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 Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...