Crafting Un-Fortune: Rape, Romance, and Resistance in Hester Pulter's The Unfortunate Florinda

Two bloody blades; two pricked veins; two golden bowls to catch the blood. Thus far, the climactic scene of Hester Pulter's seventeenth–century prose romance, The Unfortunate Florinda, eerily accords with the story of the death of Seneca. The famed classical story had experienced a resurgence in the early modern period, thanks to "Three Good Women" in Montaigne's Essays (1580), and with this revival emerged a particular emphasis on the Stoic virtue of Pompeia Paulina, Seneca's wife.² As Montaigne recounts, Seneca—forced by Nero to commit suicide—begs Paulina to live on virtuously without him, but she refuses: "I would not have you imagin that the vertuous examples of your life have not also taught me to die … I wil go with you and be partaker of your fortune".³ Together, then, Seneca's and Paulina's wrists are cut, and it is this scene that provides the allusive precedent for Pulter's grisly spectacle.⁴ Manifesting a Paulinian fortitude after being raped by the king of Spain, Pulter's Florinda likewise cuts her wrists in defiance of a tyrant, refusing to live in the shame and dishonor he forces upon her. And, like Paulina (rescued at the last moment by the rather shame-faced Nero), Florinda survives, as her family and friends intervene to prevent her premature death.

But there the similarities between the stories end. Rather than emblematizing Paulina's resignedly Stoic constancy, The Unfortunate Florinda's climactic scene underscores the victim's active agency, thus epitomizing the romance's utter rejection of a determinism governing either individual behavior or the narrative itself. The recognition and bewailing of a suprahuman force guiding individual destiny, often named "Fortune," is so common within the romance genre as to be nearly definitional.⁵ Pulter would seem to be playing into this clichéd convention, as she constructs her plot of established narrative sources and romance paradigms that seem to beg adherence to predetermined conventions. But as her title states, Pulter's romance is "Un-Fortunate." Resisting centuries of precedent, The Unfortunate Florinda invokes Fortune's unseen power only to undermine it, just as Florinda's grotesque vein-cutting—part of a premeditated, sustained, justified act of revenge—evokes Paulina's story only to underscore their differences. In positing the inculcation of reasoned virtue as the means of superseding an allegedly all-powerful force, Pulter's romance confutes both the determinism surrounding her heroine's fate and that of the story in which she appears.

Such interest in Fortune long predates Pulter. "Ah, Fortune, how cruelly your wheel has now turned for me!," the eponymous knight exclaims in Chrétien de Troye's Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot). "Once I was on the top, but now I've been thrown down to the bottom."⁶ Here, Chrétien's twelfth-century hero echoes the common trope of Fortune as an ever-spinning wheel, to which her victims are compelled to cling for dear life. Fortune's other dominant early modern figuration, as a woman (often blindfolded) precariously balanced on a globe, similarly evokes the instability of the human condition under Fortune's caprice (see Fig. 1). Fortune thus expresses the seemingly incomprehensible transition from one stage of life to another, often with little or no moral explanation. Such a figure proved especially useful within a genre that, as Patricia Parker notes, proceeds on a "strategy of delay," "a form which simultaneously quests for and postpones a particular end, objective, or object."⁷ By attributing a character's change in situation to Fortune, writers provide a generically acceptable justification for postponing narrative resolution, while divorcing that change from being considered a judgment upon a character's virtue or actions.

Figure 1.

At right, the female figure of Fortuna, in Emblem XCVIII from Andrea Alciato's Emblemata (Paris: Jean Richer, 1584). Image used by permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

This interest in Fortune and its relationship to individual action transcends romance to permeate a wide...