Abstract
Byatt’s tetralogy repeatedly alludes and refers to two of the most prominent figures of British cultural memory. One of them is Elizabeth I, who has been inscribed into British cultural memory as ‘the Virgin Queen, solitary but glorious defender of the English Church and architect of England’s greatness’, as Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman put it (Doran & Freeman, 2003, p.3). Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson aptly highlight Elizabeth’s importance for British cultural memory by arguing that she ‘is perhaps the nearest thing England has ever had to a defining national heroine’ (Dobson & Watson, 2002, p.1). Embodying a period of national unity and increasing international power, the figure of this anomalously powerful unmarried woman has been … central to ‘the making … of Anglo-British … culture’, as Dobson and Watson put it (2002, p.4).
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Notes and References
Also cf. Uhsadel, 2005, p.83.
As Greenblatt points out, this is not to say that the individual was then free to fashion her/his identity outside social norms (Greenblatt, 1980, p.162). However, with feudalism giving way to absolutism, traditional models of identity crumbled as social mobility increased — at least for such educated middle-class men as More, Spenser, and Shakespeare (Greenblatt, 1980, p.7) — and aristocratic power structures were reorganized (Greenblatt, 1980, p.162). Due to these changes, new forms of individual identity were established, resulting in ‘an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ (Greenblatt, 1980, p.2).
For in-depth analyses of the iconography of Elizabeth I cf. Yates, 1975 and Strong, 1977, 1995, 2003.
According to Roy Strong, the Darnley Portrait had a major influence on Elizabethan iconography, because its face pattern appears in all subsequent official portraits of Elizabeth I (Strong, 2003, p.89).
Aby Warburg can be regarded as one who paved the way for the discipline of cultural studies (Erll, 2003, p.23). Especially in recent years, cultural studies scholars have increasingly drawn on Warburg’s work on art history and memory (Weinberg, 2001, p.638). In 1921, Warburg founded the Warburg Institute, which he meant to be an interdisciplinary institution to investigate the function of both individual and collective memory (Weinberg, 2001, p.638). Formerly called the Kul-turwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the Warburg Institute had been Warburg’s personal library before he turned it into a research institute in 1921. In 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, the library was rescued from the Nazi regime by its then director Fritz Saxl, who transferred it from Hamburg to London (Diers et al., 1995, p.60). According to Ernst Cassirer, who belonged to the circle of prominent scholars around Warburg, the institute has aimed to collect material for scholars of both humanities and cultural studies (Cassirer, 1977a, n. pag.). Cassirer argues that its structure and its organization symbolize the methodical unity as well as the amalgamation of all humanities (Cassirer, 1977a, n. pag.).
Unlike Maurice Halbwachs, who developed a thoroughly theorized concept of collective memory, Warburg did not bring together his views on the mnemonic potential of culture into a coherent theory (Gombrich, 1970, p.239; Kany, 1987, p.132);he failed to publish much during his lifetime (Gombrich, 1970, p.14). At the time of his death, his work was largely fragmentary, surviving mostly in notes and jottings (Gombrich, 1970, p.3; Saxl, 2000, p.XIX). Since the 1970s, scholars have edited his lectures and notes and have brought his concept into a coherent theoretical form (cf. Diers et al., 1995; Emden, 2003; Gombrich, 1970; Kany, 1987; Ginzburg, 1995; Warburg, 1998a/b; Warburg, 2000).
Warburg’s largest and most ambitious project is his Mnemosyne pictorial atlas (Warburg, 2000) which Diers et al. describe as follows: ‘The plates Warburg collected present an historical corpus of well-chosen examples from the wealth of European pictorial memory; they are meant to be viewed as an attempt to map the paths of the prefigured icons of remem-brance [Erinnerungsbilder]. It was Warburg’s aim to turn this atlas into an organ for the history of images, art, and culture in general, achieving this goal through a new form of scientific representation’ (Diers et al., 1995, p.73).
Also cf. Schabert, who points out that Elizabeth’s (alleged) virginity was mystified for political reasons. Her virgin body symbolized the sanctity of the English national territory, while her subjects were supposed to provide her with masculine protection (Schabert, 2000, p.7).
Uhsadel argues that Frederica’s greed for knowledge qualifies her as the heroine of a Bildungsroman (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.167-8).
In Passions of the Mind, Byatt acknowledges that The Virgin in the Garden is indebted to the iconography of Elizabeth I and to Frances Yates’ academic analyses of this iconography (Byatt, 1993, p.3).
Also cf. Uhsadel, 2005, p.162.
Also cf. Chapter 9.
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© 2009 Lena Steveker
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Steveker, L. (2009). Figures of Memory: Elizabeth I and Shakespeare. In: Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248595_9
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