Abstract
A privacy performed would, it seems, be a facsimile of true privacy. However, the phrase prompts us to think about performance as constitutive of privacy, and therefore pries open the apparently natural opposition between “private” and “public.” For example, applying the notion of “performing privacy” to authorship and publication usefully complicates the meaning of becoming “public.” We think of entry into the public sphere as a defining moment in which a text, released from the immediate control of its author, risks scrutiny and judgment. Harold Love defines publication as “a movement from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption.”1 This notion of publication as a movement between two discrete and well-defined realms has seemed particularly appropriate for early modern women’s writing, which is often marked as transgressive.2 Since women’s rare appearances in print violated the period’s explicit gender norms, women’s publication appears as a moment of liberation in which the writer escapes, in her authorial persona at least, her imprisonment in the domestic cares of the private realm. The work that follows proposes that the early modern public/private boundary was the site of both discipline and self-creation for women; and that rather than separating two fully distinct realms, the boundary was flexible and dynamic, open to new definition with each author’s work.
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Notes
Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 36.
On the increase in publication by seventeenth-century English women, see Joad Raymond, “’speaking Abroad’: Gender, Female Authorship and Pamphleteering”, in Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 276–322
Lois G. Schwoerer, “Women’s Public Political Voice in England: 1640–1740”, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 56–74.
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, “Introduction”, in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Goldsmith and Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–9
Dena Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Cunent Historiographical Approaches to the Old Régime”, History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992): 1–20.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57.
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 109–41
Wroth’s letter to George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, avers that she never intended the romance for publication and asks him to procure for her a wanant to recover the printed copies. A continuation of the Urania in Wroth’s own hand remained unpublished until 1999. See Josephine A. Roberts, “Textual Introduction”, in The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), cv.
Wilson and Yachnin, “Introduction”, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Wilson and Yachnin (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.
For theoretical accounts of the relationship between early modern public/ private boundaries and form, see John Brewer, “This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, in Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 1–21
Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
Joseph Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, “Introduction: Charting Habermas’s ‘Literary’ or ‘Precursor’ Public Sphere”, Criticism 46, no. 2 (2004): 201–05
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 114–15.
Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
For comparison, see Ann Elizabeth Gaylin, Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Lawrence I. Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xvii.
Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.
The scholarship on women’s rhetorical theory provides another framework for thinking about the creation of female audiences. See, for example, Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
Aristotle, Politics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1252
“Private” was still current in this sense in early modern England; thus Shakespeare’s Henry V: “And what have kings, that privates have not too, / Save ceremony, save general ceremony?” (4.1.238-39). This and all future citations of Shakespeare’s works will be drawn from G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, eds., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10.
On the meanings of privacy, see James Knowles, “‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet”, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 3–29
Erica Longfellow, “Public, Private, and the Household in Early Seventeenth-Century England”, Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 (2006): 313–34
“Facts, Interpretations and Post-1800 Developments”, chap. 13 in Lawrence Stone, The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 651–87.
Lena Cowen Orlin, “Rewriting Stone’s Renaissance”, Huntington Library Quarterly 64, no. 1–2 (2001): 188–230.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 43.
Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Marie Fleming, “Women and the Public Use of Reason”, Social Theory and Practice 19, no. 1 (1993): 27–50
Miriam Hansen, “Foreword”, in Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix–xli
Carole Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract”, in The Masculinity Studies Reader, ed. Rachel Adams and David Savran (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 119–52.
See also Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere”, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 421–61.
Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), xx.
Heather Dubrow, Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 11–12.
Corinne S. Abate, Privacy, Domesticity, and Women in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003)
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
Catherine Belsey Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999)
Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)
Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth-Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Catharine Gray Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th Century Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 2–3.
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© 2013 Mary E. Trull
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Trull, M.E. (2013). Performing Privacy and Early Modern Women. In: Performing Privacy and Gender in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282996_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282996_1
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