Aemilia Lanyer’s Pathetic Phallacy

According to Valerie Traub, Renaissance representations of female same-sex desire were split between images of the vilified “tribade” who assumed masculine privileges by cross-dressing or employing phallic substitutes and the virtuous “friend” who engaged in an egalitarian and non-penetrative relationship with another woman. This article argues that Aemilia Lanyer’s poetry offers images of female eroticism that are at once egalitarian and involve forms of gender play and penetration. This alternative erotics is conveyed by the pathetic fallacy that governs Lanyer’s “A Description of Cooke-ham” (1611), a poem that describes an idyllic summer Lanyer spent with her former patron, Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland. The poem recounts how, as the women explored the grounds of the Cookham estate, nature itself seemed to respond to Clifford’s presence. The article argues that the poem figures not only nature, but also poetry, as a kind of sexual prosthesis that both poet and reader can invest with sentiment and sensation. Lanyer’s poem therefore reveals the strategies a woman writer used to gain poetic authority; it also may allow us to glimpse an early modern vision of female homoeroticism that can be compared to contemporary identities and practices.