SOURCE: Milne, Anne. “Gender, Class, and the Beehive: Mary Collier's ‘The Woman's Labour’ (1739) as Nature Poem.” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2 (summer 2001): 109-29.

[In the following essay, Milne examines the cultural significance of the figure of the beehive in a number of eighteenth-century texts, particularly focusing on “The Woman's Labour,” which she views as both sociology and poetry.]

The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about and with a gross rusticity admire his workes; those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, returne the duty of a devout and learned admiration.

—Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1643)

This paper looks at the cultural meaning of the beehive in eighteenth-century Britain as it is represented in a selection of literary and non-literary texts. The text at the centre here is Mary Collier's poem “The Woman's Labour,” published in 1739. Collier, who was also known as the Washerwoman Poet of Petersfield and considered to be the first labouring-class woman poet published in England, wrote “The Woman's Labour” as a response to the “pirated” 1730 edition of Stephen Duck's “The Thresher's Labour” (1736) “fancying he had been too Severe on the Female Sex in his Thresher's Labour” (Collier vi). Part of Collier's response is conceptualized in the image of the beehive, which she evokes in the final stanza of her poem

SO the industrious Bees do hourly strive
To bring their Loads of Honey to the Hive;
Their sordid Owners always reap the Gains,
And poorly recompense their Toil and Pains.

(“The Woman's” 244-47)

The presence of the beehive in Collier's poem raises several issues. One involves the tension between the beehive's potency as a symbol of industry¹—the poem's status (along with Duck's poem) as “a rare depiction of actualized rural labour” (Barrell 31)—and the social inequities it exposes. I will argue that Collier's use of the beehive is not just, as Donna Landry suggests, “a Virgilian gesture” (Landry 115) but signals Collier's participation in debates around both the division of labour and the changing cultural meaning of the beehive.

Acknowledging “The Thresher's Labour” and “The Woman's Labour” as both sociology and poetry also helps to centre my discussion of the beehive metaphor within an ecocritical paradigm. This is important because it distinguishes my critique from a purely literary one which would contain the beehive metaphor within “culture”—literary and historical—without examining the hegemony of the enculturation of the beehive. The unexamined, anthropomorphic license with which humans use the beehive as a signifier can be examined in the context of the very natural world from which traditional literary criticism attempts to remove it.

There is also a connection with the “natural Genius” so central to the way that Duck and Collier are conceptualized as poets. While the status of these poets is often characterized by their allegedly unmediated relationship to nature, this lack of mediation is always located within their “unlettered” status where it is their lack of formal education that brings them closer to nature. Not only does this underline the “natural Genius” designation as a cultural construct, but it also denies the existence of a labouring-class culture and denigrates the value of informal educations. This produces a paradox in which a lack of education locates a particular group of humans “outside” culture even as they are enculturated and fixed within a specific cultural construct identifying them as “close to nature.” Judged within the binary of culture/nature, labouring-class poets' often line-blurring and problematic actual relationship to nature is left unexamined. For example, I will explore ways that Duck's and Collier's self-identification as labourers brings about an enculturation of nature that is remarkably different in content but born out of the same context as the dominant culture. Even as writing about their labour extends the discourse of labour, Collier and Duck engage in a practice of literary cultivation in which actual agricultural cultivation and enclosure is “packaged,” even sanctioned, as a cultural commodity. I am interested in examining ways in which Collier's and Duck's “selves-in-nature” are confined between the expectations of dominated nature in the service of agricultural ends and a rationalized, idealized “natural” nature. Collier's appropriation of the beehive, then, for her own, however atypical, purposes does not necessarily liberate her from a human tendency toward speciesism. Collier rewrites the beehive to create a poetic description of actual rural labour. I would also like to consider the relationship to nature by examining the use of the beehive metaphor, the other images of nature in the poem and how Stephen Duck represents nature in “The Thresher's Labour.”

One way to accomplish this is to put both “The Thresher's Labour” and “The Woman's Labour” forward for consideration as nature poems. Methodologically this means putting nature at the centre of two poems which have always been read with labour at their centre. This poses an immediate critical problem since I do not want to diminish labour-centered readings of two poems which so obviously offer insights into the subjectivity of the labouring poor. But if the importance of Duck's and Collier's work lies, in part, in the expression of their class position, their perspectives on and representations of nature arguably offer another angle on nature poetry in the eighteenth century. For example, in John Goodridge's comparison of Thomson's The Seasons to Duck's and Collier's labour poems, he suggests that while Thomson integrates labour as nature or labour as natural—“a part of the ‘natural’ movement of the day” (28)—Duck's and Collier's nature is both hostile and something neither labourer has much time for. But Goodridge's analysis charts, in part, the broader cultural movement from God's Dominion to Man's Dominion and tacitly underlines my assertion that the representation of nature is central to an analysis of both poems.

In “The Woman's Labour,” Collier's nature is a cultivated nature which in one way completely complements the notion of the beehive as a domesticated space. Collier accepts the “new economy” of the managed hive by calling into question only the distribution of profits. Collier co-opts both mythology and nature, to “labour” in the service of labour. Titan and Orion mark the cycle of the passing days and seasons to reinforce fundamentally and historically the poem's theme of women's perpetual labour. But even as Collier sometimes refers to it as Titan, the sun plays a servile role by burning off the dew in the morning before work begins and drying the threshed hay while the labourers take a lunch break. As nature in the service of humans, this representation underlines man's dominion over nature.

Even Collier's reference to the “golden age” is not used to evoke an Arcadian landscape idyll. Rather it is specifically tied to her response to Duck's poem and his representation of women in “The Thresher's Labour”

And you great DUCK, upon whose happy Brow
The Muses seem to fix the Garland now,
In your late Poem boldly did declare
Alcides' Labours can't with your's compare;
And of your annual Task have much to say
Of threshing, Reaping, Mowing Corn and Hay;
Boasting your daily Toil and nightly Dream,
But can't conclude your never-dying Theme,
And let our hapless Sex in Silence lie
Forgotten, and in dark Oblivion die;
But on our abject State you throw your Scorn,
And Women wrong, your Verses to adorn.

(“The Woman's” 31-42)

That Collier singles out Danae as a coveted and respected woman, exemplary in a “golden age” of relations between men and women, emphasizes how she idealizes the attention that a classical God pays to a beautiful woman and projects a universal idealization of women in past cultures. Collier uses the Danae story to enhance her critique of Stephen Duck, who is unrestrained in his disdain for women field labourers even as he, too idealizes another archetypal woman—the domesticated woman waiting devotedly at the cottage door at sunset for her labouring man to arrive home.²

While Stephen Duck also instrumentalizes nature, he is freer than Collier to imagine nature as other than in the service of man. This relative freedom unintentionally underscores Collier's points that the thresher's labour ends at night and that, while the domesticated woman is an ideal, her construction entails an intense continuation of her day labour:

WHEN Ev'ning does approach, we homeward hie,
And our domestic Toils incessant ply;
Against your coming Home prepare to get
Our work all done, our House in order set
Bacon and Dumpling in the Pot we boil,
Our Beds we make, our Swine we feed the while;
Then wait at Door to see you coming Home,
And set the table out against you come:
Early next Morning we on you attend;
Our children dress and feed, their Cloths we mend;

(“The Woman's” 75-84)

In contrast to Collier as well, Duck clearly represents ways in which humans are at nature's or “Fate's” service and even ways in which nature is completely out of man's control—for example when a sudden rain forces the labourers to abandon their lunch break (a time, he points out, as Collier also does, allotted by the need for the sun to dry the cut grass) and take shelter:³

Meanwhile the changing Sky begins to lour,
And hollow Winds proclaim a sudden Show'r:
The tattling Crowd can scarce their garments gain,
Before descends the thick impetuous Rain;
Their noisy Prattle all at once is done,
And to the Hedge they soon for Shelter run.

(“The Thresher's” 185-90)

Again, Collier is able to turn Duck's words to her advantage. By closing off her access to nature as leisure, she heightens the sense of women's unending labour. In a sardonic mirroring of Duck's words, she answers his description of the “little Labour” (200) of haymaking as “pleasing work” (202) performed under a “kindly sun” (201) culminating in his apparently labourless image, “[n]ext Day the Cocks appear in equal Rows” (203) with one that simultaneously critiques Duck and elucidates women's important role in the labour of haymaking.

I hope, that since we freely toil and sweat
To earn our Bread, you'll give us Time to eat.
That over, soon we must get up again.
And nimbly turn our Hay upon the Plain;
Nay, rake and prow it in, the Case is clear;
Or how should Cocks in equal Rows appear?

(“The Woman's” 57-62)

Duck's relative leisure, as is demonstrated by this example, allows him a subtlety of representation not available to Collier. For example, he poignantly acknowledges the role that misperception plays in human relationships to nature, what Raymond Williams calls “an alteration of landscape by an alteration of seeing” (87), when he happily describes the coming spring after a long, labourless (and presumably, impoverished) winter:

BUT soon as Winter hides his hoary Head,
And Nature's Face is with new Beauty spread;
The lovely Spring appears, refreshing Show'rs
New cloath the Field with Grass, and blooming Flow'rs.

(“The Thresher's” 82-85)

Even as the poet/labourer effusively welcomes Spring, the labourer/poet reminds himself and the reader a few lines later of the real physical pain renewed employment will bring.

Alas! that human Joys should change so soon!
Our Morning Pleasure turns to Pain at Noon.

(“The Thresher's” 102-03)

In their representations of nature, Collier and Duck do not obsessively taxonomize nature but they themselves are taxonomized through a division of labour which fragments their tasks. The very conception of an exploitative work system that only allows agricultural labourers to subsist results in part from a belief among owners and economic theorists of the period that labourers are “naturally” lazy. Bernard Mandeville asserts this belief as “common knowledge”:

Everybody knows that there is a vast number of [labourers] who, if by four Days Labour in a Week they can maintain themselves, will hardly be persuaded to work the fifth. … When Men shew such an extraordinary proclivity to Idleness and Pleasure, what reason have we to think that they would ever work, unless they were oblig'd to it by immediate Necessity?

(Mandeville 192)

Collier's and Duck's taxonomies, then, encourage a way of thinking about nature filtered by methods of work organization. The wage gap keeps men underemployed, if not unemployed, all winter and women continuously overburdened. This, to reverse Raymond Williams' phrase, is an ‘alteration of seeing, by an alteration of landscape.” The natural cycles of night and day and the seasons order an increasingly fragmented array of jobs in “The Thresher's Labour” to create a cacophony Duck hears but does not reinterpret in his description of women talking. He is able to reject this talk as bad behaviour in part because the taxonomies of nature complement similar divisions of labour along gender lines. This is Collier's whole point. Men of all classes denigrate certain tasks since they never perform those tasks. But where Collier is outraged by Duck's negative image of women as noisy and incomprehensible sparrows and converts it to a positive one of industrious bees, Collier's bees are unnaturally silent in their work. This movement by Collier from reaction to what Donna Landry calls “resignation,” where Collier's “protests remain carefully circumscribed and localized rather than becoming radically programmatic” (116), is indicative of an overall reservation on the part of labouring-class writers to challenge structures of containment. Even as the beehive metaphor connects women, labourers and bees, it also inscribes women labourers in a specific representation which perpetuates the very systems of work that are in part responsible for their unrelenting struggle as labourers.

In considering bees' reputation as perfect creatures functioning in a perfect community and producing a perfect product, it is important to acknowledge that this “reputation” exists as a form of human manipulation in which bee nature becomes bee culture. Language operates as a technology here in promoting an ethic of control through the process of classification. Assuming that the relationships within the beehive are necessarily social and subject to social interpretations, the meaning of the bee is arrogantly fixed within human parameters that in many ways are completely fabular. Even in the context of scientific technologies like the microscope which in the early-modern period, as Jeffrey Merrick indicates, radically upend emblematic and symbolic meanings based on Aristotelian science, eighteenth-century writers insist upon perpetuating a variety of fables of the bees that serve primarily, in Merrick's view, to describe “the inferiority of females and [prescribe] their subordination to male authority” (10). Perhaps as a result of the relatively “disturbing” nature of the scientific discoveries—first, that the “King Bee” is female and second, that the Queen is “promiscuous,” the early-modern period is a time when the meaning of the bee is particularly unstable and vulnerable to rewritings. As well, the ascendance of “science” over folk knowledges necessitates a rewriting which formalizes and systematizes bee behaviour within a division of labour model that increasingly orders the lives of labourers such as Mary Collier. There is perhaps some value in considering simultaneously the ethic of control of the bees within apiculture to the ethic of control of labourers within agriculture. This involves demarcating a conception of the self within the dominant eighteenth-century ethic of improvement to locate notions of animal integrity framed within a paradigm of service to man.

The movement from God's Dominion to Man's Dominion underlines the important role religion plays in both eighteenth-century representations of nature and in the critique of the wage slavery farm and domestic labourers endure. Any critique of labour practices by a labourer entails a risky and audacious refusal to accept one's “place” in society. Connecting this resistance to nature questions God's Providence. But the eighteenth-century concept of “natural Religion” serves as a rationalization for such apparently impious attitudes even as it enables an ethic of control—a religious rationalization that in Collier's context, affects both the conception of the early-modern beehive and the rationalization of labour practices. Natural religion replaces revelation as evidence of God's divinity at a time when science simultaneously proposed a model of the universe as a “Great Machine” and fashioned itself as a “pious pursuit” (Willey 11-12). The order that the new science brings to nature extends to the ordering of labour practices. For agricultural labourers, this connection is particularly direct.

Collier's thematic and theoretical emphasis on the domestication of bees as an implicitly exploitative practice and on the injustice and imbalance of power between the bees and the owners of the hives suggests that the critical emphasis on her bee stanza can also be shifted towards eighteenth-century ideologies of agricultural and apicultural management. As domestic labour practices outlined by Collier overburden and imprison labouring-class women, eighteenth-century apiculture's concern with controlling swarming, “tricking” bees into moving so that honey can be extracted, deciding how much honey the bees should be allowed to retain for their own survival, and preserving colonies to encourage profit and surplus value co-opt and commodify the very “wonderousness” celebrated in bee discourse. I argue that both Duck's and Collier's pictures of rural life depict and increasingly rationalized pattern of power and ownership more along the lines of the one John Barrell discusses in connection with Thomas Gainsborough's “The Harvest Wagon” (1767), a painting which portrays labourers on their way to the end-of-season harvest feast “at which the essential solidarity of the English rural community is confirmed, as landlord, tenant and labourer sit together in a spontaneous celebration whose freedom is uninhibited by any obtrusive sense of social division” (59-60). Eighteenth-century apicultural technologies and practices institute a similar natural economy or a rigid cycle of control most commonly exemplified by the growing emphasis on controlling swarming but extending also to the design of bee boxes which “protect” bees from natural predators.⁴ Collier's emphasis is also a more accurate reflection of the rapid changes the agricultural economy undergoes in the eighteenth century, when “rural labourers cease to be ‘happy husbandmen’ and become the labouring poor” (Barrell 31). Despite the increase in apicultural knowledge and the veneer of science, the rhetoric of scientific discourse participates actively in perpetuating old fables and developing new ones.⁵

Eighteenth-century non-literary bee books reiterate this rhetoric of managed work patterns and increasing control. Motivated by the desire to fashion a “new” truth, apiculturists' use of figurative language in a scientific context paradoxically enables myths and misconceptions to escape the very scrutiny scientific practice would seem to demand.⁶ Both Joseph Warder and Stephen White first transform folk culture into natural science and then turn empirical observation to utilitarian ends. This is easily illustrated with the title page for Joseph Warder's The True Amazons: or, The Monarchy of Bees (1713). Subtitled a “new Discovery and Improvement of those Wonderful Creatures,” Warder's title maps a movement from an older, emblematic evocation of bees—bee as Amazon or Monarch—to a natural scientific methodology “Wherein [the organization of the Beehive] is Experimentally Demonstrated.” From there, Warder guides his reader “naturally” toward “improvement” and mercantile concerns “so that with a layout of but Four or Five Pounds, in Three or Four Years, if the Summers are kind, you may get Thirty or Forty Pounds per Annum.” Finally, Warder's recipe for mead promised on the title page supplies a nationalist subtext. Because mead is English and in “no way inferior to the best of Wines, coming either from France or Spain,” it is a key to the Englishman's contentment, for “if they will but try … and with me refresh themselves, with Drinking Your Majesty's Health in a Glass of such as our Bees can procure us; [they will] no more long for the Expensive Wine of our Enemies” (x).

But Warder does not encourage this particular expression of Englishness across classes. While he promotes beekeeping “to exceedingly help the poor” (ix) who can supplement their meager incomes with hard work and the application of his methods, he creates a completely different milieu for gentlemanly beekeeping. Though there appears to be a move here to democratize honey production, this democracy is one which requires an acceptance of the domestication of the landscape (i.e. enclosure), paradoxically, the very practice which has unemployed many rural working people during this period. Warder emphasizes technologies foregrounding leisure and amateur science as entertainment to “delight the Rich; not only with various Observations and Speculations, by means of their Transparent Hives … but also with a Liquor” (ix-x). The effect of this apparently leisurely approach toward beekeeping where the picture conjured up is one of gentlemen dipping Mead while watching the workings of the wondrous bees, is to transform bees, in keeping with eighteenth-century attitudes towards the natural world, into ocular entertainment, or in Michel Foucault's words, “the object of information” (200). To read Warder through Foucault's analysis of the panopticon, then, glass-fronted bee-box technology enables the transformation of the beehive into “a laboratory of power” (204) where the “cells” of the beehive are converted into “so many small theatres” (200).

If the bees, then, are “never a subject in communication” (Foucault 200), the silencing of the bees becomes a subtle imperative present in early-modern bee treatises. When Joseph Warder claims that he has “with a Studious Delight, for near Twenty Years past, convers'd with these Innocent Creatures the Bees” (iv), he has taken it upon himself to speak for the bees. While the strangeness of talking to animals needs to be tempered within its eighteenth-century context,⁷ it is important to note how Warder unselfconsciously mediates the space between the bee and the rest of the world.⁸ In this way he confidently naturalizes domestication at an even more fundamental level—sanctioned, apparently, by the bees. In part, this naturalization comes through writing, through Warder and others' production of bee-books, books which, in Susanne Kappeler's words, “amplify particular aspects of the communicative act” (170). While messages are not, as Kappeler argues, “made interaction-proof”, since subsequent writers such as Stephen White in his Collateral Bee-Boxes (1764) respond directly, albeit slowly, to Warder's text, communication occurs only between humans. The message becomes reified—institutionalized and distanced from both previous forms (especially non-scientific forms) of human/bee interaction and from the bees themselves, despite Warder's idealized and illusory image of inter-species conversation.

But the idea of “telling the bees” harkens back to folk practices which Warder's scientific method belies.⁹ One of the forms of knowledge Warder's book distances reader from is women's knowledge. In Chapter X, Warder laments that “most of the People of England will never attain to the keeping of [Bees] in Boxes, … Because 'tis a hard thing to put them out of their old road, which every Old Woman thinks she understands” (105). He also disdainfully recounts, presumably as a cautionary tale, the “Old Woman's Mistake about her Bees.” Interestingly, the tale includes an acknowledgment of matrilineal inheritance; Warder describes “the Daughters approving their Mothers Politicks” (32) as they join her in burning a two-year-old hive under the mistaken belief that the bees inside are all too old to produce honey the following year. The “Objection/Answer” dialogue form Warder uses in this chapter as an authoritative device works to interrupt the narrative flow associated with the dissemination of folk knowledge. There is also, here and elsewhere in the book, an implicit sense that this women's knowledge is “owned” by the labouring classes. In undermining the old woman's knowledge of bees, Warder both fails to acknowledge how much he owes to this kind of knowledge¹⁰ and naturalizes an industry of beekeeping modeled on the perception that bees are industrious, indefatigable and at the service of “Man, for whom they were created” (2). Bees, then, for Warder, come to define an industry within an industry. They model both the structure for this modern beekeeping industry and create honey, the product of that industry.

One structure the beehive supplies or sanctions for Warder is the monarchy.¹¹ The monarchical designation of the head-bee as “queen” is used to reiterate and reinforce the concept of the Divine Right of Kings.¹² In The True Amazons, Warder effuses in his dedication to Queen Anne¹³ that “[i]ndeed, no Monarch in the World is so absolute as the Queen of the Bees (which pleads very much with me, that Monarchy is founded in Nature and approved by the great Ruler of Princes)” (v). This naturalizing of the monarchy within God's Dominion guarantees a permanence and a hierarchical social structure that is psychologically and politically necessary in the period following the Restoration. Perhaps unintentionally, it also extends the “usefulness” of the bee as metaphor beyond its obvious material benefit. The cultural meaning of the bee exceeds the profit it can turn for the owner of the beehive.

This symbolic, political value of the bee accounts, in part, for the positive, even adoring terms,¹⁴ in which the queen bee and, in fact, bees in general are referred to in early-modern texts.¹⁵ Warder's historical context partly accounts for his enthusiastic attitude toward the queen-bee. Warder's enthusiasm, though, must be tempered by an acknowledgment of his political and social obligations to his queen and his possible economic dependence on her favour.¹⁶ Ultimately, Queen Anne may be a “queen bee” in the pejorative sense but Warder's social restraint does not permit the pejorative to emerge. Similarly, the “complementarity” of “busy as a bee” (or “brisk as a bee” in eighteenth-century usage) hinges on an acceptance of a particular image of ideal industry that is from the labourer's perspective, perhaps, truly pejorative in the way that it internalizes a discourse of idleness and industry in the eighteenth century that has percolated through into our times. But Warder's text does not allow this point of view to emerge either.

“Busy as a bee” also highlights the fact that while much of the attention in Warder's discourse is given to the queen, the bulk of bees are either female workers or male drones. Though “busy as a bee” has typically described the ethic of the worker bee and neglected the drones, Warder enlists science and allows a great deal of space in his treatise to better explain the function of the drone whom he refers to as a “noble creature” with an “ignominious name” (6-7). In a significant move which underlines the central place of language in his treatise, Warder renames the drone the “male-Bee” and devotes Chapter II, “The Description and Anatomy of the Male Bee, vulgarly Known by that ignominious Name of the Drone” recuperating the reputation of these linguistic losers in bee discourse through detailed and thorough documenting of how “Drones or Male Bees sit and hatch the Brood” and why “Drones or Male Bees [are] not to be killed in the Spring.” Warder's seeming need to elevate the male bee's status here focuses even greater attention on the “gender politics” of the hive.

While in the cultural context of the human female monarchy, Warder has, apparently, no trouble praising a Queen-Bee, it is not so easy for him, despite scientific evidence, to proclaim the beehive predominately female and acknowledge that the drone is absolutely male and “absolutely under the domain of the females” (8).

As to his Sex … 'tis most probable that he is of the Male kind. I confess being subject to the other Bees, is an Argument against me, but … here I must beg Mr. Lilly's leave to assert contrary to Grammar, that the Feminine is more worthy than the Masculine amongst the Bees.

(8)

This is not just a conceptual or ideological difficulty for Warder. By apologizing to William Lily, the author of the most well-known early-modern Latin grammar book in English,¹⁷ Warder rightly notes that rewriting assumptions about gender must occur in language so that this new “truth” about a superior female society can be assimilated. Ironically, for a society praised by humans for its orderliness, this scientific refutation of the “normal” leaves Warder slightly disordered. The role of the term “Amazon” in Warder's title serves an important function here. By complimenting the female monarchy for its strength, orderliness and competence in war, but then making bees analogous to Amazons, he can simultaneously marginalize, mythologize and make foreign the notion of a female-dominated society.

Collier's critique of Duck's poem also focuses on disparaging representations of women but takes a very different stand. Collier's decision to use a bee metaphor as a proto-feminist gesture is also worth considering in the context of “The Woman's Labour's” status as a response. Response is a typical rhetorical mode, perhaps even a genre, in the eighteenth century. It is related to what Keith Thomas calls “the denunciation of ‘vulgar errors’ [which] became an increasingly obsessive theme [in the eighteenth century]” (79). The direct echo of Duck's title and the subtitle indicate that the poem is a response—“An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck in Answer to his late Poem.” But Collier states clearly in her “Remarks” that she “answer'd him to please my own humour, little thinking to make it Public” (qtd. in Ferguson 264). It was only when she allowed the “Spouse of a Gentlewoman” to transcribe the poem for her “with a promise to keep it private” that it became a “Town Talk” when he “exposed it” and “many advise[d] me to have it printed and at length I comply'd to have it done” (qtd. in Ferguson 264). It is only possible to speculate on whether it was modesty, fear of offending Duck or just a display of humility that encouraged Collier's desire for privacy. Similarly, the motives of the Gentlewoman's Spouse in publicizing Collier's poem against her wishes are unclear, but together, Collier's reluctant authorship confuses “The Woman's Labour's” status as a response.

Confusingly, too, the response to Collier's work and how Collier's response is read by others continues to complicate and unsettle the stability of her social critique. While the response is universally viewed as a protest, E. P. Thompson characterizes Collier's poem “in the old folk mode of the ‘argument of the sexes’” as a rejoinder to Duck [that] is “witty” rather than “hostile” (x). This is in contrast to Moira Ferguson's reading of the response as “angry” and of Duck's poem as one that “infuriated” Collier (263). I agree that anger does not accurately describe Collier's tone in “The Woman's Labour” as much as it serves Ferguson's framing of Collier as a “First Feminist.”¹⁸ But without a good working knowledge of the concept of wit in the eighteenth-century, Thompson's (and John Goodridge's, who concurs with him) reconceptualization of Collier as “witty” may ironically have the effect of completely depoliticizing the poem.¹⁹ If “response” as a genre, though, can be conceptualized as dialogical, it is possible to perceive the poem as simultaneously angry, witty and even, authoritative. Collier's response as a response reflects the tension between the idea of labouring-class authority and the rigid social hierarchy and circumscribed “natural” social roles which Collier reveals as a source of her own victimization. This revelation culminates in the beehive metaphor. Yet, while Collier's response expands the range for labouring-class poetic expression, her presence and scope is quickly circumscribed, contained and rendered conservative by critics such as Laura Mandell who, in promoting Mary Leapor's “radical” vision, sees Collier and Duck “functioning merely to put male and female laborers (respectively) back into the prospect from which they had been removed” (552) as if this act, in and of itself, cannot be perceived as “radical.” Certainly, Raymond Williams sees Duck's “project” as coopted by the situation his patronage creates for him when he points out that fifty years later “Crabbe had … to begin all over again” (90), but it is a disservice to diminish the contribution Duck and Collier make to representation of labour from a labouring-class perspective.

Collier's bee metaphor responds directly to Duck's disparaging epic smile of women labourers as sparrows.

THUS have I seen, on a bright Summer's Day,
On some green Brake, a Flock of Sparrows play;
From Twig to Twig, from Bush to Bush they fly;
And with continu'd Chirping fill the Sky:
But, on a sudden, if a Storm appears,
Their chirping Noise no longer dins your Ears:
They fly for Shelter to the thickest Bush;
There silent sit, and All at once is hush.

(“The Thresher's” 191-98)

Negatively connecting women and animals is a common strategy of denigration. Duck's metaphor of women as sparrows is used in this way. Bees, on the other hand, “were considered to be an intelligent and highly ordered community, and were treated with very great respect” (Goodridge 51-2). Collier presents a detailed and powerful picture of the labouring-class woman's double day of labour in “The Woman's Labour” and convincingly refutes Stephen Duck's portrait of lazy, twittering women in the field. By transferring the animal associated with women labourers from sparrow to bee, Collier does not reject the association made between animals and women. Rather, she transforms negative associations to positive ones. But it is also important to see the contrasting similes of women and sparrows and women and bees within a broader context. Collier uses metaphor to create a relationship in language between the female labourers and the bees which, despite Mandeville and Warder, relies on the collective cultural “knowledge” of the bees' positive attributes.

Duck's specific reference to the women as sparrows evokes ambivalent cultural associations. Le Compte de Buffon, for example, recognizes an already established cultural prejudice against the sparrow when he suggests that “[t]his is not so despicable a bird as a great many imagine” (67). Early-modern bird poetry presents a spectrum of attitudes towards the sparrow from the “pet,”—Philip Sparrow and Blake's “merry, merry sparrow” in “The Blossom”—to an oral tradition of the sparrow who readily, if not eagerly, admits to being the killer of “poor cock Robin.”²⁰ On the negative side as well and in an agricultural context, E. L. Jones notes sparrows' reputation as cereal crop pests. They were considered threatening enough to the harvest that they were hunted by bounty in the eighteenth century (Jones 118), and this is the context within which Duck presents them. Coupled with Donna Landry's assertion that work-time was the only time when women could be social (113), the implications of Duck's comparison are harsh. Not only is women's work devalued but women's relationships with other women—women's culture, in other words—are portrayed in the image of sparrows who “with continu'd chirping fill the sky” (194) as threatening to the “balance” of cultivated nature. Collier's response is important, then, not just in representing and itemizing the extent of women's labours, but in countering Duck's attack on women's culture. For if sparrows in the eighteenth-century agricultural context have come to signify “pest,” then Collier's beehive signifies their cultural opposite. Indeed, Collier, in order to launch as able and witty defense of women as she has mustered here, may have found it necessary to reach hyperbolically for the beehive without considering all of the implications of this highly potent cultural symbol.

My view, then, is that Donna Landry is mistaken when she dismisses Collier's beehive metaphor as “a Virgilian gesture” (107). Collier's serious intent in using the beehive metaphor to describe woman's labour is a good deal more than gestural, and, unlike Virgil's, Collier's practical lessons of the beehive do not stand to celebrate the achievement of apicultural success. Neither is Collier's poem a Georgic. Indeed, if Joseph Addison is accurate in his “An Essay on the Georgics,” Collier would find it difficult despite her command of poetry to write a Georgic since the “Precepts of Husbandry are not to be deliver'd with the simplicity of a Plow-Man, but with the address of a Poet” (qtd. in Dryden 145). Collier's dual role as poet/labourer and the subject matter of “The Woman's Labour” distances her rather than draws her closer to Virgil. While Addison praises the Georgics as “addressing its self wholly to the Imagination [raising] in our Minds a pleasing variety of Scenes and Landskips” (qtd. in Dryden 146) and warns against “the Poet [encumbering] his Poem with too much Business” (148), “too much Business” is what Collier's poem is all about.

Virgil attempts from the very beginning of the fourth Georgic to “[show] us what station is most proper for the bees” (Dryden 239) and instruct both through husbandry and storytelling on how to “keep” bees. Collier struggles against the implications and power relations implicit to this “keeping.” Virgil's metaphoric connections between bees and humans centre on war and business, not on labour. The early lines of the fourth Georgic are riddled with militaristic and mercantile images of bees—“Embattel'd Squadrons” (4), “trading Citizens” (20, “vent'rous Colony” (28), “raw Souldiers” (32), “The Troops” (34) culminating in a description of a full battle between two “kings” for control of the hive (92-129). Collier's metaphor presents bees as workers rather than soldiers or entrepreneurs. While Collier may be guilty of anthropocentrically connecting the labours of women to those of the bees, she presents an early-modern perspective that both uses and opposes the technology of the microscope by presenting a close-up view of those who work within the beehive from the insider looking out. In part, Collier invokes the beehive in an appeal to “royal Clemency,” a popular medieval and early-modern proverb that “the king [of the bees] does not sting” (Merrick 11) which was extended to characterize human kings who ruled “by love, not terror” (13) to shield her more direct critique of Duck's representation of women. Her witty and scathing critique, after all, is directed at someone who is directly patronized by Queen Caroline. While “royal Clemency” protects her, Collier's bee stanza enhances and does not deflect attention from “The Woman's Labour”'s political message.

As Collier's metaphor helps to expose her own exploitative working conditions, so it exposes the exploitation of the bees. Though apiculture's obsession is not primarily with the well-being of the bee, Collier's suggestion of the ill-treatment of bees reflects a growing interest among apiculturists in preserving bees rather than destroying them during the extraction of honey (as was the necessary practice with straw hives). Stephen White's book Collateral Bee Boxes (1764) criticizes Joseph Warder's and others' emphasis on beekeeping as an amusement for the curious. He emphasizes the technologies which make Warder's promises of enabling maximum extraction while preserving productive colonies possible. But even in White's book, this concern for the “rights of bees” is overshadowed by the higher concern for increasing honey yields and maximizing human profit from the honey yield.

White discusses innovations in bee-box technology through a critique of John Gedde's octagonal bee-boxes. In part, he aims to debunk Gedde's chief aim—controlling swarming—by demonstrating that this goal has already been largely achieved by the methods of the old Bee-Mistresses using straw hives. Even Gedde's goal in White's view is not appropriately innovative as it “deprives the poor Bee-Master of all the Profit, and one of the highest pleasure he can expect from these useful and delightful insects” (White ii). Not only is the stress on profit here significant but White's shift in gender from Bee-Mistress to Bee-Master is relevant to “The Woman's Labour.” Paid domestic labour overseen by a Mistress is one of the women's “hidden” labours Collier exposes in “The Women's Labour.”²¹ By virtue of her labouring-class position, Collier turns the private space of a great house into public space—her workplace—with a discussion of, presumably, one of the most private labours, washing underwear. The figure of authority in this part of the poem is “our Mistress” (170). Collier uses this section to underline the brutality of the labour of the washerwoman, how work managed and performed by men is priviledged by Duck:

Until with Heat and Work, 'tis often known,
Not only Sweat, but Blood runs trickling down
Our wrists and Fingers; still our Work demands
The constant action of our lab'ring Hands

(“The Woman's” 184-88)

But Donna Landry points out that, despite Collier's clear recognition of the managed “nature” of her own existence, “The Woman's Labour” has never emerged as a document for social change (120). In part, the poem is contained by its asserted generic identity as a response to Duck's poem which limits it from being read in any expanded context. Contributing to this is the way that Collier's bee metaphor justifies a methodology for owners that perpetuates exploitative labour practices. Collier's focus on the unfair distribution of profits, perhaps inadvertently, advocates a kind of normative control where real changes in power relations between owners and labourers do not occur. Owners merely placate labourers through measures such as profit-sharing and the annual harvest feast, but labourers continue to perform the same “inevitable” tasks. This feigned ethic of caring by owners echoes Warder's and White's specious concern for the bees which relates primarily to maximizing their potential for survival in order to maximize profits. Ann Fairfax Withington points out that Stephen White, as a selling point for his collateral bee boxes, even used compassion for the bees who “return home weary and laden” (59) as a motivation for owners to buy into the new technology. But in this there is no “true” compassion for bees generated within the culture of labour. Collier is left to create her own imaginative defense. If bees are, as Warder indicates, “The True Amazons,” then Collier's call for “an Army of Amazons to vindicate the injured Sex” (Ferguson 264) brings metaphorical bees to their rescue. And women labourers are to some extent vindicated by her poem, at least, in so much as their labour is acknowledged.

Duck's poem received considerable attention because his poem was perceived as a novel and authentic view of a rural labourer's life. Yet Duck's and Collier's very authenticity becomes a two-edged sword which, even as it affords them a subject position, agency and authority within eighteenth-century discourse, converts them and their literacy practice into objects of ocular entertainment for the rich. As labouring-class poets achieve, they are, like the bees, contained within a limiting architecture, collected and metaphorically pressed behind glass, where, as they labour they are admired or damned, subject to the controlling gaze, the surveillance of the powerful. Collier's fluency with metaphor and her witty ability to convert Duck's negative to her positive by exchanging sparrows for bees attests to her skill as a poet. Collier positively connects bees and women and underlines a parallel oppression. But in neglecting to dismantle the framework of oppression and by not perceiving the oppression of animals and the oppression of women as the same oppression, she enables a more systemic containment in which she joins the daughters of Danaus, who are condemned to carry water in sieves, to perpetuate her perpetual participation in rural labour.

It is difficult to privilege a new ecocritical reading of “The Woman's Labour” over the established readings that place labour at the centre of the poem. Even as I see both Duck and Collier's self-representations as radical in a way that perhaps others do not, I ultimately concur with the conclusion that Duck is “contained” and Collier is “resigned.”²² But Collier, by using the bee metaphor, creates the connection that draws out a reading of the poem as a nature poem and allows for its broader implications to be considered. Just as the meaning of the beehive in the eighteenth century cannot be firmly fixed, neither can the impact and significance of “The Woman's Labour” be fixed within its mode as a response to Duck nor in its interpretation as a labour poem. Nor can the nature poem be fixed. Reading “The Woman's Labour” as a nature poem enlarges the definition of a genre which has its history, too, of excluding the voices of labouring-class people and the cultivated nature which has become their “natural” context and a measure of their human “nature.”

Notes

1. Perhaps the very potency of this metaphorical relationship can be measured in relation to the internalization of the image within the discourse of twentieth-century natural science. For example, Bernd Heinrich appropriates the image for the title and conceptual frame of his 1979 book Bumblebee Economics which discusses bumblebees' management of resources (heat, in particular) to maximize productivity, profit and survival.

2. This image is an established topos which appears in works as various as “Winter” from “The Seasons” (1730), Burns's “The Cotter's Saturday Night” (1786) and Gainsborough's painting “Cottage Door with Children Playing” (1778).

3. This is not merely realism, though. As John Goodridge points out, a thunderstorm is a “familiar georgic convention” (19).

4. By the nineteenth-century, this ethic of “protection” was so entrenched that Thomas Nutt bragged in his Humanity to Honey-Bees (1832) that his collateral bee-box design was “so contrived that ten thousand Bees can with ease leave their prison and their sweets in the possession of the humane apiarian, without the possible chance of a single intruder forcing it entrance to rob the magazine or to annoy the apiarian” (Harding 112). The reference to the hive as a prison certainly resonates with Collier's bee metaphor though Nutt's bright and positive tone suggests he has no sense of bee subjectivity as prisoners. Nutt's war imagery indicates a familiarity with Virgil's bees.

5. Ann Fairfax Withington writes in her article, “Republican Bees: The Political Economy of the Beehive in Eighteenth-Century America,” of how the iconography utilizing the beehive as a symbol of the monarchy was adapted to serve republican ends in eighteenth-century America. Today the bee and beehive comprise the logo for that quintessential American business, Martha Stewart's mail-order division, “Martha by Mail.”

6. This perception, though, cuts both ways. Eighteenth-century scientific discourse differs from twentieth-century scientific discourse is ways that ecocritics might actually admire. While critics such as Linda Birke chastise scientific discourse for standing outside nature through the use of the passive voice, functioning as a missing agent or “a scientist [removed] from the sentence” (44), Warder's voice predominates as he participates in the eighteenth-century exercise of fashioning the scientific gentleman.

7. As Keith Thomas points out, “domestic beasts were frequently spoken to for their owners, unlike Cartesian intellectuals, never thought them incapable of understanding” (96).

8. Stephen White even discusses how the new bee-box technology effectively “protects” bees from predators.

9. Both John Goodridge and E. P. Thompson point to folk culture around bees and women's traditional role in communicating with the bees. “Telling the bees” takes place when bees, in their cultural role as psychopomps, are told of a death in their human family. This ostensibly ensures the bees' survival (Goodridge 51). The custom is richly described in John Greenleaf Whittier's ninteenth-century American poem “Telling the Bees” (1858).

10. While Warder is quick to correct some “ridiculous” misconceptions of the past, he makes new errors which current readers, especially those knowledgeable about bees, would find quite amusing.

11. Donna Landry cites Collier's poem “On The Marriage of George the Third, Wrote in the Seventy-Second year of her Age,” to illustrate Collier's “problematical stance” in relation to “political and social authority.” In “On The Marriage,” Collier argues that “Kings should be militantly strong, if not explicitly expansionist, in the name of protestant liberty; royal couples should set the pattern of domestic virtue for their peoples” (Landry 116-17).

12. One thing that natural science had firmly established by the early-modern period was that the gender of the head-bee is female. Prior to that, the queen had been presumed male though writers regularly altered the gender of the head-bee to match the gender of the reigning monarch (Royds 60).

13. This dedication first appears in the second edition of The True Amazons (Harding 71).

14. Warder calls the bee the “most noble” and next to the silkworm, the most useful of all insects (1).

15. This positive linguistic association has not generally been examined in ecofeminist discussion of discourses which collapse the categories of “animal” and “woman.” In Joan Dunayer's “Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots,” for example, there is only a substantial account and analysis of the pejorative uses of animal referents for women. While Dunayer cites “queen bee” as pejorative (12) and “busy as a bee” as complimentary (17), she does not discuss the complimentary deferring to Halverson's assertion that “animal metaphors are overwhelmingly negative” (17).

16. Dedication is usually a sign of existing or desired patronage.

17. Warder is referring to William Lily and John Colet's A Short Introduction of Grammar (1594).

18. Ferguson published the full text of “The Woman's Labour” in her 1985 book First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799.

19. Rose Mary Davis harshly judges labouring-class poets who come after Duck. She accuses Collier of being motivated to write her response to Duck's poem not by proto-feminist indignation or wit but by greed—she hoped to emulate and capitalize on Duck's monumental success (66). This is an odd value judgment in a cultural context which would view Collier's “enterprise” positively.

20. See Peggy Munsterberg, The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry (1980).

21. Donna Landry points out that this paid domestic labour is hidden as well because it takes place in the winter months. While men work seasonally, women's work is extended year-round (114).

22. See Linda Zionkowski's “Strategies of Containment: Stephen Duck, Ann Yearsley and the Problem of Polite Culture” and Donna Landry's “The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History.”

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