Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (review)

In “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1981), Jerome Bruner suggested that genres exert “as powerful an influence in shaping our modes of thought as they have in creating the realities that their plots depict.” In this fine collection of essays edited by Ms. Dowd and Ms. Eckerle, the inventive genres of women’s life writing in the early modern period are understood as fertile spaces in which new “cultural languages” can contest restrictions on women’s lives and minds. The editors focus on the formal complexity of women’s life-writing, on the ways in which women’s autobiographical texts “intersect and engage with other genres, such as romances, novels, prayer books, or recipes.” Critics typically assume that such complexity reflects fragmentation: unable to imagine a “whole” self, the early modern woman writer expresses the irreconcilability of her split self by mixing genres. These essays, however, signal an inventiveness more concerned with the innovative integration of self than with division.

In an essay on Margaret Cavendish’s “domestic experiment,” Lara Dodds challenges the seventeenth-century separation between experience (the “marker of a private, feminine space”) and experiment (associated with the “public, masculine, and objective basis for modern science”), and acknowledges, with Catherine Gallagher, the “infinitude of selfhood” that seems to mark the birth of the female subject in Cavendish’s voluminous literary production. Life writing allowed Cavendish to “express her lifelong experiment with genre” and explore “her philosophical interest in the problems of experience.”

Mary Ellen Lamb illuminates our own critical (and cultural) tendencies to restrict certain kinds of knowledge. In an essay on Anne Halkett’s Memoirs, Ms. Lamb argues that for Halkett, “writing for God and for secular readers did not represent a split in consciousness or even, evidently, a substantial conflict.” Ms. Lamb reminds us that there were “undoubtedly hundreds if not thousands of . . . ways to negotiate the spiritual and the secular in those troubled times.” “To approach a work such as Halkett’s Memoirs,” she argues, “it is important to consider religion as a productive rather than a repressive force. Instead of a locus of arid doctrines, religion constituted a form of desire, fully compatible with sexuality, capable of generating an extraordinary diversity of variously nuanced subjectivities.”

Arguments such as Ms. Lamb’s grant this collection a kind of importance beyond the (not insignificant) framing questions of how generic conventions influence narrative constructions of women’s selves. In a related essay, Catherine Field claims that the “specialized type of self-certification” involved in the “proving” of a recipe in women’s recipe (or receipt) books indicates a way in which women participated in the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, receipt books, emphasizing cures and bodily enhancement, suggest a “benign” view of the body, in contrast to a predominant, early modern view of the body as negative and vulnerable. Josephine Donovan examines women’s “defense-narratives.” The practice of women defending themselves in writing extends back to the late medieval period and plays an unacknowledged role in the development of the novel.

Elspeth Graham’s essay on Cavendish highlights the book. Noting the paradoxes of Cavendish’s identity—the importance to her of belonging to a stable world even while political and social exile come to define most of her adult life—Ms. Graham locates Cavendish’s texts at “the brink of form,” her writing always “bound up with issues of finding form, both for her own subjectivity and for her texts.” Cavendish’s formal innovations should not be categorized as scientific or dramatic or poetic, as they often are. In Ms. Graham’s argument, they occur “as a result of [Cavendish’s] transformative intelligence.” Ms. Graham’s holistic approach to genre understands it as an entire way of thinking, not just of thinking about the self, and certainly not just of thinking about the female self. Though this thoroughgoing examination of genre as epistemology is particularly clear in Ms. Graham’s essay, the...