In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse
  • Ivan Cañadas
Hammons, Pamela S., Gender, Sexuality, and Material Objects in English Renaissance Verse (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2010; hardback; pp. xiii, 223; 11 b/w illustrations; RRP £55.00; ISBN 9780754668992.

In this carefully researched study, Pamela Hammons sets out to ‘establish a sound basis for comparing men and women’s verse’ in early modern England, and ‘to illuminate the widest possible range of configurations available between human and non-human subject and object’ expressed in such poetry (pp. 5, 8). She identifies the ‘lyric form’ as particularly fertile ground, since it ‘typically represents the first-person … perspective of its poetic speaker and foregrounds his or her emotions’, exposing ways in which ‘poets imagined mutual influences between and conflations of people and things’ (pp. 11–12). As Hammons observes, for instance, ‘Love tokens’ could ‘blur boundaries between people (for example, lovers) and between people and things’ (p. 13).

Hammons finds, in turn, that ‘women’s poetry … reveals women’s creative tactics … for asserting agency in relation to material items ranging from personal property … to real estate’, exposing ‘how women imagined their multiple, complex interactions with the material world’ (p. 24). Further, she traces gender differences, as women, ‘across differences of social rank, wealth and life stage … tend to assert more complete control over small moveables and to use them as vehicles for expressing a greater range of forms of personal agency … than they do via … poetic depictions of real property’ (p. 28).

In analysing poetry by men – including Robert Herrick’s Hesperides (1648) and ‘the Carkanet’, and anonymous verse ‘in the Bod. MS. Rawlinson poet, 211’ – Hammons underlines male anxieties produced ‘precisely because of the conventionality of objectifying the female beloved’, whereby ‘the gift’ and the gift-giving ‘male speaker’, may, in turn, ‘collapse into each other’, the ‘male lover’ transfigured into ‘a passive, possessed object’ (pp. 41–43).

More extensive and fascinating, however, are her findings concerning women’s poetry. Thus, in Chapter 5, which examines ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women’s verse about real property’, Hammons finds an important difference from ‘male contemporary poets’ penchant for openly, sometimes boldly, figuring themselves possessively in relation to property regardless of their actual riches or rank’; indeed, paradoxically, ‘the stronger a woman poet’s personal investment in power (because of her rank, wealth, social prestige and connections, or proximity to estate ownership), the weaker her representation of her relationship to property and her claims [End Page 197] for poetic prominence appear to be’, a phenomenon which Hammons interprets as a tactic by female poets – ‘especially’ propertied ‘widows’, who recognized the threat that they posed ‘patriarchy’ – sought ‘to downplay property ownership in their verse’ (pp. 117–18).

Passing to another genre, however, in her Chapter 6 discussion of Mary Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), ‘a prose utopia’ (p. 136), Hammons notes how fantasy sheds light on female aspirations, as manifested ‘in the striking contrast’ between Cavendish’s representation of ‘estates directly associated with herself’, where she stresses the position of ‘her husband, William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle’, and ‘downplays … her own personal power’, and her celebration of ‘the Empress’, who is defined both by ‘impossibly great wealth’ and by ‘independence from her husband as political agent’ (pp. 136–38). In turn, Hammons discusses other works by Cavendish, where such implicit desires are manifested in the ‘revising’ of ‘country house conventions and queering gender roles’ to ‘encode … her desire as a subject of property’ (p. 139).

Thus, discussing Cavendish’s poem, ‘A Dialogue Between a Bountifull Knight and a Castle Ruin’d in Warr’, Hammons carefully examines the role that such ‘queering of gender’, represented by ‘the Knight’s tears’ (figuring Cavendish’s husband), and by the ‘feminiz[ing]’ of ‘the castle itself’ – the latter, figuring ‘Bolsover’, a war-ravaged property, ironically already restored and settled upon Mary Cavendish at the time of the poem’s writing, and of its revisions in the 1660s (pp. 144–48). Hammons fascinatingly argues that it is precisely through such ‘queering of gender’ that Cavendish implicitly asserts her economic agency, so that ‘[a]s the Knight...

pdf

Share