Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer

Conclusion

Conclusion 247 247 Conclusion Early modern writers of all kinds give voice to the belief that rhetoric is the most powerful tool for articulating the highest kinds of truth; it is through “rare inuentions & pleasant deuises,” as Peacham says, that “the deepe vnderstanding, the secret counselles, & politicke considerations of wisedome are most effectually expressed.”1 As do many of their contemporaries, Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer corroborate Vives’s belief that the “harmony” of poetry “corresponds with the melody of the human soul” 2 as much as they illustrate Peacham’s claim that rhetoric’s “rare inuentions & pleasant deuises” are crucial to expressing the soul’s melody. But, as much as any of their contemporaries, Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer also recognize the inadequacy of language to convey devotion , conceding rhetoric’s limitations even as they attest to its capacity to enable thought and its verbal expression. Both despite and because of their abilities as poets and rhetors, Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer know as well as anyone that language will always fall short of articulating fully our most abstract of thoughts, our always less-than-perfect understanding of “divinest things.” Though there are some notable poetic and biographical differences among the three writers I consider in this study, they also share some important similarities—not the least of which is a subtly complex understanding of rhetorical theory and practice. Their work thus attests not only to their active participation in literary and rhetorical culture, but also to their rigorous habits of thought. The extent of their abilities is perhaps nowhere more evident than in their shared ability to think and to write in what 248 Women Writing of Divinest Things might, in less capable hands, seem to be hopelessly muddled ways. It has been said that only a sophisticated mind can hold contradictory things in place at the same time: that these women are able to do so, again and again, attests to the measure of their intellectual development. Often it is their successful negotiation of contraries that makes their poetic arguments convincing and comprehensible, and their rhetorical abilities have much to do with the degree of their success. In particular, their representations of devotion and of divinity (whether Hebrew, pagan, Christian or a combination thereof) are understood and expressed in seemingly paradoxical terms. It is precisely those binary oppositions that, sometimes together and sometimes separately, make their poetry interesting and vital. As I explain throughout, those binaries include the abstract and the concrete, the ineffable and expressible, the sacred and the secular, art and nature—and, of course, logic and rhetoric. Lynette Hunter, in “Feminist Thoughts on Rhetoric,” proposes that the history of rhetoric offers us possible models for overcoming the theoretical deadlock between absolutists who claim that language is adequate to representation and relativists who oppose this claim. The history of rhetoric, Hunter argues, presents repeated attempts at articulating at once feeling and truth: “feelings,” she observes, “are often unauthorized modes of knowing,” while “the rational is [often] an authorized feeling.” In this way, she proposes, “aesthetics and epistemology are closely intertwined.” 3 Many writers of the early modern period, including Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer, present a lucid picture of Hunter’s claim. For these poets, the aesthetics of their verse (which are in large measure enabled by the tools of rhetoric) are closely intertwined with their epistemology of devotion (the inner “knowing” of their convictions ). Contrary to what the Ramists believed, the expression of rational yet empirically unprovable “feeling” can never entirely free itself from rhetoric or, concomitantly, from the evidence offered by worldly experience. In the early modern mind, C. S. Lewis once said, “High abstractions and rarefied artifices jostled the earthiest Conclusion 249 particulars,” 4 and his claim is as true for the women of this study as it is for the men about whom he writes. Nor is the expression of the kinds of abstractions to which Lewis refers the kind of straightforward linear process Ramism advocates. Writers such as Pembroke , Wroth and Lanyer cannot be firmly placed in either the absolutist or the relativist camp; rather, their position on the relationship of thought and language lies somewhere in between this binary opposition, and their place in this middle ground arguably has more to do with the nature of their verse than it does with their gender. This does not mean, however, that gender is not relevant in a discussion of these...