Personal Geographies and Liminal Identities in Three Early Modern Women's Life Writings about War

Throughout literary history, war has been a recurrent theme in life writing. This article discusses life writing as an important aspect of comparative literature or world literature, and focuses on three early modern women's geographical experiences and liminal identities as found in their life writings: Marguerite of Valois (1553-1615), a Catholic and Queen consort of Navarre who served as a supporter of Protestants during the French wars of religion, Queen Henrietta Maria of England (1609-69), and Lady Brilliana Harley (1598-1643), the wife of a Parliamentarian representative of England. These three noblewomen used their writings as means of constructing their identities in the public sphere.

While describing the forced transgressions of their gender boundaries, these women reveal their concern for suffering people, and their geographic mobility in uncharted territories in which they came to create for themselves a liminal identity. Marguerite of Valois saved the Huguenots and her husband during a time of religious struggles in Paris. Queen Henrietta Maria's letters manifest her indomitable attempts to secure ammunition and support for King Charles I of England. Lady Brilliana Harley bravely participated in defending her home/garrison, Brampton Bryan Castle in northwestern England, when it was under siege by Royalist troops. These women contributed to life writing, a genre that traditional literary studies have generally associated with men. Men's life writings mainly dealt with political ideologies, decision making, and military conflicts with both enemies and lifelong friends. Although women's life writings often reveal their priorities in preserving the safety of their families, the women who write these accounts may also transgress their liminal experiences, go through rites of passage, and encounter a realm that falls outside their identity when they explore and undertake arduous and dangerous journeys.

David Herman uses the term place to refer to spatial experiences (515). The "lived place" in wartime suggests not only each individual's social relations and perception of the world, but also his/her liminal identity before the (re)positioning of the self. Liminal space is a term frequently used in psychology and cultural geography, referring to "thresholds," "boundaries," or "frontiers." Arnold Van Gennep defines liminality as a rite of passage (1), while Victor Turner, a British cultural geographer, develops the theory of liminality as a threshold or an ambiguous state: "Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (The Ritual Process 95).

Liminal space suggests the possibility of stepping into a new status. In his classic interpretation of social space, Henri Lefebvre asserts that geographical spaces, landscapes, and property connote the results of social production, while the designation of spaces marks the features of socially constructed boundaries (26). In the early modern period in which men controlled hegemonic discourses, most women's everyday experiences tended to be confined within a narrow sphere; however, their life writings not only reveal the possibility of repositioning themselves but also exemplify their "ethical position by taking up the challenge and confront, heroically, this chaos" (Szakolczai 143).

For Van Gennep, the liminal stage is like the rites of passage that a child needs to undergo before he/she becomes an adult and finds a paradigm for him/herself (1-2). The liminal stage also suggests separation from the original self and unlimited possibilities in the procedure of self-construction (La Shure). The early modern women discussed in this article not only disclose their individual sense of environment, but also reveal their bonding and perceived identities. Indeed, war itself could be seen as a liminal period, with each of the women discussed here standing on the threshold. With the uncertainty, impenetrability, and instability of the wartime situations in which they found themselves, each one was brave enough to create and define her role as a woman in transition.

Marguerite of Valois played an important role in the struggle between the Catholics and Huguenots and in the relationship between France and Navarre. In the House of Navarre, two queens of the early modern period were called Marguerite: one...