A Feminine "Writing that Conquers": Elizabethan Encounters with the New World

Abstract

A Feminine "Writing that Conquers": Elizabethan Encounters with the New World Kristen G. Brookes Farmington, Connecticut Introduction A man who represents his nation delights in exploring a virginal body of land, then takes possession of "her" through an act of seizure figured as penetration. This story of colonization is, of course, a familiar one. Yet what happens when, as in Elizabethan England, the invading nation is represented by a woman, and a virgin at that? Clearly, the fact that the prince who might have been urged to seize America's maidenhead was also a queen presents a potentially shocking metaphorical situation, one that most authors and champions of the imperial project would have viewed not only as an embarrassment, but as an abomination.1 Remarkably, however, rather than shunning this sort of metaphor, several Elizabethan writers and artists exploited it, creating grand visions of an empire founded on a relationship between two bodies figured as female virgins: Queen Elizabeth I, identical with her island realm; and the New World, a vast expanse of "virgin" terrain. Two embarkation poems—Stephen Parmenius's "De Navigatione" (1582) and George Chapman's "De Guiana, carmen Epicum" (1596)—along with the "Armada" portrait of Elizabeth, attributed to George Gower (1588), especially capitalized on the possibilities offered by a same-sex imperial encounter, portraying these New World/Old World "twins" as directly engaged with each other, in relationships ranging from "sisterly" to sexual and predatory. In the past two decades, a great deal of revelatory work has been done on gender and sexuality in discourses of discovery and colonization.2 Because of the scholarship of Annette Kolodny, Michel de Certeau, Peter Hulme, Louis Montrose, and others, the colonial encounter has come to be understood as a heterosexual one, emblematized by that between the standing, armored Vespucci and the naked, reclining female America in Theodor Galle's engraving (ca. 1580) as well as by Sir Walter Ralegh's hortatory proclamation that "Guiana is a Countrey [End Page 227] that hath yet her Maydenhead."3 In a highly influential essay that focuses mainly on Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana, Montrose explores how gendered and sexualized "protocolonialist 'othering' . . . engages, interacts with, and mediates between two distinctive Elizabethan discourses: one, articulating the relationship between Englishmen and Spaniards; the other, articulating the relationship between the woman monarch and her masculine subjects."4 Taking among his points of departure Galle's engraving and Ralegh's proclamation (which serves as his essay's epigraph), Montrose elaborates on Certeau's notion of "writing that conquers," noting that Certeau takes the engraving of Vespucci's discovery of America as "'an inaugural scene'" of "'writing that conquers,'"—that is, a "'colonization of the body by the discourse of power[,] . . . [which] will use the New World as if it were a blank, "savage" page on which Western desire will be written.'"5 Montrose further defines this term as "the writing subject's textualization of the body of the Other, neither as mere description nor as genuine encounter but rather as an act of symbolic violence, mastery, and self-empowerment . . . in particular, as a mode of symbolic action whose agent is gendered masculine and whose object is gendered feminine."6 Montrose's nuanced essay has made invaluable contributions to English Renaissance studies on gender and colonization. Most influential has been his bringing together of the sexualized relationship between male colonizer and female territory with the sexually charged relationship between this same male figure and Queen Elizabeth I, along with his highlighting of the "land-as-body" discourse that identified the body of Elizabeth with her "island" realm, which, as he notes, made possible analogies between Elizabeth and the New World terrain some Englishmen wished to explore.7 Yet Montrose's focus on Ralegh's negotiation of English masculine identity in relation to the Spanish and in relation to his female sovereign excludes the possibility of a scenario in which the masculine plays no role or in which Queen Elizabeth I is a feminine agent of...