A Waxen World: Early Modern Women and Geographical (Un)awareness

A Waxen World: Early Modern Women and Geographical (Un)awareness Mercedes Maroto Camino Whilst m y Phisitians by their lore are growne Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne That this is m y South-west discoverie Perfretumfebris, by these streights to die.1 Vincent Ward's movie Map of the Human Heart presents some issues which are part of the ongoing debate in cartographic studies. Though couched as a sentimental melodrama, the film manages to convey a critique of the politics of map-making centered around the motif to which thetitlealludes: the treasuring of a pectoral Xray as a love token by the story's main protagonist, an Inuit boy. John Donne, 'Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse', in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. by John Hayward (London: Nonsuch, 196 pp. 320-21 (p. 320). 102 Mercedes Maroto Camino The most interesting cartographic scene occurs w h e n the Inuit, now a young man, opens the closet of a map-maker's studio to find a female mannequin covered with maps. 'Woman is a map' is the map-maker's answer; and, he adds, one needs to trace their coordinates , in order to m a k e sense of them. W o m a n is, in other words, both a living being and a landscape that needs the conquering power of a masculine eye/I to be rendered meaningful. This sententious statement brings h o m e the actuality, and perhaps the undesirability, of a rnasculinist representational tradition which often precedes or accompanies the violent appropriation of women. But it disregards, among other things, the fact that, as the epigraph I have chosen shows, m a n was also seen as a m a p during the early modern period: a micro-cosmic version of the universe composed of diverse quantities of the same four elements. Ward thus sacrifices on the altar of elliptic sophistication not only the significant differences of the mapping of the sexes but also the spatial representations w o m e n have made. What follows is an attempt to redress that absence by presenting some reasons for women's cartographic silence as well as foregrounding their role in depicting some early modern landscapes. The cartographic tradition that started to consolidate i t s e l f during the early modern period entailed the reification of a 2 s Although the term micro-cosmos is often attributed to Democritus (dnthropos mikros kdsmos) arguments have been put forward to trace concept to an old Iranian legend of the origin of the world. Most cultures deploy, however, some sort of analogy between the human body, the house, the social arrangement and the cosmic world. On t h i s topic, see Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body Image of the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975). An early modern example, that of Samuel Purchas, Microcosmu or the Historie ofMan (1619), which is studied below. Early Modern Women and Geographical (Unjawareness 103 particular view of our spatial surroundings and has had serious consequences for the marginalization not only of feminine geographies but also of the geographies of other worlds. Not surprisingly, then, the development of feminist geography has been paralleled and even anticipated by the efforts to re-define what is a map, or even a landscape, coming from colonized and indigenous peoples. T w o recent cartographic exhibitions bear witness to this attempt: 'Cartographic Encounters; an Exhibition of Native American M a p s from Central Mexico to the Artie,' (Newberry Library, Chicago, 1993) and 'Putting the Land on the M a p : Art and Cartography in N e w Zealand since 1840' (New Zealand, 1989). The curators of both exhibits, Mark Warhus and Wystan Curnow, make significant claims for the need to image, and even listen to other The medieval tradition of moral cartography, exemplified by the T-O maps, also extends to the early modern period. E. P. Mayberry Senter offers a succint review of some seventeenth-century allegorical charts with the sole apparent aim of supporting a chauvinistic claim that they were...