[In the following essay, Swann examines how Cavalier poets fetishized women in their works and discusses what this reveals about masculine anxiety.]

Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the critic who examines Renaissance literature through the lens of psychoanalysis has gone badly astray. Greenblatt maintains that the mode of subjectivity, the “continuous selfhood” of the individual assumed by psychoanalysis was unavailable to men during the Renaissance. In Greenblatt's early modern world of hegemonic power, the community acts as subject, shaping and controlling the individual as object. Identity originates not in the “unique biology” of the individual, but in “the community's determination that this particular body possesses by right a particular identity and hence a particular set of possessions.” Rather than perceiving himself as subject, then, Greenblatt's Renaissance man would consider himself first and foremost as an object, “the placeholder in a complex system of possessions, kinship bonds, contractual relationships, customary rights, and ethical obligations.”¹ In this paper, I shall suggest that while our concept of “continuous selfhood” may have been denied to the Renaissance woman, we find a recognizably “modern” male subjectivity assumed and explored in the literature of this period. Moreover, I shall argue, only through a reading informed by psychoanalytic, feminist and historical analysis may we discern and understand the distinctive presentations of masculine anxiety we find throughout the amatory verse written by the seventeenth-century English “Cavalier” poets.

In his magisterial survey of English literature of the Tudor era, C. S. Lewis identified two distinct stages in sixteenth-century literary history, the “Drab Age” and the “Golden Age.” According to Lewis, Sir Philip Sidney and his contemporaries climbed triumphantly up the artistic evolutionary ladder, escaping from the primordial slime of late medieval “drabness” into the literary brilliance of the Elizabethan era:

Men have at last learned how to write; for a few years nothing more is needed than to play out again and again the strong, simple music of the uncontorted line and to load one's poem with all that is naturally delightful—with flowers and swans, with ladies' hair, hands, lips, breasts, and eyes, with silver and gold, woods and waters, the stars, the moon and the sun.²

Learning how to write, it seems, entails learning how to dismember women, how to “load” a poem with fragments of female anatomy, “ladies' hair, hands, lips, breasts, and eyes.” Lewis allies himself unquestioningly with the erotic imagination of his “Golden” poets: it is “naturally delightful” to perceive a female figure as anatomical bits, and to write poems in praise of these isolated bodily fragments. Lewis implicitly establishes vision and description as universal givens, and thus preempts any consideration of the constructed quality of visual perception and its representation in literature. However, as the art historian Michael Baxandall asserts, “Some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally relative.”³ And, I would emphasize, the viewer's “variable equipment” is also necessarily gendered. We do not see things “naturally,” we do not share one mode of visualization which has also been the common property of both C. S. Lewis and Sir Philip Sidney.

As Lewis observes, however, fragmented female bodies are strewn throughout Renaissance amatory verse. We may trace the lineage of these dismembered women back to Laura, the unattainable beloved who inspired Petrarch to write his Rime sparse. Within Petrarch's work, praise of Laura entails the fragmentation and reification of her body. The poet frequently depicts Laura as a collection of beautiful, dissociated objects, transforming her into jewels and precious metals which he scatters across his mental landscape:

Non fur giamai veduti si begli
occhi o ne la nostra etade o ne' prim' anni
che mi struggon cosi come 'l sol neve,
onde procede lagrimosa riva
ch'Amor conduce a pie'del duro lauro
ch'a i rami di diamante et d'or le chiome.
.....L'auro e i topacii al sol sopra la neve
vincon le bionde chiome presso a gli occhi
che menan gli anni miei si tosto a riva.

(There never have been seen such lovely eyes, either in our age or in the first years; they melt me as the sun does the snow: whence there comes forth a river of tears that Love leads to the foot of the harsh laurel that has branches of diamond and golden locks. …

Gold and topaz in the sun above the snow are vanquished by the golden locks next to those eyes that lead my years so quickly to shore.)⁴

Significantly, Petrarch often casts himself as the mythical hunter Actaeon. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Actaeon inadvertently sees the naked goddess Diana, who punishes the man for his transgression by turning him into a stag; Actaeon's pack of hunting dogs subsequently tears him to bits. Thus in Ovid's account of Actaeon's death, male sight and bodily disintegration are inextricably related. In a brilliant analysis of Petrarch's descriptions of Laura, Nancy J. Vickers has argued that the poet deliberately refashions this story of a male encounter with a forbidden, naked, female body. According to Vickers, “Petrarch's Actaeon … realizes what will ensue: his response to the threat of imminent dismemberment is the neutralization, through descriptive dismemberment, of the threat.”⁵ The female form, if uncontrolled by the male imagination, threatens to destroy masculine identity. For Petrarch, the fragmentation of women's bodies becomes a male survival skill.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Petrarch counters the myth of Actaeon with the practice of fetishism. According to Freud, fetishism occurs when “the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim.”⁶ Fetishism is essentially an act of metonymy, a substitution of a part or adjunct for the whole. As Freud notes, “What is substituted for the sexual object is some part of the body (such as the foot or hair) … or some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person's sexuality” (Freud 66). Like Petrarch's Actaeon, the fetishist adopts such a tactic to preserve his self-identity, which would be threatened by the sight of a naked woman. In Freud's narrative, the fetishist's castration anxiety, his fear that he will lose his masculine identity, can be traced to a specific childhood experience:

The fetish is a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in. … The boy refused to take cognizance of the fact of his having perceived that a woman does not possess a penis. No, that could not be true: for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.

(66)

The fetishist needs to distract his attention from the reality of the “castrated,” hence threatening female body, and so he creates a substitute for the worrisome “lack” he has discerned there: he simultaneously acknowledges and feigns ignorance of female anatomy. In Freud's words, the fetish acts as “a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it” (Freud 352). This appropriation and restructuring of a woman's body is fundamentally self-referential. The fetishist recreates the female body in his own image, fashioning an object of fantasy by which he may affirm his own identity. As Berkeley Kaite notes, what the fetishist “sees, and finds seductive, is a simulated rendition of his own masculine possessions.”⁷ Stephen Greenblatt, we will recall, finds central to an understanding of Renaissance subjectivity the relationship between identity and the communally sanctioned right to own “a particular set of possessions.” Psychoanalysis, by contrast, allows us to examine how Renaissance men could fashion themselves through the “ownership” and imaginative distribution of specific, very personal “possessions.”

During the Renaissance, English poets avidly pursued Petrarch's course of erotic self-defense. Anatomical fragments, jewelry, and items of female clothing regularly fill poets' fields of vision and inspire their praise. As Ben Jonson remarked of his contemporaries' fascination with small, personal objects, “There is not worn that lace, purl, knot or pin, / But is the poet's matter.”⁸ The Petrarchan motif of the disembodied hand, for example, reappears in the English cult of glove-worship. Henry Constable relishes a moment of love amidst the haberdashery in his sonnet “To his Ladies hand vpon occasion of her gloue which in her absence he kissed.” With his “Lady” safely out of sight, Constable's lover can allow himself to make physical contact with the true object of his affections: “And I thy gloue kisse as a thinge devine / Thy arrowes quiver and thy reliques shrine.”⁹ Barnabe Barnes similarly fantasizes about gaining limited access to a woman's body:

Would I were chang'd but to my mistress gloues,
That those white louely fingers I might hide,
That I might kisse those hands, which mine hart loues,
Or else that cheane of pearle, her neckes vaine pride,
Made proude with her neckes vaines, that I might folde
About that louely necke. …(10)

Here, the glove serves to mediate Barnes' contact with his mistress' person. Like the hand in the margin of a Renaissance book which points to a maxim, the glove directs the lover's attention to the woman's pearl necklace: as fetishes, the glove and “cheane of pearle” embody the “meaning” the lover ascribes to the woman's form, a sign of his male wholeness imaginatively imposed upon a female bodily text.

English poetry of the Renaissance abounds with such examples of fetishism. What particularly interests me, however, is the increasing self-consciousness and unease which tranform such depictions of the female body. Previous critics have remarked upon the psychological emphasis, the fascination with interiority which distinguishes seventeenth-century amatory verse. As William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden have observed recently, the seventeenth-century love lyric displays a “pronounced tendency to replace the woman with her image.”¹¹ The relativity of “Beauty” and the role of the male imagination in love become explicitly acknowledged by poets like Henry King:

          Why slightest thou what I approve?
Thou are no Peere to try my Love.
Nor canst discerne where her forme lyes,
Unlesse thou sawest her with my Eyes.
          Say shee were foule, and blacker than
The Night, or Sun-burnt African,
          If lik't by mee, tis I alone
          Can make a beauty where was none.
          For rated in my Phant'sy, shee
          Is so, as shee appeares to mee.(12)

When seventeenth-century poets examine the conventions of Petrarchan love, they often rewrite the amatory scenario as the indulgence of male narcissism. In a poem ascribed to John Hoskins, we find Petrarch's “love” for the unattainable Laura revealed as a mind-game for one player:

By absence this good means I gaine
                    That I can catch her
          Where none can watch her
In some close corner of my braine:
          There I embrace and kiss her,
          And so enjoye her, and so misse her.(13)

However, the verse of the mid-century royalist (“Cavalier”) poets nervously inhabits a middle ground between this radical solipsism and the blissfully unknowing Petrarchism of Lewis' “Golden” poets.

As he announces in the programmatic “Argument” of his collection Hesperides, Robert Herrick regularly “sing[s] of cleanly-Wantonnesse,” an aesthetic of purified sensuality.¹⁴ The hybrid term “cleanly-Wantonnesse,” in its yoking of two apparently contradictory words, captures precisely the paradoxical quality of Herrick's amatory vision. Just as the meaning of the noun “Wantonnesse” is subject to and thus circumscribed by the adjective “cleanly,” so too Herrick carefully delimits the potentially threatening sight of the female body. In the amatory verse of Hesperides, we find fetishism central to Herrick's program of evasive perceptual manoeuvres.¹⁵ Herrick regularly celebrates his bevy of mistresses in terms of their jewelry and clothing, and he poetically ogles selected anatomical fragments of his favourite, Julia, devoting separate poems to her legs, hair, breasts, nipples, and lips. An examination of one of his poems to Julia reveals Herrick's procedures for neutralizing the sensory threat posed by the female body:

How rich and pleasing thou my Julia art
In each thy dainty, and peculiar part!
First, for thy Queen-ship on thy head is set
Of flowers a sweet commingled Coronet:
About thy neck a Carkanet is bound,
Made of the Rubie, Pearle and Diamond:
A golden ring, that shines upon thy thumb:
About thy wrist, the rich Dardanium.
Between thy Breasts (then Doune of Swans more white)
There playes the Saphire with the Chrysolite.
No part besides must of thy selfe be known,
But by the Topaz, Opal, Calcedon.(16)

Much of the jewellery decorating the woman encircles various parts of her body, and thus visually fragments her. Rings, crowns, necklaces—these items reappear time and time again in Herrick's amatory poems. Such adornment helps Herrick to focus upon individual, framed portions of a woman's body, small areas of detail isolated from the larger vista. In this poem, Herrick presents a vast expanse of beauty—Julia's body—which he warily explores as separate “parts.”

In light of seventeenth-century gem-lore, Herrick's fetishistic preoccupation with the gems adorning Julia's body suggests a concerted effort to frustrate eroticism. As Thomas Nicols wrote in 1653, it was believed that gems “have vegetative souls, or lapidisick spirits infused into them from above, by which they live and draw the likenesse of their substance, their lapidisick juyce, their proper nourishment, for their sustenation, for the preservation of their being, and for their further growth.”¹⁷ The precious stones adorning Julia, once absorbing nourishment in the earth, are thus literally dead. Moreover, many of the jewels which Herrick scatters over the woman's body were held to counteract passion or truncate awareness. Nicols reports that a sapphire is “good against feverish distempers,” and that “the wearing of it, doth hinder the erections that are caused by Venus.”¹⁸ Reputedly the opal “cloudeth the eyes of [spectators], so that they can either not see, or not mind what is done before them,” while chrysolite “freeth men from passions, and from sadnesse of the mind,” and moreover “doth drive away nocturnall fears; and … is a very effectuall Amulet against cholerick distempers o[f] the brain”; similarly, calcedon “driveth away evil spirits … [and] is good against melancholy and sadnesse.”¹⁹

By converting Julia into a gem collection, Herrick invests her body with the capacity to regulate emotions and diminish consciousness. This simultaneously erotic yet prophylactic inertia captivates Herrick's imagination, and he takes pains to underscore Julia's intriguing stasis. Only the jewels, the dead entities in Herrick's field of vision, are granted active verbs by the poet: a golden ring “shines,” as does a bracelet of “rich Dardanium,” while a sapphire “playes” with chrysolite in Julia's cleavage. The ostensible motion of the jewels is produced by passivity, for their “shining” and “playing” occur as light glances off them. Through Herrick's use of syntax, Julia becomes a kind of human Christmas tree, a motionless entity decorated by unseen hands. She plays no role in the process of her adornment: the coronet of flowers “is set” on her head, a necklace “is bound” around her neck. As a conglomeration of jewelled sections, Julia is beautifully dead. Herrick's closing injunction to the woman demands our careful attention: “No part besides must of thy selfe be known, / But by the Topaz, Opal, Calcedon” (30.1.11-12). The speaker decrees that no other part of Julia should be described—“be known”—except in terms of precious stones; but the phrase “of thy selfe” also suggests that Julia herself must not “know”—that is, be aware of—her own body except as a collection of jewels. The imperative force of “must” suggests the speaker's urgency as he summons Julia to perceptual orthodoxy. Julia, in her mind's eye, must adopt the fetishistic gaze which Herrick imposes upon her: the woman must be dismembered, must be reified as a collection of jewels, or she will escape from the imaginative control of the poet.

Elsewhere in Hesperides, Herrick's poetry seems to confirm Freud's suggestion that the fetishist will exhibit “an aversion … to the real female genitals [which] remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place” (Freud 353). In Herrick's poem “The Vine” we may observe this phenomenon as Herrick creates a strategic gap in his text, a gap designed to conceal the uniquely female—and thus uniquely threatening—portion of Lucia's body. In a dream, Herrick is “Metamorphoz'd to a Vine,” and he wraps his “Tendrils” and “Nerv'lits” around various sections of Lucia's anatomy until she cannot move, “All parts there made one prisoner” (16.2). The most significant aspect of the dream, its abrupt conclusion, is occasioned by a feature of Lucia's body:

But when I crept with leaves to hide
Those parts, which maids keep unespy'd,
Such fleeting pleasures there I took,
That with the fancie I awook.

(16.2.18-21)

Herrick uses the term “parts” to refer euphemistically to Lucia's genitals, which the vine, an obliging seventeenth-century fig leaf, intends to cover. On the verge of contact with the site of sexual difference, Herrick finds it increasingly difficult to protect his careful ignorance, so he wakes himself up. Herrick thus evades an unmitigated, traumatic vision of the female form. His unease about Lucia's “parts” further reveals the fetishistic motive behind Herrick's odd instructions that Julia be regarded strictly as gem-stones. No “part” of Julia—her genitals, her sexual difference—can be “known” unless simultaneously denied by the presence of a fetish, “the Topaz, Opal, Calcedon.”

Elsewhere, however, Herrick cannot maintain his comforting perspective on the amatory world. Whereas Lucia, in Herrick's dream of vegetable love, seems oblivious to the phallic vine demarcating her body, Julia, it seems, will not internalize the poet's vision of her, and refuses to play scenery to Herrick's fetish:

For sport my Julia threw a Lace
Of silke and silver at my face:
Watchet the silke was; and did make
A shew, as if't'ad been a snake:
The suddenness did me affright;
But though it scar'd, it did not bite.

(116.1)

This apparently innocuous account of playfulness actually explores the fear and hostility which underlie fetishism. With one gesture, Julia destroys Herrick's carefully constructed image of her—and thus his image of himself. As with Lucia in “The Vine,” Herrick had appropriated Julia's body as background for the presentation of a sign of his masculine identity—the phallic “Lace.” Julia, however, refuses to endure this exploitation of her body as passive scenery, and her actions demonstrate her cognizance of the structure of Herrick's eroticism. Julia demystifies Herrick's supposed “love” for her by restoring the true object of Herrick's affections—his surrogate phallus—to its place of imaginative origin, Herrick's own body. Moreover, Herrick specifies that Julia throws the fetish at his face: Julia exposes the structure of Herrick's amatory vision by forcibly juxtaposing the “Lace” with Herrick's eyes, emblematizing the perceptual closed loop of the phallic image and the male gaze. As Julia rebels, the hostility which informs the objectification of women is turned back upon the fetishist, and in Herrick's anticipation of bodily harm we find his renewed fear of castration, a fear which can no longer be allayed by the reassuringly immutable sight of a fetishized woman.

Lest we think Herrick's concerns atypical of this period, we should also examine Waller's verse “To a Fair Lady, Playing With a Snake.” In this poem, a man contemplates the nubile Chloris, who conceals a snake in her clothing. (One of Waller's editors has suggested that “‘Twas formerly not unusual among our English ladies for coolness in the hot weather to carry a snake in their sleeve.”²⁰) In the Petrarchan schema, as we have noted, male love is predicated upon female absence: it is Laura's unattainability which allows Petrarch to refashion her image and scatter her body in poem after poem. Julia's rebellion against fetishism, however, suggests that female obduracy can take undesirable forms. Whereas Julia flings the serpentine lace, the sign of her objectification, back at its maker, Chloris seems disinclined to relinquish the snake which adorns her person. Indeed, the creature becomes the focus of eroticism for Chloris herself: “‘Tis innocence, and youth, which makes / In Chloris' fancy such mistakes, / To start at love, and play with snakes.”²¹ Chloris, in other words, will adopt the stance of the fetishist: because she “starts at” or avoids love, she will employ her “fancy” and fix her attention upon phallic substitutes. The poet complains that the snake has contributed to Chloris' lack of interest in men: “By this and by her coldness barred, / Her servants have a task too hard; / The tyrant has a double guard.” In the next stanza, however, Waller confirms the fetishistic identity of Chloris' play-thing and reveals the true nature of his love: “Thrice happy snake! that in her sleeve / May boldly creep; we dare not give / Our thoughts so unconfined a leave.” Waller's snake is Herrick's vine relieved of its inhibitions.

Waller's poem has been recently interpreted as a narrative of female sexual cruelty: “Chloris is well aware of what she is doing, allowing the snake all the scope which her rejected lover is denied. Hers is a flaunted self-sufficiency aimed at humiliating the man with a living symbol of his impotence.”²² Chloris certainly exhibits a kind of erotic autonomy, but Waller himself suggests that the men who watch her snake-charming routine all have their psycho-sexual blinkers firmly in place: “we dare not give / Our thoughts so unconfined a leave.” Is Chloris really “flaunting” her self-reliance for the sake of “humiliating” the male audience which gazes at her? Or, like Herrick's Julia, does Chloris merely “start” from her traditional role as amatory object by recognizing the structures of the male erotic imagination, and appropriating them for her own use? When you begin to look for her, the sexually self-sufficient woman appears with surprising frequency in later seventeenth-century literature. Milton's Eve, of course, initially fell in love with her own reflection and fled from Adam when she first laid eyes on him. Only through the intervention of God, the Divine Sexual Therapist, was Eve persuaded to abandon the error of her narcissistic ways.²³ Cavalier amatory verse, by contrast, often records the poets' failures to justify the ways of men to women. As we have seen, the unkind mistress assumes a new form in this period when women reject their role as passive backdrops for fetishistic displays.

I would like to compare two poems to demonstrate further how the structure of “Golden Age” eroticism disintegrates within Cavalier verse. In the forty-fifth poem of the Amoretti, Spenser exhorts a daughter of Eve to accept for her self-image the product of a male imagination:

Leave lady in your glasse of christall clene,
Your goodly selfe for evermore to vew:
and in my selfe, my inward selfe I meane,
most lively lyke behold your semblant trew.(24)

The dangerous narcissism of the woman gazing into the mirror becomes the healthful recognition of “trew” female identity which originates from the male “inward self.” Rather than create an autonomous female identity, the “lady” must perceive herself as the product of a male mind. In “Lucasta's Fan, With a Looking-Glass in It,” written by Richard Lovelace, Spenser's self-regarding mistress again takes up her mirror. Rather than swerving from her mirror to internalize a male viewpoint, however, Lucasta seems determined to gaze forever in her “glasse of christall clene.” Near the poem's conclusion, Lucasta looks into the mirror and addresses her fan:

My lively shade thou ever shalt retain
          In thy enclosed feather-framed glass,
And but unto our selves to all remain
          Invisible thou feature of this face.(25)

It would seem that Lucasta, unlike Milton's Eve or Spenser's mistress, will not “know” herself properly. For Lovelace, only violence can disrupt such female self-absorption:

So said, her sad swain overheard, and cried
          Ye gods! for faith unstain'd this a reward!
Feathers and glass t'outweigh my virtue tried?
          Ah show their empty strength! The gods accord.
Now fall'n the brittle favourite lies, and burst!
          Amazed Lucasta weeps, repents, and flies
To her Alexis, vows herself accursed
          If hence she dress herself, but in his eyes.

The male lover Alexis destroys Lucasta's erotic self-sufficiency. By shattering the mirror and fan with which the woman had structured her subjectivity, Alexis procures Lucasta's renewed passivity as the object of his gaze: she will no longer “dress herself, but in his eyes.” I imagine that Alexis would advise Waller to strangle Chloris' pet snake without delay.

In Lovelace's account of the rise and fall of Lucasta's fan, we find the dynamics of the perceptual coercion by which, Susanne Kappeler argues, a patriarchal society objectifies women:

The fact that women, as individual subjects, have inserted themselves into the cultural audience …, have apprenticed to the male viewpoint which surveys women as objects and as products of fine art, is itself one of the most fundamental sources of female alienation: women have integrated in themselves, have internalized, a permanent outpost of the other gender—the male surveyor.²⁶

But some women in Cavalier poetry leave their seats in the “cultural audience” to watch the performance of their very own one-woman shows. In Freud's analysis, we might recall, the fetishist simultaneously acknowledges and disavows sexual reality: he manages to gaze at a “castrated” woman but see a reassuringly intact self-portrait at the same time. The Cavalier poets try but often fail to achieve this stance of knowing ignorance. As we have seen, one intriguing cause of their failure is uncooperative women. Poetic female characters like Julia and Chloris refuse to assume the role of object, and Herrick and his contemporaries cast their refusal as the seizure of the fetish. Long before Sarah Kofman or Naomi Schor tried to theorize a female fetishism,²⁷ the Cavalier poets explored the issue through their poetry. From Freud's analysis, it would seem logically impossible for women to become fetishists. As Laura Mulvey's description indicates, the gendered polarity of subject and object appears fixed:

The message of fetishism concerns not woman, but the narcissistic wound she represents for man. … [Women] are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men. Yet, in a real sense, women are not there at all. … The true exhibit is always the phallus. Women are simply the scenery on to which men project their narcissistic fantasies.²⁸

The Cavalier poets, however, pose an interesting question: what happens if the scenery appropriates the exhibit for her own purposes?

Arthur F. Marotti has drawn attention to the political freight borne by amatory discourses in Renaissance poetry. For John Donne and his Elizabethan contemporaries, Marotti argues, the language of Petrarchan love served as a polite code for political aspirations, providing “an amorous vocabulary” through which courtiers could express their “ambition and its vicissitudes.”²⁹ In this context, the Ovidian poetry of Donne and his peers functioned as a kind of wish-fulfillment, as idealizing “courtship” was replaced by libertine sexual conquest: “Socially, economically, and politically vulnerable Inns gentleman … found it pleasant to turn the tables imaginatively by composing, circulating, and collecting love poetry of another sort, literature that celebrated male social, economic, and sexual power.”³⁰ The verse of the Cavalier poets charts a similar attempt to retreat into a compensatory utopia of eroticized male dominance; however, as their failures of fetishism indicate, the mid-century writers sometimes encounter obdurately self-sufficient women whom, try as they will, the poets cannot imagine as submissive. In an analysis of pornography, Susan Gubar has argued that feminist critics need to pay greater attention to “male literary traditions in terms of their production of images of male and female sexuality.” Gubar advocates combining insights from psychoanalysis with an historical framework to examine the “aesthetic interactions between the sexes in literary history as an index of the relationship between the sexes in history.”³¹ To conclude this discussion, then, I would like to suggest one way in which we might historicize the portrayals of failed fetishism which distinguish Cavalier amatory verse.

In Sir John Suckling's poem “Upon my Lady Carliles walking in Hampton-Court garden,” we find another depiction of frustrated Cavalier eroticism. Ostensibly a dialogue between Suckling and Thomas Carew, the poem presents what seem to be contradictory perspectives on the same woman. To Carew, Lady Carlisle is “A thing so near a Deity” that she seems a miraculous, disembodied essence:

Didst thou not find the place inspir'd,
And flow'rs, as if they had desir'd
No other Sun, start from their beds,
And for a sight steal out their heads?
Heardst thou not musick when she talk't?
And didst not find that as she walkt
She threw rare perfumes all about
Such as bean-blossoms newly out,
Or chafed spices give?———(32)

Suckling the libertine reacts differently to the sight of Lady Carlisle strolling in the garden:

Alas! Tom, I am flesh and blood,
And was consulting how I could
In spite of masks and hoods descry
The parts deni'd unto the eye;
I was undoing all she wore,
And had she walkt but one turn more,
Eve in her first state had not been
More naked, or more plainly seen.

(ll. 24-31)

We find in Suckling's retort the paradigm of erotic ignorance so familiar in Hesperides: like Herrick, Suckling seems to pursue a frank sensuality which he does not achieve. As in Herrick's interrupted vine-dream, Suckling's interest in Lady Carlisle's “parts” remains unfulfilled, although he implies that other, lesser men are better informed on the subject than he:

‘Troth in her face I could descry
No danger, no divinity.
But since the pillars were so good
On which the lovely fountain stood,
Being once come so near, I think
I should have ventur'd hard to drink.
What ever fool like me had been
If I'd not done as well as seen?
There to be lost why should I doubt,
Where fools with ease go in and out?

(ll. 40-49)

According to Carew, however, Suckling should be thankful that he could not complete his imaginative strip-tease:

'T was well for thee she left the place,
For there's great danger in that face;
But had'st thou view'd her legg and thigh,
And upon that discovery
Search't after parts that are more dear,
(As Fancy seldom stops so near)
No time or age had ever seen
So lost a thing as thou hadst been.

(ll. 32-9)

If we find in Carew's words of commiseration a brief survival guide for fetishists—knowledge of a woman's “dear parts” must be avoided, or phallic identity will become a “lost thing”—the poem also evokes a specific historical context which produced such a concept of female “danger.”

Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle, was the center of a Neoplatonic coterie, an aristocratic salon in which men and women followed an idealistic code of amatory social behavior. Although her standing at court fluctuated, the Countess became increasingly influential in the 1630s, and the hyperbolic compliment mocked by Suckling was regularly offered by her admirers.³³ In 1632, Carew himself wrote “A New-yeares Sacrifice. To Lucinda,” in which he abjectly worships Lady Carlisle as his “Goddesse”:

… it were Apostasie in me,
To send a prayer to any Deitie
But your divine selfe, who have power to give
Those blessings unto others, such as live
Like me, by the sole influence of your eyes,
Whose faire aspects governe our destinies.(34)

Platonic love was promoted at court by Henrietta Maria, and the queen's fashionable cult of love not only codified decorous, respectful relationships between men and women, but also enshrined female independence and influence at court. Henrietta Maria's Neoplatonism thus entailed what Erica Veevers has recently termed “conservative feminism”: women were to exercise their beauty and virtue to improve male behavior and foster social harmony, at the same time enjoying a new measure of independence, free from aspersions cast upon their sexual propriety.³⁵ The conclusion of Suckling's poem counters Lady Carlisle's political power, figured in Carew's real and ventriloquized Neoplatonic discourse, with the innuendo of the sexual double standard. If, unlike Lovelace's repentant Lucasta, Lady Carlisle will not “dress herself” (or undress herself) in the male poet's eyes, Suckling will at least insinuate that others have successfully braved the “great danger in that face.” Suckling, however, cannot imagine himself as the sexual conqueror of a powerful woman. Suckling's stance of simultaneous sexual ignorance and knowledge replicates the paradoxical mind-set of the fetishist. Yet the attenuated nature of Suckling's eroticism—his truncated X-ray vision of the woman's body, followed by the blustering, optative claim of vicarious sexual mastery—underlines the creative difficulty Suckling encounters when he tries to objectify the Countess. Although he scoffs at Carew's Neoplatonic praise, it seems that the new ideology of female “danger” constrains Suckling's imagination.

In a recent discussion of seventeenth-century literature and politics, Lawrence Venuti argues that poets like Suckling, by undermining Neoplatonic ideals, demystify courtly culture and “subvert the Caroline ideology of absolutism and thereby question the court's hegemony.”³⁶ I would suggest, however, that the Cavalier poets found their poetic strategies for objectifying women demystified, subverted, and questioned by specific aspects of Caroline gender ideology. The gender-roles established by Henrietta Maria's Neoplatonic love-fashions subverted male hegemony over women, and contemporary poets found this new sexual politics threatening. The dialogic principle of Suckling's poem on the Countess cuts both ways, and throughout Cavalier verse, the female “danger,” the female power and autonomy espoused by the worshipful Carew, impairs traditional structures of male amatory vision. While Ben Jonson could, in 1629, satirize the précieuse Lady Frampul as a woman “runne mad with pride, wild with selfe-loue,”³⁷ Lady Frampul's daughters Julia, Charis, Lucasta, and Lady Carlisle evoke unease, rather than laughter. The Cavalier failures of fetishism indicate the presence of an ideological prophylactic, a new conception of gender which played imaginative havoc with time-honored poetic strategies of eroticized male self-gratification.

Henrietta Maria's challenge to the existing sex-gender system was one variation on a seventeenth-century theme, the questioning of traditional hierarchies. By the 1640s, Cavalier anxiety about emasculation moved from the margins of the cultural psyche to the political mainstream, as civil war engulfed England. The structures of both church and state were transmuted by force, and Charles I was beheaded. Freud himself, I think, would not have been surprised that fetishes and their frailty should have preoccupied writers who faced such political and cultural upheaval. A little boy experiences anxiety when he first becomes cognizant of his mother's lack of a certain bodily possession; “in later life,” writes Freud in his essay on fetishism, “a grown man may perhaps experience a similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger, and similar illogical consequences will ensue” (Freud 352). The Cavalier poets wrote their love lyrics with this cry crescendoing around them; their complex, fascinating poetry embodies the “illogical consequences” of their increasing sense of panic.

Notes

1. Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986) 216. For a trenchant, non-feminist critique of Greenblatt, see William Kerrigan, “Individualism, Historicism, and New Styles of Overreaching,” Philosophy and Literature 13 (1989): 115-126. Kerrigan recognizes the theoretical stakes in Greenblatt's dismissal of psychoanalysis: “Another way of looking at the Renaissance, through the lens of Freud, has been finding individuals there, and this activity threatens the foundation of new historicism” (117).

2. C. S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1954) 65.

3. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 40.

4. Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The “Rime sparse” and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976) 86-88, Poem 30, ll. 19-24, 37-39.

5. Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” in Elizabeth Abel, ed., Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) 103-104. Poem 23 in the Rime exemplifies Petrarch's response to the myth of Actaeon.

6. Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 7, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin Books, 1977 [1953]) 65. All future references to Freud are to this edition and volume of his works.

7. Berkeley Kaite, “Reading the Body Textual: The Shoe and Fetish Relations in Soft- and Hard-Core,” American Journal of Semiotics 6 (1989): 84.

8. Ben Jonson, “An Elegy,” ll. 16-17, from The Underwood, in Ben Jonson: Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson (London and New York: Oxford UP, 1975) 191.

9. The Poems of Henry Constable, ed. Joan Grundy (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1960) 131. For a discussion of the bella mano motif in Constable and his contemporaries, see James Mirollo, Mannerism and Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 125-159.

10. Barnabe Barnes, Sonnet 63, ll. 5-10, in his Parthenophil and Parthenope, ed. Victor A. Doyno (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1971) 39.

11. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 182. Other helpful, although untheorized assessments of the interiority of seventeenth-century amatory verse include Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) and H. M. Richmond, The School of Love: The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964).

12. “The Defence,” ll. 1-10, in The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) 145-146.

13. John Hoskins, “Absence,” ll. 17-24, in Herbert J. C. Grierson, ed., Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921) 24.

14. For a discussion of “cleanly-Wantonnesse” as refined sensuality, see Thomas R. Whitaker, “Herrick and the Fruits of the Garden,” ELH 22 (1955): 16-33.

15. Few critics have explored the implications of J. B. Broadbent's remarks that “fetichistic [sic] superficies” fill Herrick's love poetry (Poetic Love [London: Chatto and Windus, 1964] 246). Gordon Braden, in a subtle and perceptive reading of Herrick, argues that in the amatory poems, “The emphasis on foreplay and nongenital, especially oral gratification, … and the generally voyeuristic preference of perception to action … are all intelligible as a wide diffusion of erotic energy denied specifically orgastic focus and release” (The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry, Yale Studies in English 187 [New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1978] 223). William Kerrigan elaborates upon Braden's interpretation in “Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick,” George Herbert Journal 14 (1990-91): 155-71; see also Lillian Schanfield, “‘Tickled with Desire’: A View of Eroticism in Herrick's Poetry,” Literature and Psychology 39 (1993): 63-83.

    Recent examinations of the “politics” of Hesperides have ignored the specifically gendered nature of Herrick's amatory verse. In Robert Herrick's “Hesperides” and the Epigram Book Tradition (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), Ann Baynes Coiro argues that Hesperides chronicles the poet's growing disillusionment with Stuart ideals and policy; from this perspective, Herrick's poems about women participate in the “dreaming fantasy” of pastoral beauty which Herrick steadily subverts (11). Coiro elsewhere analyzes Julia as a progressively transformed “metaphor for language” (“Herrick's ‘Julia’ Poems,” John Donne Journal 6 [1987]: 67-89).

16. Robert Herrick, “To Julia,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956) 30. All future references to Herrick's poetry are to this edition. I have followed Martin's format for citing Herrick's poems: i.e., page number. number of poem on page. line number(s).

17. Thomas Nicols, Arcula Gemmea: Or, A Cabinet of Jewels (London, 1653) 2. Nicols relies upon authorities such as Boethius and Cardanus.

18. Nicols 84.

19. Nicols 90, 105-106, 129.

20. Cited Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616-1660 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990) 313.

21. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. G. Thorn-Drury, The Muses' Library (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1893) 334.

22. Hammond 314.

23. For a provocative reading of Eve's role as “doomed narcissist” whose loss of autonomy underwrites patriarchy, see Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 321-347.

24. Sonnet XLV, ll. 1-4, from Amoretti, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989) 627.

25. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) 51.

26. Susanne Kappeler, The Pornography of Representation (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986) 57-58.

27. Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Women in Freud's Writing, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985); Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985) 363-372. For a critique of recent feminist theories of fetishism, see Emily Apter, “Splitting Hairs: Female Fetishism and Postpartum Sentimentality in Maupassant's Fiction,” in her book Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1991) 99-123.

28. Laura Mulvey, “You Don't Know What is Happening Do You, Mr. Jones?,” Spare Rib 8 (Feb. 1973): 30.

29. Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love Is Not Love’: Elizabeth an Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order,” ELH 49 (1982): 398.

30. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986) 73.

31. Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 739.

32. The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. Thomas Clayton, Vol. 1, The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 30.

33. For an assessment of the Countess' role in Caroline politics and poetry, see Raymond A. Anselment, “The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 212-233.

34. The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949) 33.

35. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 15. Veevers argues that Lady Carlisle's Platonism was rooted in French salon préciosité, whereas Henrietta Maria's practice reflected the devout humanism of St. François de Sales. The distinction was often lost on contemporaries, however (Veevers 37-39).

36. Lawrence Venuti, Our Halcyon Dayes: English Prerevolutionary Texts and Postmodern Culture (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989) 259.

37. Ben Jonson, The New Inne 5.2.30, cited Veevers 38.