Domestic agents: Women, war and literature in early modern England

How did early modern literary narratives of war represent women? English culture became intensely occupied with war during two historical periods: the late Elizabethan years, when England engaged militarily in multiple European conflicts, and then the mid-seventeenth century when the internal conflicts of the English Civil War plagued the country. These periods produced a "culture of war" in which literature participated, and an important but heretofore unexamined facet of literary representations of war is women's domestic roles. Women were traditionally defined by Renaissance gender ideology through their domestic associations with marriage, the household, and the private sphere. In literature about war, I find that women's domesticity intensifies in importance to the fate of the nation both symbolically and literally.; Driven by a broad concern to explore the relationship between the emergent notions of the public and private in the early modern period, this project connects two areas of literary criticism: historicist literary criticism on England's politics and nationalism, and feminist criticism about gender roles. In the traditional genres of tragedy, history and epic that were typically devoted to the exploits of men in the public spheres of the court and battlefield, the canonical authors Shakespeare and Spenser also addressed women's roles in war, representing their idealized conduct as crucial to national identity and social order, but also expressing common cultural anxieties. Turning to the Civil War period, when women's roles in the public sphere and in war considerably expanded, the project broadens out to include court literature, popular poetry, and writing by women that addresses women's changing domestic roles. I examine literary representations of the controversial Queen Henrietta Maria in peace and wartime, Margaret Cavendish's dramatic representations of women in domestic and civic arenas, and finally the private letters of Lady Brilliana Harley documenting her domestic role as wife and mother along with her defense of the family castle. Wartime, as a crisis of political and social order, heightened the stakes for women's domestic roles, constructing women's agency and sexuality as a matter of nationalist virtue, but also as matter for anxiety when women's domestic conduct increased in public importance.