Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets
368
Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets
368Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253202635 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/1981 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
Shakespeare's Sisters
Feminist Essays on Women Poets
By Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 1979 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan GubarAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-20263-5
CHAPTER 1
Jane Lead: Mysticism and the Woman Cloathed with the Sun
Catherine F. Smith
Jane Lead was an English Protestant mystic and spiritual autobiographer who lived from 1624 until 1704. In April 1670 she had a vision of "an overshadowing bright Cloud and in the midst of it the Figure of a Woman." Three days later the luminous figure reappeared, saying "Behold me as thy Mother." Six days later the Woman promised "to transfigure my self in thy mind; and there open the Spring of Wisdom and Understanding." After years of continuing visions — "I have learned to observe her Times and Seasons, I witness her opening as in the Twinkling of an Eye, a pure, bright, subtil, swift Spirit, a working motion, a Circling Fire, a penetrating Oil" — Jane Lead prophesied
This is the great Wonder to come forth, a Woman Cloathed with the Sun ... with the Globe of this world under her feet ... with a Crown beset with stars, plainly declaring that to her is given the Command and Power ... to create and generate spirits in her own express likeness ...?
This bright Woman is Lead's revision of Sophia, the Virgin Wisdom of God in esoteric theology and apocalyptic tradition. Recurrence of a similar ideal in poetry by women in the twentieth century — "I/am a pure acetylene/ Virgin" — "I am the woman/ ... whose words are matches" — suggests a pattern of vocabulary shared across women's literary history. It may point to a paradigm in women's imagination as well.
But we must know more history before we can see pattern and paradigm. Jane Lead's life is evidence that we know too little about one group of seventeenth-century writers, the millenarian, sectarian authors of spiritual autobiographies. Those earlier women might be said to have set turning for their time the wheel of self-revelation by women that we reinvent in our own.
Little is certain about Jane Lead's early life. Contemporary records are mainly retrospective appreciations of her visionary insight, written by herself or by sympathizers. Those statements usually employ hagiographic conventions of recounting the lives of mystics or visionaries. Nevertheless, a personality and a culture are apparent in them, individualizing her and connecting her life with persisting conditions for women writers.
She was born Jane Ward, probably in 1624, to an "honorable and esteemed" family, probably gentry, in the county of Norfolk. She received the limited education thought appropriate, either by private tutoring or in a parish petty school where girls were taught domestic skills along with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Early dissatisfaction with her life openly broke into a Christmas celebration when she was fifteen. Amid dancing and music, she was suddenly, deeply depressed and seemed to hear a voice whispering "Cease from this, I have another Dance to lead thee in; for this is Vanity." She stopped dancing. During a crisis that lasted more than three years, she was obsessed with the biblical stricture that "Whosoever loveth and maketh a lie" must be left out of the New Jerusalem. At eighteen, relief came through ecstatic visualization of a pardon with a seal attached to it.
Still intensely curious about her experiences, Ward persuaded her family to send her for a six-month visit to her brother, a merchant in London. There, she scoured public and private religious meetings in the political and religious turbulence of Cromwell's England, with its numerous sects such as the Ranters, the Diggers, and the Quakers. For eighteen-year-old Jane Ward, this brief, highly motivated education in ideas of the spirit served as the advanced schooling otherwise closed to her. When her parents rejected her choice of a marriage partner in London, she returned to Norfolk to refuse, in turn, several of their choices for her, saying that as a bride of Christ, she found earthly marriages repulsive.
Marriage being an economic necessity, however, she did marry a distant relative, William Lead(e), who met her standards for spiritual devotion. Four daughters were born during the twenty-seven-year union that was the most regular phase of Jane Lead's long life. The marriage ended in February 1670, when she was widowed at forty-six. Destitute, with two living daughters (the keeper of the family's money having proved dishonest), she resolved to commit herself to a "life of Spiritual Virginity," placing priority on exploration of her inner life. Writing later in her journal and transmuting her married experience into marriage metaphor, she quotes the Virgin Sophia's directive on setting aside material concerns to achieve conscious separateness.
... Being Dead wherein we were held fast, we should [be] ... discharged from the law of the first Husband, to which we were married, after the Law of a Carnal Command ... that first Husband who so long hindered my marriage with the Lamb.
(Fountain of Gardens, I, pp. 69–71)
Pragmatically, the change meant that she joined certain friends who admired her capacity for ecstatic knowledge and who had introduced her to the mystic thought of the German idealist philosopher and Protestant "Inner Light" theologian, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). The group centered on Dr. John Pordage, the Anglican cleric who became one of the first commentators on Boehme's Reformation-bred thought when it entered religious life in England around 1644. Subject to trances himself, Pordage had a controversial record as a parish priest. He had married his first wife, Mary, "for ye Excellent Gift of God he found in her; wch Gift he also became in a high Degree Partaker of." Together they held ecstatic sessions in his village parish of Bradfield, in which Mary Pordage, "Cloathed all in White Lawne, from the crown of the Head to the Sole of the Foot, and a White rod in her hand," was hailed by dancing parishioners as a "Prophetess." These practices, and his reported acquaintance with Oxford hermeticists and with Ranter preachers such as Abiezzer Coppe, led to Pordage's loss of the Bradfield living. By 1663 he was the leader of a small, private, nonconformist congregation in London joined by Jane Lead, "whose Extraordinary Gift of Revelation y Dr gave great regard to & Attended upon."
Conditions of existence for such small sectarian groups, difficult enough under Cromwell's uneven pressures, had become harshly repressive under the restored king, Charles II. The Conventicle Act of 1664, for example, forbade gatherings of more than five adults for practice of any religion other than allowed by Anglican liturgy, with penalties of three months imprisonment or five pounds for the first offense and up to deportation for seven years or a hundred pounds for the third. In spite of these threats, as well as the Great Plague that killed thousands in a week, and the 1666 London fire, Pordage's and Lead's group continued to meet. After her vision of Sophia and her commitment to a new life, Jane Lead in 1674 moved into John Pordage's household.
Then was a new Charge for my self, and the Dr. that we should draw apart from all impertinent Fellowships; because called to act forth a Superiour part, as those who are designed to wait for the Triune Glory to fill our whole Temple Minds, who will in our Heavenly Conversation be, if no thing throngs in from this World.
(Fountain of Gardens, II, pp. 137–38)
Mary Pordage had died in 1668; very little is known about Pordage's second wife, Elizabeth. According to Jane Lead's journal from these years, she lived in the household as Pordage's partner in meditation and vision, in writing commentary on Boehme, and in the public work of forming the congregation, then numbering nearly a hundred. Pordage transcribed her revelations. As before, with marriage offers, Lead controlled the demands of external convention by asserting the authority of her inner life. When her brother "privately ordered" her to leave the Pordage household and accept his support or forfeit all future offers of assistance, she refused.
It was said within me, thou art in a great strait, yet nevertheless stand by the Vow and Solemn Engagement ... to go forward jointly with thy appointed Mate ... to that work, which the present offer is much too low for to retard.
(Fountain of Gardens, I, p. 328)
In 1681, her fifty-seventh year and the year of Pordage's death, she brought out her first book, a spiritual guide called The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking. ... Two years later she published her commentary on apocalypse, The Revelation of Revelations ..., as well as Pordage's first work in print, Theologica Mystica, with her introduction.
Productiveness in the years with Pordage counterpoints the effort recorded in her journal to practice the contemplativeness she very much wanted to explore. The journal, which is her spiritual autobiography, takes its shape from tensions and growth in those years. Written from 1670 to 1686 in "loose Shreds of Paper, for the sake of her own Memory, and for Monitions and Encouragements to some few Particular Friends," the journal was eventually titled A Fountain of Gardens ... and published in 1697-1701, in four volumes nearly two thousand pages long. It includes set-piece visions followed by interpretation; dreams; conversations and argumentation with Sophia and with her heir and mate, Christ; symbolic narratives of spiritual progress; exuberant experiments with imagery and metaphor ("Every thought presents a Person, they are Magical Essences, subtle Spirits ...") that pile up effect in an attempt to break beyond fixed form ("Vision and Prophecy were but as the Door-Post ...") (Fountain of Gardens, III, p. 81; II, p. 522). The journal might be called a writer's diary, the working papers of an experimental stylist and theoretician of imagination, had Jane Lead thought of herself as an artist rather than a prophet. But she wrote when few women were considered artists, although a number, like her, imagined selves and ordered universes in their spiritual autobiographies.
After 1681 her hard-pressed congregation dwindled, and by 1692 Jane Lead was living alone in a house of charity in Stepney, on the outskirts of the city of London. Her writing went on, and she arranged its printing and sale. A common enough practice with sectarian writers before 1660, it was dangerous for both author and printer after the Restoration. In addition to the general suppression of unordained preachers that imprisoned John Bunyan, for example, virulent objections specifically to women preachers resulted in their special harassment and produced a large pamphlet literature of attack and defense, including many of the personal accounts by outspoken Quaker and other sectarian women such as Jane Lead. A note appended to her Enochian Walks with God, Found Out by a Spiritual Traveller ... (1694) emphasizes her aggressive isolation in this period.
This Book is to be Sold by the Author, Jane Lead, living at the Lady Mico's Colledge, right against Stepney Church; and at her Daughters Barbary Walton, at Mr. Mileman's in New-Street, at the end of Dean Street, right against the 3 Tuns.
And if any one be dissatisfied in any Point handled in this Book, the Author is ready to give answer thereunto, while she is yet Living.
Another shift in Lead's life occurred around 1694, irrevocably making her a recognized figure in sectarian circles. One of her books having reached Germany, correspondence began with sympathizers there who published translations that stimulated continental interest in her work. In this way began her relationship with Dr. Francis Lee, who had found her work in The Netherlands and returned to England to meet her. An Orientalist of St. John's College, Oxford, Lee had become a non-juror, forced to give up his university position for refusing to sign the oath of allegiance to the new king, William. He had then trained as a physician. Drawn to mysticism as a religious person, as a scholar particularly interested in the literature of the Apocrypha, and as a physician curious about trances and the causes of imagination, he was also out of money and a job when he decided to join Jane Lead, casting himself "upon God's most wise direction in all things." About a year later Jane Lead became blind at seventy-one. At Lead's suggestion Lee, who was thirty-four, married her widowed daughter Barbara, and acted as Lead's secretary and editor until her death at eighty in 1704. Together they reorganized her congregation as the Philadelphian Society, advocating individual transformation as the means of bringing about the millennium, but rejecting the anarchism of the Ranters and the planned social reforms of the Diggers and the Quakers. Taking its name from the church of Philadelphia, or the remnant of believers at the beginning of Apocalypse, the new group was philosophically based in Jacob Boehme's ideas.
In face of Reason's dominance in the developing Enlightenment, Boehme, a mystic, had resynthesized the long-respected but fading systems of gnosticism, Jewish and Christian mysticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, and astrology in a hybrid called theosophy. Shoring up belief in a transcendant spirit and millennial harmony, his theosophy contributed importantly to Protestant theology of the individual "Inner Light" of God. His cosmology relies significantly on inherited expression, especially sexual metaphor for spiritual process. Sophia, female image for potential Being and for the soul, is an important example. Derived mainly from gnostic heresies, the Kabala, Wisdom literature, and apocalyptic language of Scripture, Sophia is the primary, unconditioned ground of Being out of which the self-actualizing, masculine will of deity creates.
The Wisdom is the outflown word of the Divine Power ... a Substance Wherein the Holy Ghost works, forms, and models ... For the Wisdom is the Passive, and the Spirit of God is the Active ... She is the true Divine Chaos, wherein all things lie ... a Divine Imagination.
In existence, this female potentiality continues in a dialectic with male power of manifestation, as the soul (a daughter-fragment of original mother Wisdom) coexists with separate, rational intellect and will. At apocalypse, the fiery female impulse rejoins conscious power of expression in an integrated, androgynous being imaged by Boehme as Sophia remarried to her son/mate, Christ. Mary, the mortal mother of Christ, is understood as a terrestrial "Type" of Sophia, as were Eve and other mothering figures in Christian history, a conception that influenced Jane Lead's identification with Sophia and her belief that "the pure in heart might come this Woman to be" (Fountain of Gardens, II, pp. 103-130, especially p. 125; I, p. 468).
Following the patriarchal outlines of his sources in nonrationalist philosophy, Boehme's androgyne is male, completed by nurturing female, who is generally assigned the values of the Other, as Simone de Beauvoir discusses that concept in The Second Sex. And Behmenists John Pordage, Francis Lee, and Reverend Richard Roach, the sympathetic Anglican who served as historian for the Philadelphian Society, continue the metaphor unrevised in their writing about the soul as feminine and in their lives, as they literally ascribe special authority to the spiritual transformations of women. John Pordage depended first on his wife Mary's, then on Jane Lead's visions. Philadelphian Society historian Richard Roach asserts that Virgin Wisdom, "standing in the Female Denomination ... will in an Extraordinary Manner Excite and Animate that sex whereby She is represented; and Endow them with her Peculiar Graces and Gifts, in such Degrees, that they shall Out-run and Exceed the Males themselves...." Francis Lee attached himself to Jane Lead until her death, considering her a "Pattern and Model in this and the Approaching Age."
But what about the women, those token visionaries? Much in their experience might be familiar still. As Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, among others, have observed, male patronage and wrongly-weighted, malemade tools for the urgently building female self have been continuous conditions for women writers. But Behmenist ideas, their fantasies, and their social experiences as women were the tools for Jane Lead and others, who clearly used them. Philadelphian Society gatherings were so well attended by women, remarks Roach, "that it was thence call'd the Taffeta Meetings." And, while Lead's imagination shows conflict between competing ideals — the apocalyptic mother/mate of Christ and the self-contained, primary female — she, like Woolf and Rich later, constructs a language of feeling, particularly female feeling, that speaks from the bound, radiant matrix of female experience. Working from her own actuality as a sentient human being uniting female soul with female intellect and will, she adapts received forms to accommodate her experience. To discover Sophia, for Jane Lead, is to recover self-sufficiency. "Now give me leave," she writes in her journal
... to tell you the Beginning of my Way that the Spirit first led me into. In the first place, then, after some Years that I had lived in some good Degree of an Illuminated Knowledge, Setting under the Visible Teachings of Men, that could give no further light than they had arrived from others, through all of which I traced as a wandering Spirit that could find no Rest: but something still I found within my self that did open to draw in from a more pure Air, than I could meet without me: whereupon I introverted more into my own Inward Deep, where I did meet with that which I could not find elsewhere....
(Fountain of Gardens, I, p. 6)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakespeare's Sisters by Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar. Copyright © 1979 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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