The Female Eunuch (28 page)

the lady of the manor became exalted into a quasi-religious fervour. The literature of adulterous passion was, like the modern stories of obsession, fetishism and perversion, a series of vicarious peeps into a region so fraught with dangers that only a lunatic would venture there. Every young clerk learnt from his dominies what
love
was:

Set before thyne eyen howe ungoodly it is, how altogether a mad thing, to love, to waxe pale, to be made leane, to wepe, to flatter and shamefully to submyte thyselfe onto a stynkyng harlot most filthy and rotten, to gape and synge all nyght at her chambre wyndowe, to be made to the lure & to be obedyent at a becke, nor dare to do anything except she nod or wagge her head, to suffre a folyshe wo- man to reigne over the, to chyde the, to lay unkyndnesse one against ye other to fall out, to be made at one agayne, to gyve thyselfe wyllynge unto a Queene that she might mocke, knocke, mangle and spoyle the. Where I beseche amonge all these thinges is the name of

a man? Where is thy berde? Where is that noble mynde created unto most beautyfull and noble thynges?
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But the more he strove to heed their teachings and disdain love, the more likely he was to be struck down unsuspecting by the bright glance of another man’s chaste wife, which is what happened one fateful day to Francesco Petrarca. The effect on European letters was to last five hundred years. Petrarch was, besides a genius, very astute and he understood pretty clearly the nature of his passion. He managed to integrate it into his whole philosophical system, sublim- ating it by a thoroughly conscious and meticulous process. Laura became the mediatrix of all love and all knowledge of which God himself is the only Begetter. Her death made the process easier. Love of Laura, the lady of the laurel, the topaz and the ermine, the white deer, the madonna, was his greatest cross and his greatest blessing. By bearing it conscientiously all his life he made it his salvation. In almost every sonnet Petrarch achieves a reconciliation between his joy and his pain, his body and his soul but his myriad followers were neither so intelligent nor so

fortunate. Probably only Dante achieved the same sort of dynamic equilibrium with his Beatrice, consciously demonstrating it in the
Purgatorio
and the
Paradiso
when she takes over from Virgil and leads him to the beatific vision. For lesser men Petrarchism became a refinement of adulterous sensuality. One of the factors in the sur- vival of Petrarchism was that Petrarch was not living in a feudal situation. Laura was not the wife of his lord but of a peer, the citizen of a city-state which was bureaucratic and not hierarchic in structure. He managed singlehanded the transfer of courtly love from the castle to the urban community in a form which enables it to survive the development of the mercantile community and centralized govern- ment.

With the breakdown of the feudal system came the corrosion of hierarchic, dogmatic religion. Medieval Catholicism had based its authority upon the filial station of the celibate clergy. Celibacy was incessantly promoted by edicts of the Church in favour of sexual abstemiousness not only in the clergy but even in the married. It would be tiresome, if shocking, to relate the prohibitions which the Church laid upon intercourse within marriage, before communion, during Advent and Lent and on rogation days and fast days, or the prurient interrogatories which priests were instructed to conduct in the confessional. Marriage was a station in life inferior to vowed celibacy and infantile virginity and the abstention of widows. Second marriage was not allowed a blessing in the Catholic rituals. It was considered better for a priest to have a hundred whores than one wife. Mystics and saints compelled to be married by their station in life, like Edward the Confessor, made vows of celibacy within mar- riage. The second-class status of marriage became one of the principal issues in the Reformation. Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar, had barely posted his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg when he took himself a wife.

Perhaps the best way of understanding the Reformation is to connect it with the decline of the feudal system

in those northern countries where it took place. In England its course seems to reflect pretty clearly the impact of lower-class values on upper-class culture. The poor do not marry for dynastic reasons, and they do not marry out of their community in alliances with their peers. Goings-on in the castle have never been based upon practice in the cottage, except when a lord decided to take unto himself a supermenial as he does in the story of Patient Griselda, told by Boccaccio in the thirteenth century and taken up by the Renaissance

in a big way;
7
possibly the fascination that this story of the lord who

married a peasant girl had for the Renaissance throughout Europe was an indication of the rethinking about marriage that is insensibly and unofficially going on. Griselda, taken from her hovel, is installed as her lord’s humble and uncomplaining wife. Even when he takes a new, young and noble wife, she does not abate her servility, for she welcomes her and dresses her for the wedding, and a result wins her lord back. He of course claims he was testing her. The story re- flects the general effect of the impact of lower-class
mores
on the at- tenuated and neurotic sexuality of the ruling class, albeit in a distort- ing mirror. When Adam delved and Eve span there was little point in lady-worship. Nostalgic and probably mythical accounts of mar- riage and giving in marriage in Merrie England are unanimous in their praise of the young folk who grow up working side by side in the tight-knit agricultural community. A boy made his choice from the eligible girls of his own village, lovingly steered by his parents and hers, indulgently watched during the permitted revels at Maying and nutting, pursuing a long courting process of token-giving and kiss-stealing, until there was space in his home for his bride, and need of a new hand in the butter and cheese making, the milking, the brewing, the care of lambs and chickens, at the spinning wheel and the loom. Books of husbandry listed the qualities he should look for in a wife—health, strength, fertility, good-will and good humour as well as her proper complement of

household skills.
8
He respected her as a comrade and provided they were both healthy and strong they desired each other. The obsession of romantic love was simply irrelevant. Provided they agreed in age and social standing (a condition guaranteed by dowry and jointure) there was no obstacle except the tiresome caprice of the church laws against affinity, which had to be bought off by dispensations seeing as by the sixteenth century they disqualified nearly all the members of a village from marriage through either blood relationship or the imaginary ties of gossipry, the spiritual relationships incurred by baptismal sponsors.

By the sixteenth century this placid picture, which resembles the courting situation which still pertains in the extended kinship sys- tems of feudal Calabria and Sicily, was broken up by the effects of enclosures, the increased exactions of the Church, and the rise of urban centres. Increased mobility, especially of the young men, in- creased the likelihood of marriage outside the known community. Changes in land tenure came to mean that a young man could not marry until his parents died and left him master of his own small property. By the seventeenth century a new pattern was established in England; late marrying was combined with betrothal followed by cohabitation. Peter Laslett found that parish registers showed christenings following hard on weddings, while marriage at thirty must be construed, in terms of the average life-span, as senile mar-

riage.
9
The Church had long since lost control of the parish and her

own courts were inadequate to deal with the results of her unrealistic laws about affinity and kinship. Too many parishes were left without competent clergy, and common law marriage was on the increase. The religious reformers began to forge a new ideology of marriage, as public and holy, so holy that it had first been celebrated by God in heaven. It was extolled as the highest state of life and the condition of attainment of the status of citizenship and manhood. The increase in literacy and the advent of printing gave new scope to theory and

literary example. The first tales of courtship and marriage found their way into written forms, now printed for the new, semi-literate readership. Much of this was didactic and set out ways and whys of marrying; some of it was cautionary, some escapist, and some direct polemic. Ballads appeared, containing the exempla of the marriageable girl; possibly based on old songs of wooing like
Jone can call by name her cowes
.

Any girl who was personable, healthy and good-natured,
10
was

likely to be heartily wooed, but love was always subject to firm considerations of suitability and advantageousness. Her husband must not be old or disfigured or cruel or a whoremaster. She was not married away vilely for money, for the heroes of ballads and their admirers strongly condemned the practice of the nobility in disposing of their children like stud cattle; on the other hand a girl could not be married out of her father’s house until a suitable groom presented himself in a proper manner. She agreed to treat him well, respect him and joyfully to do his will in bed, but there is no indica- tion that she expected her life to be transfigured by love. She con- sidered herself to be as others thought her, a sexual creature ready for mating, and her husband was chosen as
likely
in this fashion too. On her marriage day she would be wakened by her bride knights and maidens, dressed in her best gown, stuck over with rosemary and crowned perhaps with ears of wheat, and taken in procession to the village church, where she would be assured of her husband’s protection and a share in his fortunes. The blessing would promise children and freedom from nameless fear and jealousy. Feasting would last all day while the young couple chafed to be alone, for weddings were held in midsummer when the sun does not set until eleven; then they would be escorted to bed and left alone.

This is what happened according to the folklorists of the sixteenth century. Too often it did not, but it supplies the justification for the boast of the country to the court, that it alone knew the secrets of ‘true love’, based on

familiarity and parental control.
11
But the legacy of Petrarchan pas- sion, with the invention of printing, became more and more access- ible as an idea and reacted on the sensibilities of young folk whose brains were already inflamed by the sexual abstinence imposed by a system of late marrying. Schoolmasters, preachers and reformers raged and wept over the prevalence of lecherous books and plays; prose works spun out long tales of chivalry debased into adventure, poems sang of adultery and the delights of sexual titillation, plays set forth images of juvenile infatuation and clandestine marriage. Young men in search of uncontaminated women, for the arrival of venereal disease at the beginning of the sixteenth century had com- plicated many things, rode up and down the country wooing country girls of substance with snatches of Serafino, Marino and Anacreon,

justified in the name of the great Petrarch whom few Englishmen had ever read.
12
The Elizabethan press thundered with denunciations

of the lewd seducers of silly country girls. Elizabeth and Mary both brought out the severest edicts against young men who charmed country wenches, lured them into marriage, wasted their dowries

and then cast them off.
13
The church authorities insisted on the

reading of the banns in the parishes of both parties, but often they were read in quite the wrong places and more often not read at all. Religious turmoil added to the confusion. Parishes left without in- cumbents depended upon hedge-priests to legitimize children; the preposterously ramified laws which could nullify marriage were unknown until invoked by an interested and better informed party. We will probably never know how many people suffered from the confusion about ecclesiastical law, which dealt with all questions of marriage and inheritance, and the changes of official religion in the sixteenth century. Perhaps it was only the reforming clergy perse- cuted by Mary, and disappointed by Elizabeth’s refusal to recognize clerical marriage, who created the myth of perfect

marriage, but minorities change the culture of majorities and cer- tainly a change was occurring.

By the end of the sixteenth century love and marriage was already established as an important theme in literature. The nuclear house- hold was certainly typical of urban households and a greater propor- tion of the total population now lived in cities, but even the agricul- tural majority was also following the trend to triadic families. But it was still a developing argument, and not yet an escapist theme. The town took its cue from the country, where marriage was toler- ance and mutual survival in a couple of rooms, where winter was longer than summer and dearth more likely than plenty. The dis- astrous step to marriage as the
end
of the story, and the assumption of ‘living happily ever after’ had not yet been taken. One of the most significant apologists of marriage as a way of life and a road to sal- vation was Shakespeare. It is still to be proved how much we owe of what is good in the ideal of exclusive love and cohabitation to Shakespeare, but one thing is clear—he was as much concerned in his newfangled comedies to clear away the detritus of romance, ritual, perversity and obsession as he was to achieve happy endings, and many of the difficulties in his plays are resolved when we can discern this principle at work. Transvestism is a frequently discussed Shakespearean motif, but it is rarely considered as a mode of revel- ation as well as a convention productive of the occasional frisson. Julia (in
Two Gentlemen of Verona
) and Viola (in
Twelfth Night
) are both transvestite heroines, on close terms with the audience, who are explicitly contrasted with Petrarchan idols living on another plane of ceremony and imagery, Silvia and Olivia. These goddesses are debased in the course of the play by their own too human tactics, and even in the case of Silvia by an attempted rape. The girls in men’s clothing win the men they love by a more laborious means, for they cannot use veils and coquetry; they must offer and not exact service, and as valets they must see their loves at their least heroic. In
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