Belated Yuletide Reveal

[fulselden]

So, a few days back I became approximately the last person on the geeky side of the internet to see Inception, which was, well, fun. Really fun. I'm still a bit baffled as to why it became INSTANT FANDOM CATNIP, however - I guess it did a pretty elegant job at creating side characters one wants to see fleshed out, and the oneiromancers-for-hire bit of the worldbuilding is simultaneously fairly intriguing and entirely disposable (incidentally, Cob and Moll? MOST BORING ARCHITECTS EVER. Seriously, they get a lifetime to build an entire world, and they come up with a city full of indentikit skyscrapers ? I mean, I suppose I should be grateful that the film didn't indulge in too much visual noodling of the Gilliam variety, but, still. I might feel more kindly towards Cobb if his plot hadn't involved a touch too many sadface SLOW MOTION KIDS sequences). Also, I guess almost the entire cast was made up of eminently slashable guys. That probably helped.

But if the, uh, fandom lens (tm) doesn't always make things all that much clearer, it worked wonders on the fandom I was assigned for Yuletide, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Admittedly, the last time the fandom for this one was exactly flourishing was in the early years of the seventeenth century, but as my very sweet recipient, yunitsa, says, if any early modern text deserves to have a present-day fandom, it's this one, which in its most basic form (it has a fairly complicated textual history. Here's the expanded 1590 version, if anyone's interested - warning for sixteenth-century attitudes to sex, death, peasants, lions and bears, etc etc) is the average exquisite tale of a couple of Arcadian princesses forced into a year of pastoral seclusion by their father (why? AN ORACLE DID IT), being wooed and won by a pair of dashing princes, Pyrocles and Mucidorus.

Oh, and of course Mucidorus disguises himself as a shepherd while Pyrocles decides to dress up as an Amazon - and, oh boy, the text goes to great trouble to impress upon us that he makes a very pretty Amazon indeed. So pretty, in fact, that the princess' mother and father both fall for him/her. Oh, and Sidney makes a point of keeping Pyrocles as a 'her' for as long as possible, even when the Amazon disguise is a very open secret indeed (how open? well, morning-after-with-princess-Philoclea open, for one). Shenanigans ensue.

Anyway, while my love for Sidney's 1579-ish An Apology for Poetry is deep and abiding, I've never really made friends with the Arcadia. Which is, y'know, a pity, because it is the early modern English prose romance. Really, want to know what Shakespeare was playing off in the forest of Arden or the outskirts of Athens? Take a spin through the Arcadia. Also, it doubles as a testing ground for Sidney's sideline in reforming English poetics - see, for instance, his spectacular double sestina, Ye Goatherd Gods. I mean, let me hasten to say that I think TS Eliot was talking out of his arse when he (I think) sniffed at the Arcadia as 'a monument of dullness', but, well, for me, at least, the Arcadia works spectacularly well when read curled up in my brain's fandom windowseat. Suddenly the massive slashiness and curlicuing plotlines, the general humming sexiness and the gorgeous, gorgeous clothes work so much better. (Well, I always enjoyed the gorgeous clothes).

I guess I have a tendency to read stuff much too earnestly? Anyway, my only regret about this year's Yuletide is that I ran out of time to make the whole thing into a MASSIVE SPACE AU (no, no, it's ok! My recipient actually suggested this!).

As it is, I went for highschool (um, yep): Glasses, or Feathers.

And girls-only romance (nope, not that kind, alas. The thrones and shipwrecks and distant shores kind): A Perfect Woman's Shape.

This second one is a crossover with a particularly excellent (and exceedingly epic) Arcadia fic (well, though there's a lot of Spenser and Shakespeare in there as well) from 1621, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, by Lady Mary Wroth. I'd never read this before (and I haven't read all of it now - there's a manuscript continuation that I didn't get hold of, although it's in the modern edition), but it's pretty fascinating, not least for its full-on girlifying of romance narrative.

And it has a great frontispiece, courtesy of Simon van de Passe, the guy who did that picture of Pocahontas. Check it out:






Wroth was Philip Sidney's niece, and the Urania gained pretty instant notoriety as a roman à clef spilling the beans about Wroth's unhappy marriage and her liason - after her husband's death - with her cousin William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. Juicy stuff, and by no means the only scandal Wroth dressed up with a bit of pastoral scenery and some fancy (or fancier) names. Before the year was out, she was petitioning the king (via the duke of Buckingham) for a warrant to allow her to gather in any books that had been sold, claiming that she'd never intended to publish the work in the first place.

So far, so depressing: crushing marriages and tangled love affairs (William Herbert got around, to put it mildly) and societal censorship all round. But the thing is, all of that really is right there in the text: women in the Urania end up hitched to men who don't deserve them; make friends and enemies; feel lust and love and write poems about it.

Check out Pamphilia (Wroth's main avatar) refusing to back down from another adventure:

Let it be what it will said Pamphilia, I will see the end of it, led as in a dreame by the leader, not with bewitching dull spirit but craft. You may said Vrania, hauing had such successe in the last, yet take heed, all aduentures were not framed for you to finish. Nor for you to be enchanted in, answered shee. So they went on, the two other marking what they did, who sent some one, or two of their seruants to discouer what this was. They found a round building like a Theater, carued curiously, and in mighty pillars; light they might in many places discerne betweene the pillars of the vpper row, but what was within, they could not discouer, nor find the gate to enter it.

Admittedly, this doesn't go so well - Pamphilia and Urania end up sitting out a chunk of narrative trapped in the magic theatre once they get inside - but, well, they're rescued by another lady, which counts for something. And the theatre turns out to centre around a pillar of gold which bears a book containing a bit of Urania's life story, which, being your typical long-lost princess, she's been piecing together since the first lines of the work. Talk about the centrality of female narratives.

And Pamphilia, whose love for the unfaithful Herbert-figure Amphilanthus (his name means 'twice-loving' - never a good sign), is one of the central threads of the narrative, may suffer beautifully on his account, but, hey, she also gets crowned queen of Pamphilia, having been specially chosen for the job by her uncle, gets to go adventuring all around the mediterranean with her bestest of friends Urania, and even immortalises her love in verse:

When she had (as long as her impatient desires would permit her) beheld the chast Goddesse, she went to her bed againe, taking a little Cabinet with her, wherein she had many papers, and setting a light by her, began to reade them, but few of them pleasing her, she took pen and paper, and being excellent in writing, writ these verses following.

Ok, as scenes of female creation go, this manages to top that famous vignette of Austen hiding her papers at the creak of the door in terms of chronic enclosure and secrecy. But Wroth was still the first English woman to publish a sonnet sequence (see here), and some of her stuff isn't half bad. Check out this wry, bitter, sharp-voiced version of love as a blind, heart-stealing trickster manchild:

Love like a Jugler comes to play his prize,
And all mindes draw his wonders to admire,
To see how cunningly he (wanting eyes)
Can yet deceive the best sight of desire.

The wanton Childe, how he can faine his fire
So prettily, as none sees his disguise,
How finely doe his trickes; while we fooles hire
The badge, and office of his tyrannies.

For in the ende such Jugling he doth make,
As he our hearts instead of eyes doth take;
For men can onely by their slights abuse.

The sight with nimble, and delightful skill,
But if he play, his gaine is our lost will.
Yet Childe-like we cannot his sports refuse.

Most daringly of all, Wroth does a gender-swap on a scene from Book III of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, where the lady knight Britomart rescues Amoret from the vile enchanter Busirane. In Wroth's revisioning (at an underworld whose entrance is marked by what seems to be a full-on stone circle - 'a place made round like a Crowne of mighty stones'), the torturer is female - Pamphilia's rival Musalina ('no hater of mankind', as the narrator snidely puts it) - and the victim is Amphilanthus:

Pamphilia aduentured, and pulling hard at a ring of iron which appeared, opned the great stone, when a doore shewed entrance, but within she might see a place like a Hell of flames, and fire, and as if many walking and throwing pieces of men and women vp and downe the flames, partly burnt, and they still stirring the fire, and more brought in, and the longer she looked, the more she discernd, yet all as in the hell of deceit, at last she saw Musalina sitting in a Chaire of Gold, a Crowne on her head, and Lucenia holding a sword, which Musalina tooke in her hand, and before them Amphilanthus was standing, with his heart ript open, and Pamphilia written in it, Musalina ready with the point of the sword to conclude all, by razing that name out, and so his heart as the wound to perish.

And, intriguingly, Pamphilia doesn't rescue her guy: only the unconstant can pass the ring of flames. Her possession of the moral highground, mind you, is later spelled out to Amphilanthus in burning letters - returning to the same 'hell of deepe deceit', he sees a vision of

Pamphilia dead, lying within an arch, her breast open and in it his name made, in little flames burning like pretty lamps which made the letters, as if set round with diamonds, and so cleare it was, as hee distinctly saw the letters ingrauen at the bottome in Characters of bloud [...].

Eventually, Wroth has him come to his senses, reconcile with Pamphilia, and tear the whole place down, 'resoluing nothing should remaine as witnesses of his former ficklenes'. As Jacqueline Miller points out ("Lady Mary Wroth in the House of Busirane" in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (eds. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, 2000)), this is a remarkably twisty and recursive scene of rewriting, for all Wroth's eventual dismantling of Spenser's scenery. There's something rather touching about Wroth's refusal to write Pamphilia into the Britomart role, able to charge in and rescue all comers, her chastity ultimately unassailable. This rewriting of Spenser, like Pamphilia's closeted versifying, is rather muted and constrained by practicalities, for all the epic wish-fulfillment of Pamphilia's literally readable heart. As Miller has it, 'Wroth associates female romantic/sexual desire with questions of narrative deferral and closure' - not to mention physical enclosure, in theatre or cabinet, arch or open heart - and the narrative is haunted by privacy, by the dangers and delights of closed-off spaces and rounded-off stories. Real life is too close to the surface, here, though, for easy endings, even when you borrow a hell so that you can knock it down. For my money, Wroth's intricate, sprawling text reads has something of the family chronicle about it; the messiness of a text that's allegorising a world where women are there to be read, not to write, and it's men who get to do the knocking down and the building anew, where a work published by a woman might need to be stuffed back in the closet post-haste, family skeletons and all.

Well, that was a bit more involved than I meant to get: early modern women writers tend to fill me with FEELINGS. At least Wroth is entirely readable, which is not entirely par for the course (I say angstily). Aaaand ... now I should probably get bac to my NYR stories.