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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
Writing in her mid-fifties, several years after the death of her husband, seventeenth-century autobiographer Lady Anne Halkett chose as the subject of her Memoirs a dozen years out of a life that was to span most of the century (1623-99). Her focus on the turbulent period of the Interregnum provides the text with much of its vivid interest: Halkett helps the young Duke of York (later James II) escape from London, disguised as a woman; meets the king in Edinburgh on his abortive attempt to return to power; nurses soldiers wounded in the battle that ensures; and refers in the course of her text to political schemes and secret correspondence, duels of honor and the rescue of an abducted heiress. No less dramatic than these political intrigues are her personal relationships, in part because of their entanglement in unfolding political events. After her mother's disapproval ends an early courtship with Thomas Howard, Halkett falls dangerously in love with a man who seems, by all accounts save her own, a scoundrel. (1) Colonel Joseph Bampfield would eventually desert the Royalist cause, and he appears to have been equally opportunistic in his personal life, telling Halkett he was a widower when, in fact, he was not. Her attempt to determine the truth about his character is made more difficult by the chaotic state of communications during the Civil War (Rose, 271). When she discovers that Bampfield's wife is alive, Halkett reaches the nadir of her experience--her reputation has been compromised and she believes herself unable to enter any new relationship. (2) This final knot is untangled with the help of Sir James Halkett, a widower himself, a sensible and sympathetic friend, and eventually, her husband. After Lady Halkett's account of their wedding, in 1656, the Memoirs end abruptly. (3)
No summary of its events can do justice to the Memoirs. It can only suggest the rich texture and lively intelligence which have led to the work's being singled out for praise, even when women's autobiographical writing rested, for the most part, in obscurity. But even an abbreviated account of Halkett's role in these adventures confounds any naive notions that women of her time were entirely constrained by dominant cultural stereotypes. Despite the injunctions insistently repeated in contemporary sermons and conduct books, Halkett is neither silent nor obedient, (4) and if she remains, in all likelihood, chaste, the events she writes about nevertheless so threaten her reputation that defense of her virtue becomes a central rhetorical motive for her writing. Indeed, I shall argue, the Memoirs are carefully and deliberately constructed to justify behavior that has left Halkett vulnerable. This much will be no surprise to her readers. What is more interesting is the form this defense takes. By appropriating the familiar conventions of the romance to her own rhetorical purposes, Halkett both entertains and wins assent to an unconventional life: she contextualizes her actions in a genre capable of accommodating the shifting uncertainties of her early years, and she constructs a reader sympathetic to the impact of this turbulence on the life of a young, single woman. As a result of Halkett's efforts to fashion an acceptable self, moreover, the Memoirs become a rich source of insight into authorizing strategies available to women writers in this period.
One of the challenges posed by the Memoirs is the need to respond both to its deliberate strategizing and to its remarkable frankness, especially about the potentially scandalous matter of Halkett's relationship with Bampfield. As her modern editor notes, "If she leaves much unsaid, at least in the manuscript as it has survived, it is surprising that she wrote so much on the subject" (Loftis, ix). In a narrative where identities are masked and deception figures prominently--in the depiction of social and political turmoil and in Halkett's personal dilemma--the simultaneity of concealment and disclosure is at the very heart of the memoirist's enterprise. As the co-authors of a recent study observe, "The interplay of revelation and secrecy is the essential element in the autobiographical act, fundamental to both the control of meaning and the possibility of self-construction" (Graham et al., "Pondering All These Things in Her Heart," 51). This paper will highlight that interplay as, following a brief survey of critical responses to the Memoirs, it explores those strategies by which Halkett authorizes her self-construction.
I
The reception of Halkett's Memoirs may be said to have passed through three stages, beginning with a period in which praise of the work's quasiliterary qualities was undermined by devaluation of its "feminine" concerns. Margaret Bottrall, for instance, claimed that the work handled "sufficient material for a full-length novel ... with almost a novelist's skill" (149). Still, like other early studies of seventeenth-century autobiography, hers relegated Halkett's work to more or less cursory treatment in the final chapter along with several other texts, defining the Memoirs as "a thoroughly feminine document ... neither reflective nor speculative," and "concerned with persons and actions, not with ideas" (149). Similarly, Paul Delany credited Halkett with introducing new subject matter into the genre, but nonetheless dismissed her contribution as a matter of "household intrigue and drawing-room sentiments" (164). The nature of both assessments illustrates why women's autobiographies were marginalized; their emphasis on community, especially the domestic community, "does not occur in the male model of individualistic autobiography" (Marcus, 137), which was traditionally used to define the genre. (5)
Moving the neglected works of early women writers in from the periphery has been a central task of those feminist critics who sought first to recover and then to develop appropriate methods for assessing such works--methods that valorize rather than diminish women's experiences and "ways of knowing." Nancy Chodorow's delineation of gendered patterns of psychological development has been particularly useful in such approaches, providing a theoretical basis for a new focus on women's "relationality." (6) In this second stage of reaction, feminist critics found a good deal to approve in the assertive self represented in the Memoirs, even while continuing to acknowledge Halkett's narrative gifts. (7) Rose argues that "Anne confronts, even instigates dramatic and psychic conflict, using it as a means of attaining independence and personal growth" (270), while Estelle Jelinek identifies in the Memoirs a capacity for self-revelation and self-analysis matched only by Margaret Cavendish among Halkett's contemporaries. Celebrating the personality and "positive self-image" (30) thus reflected in the text, Jelinek speculates that, with "her highly sophisticated discretion, informed frankness, and confident self-possession," had Halkett been a man, "she would have been a diplomat par excellence" (31).
A comparison of this sort would have been unthinkable in early studies of women's autobiography. To that extent, the approaches taken by Jelinek and Rose represent a significant advance. Nevertheless, they remain identified with what Smith has termed "the second generation" of autobiographical critics, "psychoanalyst[s] of sorts, interpreting the truth of an autobiography in its psychological dimension rather than in its factual or moral ones" (5). The limitations of this approach are exemplified by Jelinek's assumption that Halkett's personality is unproblematically re-presented in her selection of events and style of writing.
New theories of autobiography, shaping what I have termed the third stage of the Memoirs' reception, have challenged notions on which Jelinek and Rose depend, like "authentic self-definition" or an "accurate mirror." As Smith points out, postmodern criticism has complicated the two underlying assumptions of earlier approaches to autobiography--"confidence in the referentiality of language and a corollary confidence in the authenticity of the self" (5)--so that autobiography, "apparently so simple, so self-evident, so readily accessible to the reader" (3), has come to be seen as an altogether more complex and flexible genre:
The autobiographical text becomes a narrative artifice, privileging a presence, or identity, that does not exist outside language. Given the very nature of language, embedded in the text lie alternative or deferred identities that constantly subvert any pretentions of truthfulness. (5)
Among the new perspectives that have arisen in treatments of autobiography and that have moved women's life-writing from the periphery to the center of discussions of the genre is the understanding that women are constructed by a multiplicity of discourses, discourses not only diverse but often inconsistent and contradictory. Indeed, one might argue, as does Graham, that for women, "issues of the indeterminacy of constructions of selfhood are especially pronounced" (215).
Certainly the Memoirs include signs of conflicting messages about appropriate behavior for a young, single woman. In addition to demonstrating considerable self-assertiveness and a capacity for independent action, for instance, Halkett reveals herself as keenly attentive to matters of decorum: early in the text, she asserts her belief that marrying without the consent of one's parents is an act of ingratitude and disobedience, and she reminisces about observing appropriate rules of chaperonage in order "to see plays and to walke in the Spring Garden" (11). Yet while earlier critics have acknowledged Halkett's need to negotiate the gender ideology of her time, none have attended closely to the textual strategies by which she balances "her own often socially subversive desires" against "cultural convention" (Rose, 271). (8)
Such an investigation would seem particularly worthwhile given the potentially scandalous nature of Halkett's association with Bampfield, reflected in the fact that, at two points in the Memoirs--when she writes about first meeting him and about her discovery that he has a living wife--a leaf of the manuscript is missing. Whether Halkett herself removed from these accounts what might be incriminating material, or whether a later editor was responsible for the censorship, is not known. In either case, the missing leaves of the manuscript...
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