SOURCE: Barash, Carol. “The Female Monarch and the Woman Poet: Mary of Modena, Anne Killigrew, and Jane Barker.” In English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority, pp. 149-208. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Barash surveys Killigrew's life and works, and analyzes many poems in terms of her experience of court life.]

THE IMAGINARY UNDERWORLD OF MARY OF MODENA'S COURT

Anne Killigrew (1660-85) spent her short adult life as an attendant to James II's second wife, Mary of Modena.¹ The wages for women at court were reasonable (two hundred pounds per year, plus room and board). When Maids of Honour left court they also received a pension for life, and if they married the crown paid their dowry.² In addition to the hope of a lucrative marriage (assuming one did not become pregnant at court), living with the royal family often brought women indirect political power, the ability to manipulate rulers through intimate knowledge of their private lives. As the controversy surrounding the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart (the Old Pretender) suggests, the private lives of women at court could have far-reaching political consequences.³ Women at court were often in positions to verify (or deny) the truth of private court events for the larger public.

The inspired but outcast Cassandra was often used as a figure for the woman writer and political actor at court.⁴ When the gods spoke through Cassandra, she became possessed like a sybil and ‘her oracles were uttered in a trance.’⁵ This is almost exactly what happens at the end of Killigrew's ‘The Discontent’, where the speaker says, ‘Stupor, like to Death, my Senses bind’ (56), disclaiming responsibility for a politically damning poem. It was not only Killigrew who couched her aggressions in dream visions. What we might call visionary politics was, in fact, widespread at the court of Mary of Modena, where publishing ‘dreams’ was often a means of indicting one's enemies. Mary of Modena had a series of violent dreams in which she confronted Frances Villiers, one of James's mistresses. After these dreams, Mary reported that she had felt as if she were burning in hell when Villiers touched her.⁶ Cassandra is both a victim and a prophet: one whose lack of authority derives from her refusal to submit to Apollo's sexual advances, but also one whose writings are fragmented, written on leaves and then scattered so no one can piece them together. Cassandra's complicated relation to language and sexuality also suggests two aspects of Mary of Modena's situation frequently invoked by women writers close to her: she was a silenced outsider and a woman whose religious vision provided a justification for writing and political action. Like Cassandra, biblical prophets were also in an adversarial relation to established authority, as when they called monarchs to task for political victories achieved at great moral and religious cost.⁷ Biblical prophecy is often suggestively metaphorical rather than specifically delineated. Like Moses's first approach to Sinai and Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's visions, the anonymous poems at the end of Killigrew's Poems shift their focus rapidly among a number of overlapping, symbolically linked narratives.

Although these poems are in many ways continuous with Killigrew's own writing,⁸ there is no archival evidence to establish who actually wrote them. If we shift our emphasis from the question of who wrote them to the question of what culture produced them, however, it becomes clear that ‘Cloris Charmes Dissolved by Eudora’, ‘Upon a Little Lady Under the Discipline of an Excellent Person’, and ‘On the Soft and Gentle Motions of Eudora’ are filled with stories and allusions that grow out of myth and ritual at the court of Mary of Modena. Whoever wrote these poems—Anne Killigrew? Anne Kingsmill (later Finch)? another woman at court? a male courtier?—they are dense and powerful poems; and they were, as Killigrew's editor claims, ‘found among Mrs Killigrews Papers … though none of hers’ (84). These gloomy, multi-voiced poems demonstrate a mythic imagination informed both by emotional darkness and remarkable exuberance. The willed deprivation of the speaker suggests a prophetic stance, an indirect, imaginary triumph by one at the margins of court life.

Read together, these poems also suggest a world of hidden meanings that will be revealed to a female reader who follows the speaker's secret path of poetry:⁹

Not that thy Fair Hand
Should lead me from my deep Dispaire,
Or thy Love, Cloris, End my Care,
                    And back my Steps command:
But if hereafter thou Retire,
To quench with Tears, thy Wandring Fire,
                    This Clue I'll leave behinde,
                    By which thou maist untwine
                                                  The Saddest Way,
                                                  To shun the Day,
                    That ever Grief did find.

(85)

Willing the continuation of her own despair, the speaker leads Cloris through the obverse of Philips's soothing solitude, to places that include reminders of biblical prophecy—‘mingl'd Bones’, ‘a Grove of Fatal Ewe’—as well as political outcasts, a ‘Slave’ and ‘Murderers’ (86-7).

The centre of the first poem is a place defined negatively:

                    Press on till thou descrie
Among the Trees sad, gastly, wan,
Thinne as the Shadow of a Man,
                    One that does ever crie,
She is not; and she ne're will be,
Despair and Death come swallow me.

(88-9)

This is a place where female authority is emphasized in its absence, ‘She is not; and she ne're will be’ an inversion of biblical inscriptions of God as pure ontology (‘I am that I am’).

This space of absent authority reveals in rapid succession a ‘Castle’, a ‘Cliffe’, and a ‘Recess’ in which ‘there lies a Cave, / Dreadful as Hell, still as the Grave’ (89). The power of metamorphosis haunts this dream landscape, which is also, metaphorically, a female body.¹⁰ The roaring of sea monsters and ‘the Boysterous Seas’ figure the speaker's raging emotions:

So Tempests bellow under ground,
And Ecchos multiply the Sound!
                    This is the place I chose,
                    Changeable like my Woes,
                                        Now calmly Sad,
                                        Then Raging Mad,
                    As move my Bitter Throwes.

(90)

This ‘Phantastick Hell’ is dissolved finally by a vision of female divinity: ‘As when Heav'ns Queen / In Hell was seen, / With wonder and affright!’ In disembodied voice like Echo, in vehemence like a biblical prophet, the energetic speaker seeks to compel belief in the authority of her violent dream vision.

The second of these three poems begins with a mythic story but returns to a more local conflict. On a day when Apollo ‘never rose more proud, more glad, more gay’, it becomes overcast, ‘the Flaming Sun / Darkn'd at Noon … / … / As if not Daphne but himself [Apollo] were dead!’ (92). The world's evil has rendered Apollo and his ‘Winged Troop’ of Cupids powerless and depressed. ‘Ambitious both to know the Ill, and to partake’, the speaker approaches one of the ‘little Weeping Gods’ to seek the cause of their malaise (93). The angry Cupid shoots an arrow at the source of his misery:

          But O unheard-of Prodigy.
          It was retorted back again,
          And he that sent it, felt the pain,
Alas! I think the little God was therewith slain!
But wanton Darts ne're pierce where Honours found,
And those that shoot them, do their own Breasts wound.

(94)

This vision of divine vengeance and mutilation originates from a place that fuses ancient relics with reminders of the modern stage:

The Place from which the Arrow did return,
Swifter then sent, and with the speed did burn,
Was a Proud Pile which Marble Columnes bare,
Tarrast beneath, and open to the Aire,
On either side, Cords of wove Gold did tie
A purfl'd Curtain, hanging from on high.

(94)

The rest of the poem is spoken by a ‘little Nymph’ who shuns ‘Love and Courtship’, and who the ‘Rigour of a Dame oppos'd, / Who instant on the Faire with Words and Blows, / Now chastens Error, and now Virtue shews’ (95). The poem allows the virtuous Nymph to triumph over her mistress, to decree what is religion and what ‘Sacriledge’ (98). The last poem finds Thalia, muse of pastoral, happily praising the ‘Soft and Gentle’ nymph Eudora.

The sensual pleasure of these poems mingles closely with an idealized, almost fetishized Virtue, allowing the speaker to sling arrows back at her enemies (male and female) and to delight in heroic action. Similarly, the pleasures of looking and the pleasures of conquering tend to fuse. It is a world of lush possibilities, rapidly shifting subject positions, and aggressive ideals that justify heroic violence. Whether or not Killigrew wrote them, these poems are part of the mythic and poetic worlds she was working in and responding to. Looking for iconic, individual Killigrew poems, critics have tended to miss the dramatic sense of poetic event and the multi-voiced mythic narratives that inform Killigrew's paintings and poetry as well as the anonymous poems that conclude her volume of poetry.

THE WOMAN PAINTER AND THE FEMALE HERO

Both painter and poet, Killigrew repeatedly calls attention to herself as an artist.¹¹ She wrote three short, narrative poems to accompany and explain her own paintings—‘St. John Baptist Painted by her self in the Wilderness, with Angels appearing to him, and with a Lamb by him’, ‘Herodias Daughter presenting to her Mother St. John's Head in a Charger, also Painted by her self’, and ‘On a Picture Painted by her self, representing two Nimphs of Diana's, one in a posture to Hunt, the other Batheing’ (27-9). And her self-portrait, in which she points to the piece of paper in her left hand, emphasizes the fact that she is also a writer.

Fragmented elements of classical art, gestures of both self-effacement and self-authorization are found in Killigrew's paintings. In her self-portrait, which may have been executed to attract patrons,¹² the background is dark and beckoning. A gauzy curtain cuts the depth between the figure of Killigrew in the foreground and the broken classical friezes in the back. The fragments of ancient sculpture are similar to those found in Killigrew's own poems: the past is crumbling but large, the woman artist bright and willing but frail. The cherubs on the urn have their back to the viewer, drawing us into the dark world behind the female artist; and the goddess on the frieze fragment at the bottom of the portrait is, like the speaker of so many of Killigrew's metamorphic narratives, changing bodily shape before our eyes. Killigrew's self-portrait alludes to the need for indirection and self-protective metamorphosis in depicting the woman artist's alterity to the classical tradition.

In the seventeenth century, women artists did not paint from nudes, they were rarely sculptors, and they were almost never commissioned to create large, allegorical works for public spaces.¹³ Like Artemisia Gentileschi, Killigrew painted the violent biblical story of Judith with the Head of Holofernes, a canvas that was sold with her brother's estate in 1727.¹⁴ Women's paintings of this narrative usually emphasize either the moment of conspiracy between Judith and her maid, or the moment in which Judith cuts off Holofernes's head.¹⁵ We should also recall that the biblical story ends with a song of praise for Judith—another femme forte—and a vision of community: Judith leading the people in dance.¹⁶

Killigrew's very subdued and domestic portrait of the Duke of York reveals both the controlled violence and rage of Judith's narrative and the multiple perspectives of the self-portrait. The background figures in Killigrew's portrait of James seem to conflict with the gentle and domestic figure at the centre. The figure on the bottom of the column resembles a harvest goddess, symbol of prosperity; but the figures jumping off the urn tell another story: some of the cherubs are dragging a female body in the direction of the stairs, and another female figure is nearly jumping off the statue to meet James.¹⁷ The conflicts between these background figures—symbolic fertility on the one hand, and sexual aggression on the other—suggest the multiple and conflicting roles for women at court: everything from the queen's symbolic power to the physical danger of ongoing sexual intrigues.

In Killigrew's Venus Attired by the Graces, another painting which seems to depict court life indirectly, both the community and the hierarchy among court women are shown. The Graces are of different ages; the two in the background are older women, but the younger one on the ground seems to be petitioning Venus as well as pointing behind her to the approaching satyr. In contrast to men's paintings of Venus and the Graces, Killigrew's nymphs are unflustered—and certainly not raped—by the satyr, who nearly blends into the darkness of the landscape and is not painted as an individual character at all.¹⁸ As in Behn's Pindarick Poem, Mary of Modena was often portrayed as Venus, with the serving women who dressed and attended her creating a protective circle around her and performing functions similar to the Graces in Killigrew's painting. Killigrew's Venus Attired by the Graces suggests another ideal found in Killigrew's poetry: in offering their service to the queen, the waiting women become part of a material and symbolic community with the queen at its centre.

Killigrew's poems repeatedly draw attention to the speaker's complicated position as one who is both insider and outsider at court. The voice of the individual woman is never authoritative in Killigrew's poems, but the lives and actions of specific woman can be read heroically, and Killigrew often sets up sequences of poems to emphasize such readings. For instance, ‘On my Aunt Mrs A. K. Drown'd under London-bridge, in the Queens Bardge, Anno 1641’ describes the death of the author's virtuous aunt, whose life and death become signs of the forthcoming civil wars:

The Darling of a Father Good and Wise,
The Vertue, which a Vertuous Age did prize;
…
The highest Saint in all the Heav'n of Court.
So Noble was her Aire, so Great her Meen,
She seem'd a Friend, not Servant to the Queen.
…
          When angry Heav'n extinguisht her fair Light,
It seem'd to say, Nought's Precious in my sight;
As I in Waves this Paragon have drown'd,
The Nation next, and King I will confound.

(76-7)

The relationships between women in ‘On my Aunt’ are found repeatedly in Killigrew's work: service to the royal family is ambiguously situated between the spiritual equality of friendship, which undermines the class differences between court ladies and their mistresses, and royal allegory, in which the servants' individual lives cease to matter at all.

ANNE KILLIGREW AS LINGUISTIC AND POLITICAL SUBJECT AT COURT

When I am Dead, few Friends attend my Hearse,
And for a Monument, I leave my Verse.

(Anne Killigrew¹⁹)

We do not know exactly when Killigrew began writing poems, but she began attempting to make them public around 1680, a time of crisis and transition not only in her own family but in the royal family as well. Killigrew was born into a family that had for several generations attended and lived with royalty. During the Commonwealth, the Killigrews fought to keep lands which had been in the family since the reign of Henry VIII. In 1674 the original settlement granting the ‘manors of Hanworth and Kempton’ to William Killigrew's family reached the end of its term,²⁰ and they became more dependent upon court favour for their income.

Killigrew relatives involved with court life included several of Anne's aunts, who were paid between ten and fifteen pounds a year to dress young princes or princesses; another aunt who was a royal mistress;²¹ and Anne's uncle, Thomas Killigrew, Vice Chamberlain to Queen Henrietta Maria and later Groom of the Bedchamber to Charles II.²² In 1662 Thomas Killigrew was granted one of Charles II's two patents to erect a theatre ‘in any place within the cityes of London and Westminster’,²³ and he was one of the few people who mocked the king and his mistresses openly.²⁴ Pepys quotes Thomas Killigrew as saying to the king: ‘This is one Charles Stuart—who now spends his time in imploying his lips and his prick about the Court, and hath no other imployment.’²⁵ Anglican chaplain to the Duke of York and Master of the Savoy, Anne's improvident father, Henry Killigrew, was responsible for the financial collapse of the Savoy Hospital.²⁶ His life was threatened repeatedly during the late 1660s and early 1670s.²⁷

As hard as it may be initially to overcome Dryden's allegorical portrait of Killigrew as ideal innocence, we are here discussing a very ambitious woman who came from a family of writers and courtiers. Killigrew's use of mythic material draws attention to her position as a female dependent at court. Like other women poets of the Restoration, Killigrew often uses mythic stories to embody women's shifting relation to linguistic and political authority. Killigrew saw herself not only as a woman artist, but also as one inheriting family interests in the London stage and the late Stuart court. It is also clear, from the number of manuscript poems about and in imitation of Killigrew, that her poems were widely known.²⁸

Killigrew's Poems suggest an ideal of women's heroism based on the femme forte. As a woman writer, Killigrew looked to Katherine Philips as a model. In ‘Upon the saying that my VERSES were made by another’, Killigrew compares her own reputation to that of Philips:

          Orinda, (Albions and her Sexes Grace)
Ow'd not her Glory to a Beauteous Face,
…
Nor did her Sex at all obstruct her Fame,
But higher 'mong the Stars it fixt her Name;
…
          Th'Envious Age, only to Me alone,
Will not allow, what I do write, my Own.

(46-7)

Killigrew appeals to what Philips wrote, what she did as a political actor, not to the myth of her innocence upheld in the preface to Philips's Poems (1667). She depicts Philips participating in a war among poets, a war in which Philips triumphs: ‘What she did write, not only all allow'd, / But ev'ry Laurel, to her Laurel, bow'd!’ (46). As we will see below, Killigrew wishes a similar poetic glory for herself.

Like Philips she depended on male friends to circulate her poetry at court. In contrast to Philips, however, she wanted it known that she was an author, and she lashed out at her audience for denying her control over her own writing.²⁹ Her speaker claims that when her audience likes her poems they will not believe she has written them:

          Embolden'd thus, to Fame I did commit,
(By some few hands) my most Unlucky Wit.
But, ah, the sad effects that from it came!
What ought t'have brought me Honour, brought me shame!
…
My Laurels thus an Others Brow adorn'd,
My Numbers they Admir'd, but Me they scorn'd:
An others Brow, that had so rich a store
Of Sacred Wreaths, that circled it before;
Where mine quite lost, (like a small stream that ran
Into a Vast and Boundless Ocean)
Was swallow'd up, with what it joyn'd and drown'd,
And that Abiss yet no Accession found.

(45-6)

Killigrew's ‘small stream [running] / Into a Vast and Boundless Ocean’ echoes Philips's description of marriage as the death of women's friendship. When her poetry is made public, Killigrew suggests, it is no longer her own but the property of an aggressive and hostile court world. Where Kristina Straub has shown how rape provides the central metaphor by which Killigrew voices her anger about this forced dependency and indirection, with Apollo figuring as the archetypal male rapist,³⁰ Killigrew's relation to court poetry and court politics complicates her references to Apollo in ‘Upon the saying’. To understand Killigrew's political position adequately, we must address her relationship to figures not only of masculine authority but of feminine authority as well.

‘Upon the saying’ is linked to other poems in which Killigrew addresses women at court in order to mark the boundaries of her own community. Several of her poems speak directly to members of the royal family or to aristocratic women, who figure as the sources of authority the female poet cannot claim for herself. ‘On the Birth-Day of Queen Katherine’, for instance, presents an apocalyptic vision of a world rescued by Catherine of Braganza's saintly appearance; the poem ends comparing this event to the birth of Jesus Christ (47-8). ‘Upon the saying’ begins with the speaker preparing to sacrifice herself to a ‘Sacred Muse’:

          O Queen of Verse, said I, if thou'lt inspire,
And warm my Soul with thy Poetique Fire,
No Love of Gold shall share with thee my Heart,
Or yet Ambition in my Brest have Part,
…
An Undivided Sacrifice I'le lay
Upon thine Altar, Soul and Body pay;
Thou shalt my Pleasure, my Employment be,
My All I'le make a Holocaust to thee.

(44)

Killigrew's speaker offers her chaste body and soul to the muse as omnipotent goddess.

The speaker writes, and another female figure, Fame, makes her giddy with pleasure. She imagines she has entered a metamorphic world in which she participates in myth and finds herself crowned a poet:

What pleasing Raptures fill'd my Ravisht Sense?
How strong, how Sweet, Fame, was thy Influence?
…
By thee deceiv'd, methought, each Verdant Tree,
Apollos transform'd Daphne seem'd to be;
And ev'ry fresher Branch, and ev'ry Bow
Appear'd as Garlands to empale my Brow.

(45)

Apollo has not metaphorically raped the speaker, as Straub argues; rather her belief in her own writing has caused her to imagine the myth from the male poet's point of view: Daphne has not been raped but ‘transform'd’ into the laurel branch to crown the conceited female Petrarchan poet. At the same time, however, the phrase ‘empale my Brow’ suggests that such worldly glory is confining, if not violently dangerous, to the woman poet.³¹

In the final reference to Apollo in ‘Upon the saying’, Apollo becomes the source both of poetic inspiration and of the speaker's social death as an author:

So Deathless Numbers from my Tuneful Lyre
Do ever flow; so Phebus I by thee
Divinely Inspired and possest may be;
I willingly accept Cassandras Fate,
To speak the Truth, although believ'd too late.

(47)

Killigrew suggests that one alternative to the model of modesty and denial provided by Philips is to speak from a distance, like Cassandra, as a female prophet. Giving herself over to Apollo puts the speaker into a complicated struggle with Fame: Apollo represents the male poets who provide the speaker access to a wider public, but whose possession of her poems means she can no longer claim them as her own. Fame leaves Killigrew's speaker feeling naked and vulnerable in ‘Upon the saying’ because her desire for Fame draws her back to the stakes of worldly success in which her writing is defined as an insider's property rather than the prophetic voice of one speaking from outside.

Killigrew seems to want both the authority of an insider and the safety provided by speaking at a distance from the inequities her poems describe. She creates heroic women to challenge patterns of male heroism, and like Philips she develops patterns of women's agency and collective authority based on potentially self-conquering heroic acts. But she often backs away from enacting the most dramatic heroic moments her poetry sets up. Nevertheless, if we think of Killigrew's Poems not as a collection of discrete new critical poems but as pieces of one heroic or romance project—like Scudéry's novels, Sidney's Arcadia, or Lady Mary Wroth's Urania—we find numerous places where one ‘unfinished’ poem connects logically with the next poem or with other poems in the volume.³² The poems repeatedly call attention to the limits placed on women's public writing, and then go beyond the very limits they have set up as authoritative. Like the radical shifts in voice within individual poems, at least some of the unfinished poems are fragments that speak about and beyond their rough edges.

For instance, ‘Alexandreis’, the first poem in Killigrew's Poems, begins with an epic invocation: ‘I Sing the Man that never Equal knew, / Whose Mighty Arms all Asia did subdue’ (1). But the speaker is stopped short with disbelief before she can begin to praise Alexander:

This is the Prince (if Fame you will believe,
To ancient Story any credit give.)
Who when the Globe of Earth he had subdu'd,
With Tears the easie Victory pursu'd;
Because that no more Worlds there were to win,
No further Scene to act his Glorys in.

(1)

The speaker asks her muse to ‘inspire / [Her] frozen style with a Poetique fire, / And Raptures worthy of [Alexander's] Matchless Fame’. The ‘frozen style’ refers both to the metaphysical poetry of Cowley and Philips³³ and to unambiguous panegyric. She requires something more passionate, more openly aggressive in response to the essentially dangerous Alexander, ‘That City-Raser, King-destroying King’. Asking for the muse's assistance, the speaker addresses the ‘Queen of Verse’ as a flirtatious mistress:

O Queen of Verse, I'll not ungrateful be,
My choicest hours to thee I'll Dedicate,
'Tis thou shalt rule, 'tis thou shalt be my Fate.
But if Coy Goddess thou shalt this deny,
And from my humble suit disdaining fly,
I'll stoop and beg no more, since I know this,
Writing of him, I cannot write amiss:
His lofty Deeds will raise each feeble line,
And God-like Acts will make my Verse Divine.

(2)

When the muse provides the poetic force requested by the female speaker in ‘Alexandreis’, the poem shifts to describe sunrise over a field of ‘warlike Virgins’ (3), with the Amazon queen Penthesilia, standing ready to challenge the male hero, Alexander. Alexander faces Penthesilia, waiting for ‘Th'Heroick Queen’ to speak (5). ‘Alexandreis’ ends there, causing the editor of Killigrew's Poems to remark, ‘This was the first Essay of this young Lady in Poetry, but finding the Task she had undertaken hard, she laid it by till Practice and more time should make her equal to so great a Work’. Although her editor wishes to minimize the ambitions embodied in this aborted heroic poem, the title echoes Cowley's Davideis and suggests a larger epic frame.³⁴

‘To the Queen’, the next poem in Killigrew's Poems, is again situated in awe of female power. Nearly half of the poem to the queen (Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza) discusses the failure of ‘Alexandreis’. The speaker claims that she was ‘imp'd with Alexander's name’ in the previous poem, and that ‘the Heav'n-born Queen’ is a more fitting subject: ‘Now surely I shall reach the Clouds, / For none besides such Vertue shrouds’ (6-7). When the speaker finally addresses the queen, she interweaves classical and biblical sources in order to construct an authoritative position for herself. She refers first to a story from 2 Samuel, in which Areuna makes himself equal to King David by offering extravagant gifts.³⁵ The biblical story leads abruptly but logically to the next section of the poem, where the speaker likens herself to Andromeda. The queen's virtue, like Perseus, rescues the speaker from a poetic impasse by granting the poet the equalizing gift of praise. Both stories show how community can be constructed among unequal partners. After the queen's virtue is rendered allegorical, the queen disappears from the poem, and the speaker likens herself to a dove—‘I wandering fly / Between the Deluge and the Skie’ (9)—a figure doubly linked with redemption, first as the harbinger of the end of the flood (Gen. 8: 8-11), and also as the Holy Ghost, the informing spirit of divine words and acts (John 1: 32).³⁶

In an unfinished ode, Killigrew dramatizes why her dove, although divinely inspired, cannot speak for itself. The ode follows the two-line ‘An Epitaph on her Self’ (82) and flows logically from it. The ‘Epitaph’ speaks to those who might seek to memorialize the dead poet, reminding them that she has already left her own ‘Monument’ in ‘Verse’. The ode then contrasts mundane squalor with the speaker's belief in a higher, spiritual calling. The speaker urges her dove to soar beyond the low and dirty material world:

          Arise my Dove, from mid'st of Pots arise,
                    Thy sully'd Habitation leave,
                    To Dust no longer cleave,
Unworthy they of Heaven that will not view the Skies.

(82)

The first stanza eases into the voice of a quite self-confident and aggressive speaker, one who has visited the earth for a short time and is returning to her heavenly birthplace:

                    Thy native Beauty re-assume,
                    Prune each neglected Plume,
                    Till more than Silver white,
                    Th[a]n burnisht Gold more bright,
Thus ever ready stand to take thy Eternal Flight.

(83)

Here, the dove is akin to the speaker of ‘Upon the saying’, whose plumage has been spoiled by those who attempt to transmit her poetry to a larger public. The dove remains an ideal, spiritual manifestation of the poet in this ode; she is imaginatively punished for taking the material world too seriously, for staying there too long:

The Bird to whom the spacious Aire was given,
As in a smooth and trackless Path to go,
                    A Walk which does no Limits know
                    Pervious alone to Her and Heaven:
                    Should she her Airy Race forget,
                    On Earth affect to walk and sit;
Should she so high a Priviledge neglect,
As still on Earth, to walk and sit, affect,
                    What could she of Wrong complain,
                    Who thus her Birdly Kind doth stain,
                    If all her Feathers moulted were,
                    And naked she were left and bare,
                    The Jest and Scorn of Earth and Aire?

(83)

The speaker finds it tolerable to be left ‘naked … and bare’ in this world because she is about to ascend to another, higher domain. When the world attacks her feathers—both her body and her poetry—it is, she imagines, her punishment for too much interest in the things of this world. The ode breaks off with the fused noun ‘The Bird of Paradice the Soul’, as if the knowledge of symbolic triumph is enough. Rather than speak from the position of the dove to suggest that the voice of the individual's soul might be spiritually or linguistically authoritative,³⁷ the poem stops abruptly, leaving her speaker suspended between earth and heaven.

The first three poems in Killigrew's Poems—‘Alexandreis’, ‘To the Queen’, and ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’—retreat from epic to what seem at first to be more modest, pastoral ambitions. After conspicuously failed attempts to imitate male heroism in ‘Alexandreis’ and to create the queen as femme forte in ‘To the Queen’, Killigrew's ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’ praises ‘Dorinda's matchless Laies’ (11). The adjective ‘matchless’ is our first clue that this poem is constructing a community based on the Society of Friendship of Katherine Philips, the ‘Matchless’ Orinda. The name ‘Dorinda’ suggests daughter of Orinda (and also Clorinda),³⁸ and the speaker's marked affinities with Philips guard her from accusations of ambition: she is merely expressing the beauty and innocence of nature. ‘A Pastoral Dialogue’ is the first of several pastoral poems in which Killigrew condemns various forms of publicly sanctioned violence.

‘The Miseries of Man’ begins in a similar pastoral setting, with two nymphs sitting in the ‘gloomy Shade’ of the ‘steep Hill’ of Fame and ‘murmur[ing] forth’ their very similar ‘Woes’:

Compos'd of various Trees, there long has stood,
Whose thick united Tops scorn the Sun's Ray,
And hardly will admit the Eye of Day.
By oblique windings through this gloomy Shade,
Has a clear purling Stream its Passage made,
The Nimph, as discontented seem'd t'ave chose
This sad Recess to murmur forth her Woes.
          To this Retreat, urg'd by tormenting Care,
The melancholly Cloris did repair,
As a fit Place to take the sad Relief
Of Sighs and Tears, to ease oppressing Grief.
Near to the Mourning Nimph she chose a Seat,
And these Complaints did to the Shades repeat.

(32-3)

If we compare this passage to Virgil's first Eclogue, we see Killigrew's reworking of the relationship between poetic speaker and audience within the pastoral tradition. In Killigrew, the speaker and the one who listens are both women, they are both outsiders, and they have a shared interpretation of the political world around them. In contrast to the dynamic distinction between the voice of public political triumph (Tityrus) and pastoral resignation and retreat (Meliboeus), which Virgil engages in the first Eclogue,³⁹ Killigrew's pastoral is a place where women's political community is voiced through the poet-speaker. Anne Finch, who was also a Maid of Honour to Mary of Modena, will elaborate Killigrew's emerging sense of the landscape as a specifically female retreat, and link women's poetic subjectivity to the willed negativity embodied in that landscape as a place of political resignation.

When Killigrew's nymphs echo and elaborate one another's grief, they describe the miserable deaths caused by poverty, sickness, and war. War is worse than other causes of death because it reveals how ‘Men their own Kind with hostile Arms pursue’ (36):

          And now, methinks, I present do behold
The Bloudy Fields that are in Fame enroll'd,
I see, I see thousands in Battle slain,
The Dead and Dying cover all the Plain,
…
Whither the Day does draw more Tears or Blood,
A greater Chrystal, or a Crimson Floud.
The faithful Wife, who late her Lord did Arm,
And hop'd to shield, by holy Vows, from Harm,
…
Low on the Earth she'l find his lofty Crest,
And those refulgent Arms which late his Breast
Did guard, by rough Encounters broke and tore,
His Face and Hair, with Brains all clotted ore,
And Warlike Weeds besmeer'd with Dust and Gore.

(37-8)

The loyal and virtuous wife who inspires many of Killigrew's other poems is here shown encountering her husband's bloody body and clothes. The punning phrase ‘Warlike Weeds’ suggests that as the husband's clothes have been stained with blood, the pastoral landscape has also been transformed by the war it describes. Killigrew's nymph condemns ‘Publick Thieves and Robbers’ who ‘having plagu'd Mankind, in Triumph ride’ (38). Before she can name names, however, ‘Clouds of black Thoughts’ break up her ‘further Speech’. Where the epic poet triumphs in singing praise of the hero (and the satiric poet by attacking his political opponents directly), the prophet chooses her subjects—and attacks them—indirectly. And because the prophet must contend with other, more popular voices, she becomes involved in the pursuit of worldly attention and, thus, fame.

The speaker's simultaneous desire for but repulsion from poetic glory is sustained over half of Killigrew's Poems; her battle with a personified Fame is an attempt to mediate between the opposing demands of heroic and prophetic discourses.⁴⁰ Fame's metonymic relation to other female figures suggests a larger pattern of repetition and indirection. At the same time, multiple versions of mythic stories enable the speaker to suggest conflicts in her own situation. The Latin fama (rumour, report, reputation) is what others say about her; a virtuous woman cannot seek fame because if she is known to desire public recognition her fame will be ill repute.⁴¹ Situating her own voice in contrast to the male voice of Alexis in ‘Love, the Soul of Poetry’, Killigrew demonstrates how male poets could achieve Fame by publishing their sexual ‘Flame’ or desire:

          The Acts of Gods, and God-like Men reherse.
From thence new Raptures did [Alexis'] Breast inspire,
His scarce Warm-Heart converted was to Fire.
          Th'exalted Poet rais'd by this new Flame,
With Vigor flys, where late he crept along,
And Acts Divine, in a Diviner Song,
          Commits to the eternal Trompe of Fame.
And thus Alexis does prove Love to be,
As the Worlds Soul, the Soul of Poetry.

(22-3)

When the speaker is a woman, however, Fame becomes both subject and object of desire, both Fame and the speaker's desire for Fame. On several occasions Fame blends with Atalanta, who stoops to pick up golden balls, and is thus defeated in her desire to reach the heavens on artistic merit.⁴² Killigrew's speaker elsewhere tries to ascend the steep mountain by which Fame was recognized in Renaissance painting. She then becomes like a male hero who struggles uphill to his own glory, the public Fame which is the demise of a woman's reputation.

Killigrew's speaker circumvents rules about women's modesty by claiming that she wants Fame, finally, not for herself, but to criticize the violence she sees all around her. And, on several occasions, she claims to abandon Fame completely.⁴³ After her protracted battle with Fame in ‘The Discontent’, she asks her muse to unburden her of ‘Art or Labour’, wishing instead ‘rude and unpolisht’ verses to match the struggles of body and soul undertaken in the poems themselves:

Briskly they clime, and Great Things undertake;
But Fatal Voyages, alas, they make:
          For 'tis not long before their Feet,
          Inextricable Mazes meet,
          Perplexing Doubts obstruct their Way.
          Mountains with-stand them of Dismay;
Or to the Brink of black Dispaire them lead,
          Where's nought their Ruine to impede.

(51)

Dark and winding, filled with personified Ruin and Despair, her poems struggle through the same landscape found in the anonymous underworld poems published at the end of her volume. Participating in the rule of Fame makes the speaker feel like a monarch: ‘To be o'th'Number of the Great enroll'd, / A Scepter o're a Mighty Realm to hold’ (53). At the same time, Fame inadvertently creates an alternative religious family among those who share adversity:

… all the Afflicted of a Land to take,
And of one single Family to make?
          The Wrong'd, the Poor, th'Opprest, the Sad,
          The Ruin'd, Malecontent, and Mad?
Which a great Part of ev'ry Empire frame,
And Interest in the common Father claime.

(53-4)

Killigrew's speaker wishes to go somewhere ‘that Earth by Humane Foot ne're prest’, but can only approach such places through prophetic visions or death: ‘Stupor, like to Death, my Senses bind, / That so I may anticipate that Rest, / Which only in my Grave I hope to find’ (56). Her fecund prophetic ‘Stupor’ allows her, repeatedly, to describe various forms of public violence. She begins with the ideal of the femme forte—one who can defy injustice through self-control, self-deprivation, and the force of negativity. But finding herself in fundamental opposition to much that passes all around her for legitimate public action, her speaker retreats to the prophetic posture, attacking her enemies through fragments, leaves, oblique and tangled references to the political positions she cannot, as a female courtier, enact directly or by herself.

Just as public crimes and iniquities stand at odds with an ideal of female community imagined in Killigrew's pastoral poems, the ideally expressive landscape of Jane Barker's pastorals is situated in contrast both to political factions and to the speaker's complicated political and poetic ambitions. Where Killigrew creates a prophetic stance to attack her opponents indirectly, Barker achieves similar ends by dividing her political vision between different subject positions and different literary genres.

Notes

1. Ellen C. Clayton, English Female Artists (2 vols.; London, 1876), i. 59-70.

2. Somerset, Ladies in Waiting 134; and Frances Harris, ‘“The Honourable Sisterhood”: Queen Anne's Maids of Honour’, British Library Journal, 19: 2 (1993), 181-98. Killigrew is not listed in the Lord Chamberlain's account books, so she may not actually have been paid for her work as a Maid of Honour.

3. Weil, ‘Sexual Ideology and Political Propaganda’, discusses in detail the changing political representations of women at court in this period.

4. Katherine Philips's friend Charles Cotterell translated La Calprenède's Cassandre (1642-5) from the French in 1652; also see Elkanah Settle, Cassandra; or, the Virgin prophetess, an opera performed at the Theatre Royal and published in 1702; Ann, Countess of Coventry had a version of Cassandra, which she included in her 1704 inventory of books (see Perry, Mary Astell, 346). See Christa Wolf, Cassandra, trans. Jan Van Heurck (New York, 1984), for a modern interpretation of the sexual politics of the various Cassandra myths.

5. Pierre Grimal (ed.), Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Oxford, 1985), 90-1.

6. G. P. Elliott (ed.), ‘Manuscript Diary of Edward Lake’, Camden Miscellany, I (1878), 14; also see Strickland, Lives of Queens, vi. 77-8.

7. On the Hebrew tradition, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York, 1985); also see Maclean's description of female prophets, Renaissance Notion of Woman, 21.

8. Doody, Daring Muse, 283; and Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 29-36, claim these poems are by Killigrew; I agree with Messenger that the poems have no internal clues that a man wrote them.

9. Messenger, His and Hers, 31-6, suggests that these final poems are homo-erotic, a reading which—taken figuratively—is plausible but which must be considered in the light of the repeated shifts among various speakers and various conflicts of power and authority in the poems. While the poems are in many ways centred on what seems to be female emotional and erotic experience, and they develop—among other narratives—a story of a woman's courtship of another woman, based on the model of Katherine Philips's poetry, the beloved woman (if she is even that) is as often threatening as appealing. Therefore, it is not accurate, I think, to read these poems as evidence of Killigrew's homo-eroticism (see e.g. Andreadis, ‘Sapphic-Platonics’, 56 n. 47, apparently following Messenger), though it would be fair to say that by the 1680s Philips's model of women's friendship was widely known among literate (and literary) women.

10. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Deserts, Ruins, and Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel’, Genre, 10: 4 (Winter 1977), 529-72.

11. She is perhaps working against the model provided by Artemisia Gentileschi, the most important woman painter of the 17th cent., whose works Killigrew is likely to have seen at court. Gentileschi completed several allegorical paintings for Charles I, who also owned several of her other works; see Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 85-8 and 92-6, on Gentileschi's self-portraits. Mary Beale was another woman painter at court in this period whose self-portraits call attention to the fact that she is a painter; on Beale, see 94-5, above.

12. Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists: 1550-1950 (New York, 1976), 28. Like Mary Beale, Killigrew may have borrowed paintings from Lely or other court painters.

13. On 17th-cent. women painters more generally, see Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (New York, 1979); and Harris and Nochlin, Women Artists. Artemisia Gentileschi is in many ways the exception to these generalizations, but even in her case, some of the most important paintings were, for centuries, attributed to her father; see Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, for a lucid discussion of Gentileschi's career.

14. The notebooks of George Vertue (1684-1756), BL Add. MS 23,070—who apparently saw Killigrew's paintings and may have attended the sale at her brother's death—served as the basis of Walpole's description of Killigrew in Anecdotes of Painting, iii. 24-6; also see Clayton, English Female Artists, i. 59-70. At least four of Killigrew's paintings are extant (her self-portrait, James II as Duke of York, Venus Attired by the Graces, and an engraving of Venus and Adonis); three more are mentioned in her poems (see Poems, 27-8); we assume from Dryden's Ode that there is a lost portrait of Mary of Modena; three other paintings (Satyr Playing a Pipe, Judith, and Woman's Head) were sold with her brother Henry's estate in 1727. There are perhaps other lost Killigrew paintings. Her portrait of James II for years lay buried as the work of ‘Lely's school’ until her signature was discovered under varnish when the painting was refurbished early in the 20th cent. (see Lionel Cust and C. H. Collins Baker, ‘Notes’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 28: 153 (1915), 112). Killigrew's paintings are listed in Appendix C.

15. Gentileschi painted at least six versions of the Judith story, which most often emphasize either the violent moment of decapitating Holofernes, or the conspiracy between Judith and her maidservant; see Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi, 278-336 and passim, esp. 285-9, where Judith is described as a model of Virtue, and 317-19, where she is compared to male models of heroism.

16. See The Book of Judith, in J. C. Dancy (ed.), The Shorter Books of the Apocrypha (Cambridge, 1972), 67-131.

17. I take the strategy of attending to the backgrounds of 17th- and 18th-century painting from John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840 (Cambridge, 1980); see also J. Douglas Stewart, ‘Pin-Ups or Virtues? The Concept of the “Beauties” in Late Stuart Portraiture’, in J. Douglas Stewart and Herman Liebert, English Portraits of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, (Los Angeles, 1974), 3-43.

18. In Killigrew's ‘Upon the saying that my Verses were made by another’, which is discussed below, the sexually endangered woman is similarly unflustered. See Lely's Sleeping Nymphs for an example of some of the traditions Killigrew was working against; in Lely's painting the nymphs are sensually displayed for the pleasure of the male viewer.

19. Killigrew, ‘An Epitaph on her Self’, Poems, 82.

20. Greater London Record Office, Acc. 1005/1.

21. Elizabeth Killigrew married Francis Boyle, later Viscount Shannon, before the civil wars. In the 1650s she had a daughter by Charles II, Charlotte Jemima Henrietta Maria Boyle (alias Fitzroy), who was later made Countess of Yarmouth; see Antonia Fraser, Charles II (London, 1979), 153; and Lewis Melville, Nell Gwyn (New York, 1924), 61-2.

22. Thomas Killigrew's papers are included in BL Add. MS 20,032; see esp. fos. 3-4 and following for a copy of the diplomatic instructions for Killigrew's service as Charles I's ambassador to the State of Venice and related correspondence; see also Historical Manuscript Commission, 8 (Duke of York's Household Accounts), 278; and Alfred Harbage, Thomas Killigrew: Cavatier Dramatist, 1612-83 (Philadelphia, 1930).

23. Greater London Record Office, Acc. 446/FP8. Thomas Killigrew was important for bringing the French heroic romance to England (Harbage, Thomas Killigrew, 4; Hardacre, ‘Royalists in Exile’, 363); he also wrote several ‘closet dramas’ (Harbage, 204), and his company frequently performed at court.

24. See Historical Manuscript Commission, 24 (Rutland MSS 2), 485-6, for descriptions of these events and Killigrew's repeated, but temporary, banishment from court.

25. Latham and Matthews (eds.), The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vii. 400.

26. William John Loftie, Memorials of the Savoy (London, 1878), 199-200.

27. Historical Manuscript Commission, 25 (Le Fleming MSS), 64, describes one such event that took place on 20 May 1669:

    On Tuesday night Mr. Henry Killigrew going to his house beyond Hammersmith was set upon by four footmen attending a mourning coach. They gave him eight or nine desperate wounds, and he is in great danger of his life.

28. I have found a number of manuscript poems describing themselves as ‘in imitation of’ Killigrew; see, for instance, ‘A Pastoral in Imitation of Mrs. Killegrew [sic]’, Bod. MS Montagu. e. 13, fo. 160^v. There are also other poems on the death of Killigrew; for one example, see John Chatwin, ‘To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Ann Killigrew. A Pindarique’, Bod. MS Rawl. Poet. 94, fos. 149-52.

29. Kristina Straub, ‘Indecent Liberties with a Poet: Audience and the Metaphor of Rape in Killigrew's “Upon the Saying” and Pope's Arbuthnot’, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 6: 1 (1987), 27-45, describes Killigrew's poem as ‘a counter-assault on her audience, an attempt to force her readers to recognize their own complicity in her victimization’ (30); for my response to Straub's argument, see below.

30. Straub, ‘Indecent Liberties’, 30 and passim. Neither Daphne nor Cassandra was actually raped by Apollo: Daphne turned into a tree to avoid his embraces, and Cassandra was punished for her lack of submission with the gift of prophecy that no one would believe.

31. In addition to ‘crown or adorn’, relevant OED definitions of ‘impale’ include ‘fence in’, ‘place side by side for comparison’, and ‘put a stake through the body’.

32. Both Sidney's Arcadia (1593) and Lady Mary Wroth's The Countess of Montgomerie's Urania (1621) have coded references to political figures and scandals at court. Sidney's work was immensely popular throughout the 17th cent.; Pamela's prayer from prison (bk. 3, ch. 6), for instance, was spoken by Charles I before his execution.

33. Richard Morton (ed.), Poems by Mrs. Anne Killigrew (facs. Gainesville, Fla., 1967), p. viii.

34. Another pair of poems works similarly against the Odyssey: ‘A Farewel to Worldly Joys’ (18) finds the speaker bound to reason like Odysseus to the mast of his ship; and ‘To My Lady Berkeley, Afflicted upon her Son, my Lord Berkeley's early Engaging in the Sea-Service’ (24) is based on the relationship between Penelope and Telemachus.

35. Messenger, His and Hers, 18.

36. See Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London, 1974), 109, for the range of ways the dove was associated with women's prophetic voice in Renaissance art.

37. Perhaps as a play on her own name, Anne Finch frequently uses birds as symbols of poetic and spiritual aspiration; see, for instance, ‘To The Nightingale’ (Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions (London, 1713), 200-2); and ‘The Bird and the Arras’ and ‘The Bird’, both in Myra Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago, 1903), 51 and 265-6. It is important to note, however, that ‘The Bird and the Arras’ is Reynolds's title, not Finch's, and that the poem Reynolds gives that name is actually a truncated version of a longer poem, ‘Some Occasional Reflections Digested tho' not with great Regularity into a Poeme’, in the folio manuscript of Finch's poetry now owned by the Folger Shakespeare Library. Parts of ‘Some Occasional Reflections’ became ‘Glass’ and ‘Fragment’ (both in Miscellany Poems); Reynolds shaped ‘The Bird and the Arras’ out of the remaining lines.

38. Killigrew's immediate source for the name was most likely the Dryden and Davenant version of The Tempest, in which Dorinda was sister to Miranda and, eventually, wife of Hippolito, a young man who has never seen a woman, and who was played by a woman as a breeches role; I am indebted to James Winn for this reference.

39. O'Loughlin, Garlands of Repose, 56-8; and Annabel Patterson, ‘Vergil's Eclogues: Images of Change’, in id. (ed.), Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982 (Baltimore and London, 1984), 163-86.

40. See McKeon, Politics and Poetry; Miner, Restoration Mode; and Zwicker, Dryden's Political Poetry; on larger generic and discursive shifts in this period. McKeon's reading of Dryden's working simultaneously against different generic frames in Annus Mirabilis is a particularly useful model for the kinds of strategies Killigrew employs.

41. It is also Fame who spreads the story of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid, bk. iv. Also see Carol Kay, Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, NY, 1988), esp. ch. 1, on political implications of these tropes.

42. See ‘The Discontent’ (51) and ‘An Invective against Gold’ (30).

43. Like Orinda's repeated attempts to subdue her love for Lucasia, Killigrew's speaker's abandonment of Fame is a rhetorical leave-taking, a gesture which is repeated over and over but not completed—because it was not possible for the speaker, finally, to conquer her political ambitions and erotic desires.

Bibliography

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Manuscripts

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British Library: Additional, Birch, Blenheim, Harley, Lansdowne, and Stowe MSS

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Huntington Library

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