Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England by Jessica C. Murphy (review)

Jessica C. Murphy sets out to challenge the scholarly presumption that early modern conduct literature provided women with a simple and ‘rigid set of rules’ for the passive maintenance of their virtue (p. 5). Through close analysis of a broad range of texts, from manuals to ballads, Virtuous Necessity complicates our understanding of the conduct advice genre between the early sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries.

The conduct advice literature of this period is shown to contain multiple and, at times, conflicting messages about the cultivation and performance of virtuous behaviour. In their negotiation of conduct advice, Murphy argues, women were increasingly required to think critically about and, by the end of the period, were even encouraged to take an active role in the construction of their virtue. But while Murphy goes so far as to suggest that there could be ‘paradoxical power’ (p. 11) for women who were successfully chaste and obedient, in that they were afforded a level of moral influence, her central thesis is not so radical. Murphy ultimately finds that this limited form of ‘power’ was derived from male authority and functioned largely to reinforce it: ‘Early modern women were not taught to be unquestioningly obedient, but what they were taught may not be that much more heartening’ (p. 52).

Virtuous Necessity is loosely structured around various types and themes of early modern conduct literature, within which Murphy discerns a shift from a strict, unviable model of feminine virtue in the sixteenth century towards a more flexible ‘post-Reformation’ model. Chapter 1 explores the earlier model through the virtue of chastity. At once pertaining to untouched virgins and faithful wives, chastity was figured by ‘both a prohibition of and encouragement of sexual activity’ (p. 15). Murphy shows how writers like Juan Luis Vives and Edmund Spenser struggled to capture the multivalence of chastity within singular, contradictory allegories, even while expecting readers to look on their texts as clear pictures of feminine virtue. Murphy concludes that the task of being chaste would not have been an easy one ‘to live up to’ (p. 33).

Chapter 2 frames the ‘post-Reformation’ model within seventeenth-century funeral sermons and conduct tracts. In these texts, male, Protestant writers lauded the confessional voices of ‘godly’ women as having a moral power to transform the virtue of others (p. 36). This authority to perform and transform virtue derived from ‘godly’ women’s own obedience to their husbands and to God. Murphy distinguishes this as a later, ‘reformative’ model of feminine virtue where women themselves were invested with a degree of ‘influence’ (p. 55), though the authorship and religious agenda of these texts remains problematic.

Chapter 3 uses the Shakespearean stage to illustrate effectively how these models were translated for early modern audiences. For the first, Murphy links Ophelia’s madness in Hamlet directly with her inability to reconcile conflicting advice about her sexuality, suggesting that, by the turn of the seventeenth century, even Shakespeare was critical of the impossible standards presented to women in contemporary conduct literature. Indeed, Murphy theorises that the puzzling fate of Paulina in A Winter’s Tale – rewarded despite her disobedience – is a reflection of the shift towards a more active, malleable model of feminine virtue. Although Paulina appears ‘subversive’, her actions are shown virtuously to serve a higher purpose, restoring the social order of the play, yet ultimately returning her to ‘the control of a husband’ (pp. 78–79).

Chapter 4 turns to a necessary examination of women writers of conduct advice literature and specifically how their texts figured ‘the circulation of virtue’ (p. 81). Interestingly, Murphy shows that women writers understood virtue as deriving more from nature than from instruction. Mother’s manuals, for instance, posited virtue within the act of breastfeeding. These texts appear to extend Murphy’s second...