Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 (review)

In Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse, Tamara Harvey uses a comparative approach to analyze the ways four seventeenth-century women in the Americas engaged in the intellectual debates of their times by challenging traditional notions of the female body. In her book, divided in four chapters dedicated to Anne Bradstreet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Anne Hutchinson, and Marie de l'Incarnation respectively, Harvey argues that the texts and discourses of these women display a clear opposition to patriarchal conceptions and a hierarchical gender order. Harvey's line of argument rests on two related notions: that of modesty "as keeping due measure" and what she calls "feminist functionalism." Basing her analysis in the discourses of experimental science and religion used by women from three different American colonies, Harvey demonstrates that their engagement with gynesis—that is, the appearance of the feminine in discursive constructions of modernity—challenged and redefined their contemporary male counterparts' definitions of the female body and its relationship with the soul.

Figuring Modesty opens with an enlightening introduction in which Harvey lays out her methodological concerns and defines the concepts that guide the discussion throughout the book. She distances herself from other studies of early modern women's writing by proposing to look at modesty as an understanding of bodies "as functional but symbolically unimportant" (2). Harvey proposes that the four women's discourses contend that souls do not transcend bodies, challenging a hierarchical relationship between body and spirit. She continues to clarify the notion of functionalism that informs her analysis as an approach that focuses on what bodies do rather than what they mean, a development that took place during the Renaissance not only in medical thought but also in legal, religious, and social debates.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to Anne Bradstreet's poetic engagement with medical functionalism and the ways she challenged the Aristotelian belief that women are inferior to men. Harvey examines Bradstreet's use of Helkiah Crooke's medical encyclopedia Microcosmographia (1615) in the quaternion "Of the Four Humors of Mans Constitution" as a way to gain insight into the poet's notion of gendered bodies. She argues that Bradstreet is particularly interested in Crooke's appreciation of women's bodies as being as functional as men's. Harvey focuses on Bradstreet's discussion, in the voice of Flegme, of the soul's dependency on the functional body. This first chapter also considers Bradstreet's political and marriage poems, emphasizing the poet's analogies between a microcosmos of the body and the family and a macrocosmos of the social and divine order. The main concern of these poems, according to Harvey, is to set competing models of masculinity in opposition rather than to advance an argument for female functionality, yet at the same time the poet offers a subtle feminist commentary. Harvey's contribution to the body of works dedicated to Bradstreet's oeuvre is that she reads beyond the poet's take on the querelle des femmes and demonstrates that Bradstreet's engagement with Crook's medical functionalism was not intended to reject the social hierarchies of patriarchy but rather to remap gender relations.

The argument of Figuring Modesty is woven evenly into the book, from the first chapter to the next one dedicated to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's most ambitious poem, Primero sueño. Harvey argues that Sor Juana, like Bradstreet, represents the body as supporting the activities of the soul and in this way diminishes the traditional symbolic value given to the body. She considers a large amount of critical works dedicated to Sor Juana's poem and on occasion seems to argue too closely with them, yet her careful reading of Primero sueño allows her to convincingly argue that the body of the dreamer is never completely separated from the soul since it is constantly evoked as sustenance of the spirit. Drawing on the section of...