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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
In Writing Women's Literary History (1993), Margaret Ezell argues forcefully fo a rethinking of the assumptions that govern feminist literary history.(1) Feminist historiography, she contends, derives its models of female authorship from nineteenth-century practices; these models distort our understanding of th circumstances and modes of production of women writers of earlier eras. In the narratives generated by such a historiography early modern women writers are constructed as isolated eccentrics at odds with themselves and their culture; their story is the recurring one of exclusion and absence, of female voices silenced and female talents repressed. Not only does such a story misread women's past; it also invites continued misreadings. To focus on exclusion is t encourage contemplation of the forces that have thwarted female literary production and to summon up yet more evidence of the silenced (alienated, isolated) woman writer--when what is needed is a great deal more in the way of basic information about the texts, contexts, and situations of early women writers.
The present essay seeks to characterize some features of the early verse and circumstances of Jane Barker (1652-1727?), focusing on poems written in the 1670s and 1680s and printed in Poetical Recreations (1688).(2) Barker, an important figure in the emergence of the novel in the early decades of the eighteenth century, is best known for the trilogy of autobiographical fictions she published between 1713 and 1726, the second of which, A Patch-work Screen for the Ladies (1723), attracts admiring notice from feminist critics and literary historians.(3) But long before Barker began fashioning her quirky narratives of the self, she composed occasional verse and, like other country gentlewomen, exchanged poems and other pieces of writing with relatives and friends. Late in 1687 (1688 is the date on the title page) more than fifty pieces of what appear to be largely coterie verse were printed without Barker's authorization as part 1 of the two-part Poetical Recreations. This body of vers makes available for study an obscure manuscript circle that included, in addition to Jane Barker, several Cambridge students.(4) My research into Barker and the young men who formed her circle, praised her poetry, and sponsored its passage into print calls into question the assumption of much feminist criticis that women writers of the early-modern era struggled into print against a tide of male hostility and derision; it also suggests that sociability is a more important feature of early women's verse than much feminist scholarship, preoccupied with themes of personal isolation and cultural exclusion, has permitted us to see.(5) My own focus on the sociable dimensions of Barker's verse aims to promote a richer and more exact understanding of the place of women writers in their immediate social setting and in relation to the larger culture.
I
Poetical Recreations appeared late in 1687 to little acclaim.(6) Roughly the first third of the volume--fifty-one poems on 109 octavo pages--consists of verse by Jane Barker. The remainder consists of poems written by "Gentlemen of the UNIVERSITIES, and Others," as the title page has it. Barker's contributions include Pindaric odes, ballads and songs, verse epistles, meditative lyrics, elegies. Of likely interest to readers today are those that directly engage gender issues ("A VIRGIN LIFE," "An Invitation to my Friends at Cambridge," "To Ovid's Heroines in his Epistles"), and those on the poetic vocation ("Necessity of Fate," "To the Importunate ADDRESS of POETRY," "Resolved never to Versifie more") and on medicine ("On the Apothecary's Filing my Bills amongst the Doctors" and "A Farewell to POETRY, WITH A Long Digression on ANATOMY.") Part 2 includes a scattering of poems to and about Jane Barker but consists mostly of unrelated verse by a number of men, many unidentified. Largely forgotten today--Charles Cotton and "Sir C. S." (Sir Charles Sedley) are the biggest name in the group--they appear to have been an uncelebrated lot even in their own time.(7)
Because many of Barker's poems bear traces of their coterie origins, it is easy to see that Barker wrote to and for friends and family rather than for a wider readership. Some of these poems are moralized meditations ("To my Dear Cousin Mrs. M. T. after the Death of her Husband and Son"); some are playful moments i a friendship--("To my Friend S. L. ON HIS Receiving the Name of Little Tom King"); others commemorate small private occasions, much as today we might take a snapshot ("To Mr. HILL, on his Verses to the Dutchess of YORK, when she was a Cambridge"). In view of Barker's current reputation as a champion of female friendships it is striking how many of these verses are addressed to men: to "m Cousin Mr. E. F.," "Mr. G. P. my Adopted Brother," "Dr. R. S. my Indifferent Lover," "my Honoured Friend Mr. E. S.," "my Brother," "Sir F. W.," "my Honourable Unkle Colonel C-- "and many more. Indeed, of the twenty-two poems addressed to someone specific, only one--unless one wishes to count an epistle to Ovid's Heroines--is written to a woman, the previously mentioned epistle to Mrs. M. T.
If verse writing afforded many seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century men an opportunity to display the linguistic talents that might lead to patronage or preferment, it seems to have offered Barker an entree--of sorts--into the centers of learning from which she as a woman was officially excluded. (It is surely significant that, if Barker's autobiographical writings are any guide, the friends she valued most highly were students at Cambridge, and the family member she adored above all others was her brother Edward, at various times a student at Merchant Taylors, Gray's Inn, and Oxford--an impressive roster of sites of masculine intellectual privilege.)(8) Barker may also have used verse exchange to create and sustain friendships more mentally challenging and linguistically sophisticated than those existing in the world she actually inhabited. Barker's writing-into-being a network of literary friendships might be read as a kind of Cavendish-like manuever intended to construct herself at the center of a textualized world--not blazing exactly, nor entirely new--but instinct with intellectual possibilities unavailable outside the domain of literary exchange.
The poems in which Barker self-consciously addresses a male reader as one poet to another provide some of the most telling moments in her printed verse, especially as they make visible the inadequacy of the forms of self-representation available to a (woman) poet at this time. "To My Friends against POETRY," for example, is filled with odd, instructive, and (as I read them) unintentional ironies generated by the mismatch between the speaker's gender and the patriarchal code within which she represents the poetic self. Th ironies cluster around the figure of the sexualized muse hinted at in the poem' opening lines--
Dear Friends, if you'll be rul'd by me, Beware o' th' Charms of Poetry; And meddle with no fawning Muse, They'll but your harmless Loves abuse.
--and then made explicit: the muses are "all grown Prostitutes." The whorish muse is meant, of course, to stand for the increasing commercialism of the worl of letters, the satiric attack on which is an expected feature of the "poem against poetry." Still, the figure sits oddly, as does the later troping of desire for literary fame as an "itch" as "hard to cure as Dice or Whore." The coarse language says something about the relative freedom from the burdens of propriety enjoyed by women in the late seventeenth century, and it reminds us, in Janet Todd's words, that before the "sentimental image of chaste, maternal, subordinate womanhood hardened into a prescription," even decorous writers like Barker could permit themselves to traffic in tropes that associate the impulse to write with disease, gaming, and phallic compulsion.(9) But we are also reminded of the insistently patriarchal cast of the conventions governing representations of the poetic vocation available to women writers at this time. It is not surprising, as Deborah Payne has said of Barker's contemporary Aphra Behn, "that the only words...
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