Friendship, Sovereignty, and Sexuality in Katherine Philips's Poetry

This article examines the tense, contradictory relationship between friendship and sovereignty in the poems of Katherine Philips. Philips's more optimistic poems suggest that if friends relinquish self-sovereignty in favor of ecstatic union, other, more valuable sovereignties might be achieved: friends might triumph over limits imposed by embodiment, or be able to free themselves from a corrupt world, or even face together the supposedly ultimate separation of death. Her laments about friendship, by contrast, explore dark sides of what it can mean to be without self-sovereignty or without regard for it: to be subject to the tyranny of a friend now figured as absolutely sovereign; to wish to subject the friend to one's own tyranny; or to languish while the friend enjoys her own freedom. Rather than resolve this contradiction, Philips places it at friendship's center, suggesting that intense subjective incoherence and ambivalent desire are what friendship have to offer.