness – all spring from internal qualities. In my terms, Orville has eliminated the disjuncture between inner and outer virtue, and in this he provides Evelina with an alternative to her grandmother, allowing her to develop qualities and inclinations already evident in her from the beginning. Evelina is naturally disposed, or disposed by her upbringing, to constrain her emotions to the socially acceptable. Her internal self-censure is so automatic that, as we have seen, even so early as the scene at the ridotto, her own account shows little emotion but confusion. Only the subsequent sight of her grandmother’s rage suggests that true anger was an option in Evelina’s case: her own experience did not seem to involve it, to the extent that she avoids naming what she does feel even to herself.

Madame Duval’s complete disjuncture of inner and outer is not the model Evelina chooses: instead, she follows Lord Orville. I mentioned earlier that Captain Mirvan is a fitting partner for Madame Duval, as the similarities between them indicate that they occupy analogous places in Burney’s moral map. Sir Clement Willoughby, self-evidently, is not Evelina’s twin in the same way. Rather, he is a complement to the Duval/Mirvan type. His manners and dress are smooth, socially acceptable, even attractive, yet he also lacks the ability to balance internal with external. He offers Evelina a third choice: the appearance of virtue without its substance. In Sir Clement Willoughby, the possession of only the external appearance of goodness is more dangerous than Lord Merton’s lack of both. Sir Clement Willoughby thus prevents the situation from becoming a simple dilemma between presence and absence of polite manners: he proves that they must arise from real goodness inside rather than from a simple hypocritical veneer[4]. Evelina cannot simply smooth-talk negative internal qualities away in public – she must deny them in private, even to herself, until they cease to be a reality.

Evelina’s language thus models her and Orville’s ideal society: it eliminates anger altogether. Her reticence in providing terms for discussion of civilised anger suggests that it does not, in fact, exist in a civilised form – that it must be twisted around into something else, just as “hypocrisy” may be re-termed “politeness” or “tact”. If properly experienced, anger is unspeakable. It is not named, not acknowledged even to one’s self, except with wordless tears. For Evelina, anger is only permissible if it is not experienced.

As a warning, Madame Duval does not disappear when she passes out of the plot. She is a type, and there are plenty more of her out there under different guises. Captain Mirvan himself appoints her successor in their little war, and his election lights on Mr Lovel. A man who does not exist unless he is seen at the theatre, who “stud[ies] for an hour what [he] should put on” (504) and whose first reaction to humiliation is to bemoan the ruin of his “new riding-suit” (ibid), is a fitting heir to Madame Duval’s role. Although his manners are more fashionable, by casting him in the same position opposite Captain Mirvan, Burney suggests that they are intrinsically no better. And indeed the appearance of the monkey, “full dressed, and extravagantly à-la-mode” (501), is a fitting dénouement to this sub-plot. Captain Mirvan is correct in identifying Mr Lovel as Madame Duval’s successor, and the monkey as Mr Lovel’s relation. Unwittingly, however, he implicates himself. In Burney’s terms, the extravagant exteriority of Captain Mirvan, Madame Duval and Mr Lovel is bestial: they have nothing but the outward show of humanity, and the irrational, defensive aggression of the monkey on being struck echoes that of Lovel in striking it, of Madame Duval in spitting at the Captain or slapping Evelina, of the Captain in shaking Madame Duval or threatening to knock Mr Lovel’s teeth down his throat. All three – and they are not alone – are as much ‘creatures’ as the monkey[5], created by the exterior show they share with it. Violence and social disruption, it seems, is the inevitable result of anger. No matter how it is expressed, it cannot be fully assimilated into civilised society.

Lord Orville and Evelina, smoothing out the violent ‘passions’ within themselves, remain the standard for emulation – but their power is limited. As Hamilton points out (439-40), Lord Orville can throw the monkey out of the room, but he cannot do the same to the man who brought it in. Instead, he changes the subject and suggests a stroll. One’s own emotions may be named away, but the anger of others cannot be so eliminated. The only possible response to it is to turn aside, to ignore it, to avoid acknowledging it in language: to change the conversation.

---------------

 

[1] “Violence” is also one of the most common terms associated in Evelina with anger. Though not used in this brief scene, its effect is certainly felt, and Evelina’s comment near the end of the same letter that Mrs Mirvan does her best to “heal... those wounds which her husband inflicts” (66) also serves to emphasise the analogy of angry words as a physical assault, by comparison with the medicinal effect of politeness.

[2] This is not the only parallel between the combatants – Captain Mirvan is also her equal in the art of assaulting the company’s ears with over-loud, tactless exclamations, in a language that ostentatiously and rather vulgarly parades its origins outside polite society.

[3] For a more detailed discussion of Evelina’s scopophobia and its implications for self-fashioning, see Emily Allen’s “Staging Identity”. Allen also treats Madame Duval as a foil and potential behavioural model for Evelina.

[4] See Jenny Davidson for a length treatment of eighteenth-century politeness and its relations (tact, gallantry, manners, self-control) through the glass of their extreme – hypocrisy. Establishing hypocrisy first as a morally neutral term, Davidson examines the way arguments (political and literary) refract around it, particularly with an eye to gender roles and the position of servants. In passing, she mentions that Burney shares with Johnson and Burke “a sincere wish to show that politeness and virtue are wholly compatible” (8): I would amend that to potentially compatible, given the myriad examples of characters who fail to achieve that compatibility.

[5] Mr Lovel takes the word to himself in facing the monkey – 'as I’m a living creature, I would not touch him for a thousand worlds' (502) – unaware that he echoes Evelina's application of it to him earlier at both the ridotto and Love for Love, when she states explicitly that her use of the term is due to his poor behaviour and affectations (40, 103).

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Works Cited.

Burney, Frances. Evelina: or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Ed. Frank D. Mackinnon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930.

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Allen, Emily. “Staging Identity: Frances Burney’s Allegory of Genre.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31.4 (1998): 433-451.

Davidson, Jenny. Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Hamilton, Patricia L. “Monkey Business: Lord Orville and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney’s Evelina.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19.4 (2007): 415-440.

Thoughts on Aphra Behn's "The Rover"

1. What does ‘libertine’ mean to Aphra Behn?
2. She has three female roles strong enough to be played by Barry, Betterton and Gwyn, and each given full scope to develop her part. Have we seen all three in one play before? What does this say about her writing?
3. Masks abound, in self-consciously ridiculous numbers. Is there a deliberate blend of stage and life?

1.

◦ Hellena is the obvious candidate for female libertine, though Angellica initially looks to fit the role better. Possibly they provide competing models? Hellena proposes to manage it enough to keep it on an acceptable  social level through discreet handling, while Angellica perhaps comes to regret her public sign, despite the wealth that results. Hellena more successfully reclaims her own role in society and the household, liberating herself not only from the conventional jealous Spanish brother and potential convent but from conventional thought and philosophy.

◦ How shall we compare Hellena to her classical namesake? Hellena takes action rather than being acted upon, as Helen is. In addition, Hellena is full of personality and repeatedly insists on defining it herself, where Helen is and always has been the empty object of men's projections.

◦ Angellica shows an admirable and comparable ability to parry wits with Willmore and articulate the opposite side of a conventional point of raillery, but seems to find herself, apparently incongruously, defending the normative married life (eg, II.ii.108-15).

◦ Florinda is more conventional in both her social aims and her inability to defend herself when put into a traditional position of female helplessness (hence her honour is more often in danger of compromise than that of the two women who care less for theirs), but does take more proactive roles than usual in pursuing her aims. For example, assuming a disguise to investigate the fidelity of one’s potential spouse is more usually a male gambit on the stage (eg, Così fan tutte).

◦ If we take Hellena to be Behn’s preferred model of the female libertine (as she seems to be), we must assume that libertinism is not just about sex, or her role could have ended in Act I Scene ii. It must, then, pertain in a particular attitude, or a freedom from any particular attitude, and/or the ability to successfully shade it into a socially acceptable lifestyle in which availability is under the woman’s control and a matter of suggestion rather than publication.

2.

◦ In Act I, Hellena deliberately and consciously toys with the conventional female roles of nun, gypsy, witch (ii.189), scold (potentially, in the first stages of her conversation with Willmore), courtly beloved (ii.213-16) and libertine – the latter primarily by denial, including the double effect of the mask. Although all of these are conventional and to some extent restrictive, Hellena’s rapid evocation of so many possibilities and her insistence on her own agency to choose or change her choice (eg, ii.204-05) simultaneously scupper the notion of a single interchangeable creature called “woman” (as Blunt would believe) and emphasise Hellena’s agency in determining her own career.

◦ Willmore draws a distinction between the mind and the beauty (body?) of a woman, admiring Angellica for one while he can “contemn” her for the other (II.ii.73-4). This immediately invites comparison with the  asked woman whose conversation he was so enamoured of in the previous act, whose beauty was the subject of verbal sallies that appeared to attract him as much as Angellica’s beauty. Does the distinction between two different models of female presentation suggest two different kinds of self-modelling? Which seems to work better?

◦ Modern romantic sensibility would suggest that Willmore would quickly tire of Angellica and return to Hellena because he loves her for her mind, but Angellica’s mind is as interesting as Hellena’s and Hellena’s face, it appears, as good as Angellica’s. Nor does Hellena offer a safely normative haven from the relationship
with a whore, given her later offer. However, the repeated concealment of the face and insistence on recognition of the mind throughout the play rather suggest it would be a disservice to Behn to attempt to read the mind/body distinction solely in one aspect of one relationship in the work, or indeed to read it only in the
context of relationships and not individuals.

3.

◦ Hellena is not above playing with the double meaning of the mask (prostitute/modest woman, allure/repel, subject/object), teasing with the allure of chastity to create the potential of seduction, consciously evoking the literal and euphemistic nunnery in calling Willmore “Father Captain” (II.243-47).

◦ Can we draw any useful contrasts between Hellena’s mask (tempting by concealing, implying chastity and riches) and Angellica’s picture (tempting by publicising, stating availability at the cost of riches)? Both increase desirability through constructing exclusivity, but from opposite sides. Angellica is a public woman, easy if you can just get the money, and Hellena costs nothing – but a few words in front of a priest. Both the mask and the picture are erected between the woman and the world at her will and in full consciousness of the  implications, and removed when the woman changes her mind.

◦ Florinda does not use her mask so consciously as Hellena and Angelica, or so effectively. She and Belvile, in fact, repeatedly fail to recognise each other’s substitution for Antonio in an honour-laden duel, and the scene that ensues, not to mention Pedro’s near rape of his own sister, question sharply the ethics of disguise. Florinda belongs to another world, the world of other Restoration Spanish plays in which the woman is a thing to be guarded and argued over. The world of masks and wits to which Hellena is aptly suited repeatedly lands her sister in danger.

◦ What does Moretta mean to call Willmore “the only Enemy to our Trade” (II.ii.181)? On the surface, courtesans, certainly; but her position alone on stage in direct conversation with the audience, the presence of so many well-known actresses in this play (all well-known and well-discussed outside the theatre as well, and
carrying the weight of audience recognition onstage with them), the play with faces and seemings and masks in Willmore and Angellica’s preceding conversation and, not least, the popular equation of theatre women with mask-wearing public women of another kind all help to break down the walls between Moretta speaking for whores and Behn/Leigh speaking for actresses. If we allow this, how do we read it? Is Willmore opposed to publication (in whatever sense of the word)? Or pretence? While possibly attracted by it (though that may be a little too Jungian)? His preference of Hellena (able to discreetly manage infidelities) over Angellica (publically unfaithful) suggests something of the former. Is this sort of attitude in men commonly encountered by women in Behn’s circles, either in the context of sexual encounters or the publication of her words in an overwhelmingly male sphere?

◦ Cf. Belvile calling Willmore “a Prince aboard his little wooden World” - well, yes, it could be an allusion to the wanderings of Charles II as Womersley would have it, but there’s a much more immediate little wooden world in which an extravagant character like Willmore shows himself a Prince. And the echo of the obvious quote from As You Like It inverts the image to suggest that perhaps this extravagance, untrustworthy and impractical and shallow as it may be, is perhaps all that is necessary to make someone appear a charismatic leader in the real world too. On the other hand, perhaps this reflects backwards on Charles, the Royal Rover. Willmore's flexibility with regards to his sex life and to the situation in which he finds himself both have strong echoes in Charles, suggesting an uncontrlled, opportunity-driven monarch, at his strongest when responding to the gusts of fortune rather than attempting to orchestrate his own fate.

Chaucer and Mozart: Twin souls!

Imported from Mony wylsum way.

Alright, so the last post wasn't really mediaeval in subject. Neither is this one - but it has a mediaeval connection, in that I leap-frog from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Mozart along a common thread. Never mind that each leap is 200 years long.

I was chatting to a cellist friend, who's staying in this house while rehearsing for an audition for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. She mentioned that she'd like to get to know the operatic repertoire a little better, and... well, it ended up with me having one of my besotted little raves about the three Mozart/da Ponte operas, particularly my favourite, Così fan tutte.

For those who don't know it - well, it's easy to summarise. Remarkably easy, for an opera. One of the reasons I love it is for its beautiful structure - it has a lovely symmetry, both musically and dramatically, which makes it a joy to listen to and gives it the perfect action curve for a theatrical piece. There are six characters - three women, three men (two sopranos, one mezzo, one tenor, two basses - symmetry!), consisting of two pairs of lovers, their older male friend (Don Alfonso) and a ladies' maid, Despina. Don Alfonso makes a bet with the headstrong, enthusiastic young men that, despite their passionate belief in their lovers' fidelity, no woman can possibly remain faithful. They're not made for fidelity, and so "così fan tutte" - all women behave like that. To prove the women's fidelity, the younger men agree to pretend to go off to war, then to dress as foreigners and each attempt to win the fiancee of the other man. Eventually, it works; a wedding feast is prepared, and in the middle of it the men slip off and return in their own persons to upbraid their erstwhile fiancees for unfaithfulness.

A two-sentence summary like that is a little misleading. The young men (Guglielmo and Ferrando) take most of the active verbs, reducing Don Alfonso's role to the initial bet, their lovers' to passive ciphers, and leaving the maid Despina out altogether. But Don Alfonso and Despina in fact run the whole affair - Alfonso is the puppet master from start to finish, and lets Despina think she is one too, though he doesn't let her in on the whole affair and she is, by the end, reduced to humiliation with her mistresses. Despina also provides an important thematic counterpoint, in that she tries to urge the women on to love, asserting feminine independence from men and their ability to choose their own path (while Alfonso maintains they have no choice but to fall), and pointing out repeatedly that men are just as unfaithful as women, if not more so. The summary, however, is not misleading in one thing: the two noblewomen (Fiordiligi and Dorabella) are passive. But to what degree, and just how - this is the critical problem!

Whenever I explain Così to anyone, I usually find myself excusing it. Don Alfonso is proved right - women are like that - so it can come across as horribly misogynistic. Its performance history has suffered from that - I believe in the nineteenth century it was rewritten to have Despina reveal the secret to her ladies early on, so that they are only playing along for most of the second act, and turn the tables on the men in the final scene. But you see, knowing the opera, and knowing (to a certain extent) Mozart and his librettist da Ponte... I can't believe that we are meant to watch it so superficially. If it were a work of non-operatic literature, no one would believe that was the intent. Perhaps operatic audiences are just too used to having morals on the surface, simple but very loud answers, tragic or comic. If the point of the opera were simply "ha, see how faithless women are!" we would be laughing at them by the end. But we aren't - the level of sympathy and the psychological depth in the music of the women - particularly in the second act, when they feel themselves beginning to give way - are such that we increasingly rebel against Don Alfonso's instructions - just as the young men are becoming too drawn in to back out. We can't lay blame easily - the women are played on, Despina is just going along with her cheerful philosophy of 'do unto men as they do unto us', the young men pledged their honour as soldiers to obey Don Alfonso's instructions for 24 hours in the blithe confidence that they would win the bet easily, and Alfonso - well, the indignant lads forced him to promise to prove his assertion, at swordpoint. Over breakfast! And the final scene is heartbreaking. They have to marry - there's no other way forward, no other way to end the opera and insist that it is a comedy, Alfonso and social expectation and genre constrain them, but the music... how on earth are these couples going to ever trust each other, or anyone else, ever again?

It's generally believed that the opera was commissioned - Lorenzo da Ponte and Mozart did not have the freedom to choose their plot, could not decide that the women would remain faithful and disprove the adage, but they could choose how they treated it: spreading the blame, exposing the cruelty to all parties involved of the situation, the plot, the actions of the characters that weren't meant to be cruel, that were all a bit of fun until... And suddenly, as I was explaining this, I realised that this line of argument was familiar - not just from my own previous rants about the opera, but from much more recently:

For which right now myn herte ginneth blede,
And now my penne, allas! With which I wryte,
Quaketh for drede of that I moot endyte.
For how Criseyde Troilus forsook,
Or at the leste, how that she was unkinde,
Mot hennes-forth ben matere of my book,
As wryten folk through which it is in minde.
Allas! That they sholde ever cause finde
To speke hir harm... (Troilus and Criseyde, IV.12-20)

And:

Ne me ne list this sely womman chyde
Ferther than the story wol devyse.
Hir name, allas! Is publisshed so wyde,
That for hir gilt it oughte y-noe suffyse.
And if I mighte excuse hir any wyse,
For she so sory was for hir untrouthe,
Y-wis, I wolde excuse hir yet for routhe. (V.1093-1099)

And so on. Chaucer's uneasiness with Criseyde's fidelity is well-known, of course, and there's little point quoting more of it. But the attitude in both cases seems to me very similar. The essential difference, I think, is the necessary lack of authorial presence in a stage production. But is it necessary? Not really. It's easy enough to add an authoritative moral presence - either through a consistent moral message that's easily detectable (often put in the mouth of the chorus), or physically, in the form of a character whose opinions are meant to be taken as sound judgement (and who is usually, in opera, disregarded, otherwise the tragic ending might be tragically averted). And then, of course, there's the even simpler expedient of sticking to plots that completely fail to challenge the audience's judgement at all and go for their effect by either tickling or punching in the belly. This is the majority of opera.[1]

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that disrupting the easy moral closure of any theatrical piece requires conscious effort on the part of the composer/playwright. Well, either that or extreme carelessness. Which brings us to our convenient midway point, he who made a theatrical piece out of Troilus and Criseyde, he who was the expert at avoiding giving us any hint of his real voice: William Shakespeare.

But even for Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida is remarkably unstable in terms of a moral base. The introduction to the play in the Norton Shakespeare[2] details admirably the competing codes for evaluating actions and events that are thrown at us in a dizzying array within just the first few scenes of the play. Those of them that do recur are never finally resolved, unless it is to be proved insufficient. The only character who might be seen as finally admirable is Hector, and his code is, finally, not sufficient either: we see him abandon it for the sake of glory when he agrees to sell away Criseyde so that he can have his duel with Achilles, and his adherence to it in the end deprives Troy of its greatest protector, Priam of his son, Andromache of her husband, his son of a father, his city of a future. Nothing that is presented to us in the course of the play suffices to judge it: they are all proved limited points of view, belonging only to the characters that speak them, incapable of comprehending the whole world. The scene that brings this most sharply into focus is quite near the end: the scene in which Criseyde, in the Greek camp, finally gives herself to Diomedes. She and he talk in the centre; she comments on her own actions; Troilus and Ulysses watch and comment on that scene; Thersites watches actors and watchers, commenting on all of them; and the audience sees them all. The instability and limitation of every judgement passed onstage is witnessed by the final set of watchers, putting them in a privileged position and inviting them to judge for themselves, but demonstrating in the process the limitations of any judgement at all.

So why the distancing? why the instability? Is Shakespeare disassociating himself from the story, drawing back as Chaucer the narrator does? I don't think so - at least, not in the same way. But certainly, to focus specifically on the question of harsh judgement on the fickle woman - it would be much harder to ascribe any comments passed about her in the play to Shakespeare himself than it is to, for example, imagine him agreeing with the final dismissal of Don John as a villain in Much Ado About Nothing. His attitude to Cressida, so far as it can be detected (which is barely at all) doesn't seem to me very similar to the attitudes of Chaucer and Mozart/da Ponte to their unfaithful women; but there may be a thread of connection there.

Mozart and da Ponte don't dissociate themselves to nearly the same extent. Neither have a narrative "I" to intrude into the theatre - but Mozart was literally in the theatre, remember, dominating the performance in a way that Shakespeare couldn't, even as an actor. As a conductor, he led it, and as composer... well. He gives it a soul which is much easier to trace, to feel, than grasping through printers' errors and actors' amendments for Shakespeare's meanings. The warmth and tenderness in his music, the wit and the humanity and the delicate distinctions in the reactions of parallel characters in identical situations... they are human, where they could so very easily remain ciphers to the plot, as the women seem determined to remain ciphers to social constructions.

... And now I think of it, there are a remarkable number of eavesdropping/spying scenes in the opera too - especially in the second act, where the seduction starts to take effect, and the characters start to obsessively analyse their own actions and feelings, as well as those of the others onstage.

That was entirely too long a post, wasn't it. If anyone read to the end - well done!

I did mention Mozart makes me rave besottedly, right?


[1] As a former singer who adores opera, I have licence to say so, just as I'm allowed by virtue of nationality to poke fun at Steve Irwin's accent.

[2] I don't remember who wrote it, and my Norton is in Melbourne and I am in Adelaide. This will have to do for a citation for now.