SOURCE: Schnell, Lisa. “‘So Great a Difference Is There in Degree’: Aemilia Lanyer and the Aims of Feminist Criticism.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 1996): 23-35.

[In the following essay, Schnell analyzes feminist criticism of Lanyer's poetry, primarily focusing on “The Description of Cooke-ham.”]

One of the most dramatic changes to the Renaissance canon has been the inclusion of women, both as they are represented (or not represented) in work by male writers and, more significantly, as writers themselves. Fifteen years ago, even Renaissance specialists would have had a difficult time naming a single woman writing between 1500 and 1660. Today, one would be hard pressed to find someone in the field who did not know the names of several: Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary, Aemilia Lanyer, Rachel Speght, and Katherine Philips, among the more widely anthologized writers. While this paper pays tribute to the many literary critics whose work has brought early modern women writers out of oblivion, it also challenges certain critical assumptions, in particular the commitment to community that is the heart and soul of any feminist ideological position. For many of us, the critical recovery of Renaissance women writers has signified the recovery of an early modern feminist consciousness that, with the considerable weight of authority carried by “history,” bolsters and endorses the energy of our own perceived community.

The problem is the singularity of that “community.” The tendency has been to see early modern women as an undifferentiated category. Reflecting on the aims and methods of feminist historians of the early modern period, for instance, Susan Amussen considers how we can “use exceptional women to understand all women's experience, and more broadly, how we can think about the relationship between the women we know about and all women in early modern England.”¹ Although Amussen momentarily acknowledges the difficulty of such a project, she nonetheless defines “the central problem” of the field as the delineation of “the relationship between those women whose lives—or even a moment of whose lives—are recorded and all women” (220; emphasis added).

It is hard not to be sympathetic with the politics behind Amussen's project. Between the possibilities offered up by the likes of Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Jonson, and Milton and, especially, the critical habits of their latter-day students, the field has been a great beacon of patriarchalism. To get women on the map at all in Renaissance studies, it was important, for a time, to present a united front. Judith Butler explains perfectly the “urgency of feminism to establish a universal status for patriarchy in order to strengthen the appearance of feminism's own claims to be representative,” but she concedes that this need “has occasionally motivated the shortcut to a categorical or fictive universality of the structure of domination, held to produce women's common subjugated experience.”²

Part of the problem, too, is that although much poststructuralist attention has been paid to discursive construction elsewhere in early modern studies, particularly by the New Historicists, the most prominent work on early women writers emphasizes women's “experience” rather than their rhetorical presence in a text. Amussen, confronting the argument that “women” is an inherently unstable category and thus not open to more positivist historical analyses, maintains that

the solution does not lie in writing only about individuals: it is as artificial to separate people from their worlds as to combine them together. Nor does it lie in shifting our focus from the people who make up the categories and their experience to the categories themselves and the discursive practices which constitute them. … Our history needs to include not only the ways meaning was constituted, but also an understanding of how those meanings shaped women's experience. … We should not collapse what happened, how individuals made sense of those events, and normative strategies for doing so, all into one category. … We must examine the intersection of experience and the discourses within which it was understood.

(229-30)

Amussen's program seems a fit compromise between the historian's urge to know the facts and the discourse theorist's concerns with the construction of meaning. But the intersection of the categories of experience and discourse still assumes that an experience of patriarchal oppression unites all women. Driven by the political aims of feminist scholarship (“Our study—however arcane—will in some way offer a clearer understanding of our world and empower us to struggle for justice” [230]), Amussen appears unwilling to entertain the possibility that in individual writers difference, both experiential and discursive, sometimes radically disrupts the notions of sisterhood that she finds so compelling. “To argue that we can and must talk about ‘women,’” Amussen claims, “is not to deny differences in power and culture between women; it does ask us to look at common themes as well as differences” (230). Yet Amussen's methodology does deny the power of difference between women, for the attention to difference must never exceed the feminist's insistence on “common themes.”

The struggle for social justice that informs feminist criticism has to recognize the places in women's writing where the search for commonality breaks down because material differences—class or race, for instance—have come to be understood as insurmountable. Using Amussen's own method, I read Aemilia Lanyer's “Description of Cooke-ham” below as a text in which a discursive construction of difference overturns superficial formulations of female commonality. A universalist understanding of women's experience is clearly evident in Lanyer scholarship; in this essay, on the other hand, I examine what happens when discursive and material rehearsals of difference in Lanyer's work are allowed to compete with the poet's attempts to advance a united female community.

Lanyer's 1611 volume, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, is an appropriate place to reflect on the critical practices that have reinforced a universalist understanding of women in early modern studies, for the poet plays directly into and, I would argue, with the very assumptions rehearsed in Amussen's work. The mere publication of the book constitutes Lanyer as an exceptional woman in the early seventeenth century; the nine dedications to noble women, the epistle to “all vertuous Ladies in generall,” the “apologies” for women that pervade the long eponymous poem, and the country-house poem with which the book concludes, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” invite the connections Amussen urges between “all women.” Lanyer's frequent allusions to gender inequity, moreover, have made her a poster girl of sorts not just for women of the early seventeenth century but also for us, particularly those of us who have struggled professionally against historiographical and critical biases that have defined our work as, at best, marginal. Writing about Lanyer and other early modern women writers as other than protofeminists feels like letting the patriarchalists reclaim their ground under the banner “We told you so.” It is close to an act of betrayal to argue that Lanyer's rhetorical inconsistencies, noted by almost all of her critics, reveal a textual presence whose relationship to the women she addresses is more vexed, though perhaps more interesting, than most of her critics have suggested.

For when Lanyer writes to women of the upper classes, she is marginalized—self-consciously, it seems—both as a woman and as a member of a socially inferior class group. The critical tendency has been to ignore the gulf between Lanyer and her addressees, to consider her rhetorical strategies as “circumvent[ing] the barrier of social class,”³ and to see the dedicatory poetry and “The Description of Cooke-ham” in particular as straightforward records of a bid for patronage. But because Lanyer's class status and vexed position vis-à-vis a factional court society are well documented;⁴ and because dedicatory literature is the designated site of social transaction, any reading that takes the sentiments expressed there at face value seems naive.

Indeed, the patronage question is easily the least straightforward one we might ask about Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Many critics have cast doubt on the representations of relationships enacted in “threshold” literature—dedications, prefaces, epilogues, glosses. For instance, David Lee Miller notes that the dedicatory sonnets Spenser attaches to The Faerie Queene “mediate the poem's relation to the social order around it.” Similarly, Mary Ellen Lamb decries “much of what has been written on the subject of Sidney patronage” because it “is based on the adulatory dedications of hopeful poets or the embittered complaints of disappointed ones, both untrustworthy … the dedications are often the products of wish-fulfillment (what needy author would not praise someone who might give him money?), while complaints, like Spenser's ‘Mecoenas is yclad in clay,’ are often too vague to be informative.”⁵

Lamb's indictment of literary historians who compensate for “the absence of facts, or worse, the presence of misleading ones” by “idealizing … patronage as a chivalric remnant of a disappearing aristocratic obligation to foster poets” (162) weighs heavily on Lanyer scholars, whose positivism has sometimes both oversimplified and exaggerated the poet's relationships with the women she addresses.

Barbara Lewalski, whose archival work on Lanyer has been prominent, indeed valuable, sees in the dedications a

rewrit[ing of] the institution of patronage in female terms, transforming the relationships assumed in the male patronage system into an ideal community. Here the patrons' virtue descends through the female line, from mothers to daughters—and it redounds upon their female poet-client and celebrant, Lanyer. … The author describes her book as the glass which shows their several virtues, and she invites them to receive and meditate upon Christ their Bridegroom, here depicted.

(221; emphasis added)

Although there is no evidence anywhere that Lanyer enjoyed the privileges of patronage, Lewalski confidently submits that “these dedications reveal something about Lanyer's actual associations; though hyperbolical like most of their kind, they would fail of their purpose if they were to falsify too outrageously the terms of a relationship” (220). That Pollard and Redgrave list only nine extant copies of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in the Short Title Catalogue calls the volume's success into question; Lewalski, however, relegates that information to a footnote and makes nothing of the considerable difference in degree between Lanyer and her addressees. She relies wholly on the universalist appeal of the term feminist and a seemingly unassailable common sense to affirm, or falsify, their relationship.

Other critics, perhaps taking their cue from Lewalski, have constructed versions of the same argument.⁶ Tina Krontiris, conceding that Lanyer's apparent bid for patronage is problematic, nonetheless hears in her feminist voice, “a form of protest against misogynist ideas” (111). She understands Lanyer's “strategy for attracting patronesses” as a panegyric attempt at “solidarity” (a word Krontiris uses often) that backfired when the poet's female audience reacted unfavorably to her overt feminism (111).

Notwithstanding the difficulty of reconciling the alternately aggressive and obsequious voices of the dedications, Krontiris leaves no room for the possibility of ambivalence produced by class difference. The distance between Lanyer and her audience is marked only by her confusion about the protocol of address. Krontiris's analysis, while considerably more sophisticated than other critics', installs Lanyer, again, primarily in solidarity with her addressees even if it means willfully misreading the textual evidence Krontiris herself has illuminated:

In “A Description of Cooke-ham,” which is Lanyer's most promising bid for patronage, she refrains from what might then be considered bold statements in favour of women. This, taken together with the absence of such statements from the dedicatory epistles to Lady Margaret and Lady Anne [Clifford, to whom the poem is addressed], suggests perhaps that the feminist sentiments of the principal potential patronesses of the book could not be taken as granted or used in public. Although these two women had grudges against men that Lanyer could appreciate and exploit, she could not with certainty enlarge them into a public castigation of the male sex.

(119)

Krontiris seems to overlook the obvious: Lanyer's not entirely unambivalent relationship with the Cliffords. Yet, rather than look for other social influences on Lanyer's sentiments toward her “principal potential patronesses,” Krontiris explains away the absence she notes in the dedications and, especially, in “The Description of Cooke-ham” as something like tact—hardly the first word to come to mind in describing a poet who complains to Queen Anne that she has not enjoyed her life “since great Elizaes favour blest my youth.”⁷

My own reading of Lanyer seeks to complicate her feminism by pointing to a profound ambivalence, ignored by Lewalski and Krontiris, in her notions of female community. In the remainder of this essay I turn to “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the country-house poem that concludes Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum and that has typically been seen as Lanyer's most explicit celebration of a community of good women.⁸

Cooke-ham, we discover, was once the pastoral retreat of the countess of Cumberland and her daughter, Anne Clifford. The poem bids farewell to a time when the countess, her daughter, and the young Lanyer supposedly inhabited the enchanted estate and its gardens,

                                                                                                              where I first obtain'd
Grace from that Grace where perfit Grace remain'd;
And where the Muses gave their full consent,
I should have powre the virtuous to content:
Where princely Palace will'd me to indite,
The sacred Storie of the Soules delight.
Farewell (sweet Place) where Virtue then did rest,
And all delights did harbour in her breast.

(1-8)⁹

It seems at first a decidedly unironic Eden. Lanyer relates the genesis of her poetic career—the inspiration of Virtue, which everywhere surrounded her—and the main elements of her vision appear united: a natural landscape and a supportive female community “wherein [her] selfe did alwaies beare a part” (121). In fact, the vision is far from stable; the poet, after all, bids farewell to what seems a mere dream: “Never shall my sad eies againe behold / Those pleasures which my thoughts did then unfold” (9-10; emphasis added). Again and again, Lanyer foregrounds her role as constructor: “Oh how (me thought) against you thither came, / Each part did seeme some new delight to frame!” (17-8; emphasis added); “Oh how me thought each plant, each floure, each tree / Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee” (33-4; emphasis added). The poet betrays her own illusion. Her bid for literary and cultural authority, granted by the Cooke-ham of her imagination, is never heard within the concrete outline of the country house.

Traditionally read as an elegy for the “Edenic perfection of virtue represented by the countess” (Beilin, 203), the poem is replete with reminders of the oppressive social structures that facilitate that virtue. Initially, they are naturalized, anticipating (or recalling) Jonson's “To Penshurst”:

The very Hills right humbly did descend,
When you to tread upon them did intend.
And as you set your feete, they still did rise,
Glad that they could receive so rich a prise.

(35-8)¹⁰

A mere sixty lines later, however, Lanyer is herself trod upon, although not so willingly as the hills:

And that sweet Lady sprung from Cliffords race,
Of noble Bedfords blood, faire steame of Grace;
To honourable Dorset now espows'd,
In whose faire breast true virtue then was hous'd:
Oh what delight did my weake spirits find
In those pure parts of her well framed mind:
And yet it grieves me that I cannot be
Neere unto her, whose virtues did agree
With those faire ornaments of outward beauty,
Which did enforce from all both love and dutie.
Unconstant Fortune, thou art most too blame,
Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame:
Where our great friends we cannot dayly see,
So great a diffrence is there in degree.

(93-106)

That Lanyer cannot insulate her poetic aesthetic against a reality that casts her as inferior characterizes the poem's fatal inertia. For their part, the Cliffords complicitly accept the whims of “unconstant Fortune.” Clearly, the poem is not an elegy for them, or for Cooke-ham, or for a community of women; it is an elegy for Lanyer herself:

Those recreations let me beare in mind,
Which her sweet youth and noble thoughts did finde:
Whereof depriv'd, I evermore must grieve,
Hating blind Fortune, carelesse to relieve.

(123-6)

“Blind Fortune,” strangely out of place in a poem ostensibly about the Christian values promoted by the Cliffords, subsumes the reflected image of a social vision that is Christian.¹¹ In the end even “delightfull Eccho,” the landscape's verbal authorization of itself, is unable to reply. In this blind, deaf, dumb setting, Lanyer seems the only sentient, and, by her definition, Christian being.

Lanyer's tenacious insistence on the power of her own knowledge, even if it is only of bitter loss and prejudice, leads to the poem's final, surprising gesture, conspicuously underrepresented in the criticism. Beilin, for instance, merely says, “In the single dramatic event of the poem, the countess leaves a ‘chaste, yet loving’ parting kiss on the great oak, which the poet immediately steals for herself, as if trying to absorb the countess's love and spirit” (205). Lewalski dismissess the scene, even more efficiently, as “sentimental” (240). In her introduction to Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Susanne Woods makes no mention of it whatsoever. The bizarre passage is, in fact, more problematic than the critics seem willing to concede:

But your occasions call'd you so away,
That nothing there had power to make you stay:
Yet did I see a noble gratefull minde,
Requiting each according to their kind,
Forgetting not to turne to take your leave
Of these sad creatures, powrelesse to receive
Your favour when with griefe you did depart,
Placing their former pleasures in your heart;
Giving great charge to noble Memory,
There to preserve their love continually:
But specially the love of that faire tree,
That first and last you did vouchsafe to see:
In which it pleas'd you oft to take the ayre,
With noble Dorset, then a virgin faire:
Where many a learned Booke was read and skand
To this faire tree, taking me by the hand,
You did repeat the pleasures which had past,
Seeming to grieve they could no longer last.
And with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave,
Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave:
Scorning a sencelesse creature should possesse
So rare a favour, so great happinesse.
No other kisse it could receive from me,
For feare to give backe what it tooke of thee:
So I ingratefull Creature did deceive it,
Of that which you vouchsafe in love to leave it.
And though it oft had giv'n me much content,
Yet this great wrong I never could repent:
But of the happiest made it most forlorne,
To shew that nothing's free from Fortunes scorne.

(147-76)

Following the poet's lament about the enforced social distance between herself and the Cliffords, the countess's unfettered affection for a tree has unmistakable comic, and bitter, irony. Lanyer, charged with memorializing Cooke-ham and the Cliffords, must finally steal a kiss from the tree to get what is, in the context of the poem, rightfully hers. Parodying a social logic that grants favor to unfeeling objects but humiliates devoted subjects, Lanyer's highly equivocal theft introduces every-woman-for-herself opportunism into the so-called community of Cooke-ham, canceling the collective theme of the poem.

Lanyer's self-worth is reprised in her final lines:

This last farewell to Cooke-ham here I give,
When I am dead thy name in this may live,
Wherein I have perform'd her noble hest,
Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,
And ever shall, so long as life remaines,
Tying my heart to her by those rich chaines.

(205-10)

Acknowledging her reliance on the cultural authorization that will come only at the bequest of the countess, Lanyer at the same time seems to retire the debt by claiming her own superiority as maker. Sounding uncannily like her most celebrated contemporary, who concludes the work that represents his own retrospective with the lines “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee,”¹² Lanyer reminds the countess that in the end Cooke-ham is only the poem. The final line rehearses one last time Lanyer's ambivalence to patronage: the “chaines” may be “rich,” but they are restrictive nonetheless. The pun that the poem opens with and that haunts us at its conclusion now seems entirely conscious: Lanyer has written not an encomium to but an indictment of the myth of aristocratic generosity and fairness.

My argument unavoidably begs the question of Lanyer's actual relationship with the Cliffords, for how could she hope to secure patronage with poetry that contains such mixed messages? I am uncomfortable answering the question, for even Lewalski admits that we know almost nothing specific about the poet's relationships with any of the women she addresses. Nonetheless, I would hesitatingly conjecture that the only relationship Lanyer had with any patroness occurred in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy. My hesitation comes from the risk that in saying this, I will be seen to be simplifying what are, in fact, a very complex set of motives on the part of the poet. Like her contemporary Ben Jonson, Lanyer appears to have been extremely conservative politically, and this raises a vexing issue for her poetry. She revered the upper classes and fantasized herself a member of them. Indeed, the well-documented feminist arguments she presents initially seem aimed at establishing the commonality that will urge her acceptance into the exclusive circle of aristocratic women she addresses in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. But gender has little to do with class privilege, and Lanyer knows it. Despite the force of her rhetoric, Lanyer never obliterates the enormous differences in degree between herself and her dedicatees. Indeed, writing itself is but one act of subservience necessary for her even to be noticed by women like the Cliffords. At the heart of Lanyer's text is frustration and profound ambivalence arising from the unresolvable irony that she is excluded by the very exclusivity she covets. Like Jonson, Lanyer is unable to subordinate her belief in her own considerable intelligence and personal worth to a social system that demands self-abnegation of those in the lower orders who wish any favor. Thus she is also unable, in the end, to celebrate her fantasy of a united community of women. Her bitterness toward, envy of, even rage at other women are just as real as her disgust with patriarchal politics. To disregard those emotions, as feminist analyses often do, may fortify our indignation over gender inequity, but it trivializes Lanyer's complex response to her own experience.

Notes

1. Amussen, “Elizabeth I and Alice Balstone: Gender, Class, and the Exceptional Woman in Early Modern England,” in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. Betty S. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 219; emphasis added.

2. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 3, 4.

3. Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992), 108.

4. See Barbara Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 213-9; Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer's ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 208-10; and Susanne Woods, Introduction to The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” ed. Susanne Woods (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xv-xxv.

5. Miller, The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50; Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke's Patronage,” English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 162.

6. For example, Elaine Beilin paints a picture of Lanyer the Christian visionary: “Lanyer is best understood as a millenarian advocating the establishment on earth of God's will through the particular agency of women” (Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987], 181). The women of her dedications, the women of Christian antiquity who appear in the wide central panel of the triptych, and of course the pious, otherworldly Margaret Russell Clifford of “The Description of Cooke-ham” are all realizations, living and dead, of “the ideal Christian woman” (179). “Humble” and “self-deprecating” (184), Lanyer commits herself to the worthy task of extolling the true spiritual nature of women. Like Lewalski, Beilin represents Lanyer as speaking for, rather than with or even against, the aristocratic women of her dedications; she becomes the voice of virtuous resistance for all upper-class women in Renaissance England who were victimized by patriarchal definitions of their womanhood. Similarly, Lynette McGrath argues for Lanyer's expression of relational feminism, or sisterhood. Quoting Luce Irigaray, she writes: “In a historical climate absolutely unconducive to women's poetic expression, Lanier circumvented the social proscriptions against her speech by establishing a congenial women's world in which her poetic voice could emerge to challenge ‘a culture which oppresses [women], uses them, makes of them a medium of exchange, with very little profit to them’” (“‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Amelia Lanier's Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice,” Women's Studies 20 [1992]: 335; emphasis added).

7. Lanyer, “To the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie,” in Woods, “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” 110. All subsequent citations are to this edition.

8. As Lewalski points out, however, “the house itself is barely mentioned” (237). Indeed, Lanyer gives little sense even of the grounds, unlike Jonson in “To Penshurst,” a poem often compared to “The Description of Cooke-ham” (see Lewalski, 234-5; and Susanne Woods, “Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson,” Ben Jonson Journal 1 [1994]: 15-30), in which a particular tree and its history are highlighted in the first lines. Nonetheless, Lanyer's poem is said to “[transform] a literary landscape into a redeemed Eden inhabited by three women” (Beilin, 202); it “gives mythic dimension to Lanyer's dominant concerns throughout the volume: this lost Eden was a female paradise and as such an ageless, classless society in which three women lived together in happy intimacy” (Lewalski, 237).

9. Other than in this poem, there is no suggestion anywhere that Lanyer did, in fact, live at Cooke-ham with the countess and her daughter (a diarist). Berlin, Lewalski, and Woods (in her introduction to the poems) all confidently assume that Lanyer's account is a true one. I, on the other hand, think it not impossible that the poem and the situation it presents are entirely fictional.

10. I am grateful to my student Trish Laprey for pointing out the social ramifications of these lines.

11. Lanyer's deity endorses one a central tenet of her theological position, which is that the message of Christianity is primarily one of social equity. In the dedication to Queen Anne, for instance, Lanyer calls Christ “the hopefull haven of the meaner sort” (50); in the dedication to Anne Clifford, she explains that [God makes both even, the Cottage with the Throne, / All worldly honours there are counted base” (19-20). Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum contains frequent reminders of the poet's social theology. I cite just two of them: “Unto the Meane he makes the Mightie bow, / And raiseth up the Poore out of the dust” (123-4); “The Widowes Myte, with this may well agree, / Her little All more worth than golden mynes, / Beeing more deerer to our loving Lord, / Than all the wealth that Kingdoms could affoard” (293-6).

12. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), sonnet 18.