Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Confuting Those Blind Geographers: Christopher Marlowe’s Spectacle of Maps and the Female Body
- 2 ‘T’illumine the now obscurèd Palestine’: Elizabeth Cary and the Mapping of Early Modern Marriage and Colonialism
- 3 ‘Willing to Pay Their Maidenheads’: Thomas Heywood and the Cartography of Bodily Commerce
- 4 ‘The Fort of her Chastity’: Cavendish’s Mapmakers of Virtue
- Conclusion: Women as World-Writers
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
In addition to reviewing the trajectory of geography, territory, women's bodies, and early modern women's identities over the course of the time and texts examined in the book, the conclusion also offers a brief examination of the influence of these writers’ geographic rhetoric on the flourishing of English women playwrights at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the next. Mary Pix's Queen Catharine and Mary Davys’ The Northern Heiress demonstrate further use of the ideas of women as surveyors and thus controllers of themselves and the spaces they occupy. Moreover, royal connections continue, as Queen Anne becomes associated with England in ways similar to that of Elizabeth.
Keywords: early modern women's writing legacy, Mary Pix, Queen Catharine, Mary Davys, The Northern Heiress, Queen Anne.
The assertions in the previous chapter hold that women like Cavendish, Behn, and their characters could write a world as effectively and vividly as any geographer. And both women authors continued to write while they could, despite any social and financial difficulties. The past fifty years has seen renewed and sustained critical and popular interest in the works and lives of these women writers, with academic texts, classes, and conferences examining their output, and fictional texts that reimagine their lives. But it is an inescapable fact that, in their time, these two writers were considered strange, even dangerous anomalies. Of Cavendish, Samuel Pepys writes that she was a ‘conceited ridiculous woman’. Behn became, according to Janet Todd, ‘a byword for lewdness’ who faced sharp criticism throughout her career. And while Behn has been lauded by more recent writers like Virginia Woolf as an important foremother in the history of women's writing, these later accolades did not help an often impecunious Behn in her lifetime, as she was often short of money, and most likely died in straitened circumstances. This reality brings to mind the suffering undergone by many of the women examined in this book, including characters, historical figures, and writers. Indeed, for all the geographic ingenuity they demonstrate, characters like Dido, Zenocrate, and Mariam arguably achieve their fullest power in death. The Isabel of Cary's History of Edward II wins political and martial victories in her story, but even a passing knowledge of the queen's history calls to mind her eventual sequestration and later notorious reputation.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage , pp. 245 - 258Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019