Speaking and Silent Women in Upon Appleton House

Abstract

Ostensibly, Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House is a country-house poem praising Nunappleton House, the Yorkshire estate of the great Parliamentarian general, Thomas, Lord Fairfax. 1 Marvell, however, is never one to do anything simply; Upon Appleton House, ranging widely through the gardens and the history of Nunappleton House, is as much a conflict, on its own poetical terms, as the Civil War itself, the memory of which the poem so uneasily skirts. One locus of this pervasive agon is poetic representation, an arena in which the poem's argument with itself plays out most clearly through its use of feminine voices; as Christopher Kendrick points out, remarking on the sexual connotations of "upon" in the poem's title, "women sum this manor up." 2 Marvell deploys the women in the poem to show ruptures between history and poetry, and between the historical poet and the poetic speaker. There are two feminine voices that disrupt the masculine voice of the speaker, and two other women in the poem who, like these speakers' shadows, do not speak at all. The voices are the unnamed nun and the cook Thestylis; the silent bodies are the virgin Thwaites and the child Maria.