Marriage, Celibacy, and Ritual in Robert Herrick's 'Hesperides.'
1997; University of Iowa; Volume: 76; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-7977
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies of British Isles
ResumoOver past two decades, Robert Herrick's relationship to Stuart culture has been steadily reassessed. Literary scholars have firmly refuted notion that Herrick was jolly naif who frolicked about Devon oblivious to turmoil of 1640s, and we now understand Hesperides as deeply politicized work. Claude J. Summers has observed that ideologically charged epigrams, verses to King and his family, and occasional poems on Civil War express Herrick's extreme royalist attitude.(1) Leah S. Marcus has demonstrated how Herrick's poems of rural festivity participated in Laudian Anglican program of revival: communal holidays, constructed as extensions of sacramental worship, were intended to affirm authority of Church within hierarchical society governed by `King.(2) Likewise, through his celebrations of childlike obedience, Anglican doctrine, and prohibited religious ceremonies, Herrick presents in Noble Numbers poems which are resolutely and combatively Laudian.(3) This understanding of Herrick's political stance has been fruitfully complicated by Ann Baynes Coiro, who insists that poet goes beyond royalist propaganda to engage in an ironic questioning of Stuart ideals.(4) Thus we now regard Hesperides neither as mindless bale of butterflies,(5) nor as rote exercise in religiopolitical conservatism. Despite this new appreciation for politics of Herrick's poetry, assessments of Herrick's representation of women remain surprisingly ahistorical. In his fine study of Herrick's classicism, Gordon Braden has paid subtle, detailed attention to eroticism of Hesperides; some recent critics have taken Braden's work as point of departure, either building upon his analysis of Herrick's obstructed desire, or refuting his contention that Herrick exhibits prepubescent sexuality.(6) Other scholars have insisted that we recognize gendered dynamics of power at work in Herrick's amatory verse. Moira P. Baker has argued that Herrick's fragmenting depictions of female body participate in the cultural repression of women, while Bronwen Price finds in Herrick's textual self-censorship, fetishism, and voyeurism a sexual politics bound up within an emerging bourgeois economy and discourse of subjectivity.(7) Although implying historical process, these feminist readings place Herrick's portrayals of women in realm abstracted from Stuart England: like non-feminist analyses of Herrick's eroticism, neither Baker's monolithic patriarchy nor Price's Foucauldian subject seems to engage with religiopolitical struggle that informs much of Herrick's poetry. We find most satisfying attempt to historicize Herrick's depiction of women in Heather Dubrow's illuminating study of seventeenth-century English epithalamium. Dubrow argues that epithalamium was an especially significant genre during social upheaval of Stuart period: marriage was anxiously viewed as a source and symbol of an orderly and harmonious society,(8) and epithalamium allowed poets both to explore and allay contemporary fears of social instability. Herrick's epithalamia, Dubrow observes, are populated by reluctant brides, and she argues that this antipathy toward consummation destabilizes Herrick's marriage poems.'(9) Dubrow stops short, however, of assessing ideological significance of this distinctive feature of Herrick's epithalamia. If Herrick poetically destabilizes ceremony designed to reinforce his society's gender divisions, how should we characterize politics of gender in Hesperides? …
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