|
COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Evans and Cheevers at Malta
In 1658, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, two Quaker preachers whose previous missionary travels had taken them to Scotland, Ireland, and all over England, left London for Alexandria and Istanbul. Traveling together, part of their purpose was to follow Paul's travels, but they also hoped to meet with and to convert the Sultan. When the women arrived at Malta en route to Turkey and Alexandria, they began distributing Quaker literature, and interrupted a Catholic Mass. As a result of their preaching, Evans and Cheevers very quickly came to the attention of Catholic authorities on Malta. They were summoned to the English consul's residence, where they were interrogated by the Catholic authorities. Several weeks after their preliminary interrogation, the consul, James Watts, whom the women called Judas, turned Evans and Cheevers over to the Inquisition, where they were confined to a tiny, airless cell without access to light, water, or regular supplies of food. They were also frequently deprived writing materials.
Despite these privations, Evans and Cheevers wrote a lengthy narrative, as well as numerous hymns, prayers, and letters to family members and Quaker Friends during their captivity, which would last three years. Several of these documents were smuggled out of the country by Daniel Baker, a fellow Quaker and ship's captain moored at Malta. Baker visited Evans and Cheevers in prison and tried to negotiate for their release. When he could not secure their liberty, he arranged for the publication of their writings on his return to England. (1) The circular, fragmentary, and repetitive quality of the narratives suggests that the various documents were written and published in haste, with little editorial intervention. (2)
During the women's captivity, inquisitors and captives--each equally convinced of the rectitude and exclusivity of their path to God--attempted to convert each other. In addition to Evans and Cheevers's steadfast faith, their writings were a constant source of conflict between them and their inquisitors, who attempted to deprive the women of writing materials, and who circumscribed their literary activities on numerous occasions. The battle between Evans and Cheevers and the Inquisition was staged, therefore, at least in part over access to pen and paper. Indeed, both writerly and spiritual authority are at issue here, and stand in contested relation to one another. Furthermore, both writerly and spiritual authority are intimately linked to early modern understandings of female authorship and self-representation.
Primarily, Evans and Cheevers's writings recount their interactions with the Catholic Church and demonstrate their steadfast faith in the face of numerous attempts to convince them to recant and convert to Catholicism. In their writings, however, the women also articulated their relationship to each other. During their captivity, Evans and Cheevers provided each other with ongoing spiritual and material support, remaining unified in their faith despite their eventual physical separation. Their mutual support and indivisibility--as well as their own articulation of their relationship as a marriage--has been variously portrayed as an example of early modern women's negotiation of property relations, an instance of early feminist theology, an example of "Quaker literary style," and evidence of early modern "lesbianism." (3) In their lives and writings, I argue, Evans and Cheevers negotiate complex, interrelated networks of early modern and Quaker ideologies of F/friendship, marriage, collaborative authorship, and missionary travel. (4) Further, each of these relations is eroticized, but that eroticism defies easy translation into a modern, identarian rendering of sexuality. My reading of Evans and Cheevers's various writings suggests that any interpretation that either denies the sexual possibilities of early modern women's friendships or that offers an easy assumption that all eroticism must be sexual, and in this case lesbian, is rendered moot by an understanding of Quaker F/friendship. As I discuss later, Quaker F/friendship hinges on an understanding of oneness in the body of Christ and is therefore an embodied friendship that is always also sexualized, although not necessarily sexual in modern terms.
When Evans and Cheevers were first imprisoned in Malta, they were placed in the same cell. Their resistance to conversion was so strong, however, that their captors decided to separate them. Separation, the inquisitors hoped, would weaken the women's resolve; they would admit the error of their Quaker beliefs once isolated from each other. In response to the threat of separation, however, the women ranted, raved, broke out in rashes, and declared themselves married to one another and therefore indivisible. Their horrified captors left them alone for several more weeks, but ultimately returned to separate them. To the chagrin of the inquisitors, Evans and Cheevers proved just as resistant to conversion when separated as when they occupied the same cell.
The first of the women's narratives offers details of the altercations between the inquisitors and their captives over both writing materials and the women's desire to remain together in prison, for which Evans invokes marriage vows:
We asked why they took away our goods? They said, it was all theirs, and our lives too, if they would. We asked, how we had forfeited our lives unto them; they said, For bringing Books and Papers. We said, if there were any thing in them that was not true, they might write against it. They said, they did not scorn to write to fools and asses that did not know true Latine. And they told us, the Inquisitor would have us separated, because I was weak, and I should go into a cooler room; but Sarah should abide there. I took her by the arm, and said, The Lord hath joined us together, and wo be to them that should part us. I said, I rather chuse to dye there with my friend, than to part from her. He was smitten, and went away, and came no more in five weeks,... they did not part us till ten Weeks after: But oh the dark clouds and the sharp showers the Lord did carry us through! Death it self had been better than to have parted in that place. They said, we corrupted each other, and that they thought when we were parted, we would have bowed to them. But they found we were more stronger afterwards than we were before; the Lord our God did fit us for every condition. (13-14)
Throughout their captivity, then, Evans and Cheevers attempted to assert control, sometimes successfully, over the physical structure of their relationship. Although they were eventually separated, the women still refused to bow to their Inquisitors. The Inquisitors' fear that Evans and Cheevers would corrupt each other if they remained together is, I suggest, a fear that together the women would give each other strength to resist Catholic conversion. Both Quaker and Catholic parties to this altercation are interested in spiritual corruption rather than corporeal, sexual corruption. Separation was a strategy based on the assumption that they would be easier to convert individually. The inquisitors' hypothesis, however, was disproved. Once separated, the women continued to frustrate their captors by responding to interrogation with identical answers. And this is the sense in which they would remain uncorrupted in the eyes of their Quaker audience.
Some of the conditions of possibility and conditions of intelligibility for Evans and Cheevers's unified voice, collaborative authorship, and traveling ministry rest in Quaker Women's Meetings. Established as an avenue for women's charitable activities, these meetings afforded Quaker women both considerable temporal authority and an active forum for developing female friendships. Evans and Cheevers's friendship is also situated within the context of early modern friendship discourses and Quaker ideology of marriage.
Traveling Friends
In part, traveling companions offered each other some measure of safety in a world often actively hostile toward Quakers, and same-sex partnerships exempted missionaries of both sexes from charges of sexual impropriety. (5) These traveling partnerships cannot, however, be simply dismissed as defensive maneuvers or protective mechanisms. Whether or not these relationships were born of necessity, they allowed Quaker women from Margaret Fell to Joan Vokins and Evans and Cheevers to leave husbands and children behind, putting their own missionary work and, I suggest, their relationships to each other, above the responsibilities of marriage to subvert the presumed hierarchy of relationships in a woman's life. As with all social restrictions and regulation, the imperative for Quaker women missionaries to travel together opens up particular relational possibilities as it forecloses others. (6) Along with Quaker Women's Meetings, these traveling partnerships offer glimpses into friendships between early modern women.
In addition to being cellmates, coauthors and companionate "yoke-fellows," Evans and Cheevers's relationship was a traveling F/friendship that was part of a larger movement. Same-sex traveling companions, in fact, were far from uncommon in Quaker and Puritan missionary circles. Traveling over thirty years after Evans and Cheevers and making various travels to North America and the Caribbean, for example, Quaker preacher Joan Vokins was accompanied by a series of fellow women travelers. Vokins made several journeys to the "New World," including travels to New England, New York, Rhode Island, Antigua, St. Nevis, and Barbados. On each journey, assorted Quaker women joined her (Garman, 159). In her posthumously published account of her missionary travels, God's Mighty Power Magnified (1691), Vokins lists dozens of "Maiden" F/friends who accompanied her for portions of her journey. "And I arrived at New York the 4th day of the 3d Month, 80," Vokins relates in a typical passage, "and a Maiden Friend, whose Name was Sarah Yoklet went with me from England, and traveled with me until I came to Oyster-Bay in Long Island; and the...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
