Walsingham: gender, pain, knowledge

Abstract

Robinson's 1797 Walsingham, with its female protagonist who dresses and passes as a male, may best be understood in the context of shifting attitudes over the course of the eighteenth century about the value and legitimacy of women's attempts to be like men. After providing this context to demonstrate that such attempts were roundly viewed as improper at the end of the eighteenth century, this article examines the significance of Robinson's nonetheless using a gender-bending female protagonist three years before that century's close. Her doing so not only raises the possibility that her characters have homosexual relationships or experience homoerotic desire, but also formulates unexpected limits to acceptable femaleness. The novel suggests that emulating ‘male’ intellect is more positive than her culture, for the most part, remained able to accept. Robinson demonstrates that it is valid for a woman to have a strong intellect in part through writing the novel in the voice of the erudite male protagonist, Walsingham, and through having her characters quote from and refer to a wide array of classical and modern authors. Rather than simply advocating a sort of mental androgyny, however, Robinson goes farther to suggest that women have access to a means of knowing not available to men, an epistemology rejecting the binary thinking that organizes the world into mutually exclusive oppositional categories.