Calista and the "Equal Empire" of Her "Sacred Sex"

Calista and the "Equal Empire"mlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA of Her "Sacred Sex" J. M . ARM 1STEAD gfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA If we look at Rowe's RQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA T h e F a ir P e n it e n t from the viewpoint of Chris­ tian doctrine, as Douglas Canfield has so usefully done in his recent book, we must, I think, come out with a reading very like his: the play is a dramatic essay on the power of forgiveness.1 And if we look at it with genre uppermost in our minds, then we can hardly dispute Frank Kearful's conclusion that it is an early attempt "to fuse the nat­ uralism of domestic tragedy and the patheticism of 'sentimental' tragedy with a new didacticism."2 It is only when we keep Calista central to our response, as most critics have always found themselves irresistibly doing, that major difficulties of interpretation arise. Canfield knows he is in the minority when he argues that Calista fully and effectively repents. The prevailing view, in the eighteenth cen­ tury and now, was concisely stated by Samuel Johnson in his "Life of Rowe"; Calista "shows no evident signs of repentance, but may be reasonably suspected of feeling pain from detection rather than from guilt, and expresses more shame than sorrow, and more rage than shame."3 Lately, Annibel Jenkins and Richard Dammers have differed as to the reality of Calista's penitence even as they have agreed that, in Dammers' words, "Calista embodies tragic destruction caused by the unreasonable domination of women by men."4 The most recent readings that I know of, those by Janet Aikins and Jean Hagstrum, shift the emphasis from this social dilemma to the contours of Calis­ ta's feelings—Aikins finding that "Rowe is interested in examining 173 174 / ARMISTEADgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA the condition of a person in a hopeless situation, not in effecting change in the society that renders such a situation hopeless," Hagstrum con­ centrating on what he calls the "substructural movement of the play" that pivots on Calista's death wish.5 These recent interpretations are not fundamentally wrong, that is, unfaithful to the dynamics of the play itself, but they remain partial so long as they fail to account for the deep integrity of Calista's pro­ test against moral conventions. By examining the literary contexts of that protest we can see that her penitence, though real, does not in­ volve a capitulation to the moral values embodied in her father. What Aikins reads as psychic torment can then be understood as an an­ guished search for a language and moral code to explain and legiti­ mize unorthodox behavior, and what Hagstrum sees as her death wish can be found giving way to the invocation of a higher law. This higher law is heavenly, even Christian, but is understood only by those who can share Calista's vision of an "equal empire" of her "sa­ cred sex," and it is not operative in the social forms which Sciolto currently "fathers" and which Horatio and Lothario enforce in their antithetical ways. Thus, to some extent Dr. Johnson saw true: while penitence and forgiveness may calm, they cannot cure Calista's "rage," for it springs only secondarily from a sense of the specific sins of individuals, including herself. Its primary source is her tragic recog­ nition, persistent to the play's end, that the dominant institutions and social rituals, albeit supervised by pious men and designed to secure society from mankind's imperfections, cannot fulfill her own most profound, most "soulful" needs. So the play is very much about psychic torment, the "melancholy . . . woes" of "private" persons trying to socialize and sanctify their fallen natures (Prologue, 1. 16).6 The extent to which they are tragi­ cally unsuccessful in doing so is accented by the pervasive shipwreck imagery. Sciolto feels that Calista has "rashly ventured in a stormy sea" (5.1.249). Horatio thinks that Altamont has been "wrecked upon the faithless shore" of his bride (3.1.261). Lothario gives in to a "storm of passion" (4.1.81), but Calista welcomes a different storm that will sink her to the peaceful ocean floor (4.1.133-39). Lavinia, having...