1995 Katherine Philips (1632-1664): “The Matchless Orinda”
De Paul University, MALS Program
Perceptions of Reality
Dr. Jeanne LaDuke
Pat Anderson
Grade A-
See examples of original sources at the end
Abstract
In this paper I look at the life and writing of Katherine Philips, (The Matchless Orinda), illustrating how Philips manipulated her writing to fit acceptable standards set up for women during the Renaissance.
Her eloquent writing was appreciated by women and men of her day. Some recent researchers suggest that her female friendship poems were erotic in nature. I will argue that whether platonic or erotic, she was a talented poet. And despite having to use great care, she was successful in communicating life experiences from a woman’s perspective. I can only imagine what her writing might have been like if her spirit had been free to write without consideration of gender.
Historical Context
In the seventeenth century women not only had to have just the right circumstances to enable them to write, but they had to develop strategies about how to do so in keeping with the rules set up by men (Mermin 336). They had to be careful not to elicit men’s anger (Mermin 336). Women had to make their writing seem spontaneous, without artfulness and had to be sure to communicate that they were not in competition with men (Mermin 336)
Women generally avoided iambic pentameter, formal odes or epics, classical allusion, or exalted diction (Mermin 336). Women wrote relatively simple fables, understated small and ordinary themes, spoke of themselves in self-deprecating, low-key terms, and kept their tone conversational (Mermin 336).
Men wrote as if their words were genderless, but women could never forget what they wrote and would be read as women (Mermin 336). They had to be on their best behavior because failures of breeding or temper would discredit their whole sex (Mermin 336). The gentlemanly amateurism in the Renaissance tradition provided a framework for women to write in a time when simply appearing in public was viewed as taboo for women (Mermin 336), (let alone being published). Until well into the nineteenth-century publicity to a woman was assumed to defile her virtue (Mermin 338). I like Ann Messenger’s (Williamson 23) description of women writers that Williamson provides:
Women may begin writing to deal with loss, but they end up writing to survive it. Because poetry is more public than private expression in the seventeenth century, we can also observe the degree to which contemporary discourse shapes women’s writing, just as it does men’s, but also the degree to which women transform the discourse to their purposes as a group (Williamson 23). Women writers had to use enormous care to avoid posing any threat to male egos. In spite of the limitations placed upon them by their social realities, they were able to express their female perspectives.
Early Orinda
Katherine Philips was influenced as a small child by her grandmother Oxenbridge’s interest in writing poetry (Limbert 179). She loved poetry at school and actually started writing verses there (Limbert 179). Her father John Fowler, a prominent London merchant, brought her up with strong Puritan connections (Limbert 179). She read the Bible at age four and wrote down sermons verbatim at age ten. As a child, she used to pray for an hour at a time (Limbert 179). She was against the bishops and prayed that God would take them to him (Limbert 180). She started to attend Mrs. Salmon’s School in Hackney at age eight. (Limbert 180)
The earliest of her work known to survive was found in an unpublished manuscript in the uncatalogued Orielton Collection of the National Library of Wales. It illustrates that Philips was practicing poetry as early as age fourteen (Limbert 179) It’s not surprising that this manuscript was found in Orielton (three miles southwest of Pembroke, Wales) as it was once the home of Anne Lewis Owen, referred to as Lucasia by Philips, in her most intense friendship poems (Limbert 182).
The Orielton manuscript contains two poems and a short prose receipt that are unpolished compared to her later works, yet are informative about the author’s early years (Limbert 181-182). It is suggested that the manuscript was written when Philips was between fourteen and sixteen years old, after her mother’s marriage and before her own (Limbert 181-182). Excerpts from the two poems are quite telling in relating her attitudes about marriage and romance:
No blooming youth shall ever make me err
I will the beauty of the mind prefer
If himans rites shall call me hence
It shall be with some man of sence
…
Faithful in promise & liberall to the poor
…
Ready to serve his friend his country & his king
Such men as these yout say there are but few
…
Butt if I ever hap to change my life
Its only such a man shall call me wife” (Limbert 186).
Excerpts from the poem on the reverse side:
A marry’d state affords but little Ease
The best of husbands are so hard to please
…
No Blustering husbands to create y’r fears
…
Few worldly crosses to distract y’r prayers
Thus you are freed from all the cares that do
Attend on matrymony & a husband too
… (Limbert 186).
These early poems clearly illustrate her very early feminist thought and insight into conditions women faced.
Hageman views Philip’s two juvenilia poems above as an example of how thoroughly the young poet assimilated the values of seventeenth-century neo-classical poetry (570). Philips was able to transform the loyal, sensible, and moderate friend, advocated by poets like Ben Jonson, into a description of a model husband (Hageman 570).
These tiny glimpses into Philips’ early creativity show that she was familiar with composition and was approaching a feel for heroic couplets; they also illustrate her interest in talking to women through her poetry (Limbert 185). Her poems clearly reveal a young woman with unromantic ideas about marriage, not usually seen in English literature (Limbert 185). Philips does not speak as a character imagined by a man, she actually speaks for herself (Limbert 185).
It is believed that she lived in London until her widowed mother married Sir Richard Phillips (sic) of Picton Castle in Wales; she moved with her mother to Wales at that time (Limbert 180). At 16, Philips married Colonel James Philips, a fifty-four-year-old widower and prominent Puritan Parliamentarian (Limbert 180). They moved to her new husband’s home in Cardigan where he was active in politics (Limbert 180). After seven years of marriage, she had a son who died at six weeks of age (Williamson 76).
Philips and the Renaissance
Women’s literary output began in England, around 1640 (Williamson 16). Katherine Philips was the first English woman to publish a volume of poetry (Williamson 16). Women became the subjects and developed their own perspectives, rather than being objects of male perception and expression (Williamson 16). They wrote from positions that were self-defined (Williamson 16). Before this time in history, women’s poetry was not distinguishable from men’s (Williamson 18). Around the seventeenth century, one can truly start to hear female voices who take female pseudonyms, address their needs, and created their own conventions and themes (Williamson 18).
Williamson says that Philips was a model for women poets; she used two current discourses, retirement tradition, and libertine ideology, to show women how to use the codes of the culture to write about their life predicament (14). It took great courage to write about gender relations for these women; their poetry can give us a clue about what they were thinking and what their biases were (Williamson preface). Women writers of the Renaissance viewed each other as models and obtained inspiration from each other; they created their own traditions and usually wrote for other women (Williamson 14).
Philips characterized commonalities of women writers after 1650 in that they were artistically, politically, and socially conservative (Williamson 21). They were married to supportive husbands, were usually childless, and were reserved about sexuality (Williamson 21). They had their own coterie audience and their writing forms included poetry, occasional plays, novels, essays, and autobiographical letters (Williamson 21). They seldom wrote for money, hesitated to call attention to themselves by publishing, and used undoing to excuse their gall to publish (Williamson 21). Philips felt obligated to justify her privilege to write, sought freedom, yet at the same time sought community too, especially with other women, frequently in intimate relationships (Williamson 22). She tried to tread the ambiguous line between being a silent, submissive woman and her energy and ambition as a writer (Williamson 65).
Seventeenth-century women writers’ conservatism did not allow them to advocate for radical changes, but they wanted better lives for women as a group (Williamson 22). In adapting the retirement tradition they avoided threatening their readers and illustrated a way, within their social constraints, to escape their social lot that could not be changed (Williamson 22).
Philips’ unblemished reputation served as encouragement to other women (Mermin 335). She feared publication as it might be seen as sexual self-display (Mermin 335-336). Philips claimed that her poems were printed without her consent and compared women’s publications to exposing their bodies (Mermin 335-336). She claimed to have written for her own entertainment, yet at the same time prepared her work in manuscript form (Mermin 338).
Women sought to demonstrate how they could survive in a male universe, largely through bonding with other women (Williamson 31). They took male indifference for granted and sought to compensate for it rather than challenge it (Williamson 31). Philips sought respect and consideration for wives but saw equality as only available in female friendships (Williamson 32).
Philips took the privilege to write without social sanction for her doing so (Williamson 35-36). As a result, she had to develop strategies to get beyond societal messages to remain silent (Williamson 35-36). Writing served the purpose of raising women’s and men’s consciousness about their oppression (Williamson 35-36).
Philips provides confirmation of her humility in what she wrote Sir Charles Cotterell (her editor):
I am so far from expecting Applause on account of anything I write, that I can scarcely expect a Pardon: And sometimes I think that to make Verses is so much above my Reach, and a Diversion so unfit for the Sex to which I belong, that I am about to resolve against it forever…..the Truth is, I have always had an incorrigible inclination to the Vanity of Rhyming, but intended the Effects of that Humour only for my own Amusement in a retir’d Life” (Williamson 64).
Because translation was thought of as “feminine” (it was non-original), it was viewed as being well-suited for women. Renaissance female translators, despite being discouraged from creating their own original work, did inject their own translations, thus adding or shifting emphasis, coining new terms, extending metaphors, omitting phrases, and making the vernacular fit (Wilson xxx).
Philips’ translation of Corneille’s “Pompey” was enthusiastically received at the new Theatre Royal in Dublin, in 1663 and was later published in Ireland and London (Limbert 180). Philips also left behind a partial translation of Corneille’s “Horace”, which was later completed by Sir John Denham; it became a favorite of the court of Charles II (Limbert 181).
Friendship Poems
Shortly after her marriage, her poems began to be circulated widely by her coterie of friends who were also the subjects of her verses (Limbert 180). Her best works were platonic friendship poems about other women; she used symbolic trappings of fire, water, and twinned spirits to elevate them to goddess status (Limbert 180). No evidence exists to show that any of the women responded in a similar fashion (Limbert 180).
During the time of the Renaissance, gender was bound in a hierarchy in which men and women could not be equals (Mueller 114). Thus men and women could not be friends (Mueller 114). Separate education and socialization for the sexes functioned to reinforce limits on how human equality could be perceived (Mueller 114).
Philips’ friendship poems provided an acceptable form for women to experience equal relationships. It makes sense to me that women might attempt to share intellectually with other women since the men in their lives didn’t perceive them as intellectual equals. It seems quite logical that people would naturally gravitate toward egalitarian relationships.
The theme of platonic friendship is found throughout Renaissance literature (Hageman 573). The English writer, George Turberville, described two friends as, “two in bodies twaine/Possessing but one heart” (Hageman 573). The classical assumption made by Renaissance writers was that friendship poems were celebrating the relationships between men (Hageman 573). When women were present in friendship poems they were portrayed as seductresses who separated male friends (Hageman 573). Philips’ friendship poems took for granted that women could be friends with each other as well as with men (Hageman 573). Philips also modeled the male style of uniting spirits and bodies.
Like many female writers of the seventeenth century, Philips took a traditionally male convention and applied it to the female experience, thus providing a forum for their female voices to speak (Mermin 343). Mermin sees the results as revolutionary because of Orinda:
… speaks as a woman, to a woman, usurping the position of the male speaker rather than responding to a man or a male tradition that has spoken first” (Mermin 343).
In writing about female friendship, Philips gave them value, not only in a literary sense but in the realm of human relationships. By following the male poetic traditions in her friendship poems, Philips avoided being perceived as threatening to the powers that be. And yet she actually gave power to women by valuing their relationships. New scientific knowledge about the placement of the planets was seen as threatening to current religious beliefs. Through Philips, women found a way to value each other and to speak without posing a threat to patriarchy.
Most women can probably relate to taking a “back seat” status when a woman friend obtains a boyfriend. Her friend is willing to forfeit much of the female relationships to make herself totally available to her lover, thus devaluing the female relationships. Devaluing our relationships is a part that we ourselves play in perpetrating patriarchy.
Many of Philips’ poems were romantic in nature. I think that many women view romance in a magical sense. The white knight in shining armor ideology is not dead and could be seen as a woman’s magical thinking, especially since science was not perceived to be within the realm of possibilities for women in the seventeenth century. (Teacher – in what sense) It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that women writers might use romantic friendship poems with other women as a way to fantasize about what an equal romantic relationship might be like and as a way of coping with their lower social status.
“To My Excellent Lucasia, On Our Friendship”
Mermin refers to Donne’s and the Cavalier poets’ work as aspiring to a perfect, paradoxical union of souls, canonization of their lovers, and casual elegance, along with Metaphysical hyperbole and wit (343). She compares Philip’s amatory poem “To My Excellent Lucasia, On Our Friendship” with this traditional male style:
“I did not live until this time
Crown’d my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but Thee.
…..
No bridegroom’s nor crown-conqueror’s mirth
To mine compar’d can be:
They have but pieces of this Earth,
I’ve all the World in thee” (Mermin 343).
Mermin says Philip’s amatory poems lack the dramatic tension between flesh and spirit present in Donne’s amatory verse (Mermin 343). Mernim describes Philips’ work as asexual and respectable, despite the quasi-Sapphic theme, and did not give rise to any societal sanction because of the blindness to the possibility of female homosexuality at the time (Mermin 343). She claims to perceive Philips as speaking the language of courtly love without hearing any “unseemly” overtones (Mermin 343).
Stiebel views “To My Excellent Lucasia…” as Philips’ soul actually becoming Lucasia not simply that Lucasia gave life to her soul (157). As united immortal souls the speaker is given similar attributes as a “bridegroom” or a “crown-conqueror”, while at the same time, remaining innocent because they are females (Stiebel 157).
Stiebel compares “To My Excellent Lucasia…” with Donne’s “The Sun Rising”:
“She’s all states, and all princes I / Nothing else is” (Stiebel 157).
Stiebel claims that Donne forces the reader to view their relationship as a traditional courtly desire that goes through a transformation to a sacramental union where soulmates share the divine (Stiebel 157). Donne as the speaker invokes spirituality and innocent design to justify the use of excessive language (Stiebel 157). This is further illustrated in the poem:
“As innocent as our design,
Immortal as our soul” (Stiebel 165-166).
Stiebel further claims that traditional readings of
Philips’ friendship poems have either ignored or denied the lesbian sexuality of her verses, dismissing them as asexual examples of the current literary vernacular (Stiebel 153). Stiebel says that Mermin’s use of “unseemly” relates to her attitude about female homosexuality (153).
Stiebel discusses Faderman’s study in which she insists that “historically there was no such thing as a `lesbian” (Stiebel 154). Another reason that Philips could claim that love between two women was innocent is that, as Queen Victoria asked, “What could women do?” (Stiebel 158). In a culture that defines sexual behavior with linkage to male anatomy, sex without men was not only unthinkable, but it was also impossible (Stiebel 158).
Since the Renaissance had no concept of lesbianism, female poets were free to let their creativity flow within the acceptable framework of female friendship poetry. Women writers today couldn’t write the same poetry without homosexuality being questioned, simply because the concept of homosexuality is a part of our public discourse – it is a part of our reality.
As I see it, women were trying to use men as role models, but of course, the fit is not always appropriate. It was not socially acceptable for women to be assertive with love for men, so they directed themselves toward something they had experience with, intimate friendships with other women. I think that any woman today could relate to the level of intimacy and level of acceptance that you can share with a woman friend. It seems to me that Philips did a splendid job modeling the traditional male amatory style in the above poem to Lucasia.
I think that both authors’ perceptions make valid points. Society certainly has tried to ignore and/or deny homosexuality in general, so it wouldn’t seem surprising that seventeenth-century readers wouldn’t “see” the possibility in Philips work. I can also see that her friendship poems could easily be read as asexual, modeling male conventions. One’s perception might originate from one’s attitude and comfort with the topic of homosexuality. From my feminist perspective, I think that it is certainly possible that Philips was a lesbian. For me, it’s not an issue. What I value is her talent and courage as a woman to write at the time she did, and the fact that her voice was and is being heard. She gave value to women’s life experiences, which realistically do include heterosexual and/or homosexual perspectives.
“Orinda To Lucasia”
Philips compared herself to nature in “Orinda to Lucasia”:
“Observe the weary birds ere night be done,
How they would fain call up the tardy Sun,
With feathers hung with dew,
And trembling voices too,
They court their glorious planet to appear,
That they may find recruits of spirits there.
The drooping flowers hang their heads,
And languish down into their beds:
While brooks more bold and fierce than they,
Wanting those beams, from whence
All things drink influence,
Openly murmur and demand the day” (Mermin 344).
Mermin claims that Orinda compares herself to nature awaiting the fecundating sun, the image of male sexual force, frequently used by women poets (344).
Stiebel says Lucasia is the sun who will restore the light and energy of the day (life) to Orinda, who calls for her friend to appear like the birds, flowers, and brooks call for their own rebirth at a delayed sunrise (156-157). Lucasia means more to her than the sun to the world and if Lucasia doesn’t arrive soon she will see her die rather than be able to save her (Stiebel 156-157). The conventional oxymoronic terms such as light versus dark, day versus night, presence versus absence, and life versus death are what Orinda used (Stiebel 156-157). Elements of nature were used to reflect her state of being, and in a reversal of the magnitude of traditional significance, illustrated microcosmically in relation to the macrocosm of Orinda’s feelings (Stiebel 156-157).
Since I believe that artists are unconsciously relating a sense of their time, I don’t necessarily think that Orinda was referring to sexual power. Why not the innate power of her spirit to be free in the controlled time in which she was part. I get an image of her definitely using nature to illustrate a powerful hierarchy, like the brooks being more powerful than the flowers and yet all desiring the beams to “drink” in influence (which IS power).
Mermin labeled the sun “fecundating”; other definitions of the word are: to make fruitful, prolific, to fertilize, to impregnate, fertile, and rich in inventive power. I think Mermin was really making a stretch in relating it to male sexual power.
I agree Orinda probably saw herself as a flower compared to the brook, but I fail to see any sexual reference. Any woman who was bold enough to write at that time was a strong woman for whom power would not only rest within a sexual frame. I value the power to write freely what your spirit (your unconscious voice) brings to you from the universe, rather than having to write artlessly and avoid fracturing any male egos. As a woman who likes to write, I can identify with Orinda’s “demanding the day”. She wanted her voice to be heard, she wanted to be taken seriously, I cannot begin to see how Mermin makes sexual connections. I can see that women did identify themselves with nature.
Male Responses
Mermin says that women writers were praised easily, if not condescendingly (336). She provides an example of what one of Philip’s editors said in a preface of her published poems: would be no disgrace to the name of any Man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman (Mermin 336). Abraham Cowley said that Philips was, “the only genuine woman poet known to history” (Mermin 337).
Cowley wrote of her in verse:
We allow’d you beauty,
and we did submit
To all the tyrannies of it,
Ah cruel Sex!”
will you dispose us too in Wit? (Mermin 336).
The Earl of Orrery wrote to Mrs. Philips:
In me it does not the least trouble breed,
That your fair sex does ours,
in verse exceed (Mermin 336).
Even a century and a half later Keats prefaced his praise for her poems with a nasty snarl at intellectual women (Mermin 337).
An anonymous woman commented felicitously:
Thou glory of our sex, envy of men,
Who are both pleas’d and vex’d with thy bright pen (Mermin 337).
Philips’ physical person, her beauty, was generally the prime target of criticism (Mermin 338). Henry Vaughn said of her:
language Smiles, and accents rise
As quick, and pleasing as your Eyes,
The Poem smooth, and in each line
Soft as your selfe (Mermin 338).
The beauty and virtue of her poetry are the same as her body; they are thus both exposed (Mermin 338).
The quotations certainly illustrate men’s attitudes towards Philips.
Conclusion
Around 1663 a group of Philips’ poems fell into the hands of a London publisher Richard Marriott; he filed to print a pirated edition on November 25, 1663 (Limbert 181). Philips was in London at the time to do business for her husband and to see that her friends were able to suppress the pirated edition (Limbert 181). While still in London, she died of smallpox on June 22, 1664 (Limbert 181). Philips’ legacy included publishing one volume of verses, one of the letters, and the translation of two plays (Williamson 19).
Philips claimed for women the ability to build and sustain friendships, to voice healthy skepticism about love and marriage, to realize identity and integrity in private worlds, and to write about their personal experiences (Williamson 78). For a woman of middling background who died at thirty-three at a chaotic age, this was not a meager achievement (Williamson 78).
I am willing to bet that many people today, not having studied women’s history, have an image of women as quite passive historically. Many people today if asked might say that feminists’ voices came about in the late 1960s and early 1970s – the modern feminist movement. I know that women have been trying to scream out for equality, in whatever way they could, since time began.
In conclusion the words of Wilson seem to sum it all up:
Participation – any participation – in the shaping of language is social power. The written word as a signifier of status and power is capable of bestowing parity to males and females in that privileged space. The literary labor of Renaissance women writers thus articulates a desire, however subliminal, for the status and power that equality implies. Assuming the voice of a poet, engaging in the shaping, defining, and ordering of experience, participating in constructing and creating, women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could temporarily offset the hierarchies of gender and become the equals of men in the act of creation (Wilson xxxii).
Works Cited
Hageman, Elizabeth H. “The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips.” Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Katharina M. Wilson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 566-608.
Limbert, Claudia. “Two Poems and a Prose Receipt: The Unpublished Juvenilia of Katherine Philips” (text) Women in the Renaissance. Ed. Kirby Farrell, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Arthur Kinney. Amherst: the University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, 179-186.
Mermin, Dorothy. “Women Becoming Poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch.” English Literary History 57.2 (1990): 335-356.
Mueller, Janel. “Lesbian Erotics: The Utopian Trope of Donne’s `Sapho to Philaenis.'” Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Harrington Press, 1992. 103-134.
Stiebel, Arlene. “Not Since Sappho: The Erotic Poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn.” Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context. Ed. Claude J. Summers. New York: Harrington Press, 1992. 103-134.
Williamson, Marilyn L. RAISING THEIR VOICES British Women Writers, 1650-1750. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990.
Wilson Katharina M. Ed. Introduction. Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.