Abstract
The various rhetorical and visual strategies for representing the sati enabled many travelers to dissociate themselves from the cruelty of the spectacles of widowburning. Yet, there also emerged, as we saw, representations of the rescue motif, where Hindu widows became objects to be rescued and saved from the cruel excesses of their own culture. As the following pages will illustrate, there also were uncanny convergences in the different discourses that constructed the sati in India and those that fashioned “good wives” and widows in Europe. Earlier, I mentioned the dangers of imposing a pan-European single cultural norm for all European women. There were obvious cultural differences between Dutch, French, English, German, Scottish, Portuguese, and Italian women; there were religious distinctions, as there were differences in class, marital status, wealth, education, and autonomy. Divisions between rural and urban, changing mores from one decade to another, as well as specifically regional variations make the term “European women” problematic. But, I suggest that, despite the vast differences among European women, the dividing lines between one group of women and another were frequently porous. Many intersections occurred within the diverse cultural assumptions that constructed women in different European regions.
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Notes
See Joseph Swetnam, The Aragnment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), in Katherine U. Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, ed. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts about the Controversy about Women in England (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 119–216.
William Biddulph, The Travels of Certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bythinia, Thracia, and to the Black Sea. And into Syria, Cilicia, Pisidia, Mesopotamina, Damascus, Canaan, Galile, Samaria, Judea, Palestina, Jerusalem, Jericho, and to the Red Sea and to sundry other places. Begunne in the yeere of Jubile 1600, and by some of them finished this yeere 1608. The others not yet returned (London: Printed by Th. Haueland, 1609), 55–56.
The references from The Two Noble Ladies, The Distresses, and The Duke of Milan and the mimosa pudica are cited from Robert R. Cawley, Milton and the Literature of Travel (Princeton NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1961), 110, 157.
Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives, 6, 13, 116, 66. See also Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London: Routledge, 1994); and Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture.
“The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony,” in The Book of Common Prayer (1559), in Joan Klein, ed., Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England 1500–1640 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 3–10, esp. 9.
Henry Smith, A Preparative to Marriage (1591), in Kate Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: Constructions of Femininity in England: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995), original emphasis, 82–85, esp. 82.
Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Vintage, 1994, rpt. 1984), 526–27.
Philip Stubbes, A Crystal Glass for Christian Women, Containing a Most Excellent Discourse of the Godly Life and Christian Death of Mistress Katherine Stubbes (London, 1591), in Klein, ed. Daughters, Wives, and Widows, 139–49, esp. xi, 141, 143.
Joseph Swetnam, The Aragnment of Lewde, idle, froward, and unconstant women (London, 1615), in Half Humankind, 211.
Original emphasis, Richard Brathwaite, “The Description of a good Wife: or, a rare one among Women” (London, 1619), B4.
The reference to Thomas Overbury, A Wife (London, 1614), occurs in The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Women: A Reader, ed. N. H. Keeble (London: Routledge, 1994), 165. The reference to John Gough’s Academy of Complements (1684) also occurs in The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Women, 75–76.
Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 10.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (New York: Routledge, 1992) xi.
See Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England, 1500–1660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 96–108.
See Oscar Di Simplicio, “Perpetuas: The Women who Kept Priests, Siena 1600–1800,” in History from Crime: Selections from Quaderni Storici, trans. Corrada B. Curry, Margaret A. Gallucci, and Mary M. Gallucci, eds. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 32–64.
See Alex Niccholes, Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, and of the greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a Good Wife from a bad An Argument of the dearest Use, but the deepest Cunning, that Man may erre in; which is, to cut by a Thread, betweene the greatest Good or Evill in the World (London: Printed by N.O. for Leonard Becket, 1615).
Martin Parker, The Wiving Age Or A great Complaint of the Maidens of London, who now for lacke of good husbands are undone, For now many Widowes though never so old, Are caught up by young men for lucre or gold, in Hyder Rollins, ed. A Pepysian Garland: Black-letter Broadside Ballads of the Year 1595–1639 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 234–38.
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© 2003 Pompa Banerjee
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Banerjee, P. (2003). Instructions for Christian Women. In: Burning Women. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05204-9_4
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