The Culture of the Head: Hair in Mary Wroth’s Urania and Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’

Abstract

Hair is not a popular subject in early modern studies. It might figure in the scholarly analysis of race in early modern England, given the significance of hair to contemporary studies of race, but it rarely does, for work there tends to focus on skin colour.1 Histories of hair, while useful, tend to be cursory in providing only catalogues of fashionable hairstyles with more substantial critical analyses beginning only with the eighteenth century.2 Yet, seventeenth-century hair does have a story to tell. ‘Hair is’, says Geraldine Biddle-Perry, ‘one of the most powerful symbols of our individual and collective identities’.3 Hair is also central to the construction of ‘hierarchies of femininity’.4 As Patricia Hill Collins explains, ‘Race, gender, and sexuality converge on this issue of evaluating beauty’; while white women are objectified by being judged for their beauty, their ‘White skin and straight hair simultaneously privilege them in a system that elevates whiteness over blackness’.5 This chapter looks at two stories that forge a vision of female identity dependant on the construction of hair as a visceral instrument of privilege. The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by Lady Mary Wroth and ‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’, printed in Natures Picture Drawn by Fancies Pencil (1656, 1671), by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle make thick, soft and slightly curled long hair an upper-class attribute that can be used powerfully by women.KeywordsClass HierarchyHair LengthShort HairWhite SkinBlack HairThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.