The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Elaine Hobby THE FEMALE BAROQUE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY CULTURE: FROM MARY SIDNEY TO APHRA BEHN, by Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 290 pp. $125.23 hardback; $125.32 ebook. There is much to celebrate in Gary Waller's new book The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, which I read with constant interest, even fascination. As its title indicates, the study refuses the common fragmentation of the early modern period into pre- and post-civil wars and ranges from the poetry, plays, and fiction of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth to that of Margaret Cavendish (and her stepdaughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley) and Aphra Behn. Along the way—and clearly planned from the start as integral to the argument—are writings by figures less well-known in mainstream literary studies, including the English nuns, Gertrude More and Mary Ward. There is also briefer mention of several mid-seventeenth-century prophets—Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, Sarah Wight, Elinor Channel—and some discussion of two New World figures, Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson, as well as the extraordinary verse of Hester Pulter (unknown until its discovery in manuscript in the 1990s) and the "scissoring" activities of the women of Little Gidding as they produced their Bible concordances (pp. 138-47). Folded into the argument are discussions of the structures of Petrarchism and reference to Baroque artists including Artemisia Gentileschi. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is informed, then, by the wide-ranging activities of those engaged in the collective endeavor since the 1970s to recover past women's creativity. Waller repeatedly draws explicit attention to the importance of the "powerful community of scholars" who have, like him, taken part in the endeavor, and he firmly—and correctly, I hope—asserts that "their work has permanently altered how we picture the period" (p. 10). Given the rich findings of the recovery efforts, no single work of this length could take account of all its possible sources. Waller makes his selection through a theoretical model that he sets out in some detail in his first two chapters, approaching the period's writings through Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of the "semiotic" erupting through the "symbolic." Throughout the book, it is Kristeva who is most often referred to as an authority (see, for example, pp. 9, 12-14, 30-31, 66-69, 80-81, 90-92, 221-22, 249-50, 278-80) [End Page 395] and whose writings are most numerous in his bibliographies. As Waller elaborates his theoretical framework, other perspectives are also merged with the Kristevan one—Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" (pp. 20, 115, 152) and Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation" most importantly (pp. 24, 168)—as he seeks to "go beyond [the] autobiographical reductionism" that he thinks readings of Wroth, in particular, have been limited by (p. 221). For this reader, the endeavor to not be overly focused on biographical frameworks is only partially successful. As I read, despite the great attractions of the writings presented and the most welcome unfussy clarity of the book's style, I was repeatedly frustrated by Waller's drive to find in his writers the Baroque sub-categories that he defines (drawing on José Antonio Maravall) as "fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch, and plateauing" (pp. 10, 17). The first and last of these, especially, seem to prompt Waller to the biographical speculation that he warns against. The theoretical model also seems to have led Waller to select for analysis a disproportionate number of authors where control, editing, or direction from a man or men is at issue: Catholic authorities for Ward and More, Hutchinson's persecutors, the Little Gidding women, and the rather odd selection of civil war prophets, who include such manipulated figures as Channel and Wight without any mention of their dozens of sisters who did not encounter equivalent obstacles. It might be that—allowing for the liberal use of such variants as "pale Baroque," "emergent...