Female Performativity in The Tragedy of Mariam

[T]he semblances and appearances of all things cunningly couched, are the principal supporters of our Philosophy: for such as we seem, such are we judged here.

--Philibert de Vienne

[I]t can never be obvious what a woman has inside her.

--Katharine Eisaman Maus

In recent years, The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, written by Elizabeth Cary sometime between 1603 and 1610 and published in 1613, has been interpreted as supporting a broad spectrum of political and social views. ¹ While some critics have found the play to be overtly feminist, others see it as an explicit validation of aristocratic male dominance within marriage and the state. ² Despite these contradictory interpretations, there is one notable constant in modern Mariam criticism: with few exceptions, the tragedy is read as an extension or expression of its author's own life and struggles, both within a difficult marriage and involving her conversion to Catholicism. The fact that one of the most popular scholarly editions of the text republishes the play in combination with Cary's extant biography, The Lady Falkland Her Life, simultaneously underscores and encourages this approach. ³ The apparent congruence between the play and the Life establishes a "field of conceptual or theoretical coherence" Michel Foucault incorporates into his account of the "author-function," a coherence central to current analyses of her literary production. ⁴ For instance, the consistency of her views about proper female behavior expressed in both the Life and the play has frequently been noted, exemplified by her biographer's assessment that "[s]he did always much disapprove the practice of satisfying oneself with their conscience being free from fault, not forbearing all that might have the least show, or suspicion, of uncomeliness, or unfitness; what she thought to be required in this she expressed in this motto (which she caused [to be inscribed] in her daughter's wedding ring): be and seem" (p. 195). Combine this with Mariam's proud assertion that "I cannot frame disguise, nor never taught / My face a look dissenting from my thought," a conviction she reiterates several times, and the assumption that Mariam is a stand-in for the author herself becomes logical (IV.iii.145-6). Be and seem appears to be a neat encapsulation of the kind of behavioral rigor and consistency Cary ostensibly maintained throughout her own life and thus crafted in her tragic heroine's attitude.

But to accept this assumption at face value is, I believe, to close ourselves off from the wider range of meaning offered by this rich text. Instead, I want to argue that be and seem is a key which unlocks diverse possibilities for female agency within both Cary's life and her drama. It is true that this motto is explicated for readers of the biography as evidence of Cary's insistence upon an exact correlation between virtuous thought and decorous practice, but we must pay attention to the contexts in which this text appears. The Lady Falkland Her Life is not, strictly speaking, hers at all--rather, she is a protagonist in a story of someone else's composition, and her representation is therefore shaped by the agenda of her biographer. Her status as a persona in this narrative invokes the rhetorical concept of ethopoesis, the making of character, which, as Lloyd Davis explains, is an inherently contradictory process. ⁵ The inevitability of authorial involvement in the crafting of biographical events into a cohesive record means that readers must approach it as a precise indicator of the nature of its subject with extreme caution.

The exact identity of the author of the Life is debatable, though it was evidently written after Cary's death by one of her four daughters who took the veil at the Benedictine convent of Cambray. ⁶ Throughout the text, the author is unconventionally straightforward about her mother's personal characteristics, but these are...