Tactile places: Materializing desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker

Textual Practice

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 329-352

  Anderson, Misty G ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Barker; Cavendish; Descartes; Feminist; Lesbian; Tactile; Utopia

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149314288     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09502369908582344     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Peter A. Schouls, The Imposition of Method: A Study of Descartes and Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 3-6.
2. Thomas M. Lennon, in Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) takes the opposing view that Locke and Descartes are deeply divided. See pp. 163-8.
3. Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1992).
4. Timothy J. Reiss, The Discourse of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univeristy Press, 1982), p. 30.
5. Jonathan Bennett, 'Locke's philosophy of mind', in Vere Chappell (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
6. Michael McKeon summarizes the interdependence of emergent ideologies of sex, gender and capital in his 'Historicizing patriarchy: the emergence of gender difference in England, 1660-1760', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28, 3 (1995).
7. See Catherine Stimpson, 'Zero degree deviance: the lesbian novel in English', Critical Inquiry, 3 (1981), p. 365
8. in response, Valerie Traub, 'The (in)significance of lesbian desire in early modern England', in Susan Zimmerman (ed.) Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 1992)
9. Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
10. Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 178 and 226-32
11. Kathryn King, 'The unaccountable wife and other tales of female desire in Jane Barker's The Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies', The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 35, 2 (1994), p. 156
12. Laura Rosenthal, Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 58-104
13. and Theodora Jankowski, 'Pure resistance: queer(y)ing virginity in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure', Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998).
14. Luce Irigaray, 'The mechanics of fluids', p. 111
15. and 'When our two lips speak together', pp. 205-18 in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
16. Jay Stevenson, 'The mechanist-vitalist soul of Margaret Cavendish', SEL, 36, (1996), p. 532.
17. Eve Keller, 'Producing petty gods: Margaret Cavendish's critique of experi- mental science', ELH, 64, 2 (summer 1997), pp. 457 and 451.
18. Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, wrote to Descartes directly to argue that Descartes has not accounted for these irrational, bodily circumstances which do affect the thinking being. 'It is nonetheless very difficult to understand that a soul such as you have described it, after having had the power and the experience of reasoning well, could lose all this through a few vapors, and could subsist without the body and have nothing in common with it.' Descartes responds by explaining that it is very difficult to understand the concepts of the body, the soul, and their intersection in his work. He closes with a recommendation that she should not concentrate on 'metaphysical matters' for more than a few days a year. See Descartes' Correspondance, Tome V, ed. C. Adam and G. Milhaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), pp. 316 and 325.
19. See also Albert A. Johnstone, 'The bodily nature of the self, or what Descartes should have conceded Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia', in Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (ed.) Giving the Body Its Due (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992).
20. For example, Love's Adventures flaunts convention with thirty-three scenes without subdivisions.
21. Cavendish, 'Notice to readers,' in Playes (1662).
22. Victoria Kahn, in 'Margaret Cavendish and the romance of contract', Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), pp. 545-53, atgues that Cavendish's pre- occupation with marriage, which did not reflect merely (or even necessarily) heterosexual ends so much as the political stopgap to the Hobbesean exchange of obedience for protection, which dissolves if the sovereign can no longer provide protection.
23. Payne, 'Dramatic dreamscapes: women's dreams and Utopian vision in the works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle', in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (eds) Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991).
24. Mihoko Suzuki makes a similar point in her 'Margaret Cavendish and the female satirist', SEL, 37 (1997), p. 494.
25. Donoghue points out the Ovidian echo from the story of Iphis and Ianthe in Passions, p. 229.
26. On the inscription of female same-sex desire as a legal/critical lack in Renaissance culture, see Traub, 'The (in)significance .', pp. 150-69.
27. Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists, 1642-1737 (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 142.
28. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970)
29. Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).
30. Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1982).
31. Kathryn King and Jesslyn Medoff, 'Jane Barker and her life (1652-1732): the documentary record', Eighteenth-Century Life, 21, 3 (November 1997), p. 22.
32. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 164-90, and Stafford, Body Criticism.
33. Quoted in King and Medoff, 'Jane Barker and her life', p. 27.
34. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 6-22.
35. Kathyn King's 'Of needles and pens and women's work', Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 14, 1 (spring 1995), argues that, 'By asserting continuities between traditional feminine activities and the rise of the new print culture, text-textile analogies . . . may have played a patt in promoting a female reading community' (p. 82).
36. Her point is indebted to Josephine Donovan's more materialist 'Women and the rise of the novel: a feminist-Marxist theory', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16, 3 (1991).
37. Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 17-77.
38. Leonardi's witty and insightful essay, 'Recipes for reading: summer pasta, Lobster á 1a Riseholme, and Key Lime Pie' (PMLA, May 1989), traces the evolution of the classic Rombaur cookbook The Joy of Cooking. Strong associations between women's culture and cooking have surfaced in such late twentieth-century fiction as Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, and Laura Esquivel's Como Agua para Chocolate.
39. King, 'The unaccountable wife,' p. 166
40. Donoghue, Passions, p. 178.
41. James Fitzmaurice, Introduction to Cavendish's Sociable Letters, and Janet Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 326.
42. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge), p. 3.
43. Barry Coward, The Stuart Age, England 16031714 (London: Longman, 1980), p. 400
44. Rose Collis, Portraits to the Wall: Historic Lesbian Lives Unveiled(London and New York: Cassell, 1994).
45. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 106.
46. Johnstone Harth and Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).