The Gendering of Privacy

Abstract

The question I propose to address is this: in early modern culture, did women and men experience privacy in much the same way? The short answer is of course no, for a variety of intuitively sound reasons. Consider the relationship between the male speaker and the female listener in Donne's 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning'. Wonderful and mutual and interdependent though their love may be, they can create the perfect circle at the end of the poem only if they keep to their specifically gendered patterns of behaviour: she is the 'fixed foot' of the compass who remains at home while he roams far into the outside world and eventually returns to her. The woman, in short, never moves outside the domain of the private, because there is no need for her to do so. The man's life includes public responsibilities which insist on his departure ('Though I must go')1 but allow for his return to the private realm with renewed appreciation of its comforts. To put it crudely though not inaccurately, privacy is a cage for the woman, a refuge for the man.2The difference I have outlined is only a point of departure for a more complicated exploration of privacy as represented in some especially revealing textual materials from the seventeenth century: two diaries (by Lady Anne Clifford and Sir Henry Slingsby), two autobiographical narrations (by Lucy Hutchinson and Sir Simonds D'Ewes), and two poems (by the poet known only as Eliza and by Henry Vaughan). I have chosen texts that I felt would offer interesting ways of imagining and in some senses reconstructing the experience of privacy in seventeenth-century culture. But since my focus here is explicitly on gender differences, I have adopted wherever possible the Noah's ark principle: one female and one male in each pair. This rigid rule is applied only to written texts, where the sheer amount of material is now quite plentiful, thanks to the recovery or the revaluation of early modern women writers in the last two decades. With visual materials I have not been able to live up to the same standard of equity. The works of visual art I refer to were all created by men; but I cite them nonetheless, because of what they suggest about the experience of privacy, by women and by men. If there was a female Vermeer in the seventeenth century, her work has yet to be recovered.Privacy did not come naturally to Lady Anne Clifford. She was twice married, but in neither case was wedded life the source of deep or lasting satisfaction. Looking back on her earlier self from the vantage point of her mid-sixties, Clifford admits that both marriages were filled with tension: 'those two lords of mine, to whom I was afterwards by the Divine providence marryed, were in their several kinds worthy noblemen as any then were in this kingdom; yet was it my misfortune to have contradictions and crosses with them both'.3 For perfectly understandable reasons, Clifford refused to be the submissive wife in either of her marriages. When she married her first husband, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset (in 1609), she was already fighting legal battles to ensure that the vast Clifford lands of Westmorland would be hers (as the only surviving child of her father, George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland) and not added to the property of her uncle and his male heirs, if any (as specified in her father's will). Sackville, instead of standing by her side as an ally, urged her to accept a financial settlement in exchange for her putative rights to the land. His ambition was to cut a very considerable figure at the court of James I, and therefore he was always in urgent need of spending money. When, after six years of widowhood, Clifford married Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery (in 1630), she believed that at last she had found someone mean and influential enough to ensure 'the crossing and disappointing [of] the envy, malice and sinister practices of [her] enemies' (Life of Me, p. 49). But she was wrong again, in the sense that Herbert's loyalty quickly faded when he couldn't get what he wanted: a marriage between one of his sons and Clifford's younger daughter, Isabella. …