|
COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
Throughout seventeenth-century England the widow often appeared a contradictory figure. The social realities of women who had lost their spouses commonly reenforced both the biblical image of the suffering widow and the word's etymological meaning, destitute and desolate. (1) While the Old and New Testaments assured early modern contemporaries that divine providence blesses the afflicted, as it did the widow of Zarephath, scriptural passages emphasizing the desolation also led them to conclude that "widowehood is a plague of God vpon the vngodly." (2) Municipal and local parish records further suggest isolation and deprivation: women were less likely to remarry than men, and widows depended more than other needy upon poor relief. (3) Yet the object of pity and charity was also commonly seen as a threat to male security and patriarchal society. (4) Along with their redefined social position and, in some cases, their economic gains from a former marriage, widows were in fact free from constraints that limited other woman. Some, though not all, seemed to enjoy an independence recognized by both their seventeenth-century contemporaries and modern scholars. For the financially secure woman, widowhood may well have been, as Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford contend, "a time of maximum female autonomy." (5) Freed from the legal restraints of coverture, which gave the husband control of the property his wife brought to the marriage, the widow in seventeenth-century England was entitled during her lifetime to at least one third of the estate's real property as well as any designated property held in trust; and as an executrix her control of the estate further increased significantly. (6) The declining rate of remarriage documented in the century has led scholars to conclude that even less wealthy widows benefited from "female agency in a patriarchal culture." (7) The reasons an increasing number of women chose not to remarry are, however, uncertain; and the extent to which widowhood was liberating is debatable. (8) Among the seventeenth-century women's diaries, memoirs, and remembrances written after the death of a spouse, the account of Katherine Austen (1628-1683) in particular presents both a conventional and contradictory picture, one that confirms and challenges established impressions of the widow and her daily lot.
In a century during which upwards of half the married women would be widowed by the age of fifty, it is not surprising that many of the surviving remembrances concern this last of the three traditional stages of womanhood. (9) Austen's manuscript of the sixth and seventh years after her husband's death on 31 October 1658, however, describes at unusual length the afflictions of widowhood and the limitations of remarriage. (10) The first folio's designation of the manuscript as "Book M" and subsequent references to a parchment, a brown paper, and other lettered manuscripts suggest that Austen intended to combine the surviving folios into a work that presumably included her earlier widowed years. "Book M" nevertheless provides an especially valuable record of her experiences because of its liminal nature: the sixth and seventh years marked the end of a self-imposed period of mourning, a time to underscore the past and consider the future. (11)
As she confronts her difficulties, Austen fashions an engaging image shaped by her culture. Though her self-representation has not been extensively considered, the two published pieces on her manuscript appreciate "the insight into the mind of a woman grappling with her own personal crises during a turbulent time in English history" (Todd, "'I Do No Injury by Not Loving'" 207). The more ambitious of the studies, based on the manuscript's poems, further stresses the "multi-faceted, discontinuous self-figuration, through which she negotiates the incompatibilities between her socioeconomic ambitions and gender" (Hammons 12). The nature of Austen's conflict, however, may be more deeply rooted in the traditional cultural values and social expectations than in her alleged desire to deflect "attention away from her economic and social ambitions." (12) The material pressures of daily life are, as Helen Wilcox recognizes, central in autobiographical writing of the period to "the interplay of gender, materiality and the textual 'life,'" an interplay in which the "spiritual" and the "earthly" often seem at odds (118, 116). While the interplay makes these works especially attractive to modern critical sensibilities, the cultural significance of religion should not be minimized, particularly in Austen's manuscript life, when "there are many signs that private godliness and public morality were labelled as feminine concerns, especially towards the end of the seventeenth century." (13) Fundamental to her sense of self are a religious faith and a commitment to her family that in the context of her work combine the material and the spiritual in ways that seem to embody quite traditional values. The image she presents of the widow and the position she takes against remarriage are in fact similar to those in the conduct books and religious commentaries of the period. Her self-representation affirms qualities that her century associated with the good, virtuous, or "true widow" and tacitly recalls the love, service, and obedience epitomized in the New Testament account of the widow's mite. (14) At the same time that Austen presents herself as the afflicted widow, she paradoxically demonstrates in equally conventional yet individualist terms that hers is a widow's might, a strength that comes from both God and her own indomitable spirit.
Though conscious from the outset that others might read the manuscript, Austen insists that the "personal occurrences" set forth in its folios are the basis of "a private exercise directed to my self. The singularity of these conceptions doth not aduantaige any" (4v). Near the end of the manuscript she characterizes its 114 folios as "this book of my meditations" (112v). Events from November 1664 to September 1666 occasion remembrances and ruminations, poems and prayers that often begin "Upon the.... " The exercises recall the well-established practice of occasional meditation, but as a "book" the manuscript is not entirely or even essentially meditative. Its initial folios contain descriptions of dreams, commentary about angels, and assurances of religious guidance gleaned from the writing or sermons of others and gathered together in a manner resembling a commonplace book. Later folios include letters to her three children, passages intended for other audiences, and lists of financial assets and liabilities. References to days and months within the two-year period add a degree of chronological continuity, but the manuscript is neither a diary nor a memoir. The folios of "Book M" that Austen left to "Who so euer shal look in these papers" (4v) are a personal record ultimately inseparable from its religious intent. For Austen, writing is an expression of devotion and a means of understanding to help her "view over the assurances and hopes I have had" (112v). In coming to terms with her life, Austen's image of herself is that of suffering widow, devoted mother, and servant of God. The patience and piety that characterize her desired self are not always sufficient, however, to allay the struggles that give the manuscript its distinctive voice.
Her insistence that the six years of widowhood have been the "Most saddest Yeares" (60r) stresses affliction and exploitation at odds with her apparent financial worth. "The world may think I tread upon Roses," Austen confides near the beginning of the manuscript, "but they know not the sack cloth I have walkt on [sic]. Not the heauines and bitternes of my minde" (22r). The death of her husband Thomas at the age of thirty-six had not left the thirty-year-old widow and mother of three children in serious economic straits. Besides her own legacy from her mother, the manuscript later notes an estate that included a number of houses and holdings in addition to London property. Austen and her family were by seventeenth-century standards well-off, yet she constructs a quite different perception of herself as a widow and mother of the fatherless. Although she concedes that "Many Women have had great Afflictions," she adds that "Sometimes I think, mine out goes them all" (70r). A list of taxes and expenditures, unpaid rents from tenants, and uncollected loans long past due supports her contention, "I have pased six yeares of Divers mixtures full of accidents and encounters extrordinary for a single woman to pas" (99v). Elsewhere, Austen is the widow oppressed and betrayed by those who seek to ruin the family; increasingly she and her three children, Thomas, Robert, and Anne, appear victims of those who, like the unrighteous in Isaiah,...
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
