Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England.

Hopkins, Lisa

Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England Edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999

Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens is a sustained attempt to recover from texts of the early modern period, both literary and nonliterary, histories of women functioning not only as isolated, unusual individuals but also as members of female networks and alliances. Some of them examine representations of female bonding in dramas by Shakespeare, Jonson, Dekker and Webster, and the anonymous author of Swetnam the Woman-hater; some of them examine groupings of actual women such as London maidservants, the kinship circle of Elizabeth Ralegh, named and unnamed needlewomen, and the members of the religious community founded by Mary Ward; and some of them look at female authors such as Aphra Behn, Aemilia Lanyer, Diana Primrose, and Bathsua Makin. Inevitably, this is an enterprise fraught with difficulties, since records of such groupings (which might in any case have been too informal to be recorded in the first place) are so much less likely to survive than accounts of the doings of the isolated, notable individual. The essays in this collection can be roughly divided into those that thrive on this difficulty and those that are bedevilled by it.

The one that addresses it most centrally, and is thus arguably the most interesting essay in the collection, is Jodi Mikalacki's "Women's Networks and the Female Vagrant: A Hard Case," which examines the ways in which the written account of the experiences of one particular female vagrant may encode fictionalized versions of the experiences of others. Jean Howard, in her afterword to the volume, first deplores the fact that the traffic between literature and history continues to be largely one way; she then suggests that Mikalachki's essay at least could and should be profitably read by historians. I suspect that they would in fact be struck by the weakness of her evidence rather than its strengths, but this in turn is Mikalachki's own strength, for she is absolutely clear about the nature and limitations of her project and of what exactly such testimony as she is able to recover might be used to establish. Her essay thus represents an advance not only in the knowledge-base for such projects but in the theorization of them.

Some of the work in the collection is by historians: Kathleen M. Brown's" `A P[ar]cell of Murdereing Bitches': Female Relationships in an Eighteenth-Century Slaveholding Household" offers a tantalizing glimpse into the class, race, and gender hierarchies of an American plantation. Along rather similar lines, albeit on a very different subject, is Mary Wack's "Women, Work, and Plays in an English Medieval Town," which offers a beautifully neat reading of two apparently late interpolations into the Chester mystery cycle by historicizing the moment of their production. Also worthy of mention is Valerie Wayne's sophisticated analysis of Swetnam the Woman-hater, which not only negotiates but makes a strength of the anonymity of the text it analyzes.

In stark contrast, I found Margo Hendricks's essay "Alliance and Exile: Aphra Behn's Racial Identity" positively frightening, and I think that if historians are indeed to attend to what literary critics have to say, they had better not be asked to read Hendricks's essay. Building on a chance question that she was once asked, Hendricks departs entirely from the realms of verifiability to enter into an extended speculation on the possibility that Aphra Behn might have had black ancestry. So she might; biographical knowledge about Behn is certainly slender and contradictory enough, but for that very reason we cannot know so. In under a page, however, Hendricks's initial assurance that we have enough evidence to know this not to have been so has turned into cavalier disregard of evidence and guesswork about how it could have happened: "If Behn was a passer, from which parent did she inherit her black African ancestry? How did that ancestor end up in Canterbury, if the parish records cited by Behn's biographers are accurate?" (267). How indeed? After all, why on earth should be suppose that parish records examined by presumably competent scholars should be any more reliable than a piece of speculation? Hendricks does concede that she will not "attempt to prove definitively that Behn may have had a black African ancestor," but she assures us instead that "there is another way of `knowing' the pass, of establishing one's status as a member of the `in-group'--intuition" (267). In that case, there would really be no point in bothering with scholarship at all, and that would be a pity, because it would totally disable the point and achievement of the many other essays in this volume, which do take the pains to build a careful case on available evidence, and, in doing so, offer fresh understandings of modes of female networking in the early modern period.

LISA HOPKINS is Reader in English at Sheffield Hallam University. She is currently working on a book on female heroes in English Renaissance drama.