The Female Eunuch (29 page)

It
Rosalind finds the means to wean Orlando off his futile Italianate posturing, disfiguring the trees with bad poetry; love at first sight for a stranger lady who addressed kind words to him on a day of victory becomes the love of familiarity for a sexless boy who teaches him about women and time, discovering her own role as she teaches him his, thereby leaping the bounds of femininity and tutelage. In
Romeo and Juliet
the same effect is got by Romeo’s overhearing Juliet’s confession of love, so that she cannot dwell on form, however fain. Because their love is not sanctioned by their diseased society they are destroyed, for Shakespearean love is always social and never romantic in the sense that it does not seek to isolate itself from soci- ety, family and constituted authority. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
obsession is shown as a hallucination and a madness, exorcized by the communal rite. Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
only manages to show Bassanio the worth of what he really found in his leaden casket when she dons an advocate’s gown to plead for Antonio, her hus- band’s friend and benefactor, so that her love is seen to knit male society together, not to tear it apart.

When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago, Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the tragedies are all feminine—even Lady Macbeth (who is so often misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally uncon- scious, helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the war- rior princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female hero.

The opposition between women who are people and women who are something less does not only rest in the vague contrast between the women of the comedies and the women of the tragedies. There are more explicit

examples of women who may earn love, like Helena who pursued her husband through military brothels to marriage and honour in
All’s Well
, and women who must lose it through inertia and gorm- lessness, like Cressida. In
The Taming of the Shrew
Shakespeare con- trasted two types in order to present a theory of marriage which is demonstrated by the explicit valuation of both kinds of wooing in the last scene. Kate is a woman striving for her own existence in a world where she is a
stale
, a decoy to be bid for against her sister’s higher market value, so she opts out by becoming unmanageable, a scold. Bianca has found the women’s way of guile and feigned gentleness to pay better dividends: she woos for herself under false colours, manipulating her father and her suitors in a perilous game which could end in her ruin. Kate courts ruin in a different way, but she has the uncommon good fortune to find Petruchio who is man enough to know what he wants and how to get it. He wants her spirit and her energy because he wants a wife worth keeping. He tames her like he might a hawk or a high-mettled horse, and she rewards him with strong sexual love and fierce loyalty. Lucentio finds himself saddled with a cold, disloyal woman, who has no ob- jection to humiliating him in public. The submission of a woman like Kate is genuine and exciting because she has something to lay down, her virgin pride and individuality: Bianca is the soul of dupli- city, married without earnestness or good-will. Kate’s speech at the close of the play is the greatest defence of Christian monogamy ever written. It rests upon the role of a husband as protector and friend, and it is valid because Kate has a man who is capable of being both, for Petruchio is both gentle and strong (it is a vile distortion of the play to have him strike her ever). The message is probably twofold: only Kates make good wives, and then only to Petruchios; for the rest, their cake is dough.

There is no romanticism in Shakespeare’s view of marriage. He recognized it as a difficult state of life,

requiring discipline, sexual energy, mutual respect and great forbear- ance; he knew there were no easy answers to marital problems, and that infatuation was no basis for continued cohabitation. His lifetime straddled the decay of the ancient state and the development of the new, the collapse of Catholicism and the solidification of English Protestantism, and the changes in the concept of the created universe, of ethics and science and art which we call the English Renaissance. Much of his writing deals expressly with these changes and their meaning, balancing notions of legitimacy and law with cooperation, spontaneity and moral obligation, nature and mercy against authority and vengeance.

The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem marriage from the status of a remedy against fornication by under- playing the sexual component and addressing the husband as the

wife’s friend.
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It was unthinkable to them that children should

marry without consent of their parents, but unthinkable also that parents should oppose a match which was suitable in the sense that the parties were of the same social standing and wealth, of an age and not disqualified by illness or criminality. Now that the property to be parcelled and transferred in marriage was more divisible and portable, girls may have had more freedom of choice but by the same token the old safeguards had ceased to apply. Parents deman- ded the right to know something of a bridegroom’s background, and feared marriage with a stranger who might prove to be bigamous or a pauper. The country still taunted the city with the differences between their marryings but now the urban community was growing at the expense of the agrarian, and the rural community was losing its cohesiveness.

Where the wife is actively employed in production, helping with planting out and harvesting as well as minding the women’s work, she was naturally not the family’s chief consumer in circumstances of vicarious leisure. She was not primarily chosen for her obvious

charms, not used to manipulating them for her own ends, had no opportunity to gad about, wear fine clothes and make mischief. The subjects of popular farces about marrying and cuckoldry were the town-wives who were not employed in running their husband’s business with them, who sat about with their gossips all day, flirting, drinking, flaunting new fashions and making mischief by carrying assignations and rumours, or entertaining the priest. Antoine de la Sale’s very circumstantial account,
Les Quinze Joies de Mariage
, enjoyed several centuries of popularity and was even translated and adapted

by Dekker at the end of the sixteenth century.
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This was no mere

misogynist’s account, but the heartfelt cry of a man who felt that he had been exploited by women all his life. In the larger community of the town there was more sexual competition and girls learnt early to enhance their chances by the use of cosmetics and other forms of sexual display, laying forth their breasts and padding their buttocks. Their mothers superintended the process and instructed their daughters in the arts of sexual bargaining; if the worst came to the worst, and dalliance with a lusty young buck menaced an advant- ageous match with untimely progeny, mother arranged for an abortion or for the patching up of a hasty wedding with a more or less wealthy gull. The tensions in the situation were exaggerated by the laws which prevented apprentices from marrying until their long articles were over: many a master craftsman free at last to wive picked out a juicy young thing only to find that he had some soldier’s or apprentice’s leavings. Many of the city wives were idle, but, unlike women in other countries where urban dwelling had developed at an earlier epoch, they were not chaperoned and supervised and kept indoors, but allowed to walk forth freely and salute their acquaint- ances. The staple of French and English farce was the unwitting

cuckoldom of the hardworked and henpecked husband whose wife will not keep house or cook for him.
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The miserable husband reflec-

ted that her lust seemed to fire at the sight of every man but him,

that she nagged, wheedled for fine clothes to attract strangers, that the first pregnancy meant the decline of her health and the assump- tion of permanent valetudinarianism. Obviously, such a dismal picture is an exaggeration, but the characteristics of middle-class marriage are already present: the wife is chief consumer and show- case for her husband’s wealth: idle, unproductive, narcissistic and conniving. She had been chosen as a

These London Wenches are so stout, They are not what they do;

They will not let you have a Bout Without a Crown or two.

They double their Chops, and Curl their Locks, Their Breaths perfume they do;

Their tails are pepper’d with the Pox And that you’re welcome to.

But give me the Buxom Country Lass, Hot piping from the Cow;

That will take a touch upon the Grass, Ay, marry, and thank you too.

Her Colour’s as fresh as a Rose in June Her temper as kind as a Dove,

She’ll please the Swain with a wholesome Tune, And freely give her Love.

English ballad, c. 1719

sexual object, in preference to others, and the imagery of obsession became more appropriate to her case. This is the class who were most exposed to the popular literature of escapist wedding which grew out of the collision of upper-class adulterous romance and the simple stories of peasant wedding. As long as literature kept the essential character of marriage in sight, stories of love and marriage remained vibrant, ambiguous and intelligent, but true love was quick to become a catch-phrase: the country had used it to mean their innocent

couplings leading to a life of shared hardship and endeavour; the religious reformers added the notion which they culled from the scripture, ‘Rejoice in the wife of thy youth, may her breasts delight thee always.’ Sexual pleasure within marriage was holy, nevertheless marriage was also meant to be a remedy for lechery in that a good wife restrained her husband’s passion and practised modesty and continence within marriage, especially when breeding. Unrestrained indulgence was thought to lead to illness, barrenness, disgust, and deformity of issue. For this reason it was considered particularly

horrible when a woman married against her better judgement.
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It

was originally considered to be a mistake to marry a woman with whom you had been ‘in amors’, at whose feet you had grovelled and wept, to whom you had made flattering poems and songs. Shakespeare made his comment on the disparity between what is promised to the courted woman and what the wife can realistically expect in his picture of Luciana and Adriana in
The Comedy of Errors
. The divine mistress was to dwindle into a wife within hours of her wedding: the goddess was to find herself employed as supermenial. Despite all pressures to the contrary from religious reformers, in- telligent poets and playwrights, and the desperate interest of prop- ertied parents in retaining control of marriage behaviour, love-and- marriage took over, ending in that triumph of kitsch, the white wedding. Part of the explanation can be found in the story of what happened to Petrarchism in Protestant England. The English sonnet sequences of the 1590s were either frankly adulterous like Sir Philip Sidney’s or totally honorific like Daniel’s artifical passion for the Countess of Pembroke. Wyatt had been unable to keep a note of genuine physical tension out of his dramatic and colloquial transla- tions of Petrarch, but he never ceased to battle with this irrelevant sensuality. Sidney makes no such effort. His sexual successes with

Penelope Rich are chronicled in the poetry.
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Reaction to this licence

in a society crusading for marriage as a sacred condition and

deeply conscious of the differences in the practice of the nobility after a half-century of scandals was not slow in making an appear- ance on the same literary level. The Puritans were agitating for severer punishments for fornication as standing at the church door in a white sheet was treated by some blades as a sign of prowess and prestige. The reaction to the adulterous element in the courtly literature of the nineties can be found in the epithalamia which were written as public relations work for marriage. Spenser’s, the best of them, was also virtually the first, for its precedents were mainly Fescennine and Latinate. In it he combined reminiscences of the rural modes of celebrating brides with imagery from the Song of Songs and a Platonic injection of veneration for intellectual beauty. The result is a poetical triumph, although the sonnet sequence of which it is the climax is a failure. The adoption of the Petrarchan mode to describe the methodical steps of Spenser’s very proper wooing is simply a mistake, but it is a mistake which continues to be made. The anguish and obsession of the Petrarchan lover is arti- ficially stimulated by his lawful betrothed in fits of pique or capri- ciousness: the lawful wooer lashes himself into factitious frenzies

at her father’s frown.
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William Habington followed the new pattern of Petrarchan wedding in a dreary sequence called
Castara
,
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which