The Texts
RWO
Forewords
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WWP
The Texts
RWO
Forewords
|
Foreword by Susanne Woods
Foreword by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman
Renaissance Women Online (RWO) invites students and scholars around the world to join in the process of assessing new knowledge--the texts of early women writers, long in the shadow of a masculine cultural hegemony--and to help us find the new questions we must learn to ask in order to understand and integrate the rapid intellectual changes provoked by the electronic revolution.
Print changed world culture forever. Electronic encoding and communication are changing it again. Works by early modern women have a special place in this cascading world, not only because the Brown University Women Writers Project is putting hundreds of complete and fully encoded texts onto the computer. The study of these women is also a very useful tool for observing a major shift in how European-based culture understands its traditions and applies them to constructing ideas of self and community. The traditional suppression or ignoring of the many texts representing the voices of women who lived between 1500 and 1700 provides us with an interesting oddity: new knowledge about a period and culture already long and deeply studied.
RWO has become a key opportunity for reassessing not only European culture, but our ideas of text and learning. Individual texts and entire curricula have been radically destabilized by newly collaborative and interactive models of what constitutes information worth knowing and how knowledge and ideas relate to each other and the human condition. These writings by early modern women now provide opportunities for groups of scholars from various disciplines to reconsider the shape of textual culture. Electronic communication is the central feature of this and other new networks, increasingly global and increasingly complex. The relation between the study of early modern women and the developing information age is more than ends and means, however, since the late twentieth century both resembles the early modern period, with its uneasy shift from manuscript to print culture and its rapid expansion of a global economy, and parodies it. When Samuel Daniel projected a hypothetical linguistic imperialism ("What worlds in th'yet unformed Occident/ May come refin'd with th'accents that are ours?" Musophilus, 1601, ll. 957-62), he may have envisioned something like the nineteenth-century empire and Dickens, but he could not possibly have envisioned an international Text Encoding Initiative or Robert Coover's interactive novels. What was in his time the dawn of a fully global mercantilism is now the apotheosis of international capitalism, frought with paradoxes of control and access as information and resources travel--literally--at the speed of light.
In the nineteenth century Jacob Burckhardt argued that the "renaissance" was a time when "Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such" (121). Recently Sherry Turkle made an observation which seems to apply as much to the early age of printing as to our own: "as human beings become increasingly intertwined with the technology and with each other via the technology, old distinctions between what is specifically human and specifically technological become more complex" (Life on the Screen, 21). The issues surrounding the texts of RWO may be political, ideological, economic, and aesthetic, but they are also fundamental to how we define what it means to be human, and how we use our devices for expression and connection to encode those definitions.
Centering women writers in a study of the early modern period destabilizes not only traditional views of who did what between 1500 and 1700, it also puts into the foreground paradoxes of identity. It was unquestionably more difficult for a woman to write for a public audience than it was for a man (though it was no simple matter for anyone), but, as these texts show, many women did, usually with overt ambivalence about their relation to gender roles. The simplest solution was to blame the impulse on God, which allowed traditional notions of a gendered self to be infinitely malleable in the face of divine intention. Women writing, particularly though not necessarily for print publication, engaged with the technologies of manuscript and print to formulate identities in this time of religious (and therefore ideological) flux.
Among the conservative strategies for this transgression are "translation," allowing women to put men's texts into English (as with the Countess of Pembroke's Antonius), and the dream convention (as in A Godlie Dreame, by Elizabeth Melvill, Lady Culros). Other writers are more radical. Aemilia Lanyer, in the Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), for example, acknowledges that a woman writing is "seldom seene" ("To the Queenes most Excellent Majestie"), but that she has a divinely-directed poetic vocation. Her work is the product of both Godly visitation and personal conviction.
As women found strategies to negotiate past gender imperatives, these texts also expand our understanding of how those imperatives were actually lived. The principal distinction between gender roles was between the outward focus of men and the inward (and indoor) focus of women, which roughly coincided with some, though by no means all, male-female divisions of labor. This distinction was frequently and variously expressed, as for example by Sir Thomas Elyot in the Boke Named the Governour, 1531: "A man in his naturall perfection is fiers / hardy / stronge in opinion / covaitous of glorie / desirous of knowledge / appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be milde / timerouse / tractable / benigne / of sure remembrance / and shamfast" (I.xxi). Perhaps the closest to official Elizabethan doctrine comes from Sir Thomas Smith's Common-welth of England (1589): "Then if this be a societie, and consisteth onely of freemen, the least part thereof must be of two. The naturelest, and first, conjunction of two . . . is of the husband and of the wife, after a divers sort, each having care of the familie: the man to get, to travaile abroade, to defende: the wife to save that which is gotten, to tarie at home, to distribute that which commeth of the husbandes labor, for the nutriture of the children, and family of them both, and to keepe all at home neate and cleane" (sig. C2).
To read the texts women construct, to seek out how women see themselves within and beyond the gender debates whose terms were long set by men, is to question the whole fabric of cultural definition. Categories of gender, self, human relationships and the relationship of a person to the universe are all rendered suspect by the very act of a woman's writing, and what she says helps blur those lines even more. Examples of women's refusal to remain neatly within male-defined boundaries appear at all social levels, and in both private and public writings, as the texts in RWO amply testify.
In pushing us to ask new questions, and to look anew at old material, the study of early modern women makes us more flexible in looking at boundaries and fusions, margins and centers, as they fluctuate in our minds and lives at the dawn of the twenty-first century. On a practical level, the sheer nakedness of these texts, unencumbered by critical tradition, allows us an opportunity to rethink issues of text, editing, commentary, and criticism. They become fresh loci for theorizing author, reader, and culture. Better than the male canonical texts, which have a disciplinary history that sometimes rigidifies our approach to them, these woman's texts invite us to cross the boundaries between literature and history, sociology and psychology, economic and material culture, and to re-think and recombine categorical structures of inquiry. They shift our ontological base, and demand epistemological revision.
Where will these shifts and revisions lead? What will it be like to grab the word "liberty" and its lemmas and cognates from 100 texts by women writing in the renaissance? What interaction will we develop among machine, long dead voices, textual theory, and our own reconfiguring personal and cultural identities? If, as historians insist, cultures are defined not by the answers they give but by the questions they ask, we are on the verge of a new culture, because we are on the verge of asking a set of questions we are only beginning to imagine.
Welcome to this remarkable confluence of old texts and new machines, which are really new texts confronting old assumptions. Teach us the questions to ask.
Works Cited
Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, [1860, 68]
tr. S. G. C. Middlemore, ed. Irene Gordon. New York: Mentor, 1961.
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
As a novelist, I spend large parts of my day roaming and discovering the world in imagination. Here the politics of the globe, the relationships of the home, the myths of the past, the wisdom of literature and philosophy, the curve of the sky, the angle of an ankle, the rhythm of words all come together and reveal themselves in story.
I am also a mother of two sons--now grown and off at college. During their childhood I spent endless hours telling them stories and making up stories with them. We imagined the world we couldn't see, behind the scenes of the world we did see. When my sons were nine and eleven, my husband and I moved to London, and on our first holiday we took the boys to Paris. There we visited the Museum and Hotel des Invalides. As we walked through room upon room filled with uniformed soldiers, scenes of battles, arms and armor from the 14th century to present day, I asked my sons, "Where are the women?" Granted this was a military museum, but it was also a rendition of the last 600 years of French history, and there were no women in any of the displays. "Women weren't soldiers, Mom!" they answered. "Yes, but don't you think they were somewhere in this history?" I was asking them again to consider the world behind the scenes of what they were seeing. Finally my youngest son shouted excitedly from one of the rooms, "Mom, Mom...I found a woman!" We all hurried next door, and there she was: a canteen carrier. Even Napoleon's horse and dog, now stuffed and on display, had secured a larger place in this history.
As my sons grew, we considered other stories on the periphery of what they were learning in school--such as in my oldest son's American literature course which covered the first half of the twentieth century without mentioning one woman writer. I recommended he should also read Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Eudora Welty. The question continues to challenge: how valid is a view of history if it leaves out large portions of the population?
Answering this question is at the heart of Brown University's Women Writers Project, particularly Renaissance Women Online. Though most college English majors and novelists writing in English know the names of Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott and Henry Fielding as the early pioneers of fiction, how many have heard of, let alone read, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn? Yet these women wrote voluminously in the 17th century before Defoe, Scott or Fielding and were as well or better read than many of the male writers in their day. Even fewer students and writers know about Lady Mary Wroath, who had to "write for her life" when her husband and son died, and she was faced with financial ruin, or of Katherine Philips, who lamented that she had been published against her will and therefore had to face the ignominy that came to a woman who actually published her writing. In placing the work of these and dozens of pre-Victorian women online--over 100 works encoded to render the original text--the Women Writers Project and Renaissance Women Online is part of a larger effort to raise a literary Titanic from history's floor. The resurrection has been undertaken by scholars in America and England over the past two decades. Brown's encoding of the texts and offering of them online secures the work as it breaks through the surface and, one hopes, into the canons of English literature. It also offers this work not only to scholars and English literature students, but to novelists, poets and to anyone anywhere in the world who is connected to the internet.
I think immediately of a group of women I've come to learn about who spend their days outside their homes shrouded from head to foot in black, with only their faces, not even their hair, showing. They are from the first generation of women to grow up under the strict Islamic laws of the mullahs in Iran, yet they study English literature together behind closed doors. In particular they like the novels of Jane Austen for her "subversiveness" as she satirizes the strictures of her society. Though not allowed to display their feelings in public, these women write about their feelings and unveil themselves and communicate via the internet with each other and with an Iranian woman professor, who is currently teaching in the U.S. I wonder what they will think of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn when they find them in Renaissance Women Online. I can't help but think they will share some of her spirit and defiance.
For she loves writing more than Company
But if it pleases not your Eyes or sight,
She doth not care, since it pleas'd her to write;
For she indeavours, tryes all that she may
To please her self in every honest way;
Wherefore a praise, or yet applause from you,
She expects not, nor challenges as her due."
--Prologue, The Aprocriphal Ladies
Margaret Cavendish, 1662
In 1929 Virginia Woolf wrote:
When a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values--to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important. And, for that, of course, she will be criticized; for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the correct scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from his own.
As a novelist, I recommend the Brown Women Writers Project and Renaissance Women Online. The texts available open the doors to the past and to imaginations of the past not widely known. I recently pulled down my old Seventeenth Century Prose and Poetry anthology from my own college days several decades ago. Out of almost 1100 pages of text, there was one page on one woman writer, a single poem by Katherine Philips. These texts now available online allow us all--men and women--to see from a different point of view what was happening behind the scenes of what we knew as 16th, 17th and 18th century English and American literature. It allows us a glimpse inside the imaginations of these women. The imagination after all is the creator and the subverter and the ultimate "room of one's own," room women have sought refuge in for centuries, a room we can now also share on the Internet.
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