Female Rebels and Patriarchal Paradigms in Some Neoclassical Works

Abstract

Female Rebels and Patriarchal Paradigms in Some Neoclassical Works J. DOUGLAS CANFIELD Recent criticism of Nicholas Rowe’s Fair Penitent has tended to champion Calista as a proto-feminist heroine. Annibel Jenkins sees Calista as a Francesca-like heroine of defiant, romantic love.1 Richard H. Dammers sees Calista—and Clarissa too, to whom I shall return later—as “saint-like victims of a society that limited the arena in which they could exercise free will and then, ignoring the injustice of its pressures and demands, condemned them when they fell short of its expectations.”2 Jean H. Hagstrum asserts, “Calista’s fine [rebellious] speech [“How hard is the condition of our sex”] rings in our ears, especially after Rowe bows his neck to the yoke of conventional rules and rigors. One suspects that he distrusts them; at least he cannot make his bold and attractive heroine bend to them too easily. He transforms frustrated will into the death wish, which is better than meek submissiveness.”3 Janet E. Aikins asserts, “The cause of Calista’s difficulty is society’s unnatural insistence on women’s subordination to men rather than her own moral failure,” and she concludes, “Enduring adversity, not repentance is what qualifies her for salvation.”4 J. M. Armistead argues that Calista’s indignation is central to our response to the play and that “its primary source is her tragic recognition, persistent to the play’s end, that the dominant institu­ tions and social rituals, albeit supervised by pious men and designed to secure society from mankind’s imperfections, cannot fulfill her own most 153 / 154 / CANFIELD profound, most ‘soulful’ needs.”5 And most recently, at a session on Rowe at the 1987 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies con­ vention in Cincinnati, Paul Johnston argued that for Calista happiness lies not in the religious or moral realm but rather in freedom from the tyranny of the male imagination.6 While I am in sympathy with their response to Calista’s plight, these recent interpretations seem to me based on a notion of character, specifi­ cally female character, that warrants analysis. When Jenkins champions Calista’s “self’—“her character, her problems, her sorrows” (66)—or when Dammers says “Although Lavinia may be the pattern of ideal virtue, it is clear from the substantial lines given to Calista that Rowe’s interest gravitates almost completely toward his ambiguously weak, clearly human creation” (32); or when Hagstrum says “Rowe has given us a glimpse of what a greater and freer spirit might have done with a character determined to realize her identity in unconventional sexual behavior” (121); or when Aikins says “Calista is a victim of forces over which she has no control” (270); or when Armistead speaks repeatedly of Calista’s “true identity” (177 and passim); or when Johnston says Calis­ ta’s “sole wish is to be her own person”: we can detect that each critic is thinking of Calista as a real human being or at least the sign of such a being. I do not wish to call attention to the truism that Calista is a character in a play. I wish rather to call attention to the fact that there is no such neutral a thing as a “real human being,” that character is always a construct in a fictional discourse that is constitutive of each society’s “reality,” imbued with each age’s hegemonic codes, and that fictional character belongs to a discourse that is no less constitutive. Calista’s character does not, pace Dammers, passively “reflect” real-life “counter­ parts in eighteenth-century life” (28). As recent work in eighteenthcentury studies by Nancy Miller, Laura Brown, Ellen Poliak, and Nancy Armstrong, among others, has shown, Calista’s character, as well as the characters of other familiar fictional female rebels, is part of the consti­ tution not of some true female self but of a figure of woman defined by and only meaningful in a patriarchal paradigm in a stage of transition from a feudal to an emerging bourgeois ideology.7 Calista is a figure of uppity woman. Like the collegiate ladies in Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman or the members of the female...