Monthly Archives: April 2011

The Man-Woman and Womanish Man, Cross-Dressing in Jacobean London

Posted on April 26, 2011 | 4 Comments

 

So I was rummaging through my books in storage in an attempt to get some inspiration for this week’s post. Serendipitously I came across two of my favorite Jacobean pamphlets. (Yes, I am that level of a geek when it comes to Renaissance studies.) The Hic Mulier or The Man Woman and Haer Vir or the Womanish Man (both written in 1620)* are two pamphlets that debate the fad of female transvestitism in early 17th-century London. The more I thought about devoting a post to this topic the more I came to realize how appropriate this would be considering that the 12th Annual International Demin Day was celebrated on April 21st. For those unaware, Demin Day is a worldwide protest against a ruling by the Italian Supreme court in 1992. Here are the particulars of the case: a teenage girl was brutally raped by a 45-year old driving instructor, who threatened her life if she would tell anyone. Courageously the girl did report her assailant, and he was rightfully imprisoned. However, his conviction was overturned on appeal: the Italian Supreme Court ruled that despite the assault and death threats the sex must have been consensual since she was wearing skinny jeans and had to have taken them off for her rapist. Hence the girl was complicit in the act. So outraged by the absurdity of the court’s ruling, the women of the Italian Parliament within hours began protesting and showing solidarity with the victim by wearing jeans.  In 1999, the organization Peace Over Violence started the first Demin Day in L.A..

The issue of sexual violence against women and women’s choice in clothing was being discussed in Jacobean London. Before I continue, I should give some context about the significance of clothing in Early Modern England. What a person wore was very rigidly policed by the state: the Sumptuary Laws regulated what type of clothe a person could wear. The penalty for violating the law could range from confiscation of property and/or imprisonment. Mainly, the purpose of these laws was to establish a visible marker of class, particularly at a time when the mercantile class was gaining the financial means to purchase richer clothe. Though the laws were maintained throughout the 16th-century (Henry VIII actually updated them), James I repealed them in 1604. Beyond class, clothing was also a way of stabilizing gender and sexual identity. A good example of this was the custom of breeching. Childhood was considered a period of asexuality; it was not until a young boy was “breeched” or put on his first pair of pants, between the age of 2-8. Until this point, young boys wore dresses/gowns. Clothing gave a person his/her sex.  (See Stephen Orgel’s Impersonations: the Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England [1996].)

Young boy before breechingYoung boy breeched

The emergence of women cross-dressing really troubled the connection between clothing and sexual identity. For those Latin nerds out there, you probably notice something wrong right away with the term hic mulier: hic is the masculine form of “this,” while the noun it modifies is feminine, “mulier” or “woman.” The comment being made is that the female transvestite throws everything into chaos, including language.

 Frontispiece to Hic Mulier

In the 1620 pamphlet, Hic Mulier, the writer constantly describes this figure as defying any categorization: the hic mulier is “not halfe man, halfe woman; halfe fish, halfe flesh; halfe beast, halfe Monster.” The pamphlet goes on to accuse the female transvestite of dressing more lasciviously:

From the other, you have taken the monstrousness of your deformitie in apparell, exchanging the modest attire of the comely Hood, Cawle, Coyfe, handsome Drsse and Kerchiefe, to the cloudy Ruffianly broad-brim’d Hatte, and wanton Feather, the modest upper parts of a concleaing straight gowne, to the loose, lascivious civill embracement of a French doublet. . . and extreme short wasted to give most easie way to every luxurious action.

In other words, yet confusing, the writer actually finds that in dressing like a man the hic mulier is exhibiting her lustful nature. The anonymous writer at one point insinuates that the female transvestite has traded sexual favors for her outfit and for having her hair cut short. Among being compared to a monster, “the untamed Moore, the naked Indian, and the wilde Irish,” the writer also suggests the hic mulier to be comparable to a prostitute. In Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s The Roaring Girl (1610), Moll Cutpurse, a character based on the real life female transvestite, Mary Firth, is often perceived by other characters as being sexually promiscuous.

Woodcut of Moll Cutpurse

One such character, Laxton, whose name implies his on impotency, attempts to lure Moll into a sexual rendezvous, only to have Moll come armed and challenging him to a duel. In one of the more satisfying moments in Jacobean drama, Moll soundly beats him but not before giving a speech, the longest one in the play, detailing the wrong men have done to women in presuming them to be their whores. (Here’s a link to the play. The speech happens in III.i)**

To the Hic Mulier pamphlet, a very clever response was written entitled Haec Vir, or the Womanish Man.

This pamphlet is dialogue between the characters of the haec vir (again “haec” being feminine, while vir [man] is masculine) and the hic mulier. Essentially, the hic mulier rebuts the haec vir’s argument that she is defying nature by claiming her liberation from slavish adherence to custom:

Bondage or Slavery, is a restraint from those actions, which the minde(of it owne accord) doth most willingly desire: to performe the intents and purposes of anothers disposition, and that not  but by. . . sweetnesse of entreatie, but by force of authoritie and strength of compulsion.

What the hic mulier argues is that there is nothing natural about women wearing a particular type of clothing. Rather, it is merely custom or conventionality that dictates which sex should wear what. Really, this pamphlet is incredibly empowering, admonishing women to break from custom and be allowed to use their reason: “To conclude Custome is an Idiot; and whosoever  dependeth wholely on him [Custom], without the discourse of Reason, will . . . become a slave indeed to contempt and censure.” Since they are “free-borne as Men, have free election, and as free spirit,” the hic mulier character demands that women exercise their own choice in clothing.

* “Custome Is an Idiot”: Jacodean pamphlet Literature on Women. Ed. Susan Gushee O’Malley (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004)

**The villainous father in the play, Sir Alexander, who is under the impression that his son wishes to marry Moll, thinks that she may be a hermaphrodite: “Hoyda! Breeches! What, will he marry a monster with two trinkets? What age is this? If the wife go in breeches, the man must wear long coats like a fool.” (Ii.ii.71-2)

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Francis Bacon and the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill

Posted on April 20, 2011 | 4 Comments

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Oil Spill, one of the worst environmental tragedies in U.S. history.* A question that keeps coming up in all of the retrospectives in the news media is has the Gulf Coast recovered. I find it really interesting how this question is defined. The answer almost always seems to be in regards to Gulf Coast’s economic recovery. Is the tourism industry picking up? Is it safe to eat shrimp harvested from the Gulf?

            Beyond the economic side, the question still remains as to whether the Gulf Coast has recovered ecologically. A recent article on the Huffington Post cites certain environmental scientists’ claim that the Gulf has nearly returned to a pre-spill level: that in a survey of three dozen ecologists, the Gulf averaged a grade of 68 on 100 point scale. (The pre-spill score was 71.) (It seems kind of reductive to place a numerical score on such a complex, rich ecosystem.)  One of my concerns about the reporting on the DWH Oil Spill is that there is a rush to declare disaster avoided and the Gulf restored. I think that much of the reporting looks to reassure that it is within our ability to save the environment from our carelessness. That through technology we can “restore” the natural world, correct our mistake. In, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” environmental ethicist Eric Katz challenges the belief that humanity can ever recover a pristine Nature after having polluted it: “[W]e must not misunderstand what we humans are doing when we attempt to restore nature . . . We are not restoring nature; we are not making it whole and healthy again.” The danger, for Katz, is that it will just become accepted that we can always clean up our environment mistakes with technology, in a way sanctioning our recklessness. For example, turning back to the DWH Oil Spill, consider the use of chemical dispersants. It was not that Corexit EC9500A and EC9527A actually got rid of the oil but sank it below the waves and out of our sight. I highly recommend reading Dr. Samatha Joye’s testimony to Congress and Charles W. Schmidt’s “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico,” both of which offer detailed accounts of what chemical dispersants actually do and the potential environmental warm that they can inflict.

            So what does the debate among environmentalists about the DWH Oil Spill have to do with the Renaissance? Well, quite a bit. In her reporting on the disaster for The Nation, Naomi Klein cites Francis Bacon in her analysis of the arrogance exhibited on the part of British Petroleum:

In 1623 Sir Francis Bacon best encapsulated the new ethos when he wrote in De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientarium that nature is to be “put in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man.” Those words may as well have been BP’s corporate mission statement.

Holding Bacon, the founder of what we’ve come to know as the scientific method, accountable for our modern environmental disasters is a contentious point among scholars. Before getting into that debated, let me give some background here on Bacon and what he envisioned.

When biographers deal with Bacon, they often have to contend with nearly two different personae. First there was the career lawyer/politician, who rose in James I’s government to be named Lord Chancellor only to fall from grace havig been convicted of bribery. Second, there is the philosopher whose work formed the foundation for modern scientific thought. In The Great Instauration, his opus in which he lays out his scientific philosophy, Bacon calls for an entire renewal of all learning:

That the sciences are in an unhappy state, and have made no great progress; and that a path must be opened to man’s understanding entirely different from that known to men before us, and other means of assistance provided, so that the mind can exercise its rightful authority over the nature of things.

If anything, I have always admired the grandiosity of Bacon’s project, rejecting all of Western philosophy up to that point and starting anew. Knowledge, for Bacon, would now come through systematically and inductively investigating the natural world, and by discovering Nature’s hidden processes humanity could begin to control its environment. Bacon thought that ultimately knowledge should be about meeting our physical needs. He writes in the preface to The Great Instauration, that knowledge is not about personal “intellectual satisfaction” but must be directed towards “the benefit and use of life.”    

          So should, as Klein suggests, Bacon be seen as creating a mindset that has led to our modern environmental crises? On the one side are environmental scholars, such as Carolyn Merchant, who find in Bacon a voice sanctioning the unethical treatment of Nature. Here the fundamental argument is that Bacon transformed the way the West looked at Nature, from seeing it a as mother-earth figure to an inanimate source of raw material available for our industrial consumption. Bacon does in his scientific writings discuss Nature in very violent, misogynist terms and demands that Nature be tortured into serving humanity’s needs. On the other side of this debate are modern defenders of Bacon who deem it unfairly anachronistic to lay our environmental disasters on Bacon’s door step. Pere Zagorin, I find, makes the most compelling argument on this side in noting that from the early 17th- century perspective Nature was something to be fear and was not susceptible to being victimized by humanity.

            Now here’s where I see the connection between Bacon’s thought and the DWH Oil Spill. Bacon sees modern science as a project of restoration: it was not necessarily that science was about gaining new power over our environment but rather about recovering the authority that Adam in the Garden of Eden had over Nature. A popular understanding of the Fall that was circulating during Bacon’s time was that due to Adam and Eve having disobeyed God Nature now was in state of disharmony and decline. (You might think of Adam and Eve as having “polluted” Nature with their sin.) In Novum Organum (The New Tool) (1620), which is the first part of his Great Instauration, Bacon describes the goal for the new science as this: “Let the human race only recover its God-given right over Nature, and be given the necessary power.” For Bacon, humanity could intervene into Nature through science and recover the state of Nature that once existed before Adam and Eve’s Fall. So in other words, technology/science allows for humanity to remedy its original transgression and restore Edenic harmony to the natural world. Though secularized, this same belief motivated the use of chemical dispersants in the Gulf – that it is within our power to restore Nature to an earlier, pristine condition through technology. However, I wonder if we should begin to question this belief that technology offers a path towards salvation.

*Poignantly, Transocean, the company who was in charge of operating the oil rig, is planning to fly the families of the eleven workers lost in the tragedy over the site of the rig, now lying on the ocean floor. However, I am sure those who lost loved ones due to, let’s be honest, corporate malfeasance don’t need to be reminded. Nor, I suppose, have the Gulf Coast residents and clean-up workers forgot that nearly 174 million gallons of crude oil spilled into an environment they rely intimately on. (As reported by Agence France-Presse, 415 cases of oil-related health problems have been diagnosed in the Gulf Coast area.)

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“. . . he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”

Posted on April 13, 2011 | 12 Comments

So while skulking around IMDB.com the other day, I made a possibly horrific discovery. Currently a film adaptation (I believe the first) is in the pre-production stage for Paradise Lost. With Alex Poyas (The Crow, IRobot, and Knowing) at the helm, this film, as according to the plot blurb, will take a Byronic reading of John Milton’s epic poem, portraying Satan as the much maligned tragic hero. Honestly, though, a dramatic adaptation of PL is not completely absurd; Milton originally conceived of what would become the greatest epic poem in English as a play. The 1667 edition divided the poem into 10 books, suggesting more of a 5 act play structure; it is not until 1674 that the poem appears in 12 books, more in keeping with the classical convention of epic poetry. 

                Readers of PL have argued this perennial question of Milton’s problematic depiction of Satan. As William Blake so beautifully puts the pro-Satan reading, “Milton was of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” In The Satanic Epic (2003) Neil Forsythe actually takes this reading, which was popular among such Romantic poets as Byron, Keats, and Percy and Mary Shelley, to another level, arguing that Milton fully intended Satan to be the hero of the poem.  (For those fans of Animal House, you’ll recall that Prof. Jennings [Donald Sutherland] suggests this reading to his class of undergrads, before confessing that he finds Milton to be as dull as they do. Blasphemy, I say!)

               The best reading against seeing Milton as writing essentially a satanic epic comes from Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin (1967). Essentially Fish’s interpretations boils down to this: the poem lures the reader into admiring Satan only to yank the rug out from under in pointing out that this is only due to the reader’s own sinful state. Or as my friend, Bob Kilker, brilliantly summarized at a party: “The poem has you start to like the character only to say, ‘No, you idiot. He is Satan!’”

                It is a shame, I suppose, this film wasn’t released three years ago, during Milton’s quadricentennial. Yes, the boy of Bread Street, nicknamed the “Lady of Christ’s College” by his classmates at Cambridge, turned 400 years young on December 9, 2008.

The "Onslaw Portrait"

To commemorate his birthday, numerous books were released, offering new perspectives of the poet who claimed to explain the ways of God to man. In anticipation of the quadricentennial, Laura Lunger Knoppers and Greg M. Semenza edited a collection of essays entitled, Milton in Pop Culture (2006). The topics range from examining PL’s influence on horror films to exploring His Dark Materials as a re-imagining of PL.  Let’s face it, though: Milton has a long way to go before catching up to Shakespeare’s currency for pop culture.

                What I have found really interesting in looking back over the scholarly literature that has come out since then is how our generation looks at Milton. Two excellent biographies have been published since 2008, each giving complementing picture of the English Virgil. Anna Beer’s Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008) situates Milton in the turbulent world of London during the English Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration.  For Beer, Milton was first and foremost a denizen of London. Milton’s life really was contained to a just a few blocks. As Beer points out,

“Back in 1608, [Milton] had been born in Bread Street; his school, St. Paul’s, was his nearest grammar school, just a few yards from his home; even when he returned from the transformational journey to Italy, he only moved to lodgings in St. Bride’s Churchyard, at the other end of Fleet Street, less than a mile from Bread Street. His first children, and his first pamphlets, were produced in Aldersgate Street, north of St. Paul’s, also the home of the Simmonses, the printing family that had been so important to his writing.” (388)

Beer does touch on such issues as Milton’s complicated marriages (he was three times a husband) and his strained relationship with his daughters, Mary, Anne, and Deborah (while Milton essentially cut them out of his will, they did steal their blind father’s books to sell). However, the thrust of Beer’s biography is directed towards contextualizing in the 1640s pamphleteering and his position as propagandist to the Cromwellian government. Beer rightfully remarks that “John Milton almost single-handedly created the identity of the writer as political activist, of writing as a political vocation” (121). Milton found the times apt for his belief in the power of the writer. In 1642, Parliament abolished the Star Chamber, the state body that censored the presses.  For a piece writing to be published, the king had to grant the printer a license to do so. Now that this was no longer the case, London saw a flood of pamphlets, the modern day equivalent of the blog. This was Milton’s moment: he would go on to write pamphlets promoting ideas like divorce based on irreconcilable differences (The Doctrine and Disciple of Divorce [1643]), the moral necessity of the freedom of the press (Areopagtica [1644] ), and the right of the state to execute a monarch (Eikonoklastes [1649]). Eventually on March 20th, 1649, Milton took up the position of Sectary of Foreign Tongues in Cromwell’s regime, his responsibilities being translating the government’s correspondence and defending the government in print.

                In John Milton: A Hero of Our Time (2009), David Hawkes focuses on Milton’s own belief that he was destined for greatness.

 Turning to Milton’s youthful poetry, Hawkes finds a young man essentially writing his own autobiography.  Particularly in “Ad Patrem,” Hawkes argues that the young Milton attempted to convince his father that the investment that he has made in John will return many times over. (At 32 years old, Milton was still shiftless a bit, living in his family’s home and visiting the books sellers at St. Paul’s. By this point, Milton had really only produced one memorable poem “Lycidas,” a eulogy to his dead Cambridge classmate, Edward King, and Comus, a masque performed at Ludlow Castle for the Earl of Bridgewater.) As Hawkes reads the autobiography that Milton constructs for himself, his intellectual legacy – his poems and prose – Milton had already foreseen. While lamenting that fact that “Milton is now read mostly by reluctant undergraduates and studied in detail by their tutors,” Hawkes adroitly demonstrates the relevance that Milton’s writings have for the modern rise of religious fundamentalism and the phenomenon of paperless currency (how money is rapidly losing its materiality and possessing an almost “magical” quality). For one considering delving into Milton’s bio, I would recommend these two biographies: where Beer gives us a Milton who is a product of his time, Hawkes allows Milton to speak to our own.

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