The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary F. Waller (review)

Gary Waller's The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn revisits from a new perspective many authors with whom he is intimately familiar. Waller's study is innovative in its application of Kristeva, from whom he adapts the concept of the 'Female Baroque' as part of his interest in the construction of gender. As in earlier work, here he carefully historicizes his chosen texts while also acknowledging our own shifting understanding of gender and its social construction (see, for example, Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and the Early Modern Construction of Gender, Wayne State University Press, 1993). By drawing on feminist theory, Waller argues that through the 'Female Baroque', early modern women writers engage in 'counter-discourses in which, in different ways, [they are] challenged to find devious, subversive, and oppositional space for themselves' in response to the dominant patriarchalism of the period (p. 13).

Waller's introduction outlines his application of Kristeva, defines the Baroque, situates the work historically, and builds to the idea of a Female Baroque he establishes in Chapter 1. The Baroque itself is, as Waller notes, difficult to pin down, but he offers five ways for thinking about the form: fictionalizing (in which he includes Deleuze's le pli), kitsch, melancholy, hyperbole, and plateauing. By exploring these elements specifically through literature, Waller establishes Catholicism's centrality to the Baroque and a related connection to absolutism. He asks how we can speak of an English Baroque and in answer outlines the nationalist ways in which scholars often encounter English literature. For Waller, one of the key oversights is that women writers, now being explored more and more, 'have rarely been viewed within […] a Baroque context' (p. 27).

After establishing the theoretical background for the work, Waller turns to key early modern examples. Chapter 2 outlines dominant ideologies of the period and then conceptualizes Female Baroque writers as resisting them. Following this, the third chapter addresses overlooked Catholic women's writing: the devotional work of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. Chapter 4 examines Protestant examples of an emerging or identifiable Baroque in Mary Sidney's and Amelia Lanyer's writing. Waller notes that in both the Baroque is limited, but shows how formal elements gave women a voice within Protestant culture that encouraged women to be humble and silent and to cast away the image of Mary as 'queen of the universe' (p. 117). The chapter then moves to the women of Little Gidding. Waller identifies a Baroque multiplicity in the various levels of their storytelling (p. 136). Concluding with an investigation of American Protestant communities through Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson, Waller's work in this chapter demonstrates his breadth of research and analysis.

In the final chapters, Waller turns largely to courtly examples. The fifth chapter deals with the English courts under James I and Charles I, highlighting the first noticeably Baroque influences in England. Here, Waller stresses the importance of the theatre and theatricality, discusses plateauing and kitsch, and argues that the court masque gave women 'access to a whole new social arena' (p. 172). In this chapter Waller investigates texts written in the country but which have the court in mind, including works by Mary Wroth, William Cavendish's daughters, and Hester Pulter. Chapter 6 deals specifically with Wroth, establishing the multiplicity in her prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania as an example of Baroque narrative folds. Waller notes that the text features 'both multiple flames of hyperbole and floods of melancholia' (p. 210). Of particular interest in this chapter is the connection Waller draws between the operatic form appearing in the period and Wroth's Urania (p. 211). Waller's final...