Robert Herrick and the ambiguities of gender.(Critical essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-JUN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

Robert Herrick wrote hundreds of poems about real or imagined women. It is generally conceded that his "many fresh and fragrant mistresses" were purely imaginary, but understanding how he constructs gender is vital in developing an accurate view of his poetic art. Modern criticism often depicts Herrick as a propagandist for the received standards of his day, yet close examination of his texts reveals that he recognized the ambiguities of gender and the inconsistencies of his era's beliefs pertaining to women, disrupted and interrogated them, and often engaged in outright parodic critique of accepted seventeenth-century gender mores.

The stance Herrick takes in relation to gender issues is rooted in the double-coding of female presence that already existed in the English Renaissance. On one hand stood the traditional Christian idea that women should be subordinate to men--an idea accepted by Protestants and Catholics alike. In Herrick's society, women were viewed "regardless of social rank, as wives and mothers ... and were considered morally evil, intellectually inferior," and "framed by God only for domestic duties" (Dunn, 15). Female submission was considered essential to an ordered, stable society, so that "as wives were subject to their husbands, so women were subject to men, whose authority was sustained informally through culture, custom and differences in education, and more formally through the law" (Amussen, 3).

Yet within this universally held set of notions about the nature and role of women, hinges, flaws, and contradictions abounded. Neoplatonic thought exalted woman. The cult of the Virgin, Petrarchan love conventions, and the cult of Elizabeth all grew out of this belief in the transcendence of womanhood. And the stringencies of patriarchy, though generally accepted in English society at the time, were qualified by the popular idea of "companionate marriage," which recognized God's grace as operative in women as well as in men and saw this grace as a check against unbridled notions of male superiority and the domination of wives by husbands (McDonald, 260-61).

This contradictory state of affairs was further complicated by the fact that, in contrast to continental Europe, early English society seems to have been exceptional in affording freedoms to women. Many English women were educated and prominent in the period when Herrick wrote his poems, especially at the court of Charles I, where Henrietta Maria "enhanced the status of women by demanding that her courtiers adopt the platonizing attitudes popular at the time in France" (Latt, 40). Herrick would have known the effects of Henrietta Maria's progressive attitude through his contact with the Carolinian court as a chaplain and lyricist before he took up pastoral duties in Devonshire.

Herrick's progressive attitude can be seen in the compositions he addressed not to imaginary mistresses but to real, flesh-and-blood women. His ambiguous attitude, reflecting the uncertainties of his own day, often crops up in these poems. To be sure, women exist as wives and maidens for Herrick, and his attention to them takes the form of sexual attraction in its modified and acceptable version of visual attraction to outward beauty. Yet one often detects an undercurrent of contradictory darkness flowing beneath safe conventions. The women Herrick addresses in his verses are beautiful and fragrant; the poet compares them to goddesses and flowers and lauds them for their good looks and virtue; the imagery he uses suggests the softness and passivity that was also seen as a proper social role for women. But lurking just underneath all of these conventions are the same sorts of "counterplots" that Claude Summers said work to disrupt and undermine Herrick's political poetry (167). While convention operates on the surface of Herrick's poems on women, a great deal of parodic revisionism is simultaneously taking place.

This revisionism is often seen in Herrick's epithalamia. In one he wrote to celebrate the marriage of his friend Clipsby Crew, for example; the title is "A Nuptiall Song, or Epithalamie, on Sir Clipseby Crew and his Lady." The woman is mentioned in the title (and in Herrick's epithalamium to Sir Thomas Southwell) and the poem tends to revolve around her, hardly even mentioning the bridegroom. Epithalamia did tend to emphasize the bride more than the groom, but the almost total exclusion of the bridegroom in these two poems illustrates Herrick's imaginative fixation on women. Herrick has been called prurient, and his propensity to gaze on women and notice the details of their dress and what lay beneath has made many critics uncomfortable. Still, the figuration of a woman in the epithalamium for Clipsby Crew's wedding suggests that Herrick is attracted to writing about women in such a way that the conventions of male dominance and female subservience are at least questioned, if not disrupted entirely.

"A Nuptiall Song, or Epithalamie, on Sir Clipseby Crew and his Lady" mentions the bride in more than half of the stanzas, the groom in only one. Herrick, who does not name the bride in the poem (she was Jane Pulteney), makes her the center of the work. The bridegroom, when he does appear, does not come across particularly well. He shows up in stanza 4 when he first meets the bride, and his reaction is not ideal. Hymen is told to

let thy Torch Display the Bridegroom in the porch In his desires More towring, more disparkling then thy fires: Shew her how his eyes do turne And roule about, and in their motions burne Their balls to Cindars: haste Or else to ashes he will waste.

The bridegroom then suitably disappears until he is tucked between the sheets of the "plumpe bed" with the bride and can put an end to the paroxysm that earlier caused his eyes to roll. The language attending this consummation is violent. The bridegroom is compared to Zeus, who managed to do his will on Danae despite her inaccessibility, and there is no stopping him: "Bold bolt of thunder he will make his way / And rend the cloud, and throw / The sheet about, like flakes of snow." After the long description of the bride in all her delicacy and semi-divinity, this language of rape, seduction, penetration, and violence is a harsh contrast. The bride is compared to Venus rising from the sea, he to Zeus descending upon the unwilling Danae. His "towering" desires and the "balls" of his gaze are unmistakably phallic.

Marjorie Swann has suggested that Herrick's marriage poems reinforce his society's subjugation of women, and to a certain extent they do, but her observation on the language that surrounds his marriage poetry is intriguing. The reluctant bride is separated from her female friends, enclosed in a prison-like chamber, and then the marriage is consummated:

The repetition of the monosyllabic imperative "strip" adds to the uneasy atmosphere of brutality and humiliation which haunts this stanza. Herrick presents the disrobing of Jane Pulteney as the removal of the woman's floral garments, a literal de-flowering. He thus instructs the "whimpering" bridesmaids to rehearse the role of the bridegroom, to inflict a sexualized physical loss upon their friend. Terms like "co-opted" or "coerced" may seem too heavy-handed to describe Herrick's treatment of the bridesmaids here, yet in the next stanza, the group of deflowering women is replaced by "a thousand Cupids" who hover about the bride's eyes to fan the flames of love.

Swann notes the "disquieting images of fear and intimidation--and female resistance to male authority" present in the poem (25).

But does the inclusion of such language indicate complicity, or does the tone of it perhaps hint at Herrick's own disquietude? It may be that the harsh language and the contrasts of the bride and groom are a censure of accepted custom and that Herrick is subjecting one of the major social structures of his day to a subtle literary interrogation.

Throughout the nuptial song, the bride is presented in terms reminiscent of the Neoplatonic idea that women are more spiritual and closer to the divine. The first two stanzas of the poem are interlaced with religious language whose referent is the woman about to married. She emerges from the "East," the traditional seat of spiritual wisdom and religion, and appears as a "New--/ Star fill'd with glory" that reaches up to heaven. She is compared to a "Goddesse," to "Venus" from the sea. In the next stanza she is called "Divine / Enlightened Substance," and it is remarked that she has only just come from devotions at a "Shrine / Of Holy Saints." She is compared to a "Paradise." Then Herrick provides the reader with one of his unusual appropriations of biblical text in noting that there comes from the bride "A savor like unto a blessed field, / When the bedabled Morne / Washes the golden eares of corne." The intertextual connection here is Genesis 27:27, a passage in which Isaac blesses his son Jacob with the words, "the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed." In the biblical story, Isaac receives a generous blessing in which he is granted abundant crops, nations to serve him, lordship over his brothers, curses to those who curse him, blessings to those who bless him (Genesis 27:28-29). But to those familiar with the passage, these words would bring in a note of discord because in the Genesis account Isaac thinks he is blessing Esau, not Jacob. Jacob has tricked his blind father into giving him his brother's blessing. The scene is a scene of deception, deceit, and out-and-out lying on the part of the disguised Jacob. This rather incongruous reference dampens the otherwise glorious depiction of the supernal bride. Herrick suggests the blessing the bride is about to receive may not be a very good one.

Stanza 3 three discusses the fragrance the bride gives off as she comes down the street, and its imagery is vaguely suggestive of the Song of Songs:

See where she comes; and smell how all the street Breathes Vine-yards and Pomgranats: O how sweet As a fir'd Altar is each stone, Perspiring pounded Cynamon.

In the Song of Songs, the woman's temples are likened to slices of pomegranate and her virginity to an unharvested vineyard, and spices are used as erotic symbols. But for all this language of religious sensuality, the response of those who see her is one of lust. Men who smell the perfume would want to jump in the fire and burn themselves to ashes, and the terms Herrick uses to express this contain disturbing suggestions of crudity: "Bestroaking Fate the while / He burns to Embers on the Pile." Does the sight of the bride incite the fires of lust and initiate "stroking"? This is followed up by the stanza where the bridegroom rolls his eyes in lust at his bride-to-be. A little further on,...

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