Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern Europe and France by Margaret W. Ferguson (review)

Abstract

472 Reviews Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern Europe and France. By Margaret W. Ferguson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. xiv + 506 pp. ?17.50. ISBN 0-226-24312-5. Margaret W. Ferguson's Dido's Daughters, which received honourable mention in the biennial Rene Wellek Prize, is a large book in all senses. Beginning with a survey of Western conceptions of the preliterate and literacy, Ferguson combines theoretical, historical, anthropological, and cultural concerns to decentre teleological and mas? culine conceptions of the nature and developments of language and literature. Her focus is on the gendered construction of literacy and therefore on the gendering of literature and literaryeducation, fromthe early modern period in England and France to the present. Indeed, one can read Dido's Daughters as a rewriting, reorienting, and updating of works such as Erich Auerbach's Literary Language and its Public in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965) as well as his Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). The ambitious aim ofthe book is to offer a feminist, and in a postmodern manner fractured, grand recit of the 'story of modernization' (p. 377). Narratives of progress and enlightenment are replaced with those of repression, exclusion, and subordination that linked together the 'imperfect' literacies of women and colonized peoples. This linkage is explored in the third chapter, which discusses the humanist project of educationalists such as Richard Mulcaster, to create uniform teaching methods and language usage in order to enable the 'imperial future Mulcaster imagines for his country' (p. 169). Mulcaster's imperial dream is extrapolated from his desire to increase the 'reatch' of English and from his and other humanists' wish that English should become a versatile and stable language, like Latin. In the context of Mulcaster' s aims an older (although undoubtedly masculine and dominant) vision of a revived and renewed European empire is surely being invoked?the topic, forinstance, of Frances Yates's Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1975)?rather than a plan to institute English-language lessons for New World peoples. The relationship between older concepts of European empire and the imperial ventures ofthe Tudors is a vexed one, especially given that the language ofthe time referredto plantations, but here two concepts of empire are merged seamlessly. If the villains ofthe book are capitalism, imperialism, and male prescriptive gram? marians, coalescing in the era of print culture to create a modern world of nations, au? thorized languages, and patterns of subordination, there are also heroines. The second part of the book concentrates on four late medieval and early modern women, Dido's daughters, who challengedmale linguistic and literaryhegemony: two Frenchwomen, Christine de Pizan and Marguerite de Navarre, and two Englishwomen, Elizabeth Cary and Aphra Behn. Christine de Pizan is described as charting a careful path in her writings, working through appropriation and citation and then composing her most famous work, the Cite des dames, itselfundergoing appropriation as it was 'Englished' for 'gentleman readers [. . .] seeking advancement' (p. 122). Marguerite de Navarre, in contrast to Pizan a remarkably well-connected and deeply privileged writer, is described as 'constructing an imperialist project of her own?one that repeatedly stresses the need to restrain men's political and sexual ambitions' (p. 125). The dis? cussion of Marguerite's courtly tales of love and virtue, which instantiated women as rulers of morality and men, is followed by a discussion of an altogther more militant noblewoman, Lady Elizabeth Cary. Her Tragedy of Miriam has been much revived and reprinted in recent years, achieving (briefly) canonical status in a Longman an? thology of British literature. This chapter offersa close reading of Miriam alongside a reading of Shakespeare's portrait of a foreign queen in Antony and Cleopatra. The final chapter discusses Aphra Behn and in particular her two works with New World settings, Oroonoko and the Widdow Ranter. Ferguson's Behn is 'ambivalent' MLR, 100.2, 2005 473 in her assessment ofthe 'imperial project' (p. 351), as well as ambivalent about race. Ferguson makes some odd claims, suggesting that Nathaniel Bacon, the 'outlaw' white colonist of the Widdow Ranter who likens himself to 'the black African HannibaP...