Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism by Anne Kelley

Abstract

58 early modern political theory was constructed .’’ Two surprising gaps in the Companion affect the 1660–1700 period especially. One is the lack of a chapter on translation, which (the editor points out) played ‘‘a vital role in the establishment of early modern female literary culture.’’ Translations by Hutchinson, Philips, and Behn, among others, contributed materially to that culture but get short shrift in this volume . The brevity of discussion of female friendship, erotic or companionate (two paragraphs only, both relating to Katherine Philips), is unfortunate also; this was a topos (and factor) of no small significance in the development of seventeenth-century women’s writing, as some modern studies have shown. Karina Williamson University of Edinburgh ANNE KELLEY. Catharine Trotter: An Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism. Hampshire, England: Ashgate , 2002. Pp. vi ⫹ 279. $79.95. In a combative book, Ms. Kelley surveys Trotter’s reputation, texts, and career in order to prove that this ‘‘early modern writer’’ is not ‘‘obscure, dull and narrow-minded’’and to ‘‘reposition [her] as a radical feminocentric writer.’’ Relentlessly defensive, Ms. Kelley hardly concedes that Trotter could have misunderstood something or that her texts have flaws. The inflexible tone which she attributes to Trotter replaces an older distortion with a new unreal singlemindedness . Throughout, consistency and a prudential feminism that eschews sexual unconventionality are virtues in themselves. Ms. Kelley argues that ‘‘the school of feminist criticism which advocates that women rejectthetraditionalrationalmale discourse as part of the phallocentric structure in favour of a more emotional writing based on the female body’’ is ‘‘simplistic,’’ returns women to society’s ‘‘margins,’’and deprives them of respect. For her, Trotter’s ‘‘unwavering’’ adherence to ‘‘rational morality’’providesasolution for complicated human dilemmas and will be taken seriously in public debate . Trotter is ‘‘adamantly opposed’’ to positions other than her own: Trotter’s seemingly tireless rebuttals in her argumentative essays of writers who attacked Locke and Samuel Clarke are presented as solely a matter of her holding on to an argument. Trotter’s ‘‘project [is] to demonstrate that women [can] speak with intellectual authority.’’ Trotter never deviates from a feminist pragmatism that allows a woman to yield to her body’s urges only insofar as is consistent with a self-controlled resolvetoavoidsocialdisapproval . Female characters who think in the ‘‘rational’’ way men do show women how to be powerful. Trotter’s texts are flattened, and outrageous emotional convolutions and logical perversities praised. We aretoadmire The Unhappy Penitent (1701) because its heroine demands that the hero obey what he has contracted to do no matter what the result; The Revolution of Sweden (1706) is praised because its heroine ‘‘prioritises the welfare of her country over her personal feeling’’ (and ends up murdered for her pains). Ms. Kelley dismisses those readers who find lesbianism in Trotter and Sarah Lady Piers’s correspondence and Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1696); I suggest we can make poignant moral sense of this tragedy by paying attention to the profound revulsion against coerced heterosexual contact that fills the 59 soliloquies of all the women charactersin Trotter’s plays who, as Ms. Kelley says, turn to other women for support and comfort . Ms. Kelley mischaracterizes Piers’s letters to the young Trotter when she says the affection displayed is ‘‘rhetorical rather than literal.’’ Piers’s letters jar the reader with the writer’s awkward apologies as she voices her passionate inability to stopherselffromutteringwhatshesays Trotter will see as a transgression. Behind Trotter’s repetitiveness, abstraction from experience, and austere impersonality is a woman who endured ridicule, low status, and, in reaction, was inclined to sudden identifications with admired people and passionate loyalties. In her youth, she converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and back again; in her later years, she writes as a woman who married because she had to and has lived in isolatedpoverty;thestrainedcontent of her essays represents her way of asserting a barricaded self-respect. Her letters reveal the limited choices and rejections her position inflicted on her. Ms. Kelley analyzes a poem to reveal that Trotter identified with ‘‘the dilemma faced by poor and obscure men like [Stephen ] Duck,’’ but fails to connect this identification with Trotter’s intense presentation of her self...