Workshop 31

31.
Interior Designs: The Built Environment
and Early Modern Women’s Subjectivities

Organizers:

Vera J. Camden, English, Psychoanalysis, Kent State University and the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute
Elizabeth V. Chew, Art and Architectural History, Monticello
Kimberly Hill, English, Kent State University
Heather L. Meakin, English and Women’s Studies, Case Western Reserve University

Description:

This workshop will examine a wide range of genres (e.g. epitaph, emblem, conduct book, closet drama, portrait, conversion narrative, diary, architectural plan), both fictional and non-fictional, and written or created by men as well as by women. Our aim in privileging breadth over depth in terms of the number of texts we read is to help us begin to get a sense of the complexity of the ways women’s “multiple cultural and social frames” “define, enable and constrain women’s subjectivity”; we have chosen texts written by or about women of different classes and religious beliefs, for example. The ways in which notions of the community and the individual play out in the built environment can be examined, for example, in Lady Anne Drury and Lady Anne Clifford’s concerns about their role in family dynasties (as Elizabeth Chew argues, dynasty is one of the keys to both male and female selfhood in the period) as compared to the Puritan emphasis on the individual within (or without) a community of the elect which Sara Wight and Hannah Allen articulate. These written and visual texts and physical structures, considered individually or collectively, present a number of methodological and interpretative challenges (working with the visual and the verbal; the avoidance of anachronism; comparing the rhetoric of fictional and non-fictional texts; the use of psychoanalytic theory) for the early modern scholar, and, compared and contrasted to one another, serve to articulate in often surprising ways a number of questions about early modern “structures and subjectivities.” Our focus will be twofold: 1) on the ways in which literal, physical space (this can also be the two-dimensional space of the page or painting) is used to define the female self (and vice versa, so that there is often a reciprocal shaping involved), or in some cases—as in Hannah Allen’s attempt to bury herself under the floorboards of her cousin’s house—destroy the self; 2) on the ways in which spatial metaphor is used to enable knowledge or possession of the self.

It has long been recognized that early modern women’s identity was to a large degree bound up with their ability or desire to control the borders of their bodies, so that what was inside (the female tongue, for example) remained inside, and what was outside (the male penis, for example) remained outside, except under socially regulated circumstances. This cultural fear of and desire to control the permeability of a woman’s bodily borders was mirrored in the early modern woman’s relegation to the domestic or private sphere; she needed to be doubly shut up, as it were. An additional anxiety concerned the susceptibility of their soul and body to intrusions, indeed possession by, the devil. However, the simple dichotomy between private and public has, in the last several years, been shown to be inadequate in understanding most especially, the ways in which space and place are gendered, and the ways in which women related to space and place.

Our four main excerpted texts are the painted closet of emblems, owned (and, Meakin argues, at least designed and possibly created) by Lady Anne Drury, the friend and patroness of John Donne; Henry Jesse’s eye- and earwitness account of Sarah Wight’s spiritual struggles and her oracular utterances delivered from her bed (presented by Vera Camden); Lady Anne Clifford’s description of her travels between her castles and her progression through their interiors (presented by Elizabeth Chew); and Hannah Allen’s conversion narrative (presented by Kimberly Hill) which, as Hill notes, “shows us more about the structural shifts of Allen’s psychic spaces than her spiritual development”. Some context for Lady Drury’s closet is given by Brathwait’s The English Gentlewoman and by Bishop Rainbowe’s description of Lady Anne Clifford’s improvised closet. Both these texts provide different perspectives on women’s privacy and the tensions between prescriptions and actual lived experience. Lady Anne Clifford’s portrait in her closet in the famous Great Picture provides a counterpoint to the complete absence of Lady Anne Drury’s body at the center of her closet and her epitaph (which contains a blank space which should have listed her accomplishments, although her body lies in the tomb on which the epitaph is carved). Both Clifford and Drury, however, are, in their own ways, intensely concerned with the perpetuation (or, in Drury’s case, the end) of family dynasties, a more temporally inflected concern which both women clearly desire to manifest spatially and structurally. The excerpt from Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure provides a fictional imagining of women with the freedom to “incloister” themselves not with the aim of a life of asceticism, but in order to enjoy sensory and intellectual pleasures apart from the annoyances of men. Saint Teresa’s notion of the soul (of men and women) as a castle in the innermost center of which dwells God provides a useful counterpoint. The class inflection of Lady Happy’s convent works in complicated ways with the gendering of an all-female space, as does the discovery of men within its walls and the resolution of the plot. Cavendish’s utopian imagining, and her extended building metaphor in her verse prologue to her plays in its determination to lay claim to the property of her texts, resonates with Clifford’s actual struggle to access her castles and Drury’s own apparent sense of her tiny room providing her with a sense of freedom rather than constraining her. Wight escapes from her mother’s house and the containment of her bedchamber to go rambling by the Thames River looking for self-destructive opportunities, yet it is only when she is able to develop some self-restraint and containment through her belief in Christ’s maternal “holding” that she is no longer suicidal.

We will ask participants to submit via email before the conference one question and one “answer”; that is, a sense of what they wish to know more about, and something from their own work as it intersects with the reading materials which they can offer the group. Organizers will provide 5 minutes each of context (n.b. Meakin’s video clip can be cut to a minute or at most 2 minutes!). We will then break into smaller groups for 20 minutes, and afterwards come together again to discuss the material with all participants.

Preliminary List of Readings and Images:

Epitaph of Lady Anne Drury, Hawstead Church, Suffolk. 1618. (video of family monuments will be shown at the conference) (1 page)
Painted panels from the Hawstead Closet of Lady Anne Drury. c.1612. (photographs and translation of Latin mottos; video and slides will be presented at the conference. N.B. video presentation will take only 2 or 3 minutes and stills will be circulated beforehand]) (2 pages)
The English Gentlewoman. Richard Brathwait. 1631. (Excerpt: Title page and prescription for women’s behavior in their closets) (3 pages)
Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure. 1662. I.i & ii; II.I & ii. (4 1/2 pages)
The Clifford Family Great Picture. (photograph) (1 page)
A sermon preached at the funeral of the Right Honorable Anne, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery. Edward Rainbowe, Bishop of Carlisle. 1677. (1/2 page)
The exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced By the Spirit of Grace, in an Empty Nothing Creature, viz. Mris Sarah Wight....Published for the Refreshing of poor souls, by an Eye and Ear-witnes of a good part thereof, Henry Jesse. 1647. (2 pages)
Margaret Cavendish, “A General prologue to all my playes” (1662). (1 1/2 pages)
The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford. (Excerpts from 1670 and 1673) (1 page)
Architectural plan of Appleby Castle (1 page)
Satan his Methods and Malice Baffl’d. A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with that Choice Christian Mrs. Hannah Allen, (Afterwards Married to Mr. Hatt). 1683. (3 pages)
Saint Teresa of Avila. The Interior Castle. 1577.
(11/2 pages)

Suggested Reading:
(precise selections TBA from 1 or 2 of these titles, most likely the first two!)

Gender Space Architecture: an Interdisciplinary Introduction, edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Jessica Benjamin, “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space.” 1986.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. 1958.
Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion. 1995.
Kerstin Shands, Embracing Space: Spatial Metaphors in Feminist Discourse. 1999.
Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. 1999.