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Article Excerpt
"[W]omen more often than men-they are immediately asked in whose name and from what theoretical standpoint they are speaking, who is their master, and where they are coming from: they have, in short, to salute ... and show their identity papers."
--Helene Cixous, "Castration of Decapitation?"
If one of the canonical intentions of feminist literary criticism is to tender articulate the silences of artistic and intellectual histories, to be "alert to the omissions, gaps, partial truths, and contradictions which ideology masks," then the relative invisibility of early modern Scottish women's writing and of feminist scholarship within the early modern Scottish field suggests that these "revisionary" desires either have not, or have imperfectly, been achieved. (1) This realization, which may seemingly hold little resonance outside the area of early modern of Renaissance literary studies, was acutely fostered for me by one particular experience. In November 2000, I participated in the international conference, "Attending to Early Modern Women: Gender, Culture, and Change," sponsored by the Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland. A session, "Creating a New Field: Women in Early Modern Scotland," comprised a dialogue between two historians and two literary critics, all of whom working within the field of early modern Scotland (c.1450-1700), engendered an intense self-consciousness about our individual scholarly practices--in my case, as a feminist literary critic working within Scotland and on its early literary cultures. What emerged with provocative clarity from our discussions was a similarity between the intellectual and academic position of early modern Scottish women's studies and the state of feminist literary studies, twenty or thirty years ago. If one accepts the theoretical stages of development, or institutional evolution, of feminist criticism that general histories or surveys of the subject portray, then early modern Scottish literature has not yet even reached the stage of composing a provisional female canon of its own. Even if the "gynocritical" model is currently considered undesirable, the revision of any canon demands sensitivity to the intrinsically prejudicial nature of canonicity itself, because it is employed to demonstrate what might be described as the theoretically "virginal" territory of the subject. Recent feminist literary studies has been painfully aware of, and has successfully sought to redress, the processes of marginalization and exclusion, whether sexual, ethnic, or racial. However, both implicitly and explicitly, the Attending to Early Modern Women session raised questions about the validity of the enterprise: not only the rediscovery and reassessment of Scottish women writers but also the identification and demarcation of the emergent body of writing as Scottish. This designation was perceived as being unnecessarily limiting and enclosing. At once it seemed that our area of interest required, if not exactly an apologia pro sua vita, then a substantial theoretical justification for its presence.
The intention of this essay is not to critique the existing body of scholarship on early modern British women's writing, nor to express unalloyed grief at belonging to what can occasionally seem a roofless and exiled scholarly state, a self-defeatingly narrow field. Instead, I intend to explore some reasons for the apparent obscurity of a slowly burgeoning Scottish field within British early modern literary and feminist studies. Compared to Ireland or to the literatures that have been classified as postcolonial, Scotland is insufficiently marginal to ensure the recognition of its identity. Why has Scotland not profited from the demonstrably fruitful alliance between postcolonial and feminist investigation in literary and cultural spheres? Although it would be unjust to speak of a crisis, one might suggest that some kind of intellectual impasse has been reached that may tender fragile the feminist project within early modern Scottish literature and, one might infer, within the larger project of feminist studies in Renaissance literature as a whole. It may mean that contemporary critical work does not always vigilantly retain, in the social scientist Henrietta Moore's words, "a clear sense of position and of the politics of location." (2)
In this article I suggest that the marginalization of feminist investigation within the field of early modern Scottish studies can only be properly understood within the intellectual context peculiar to the historical emergence of Scottish literature as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry; because such a context is presumed relatively unfamiliar, a brief account of its condition is given. I consider Scotland's paradoxically precarious status within Renaissance literary studies despite recent critical attention to the formation of early modern national literary paradigms. Such critical work has addressed the difficult questions of whether and how British, and largely Western European literatures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, represent, refute, or legislate ideas of national identity. What would constitute a national identity when it enters the labyrinth of literary language? Such reflection highlights the problematic relationship between women/"Woman" and "nationalism" and reveals how the enterprise of early modern Scottish feminist studies may be jeopardized by a defensive essentialism that might be defined as a spuriously unitary idea of the nation. Such theoretical concerns are best illuminated by actual instances of literary and aesthetic practice. In this article I use examples of early modern Scottish women's writing, such as the provisional corpus of Mary, Queen of Scots's poetry, and the linguistic traditions of classical Gaelic, Scots, Anglo-Scots, and English, in order to help interrogate and refine conventional processes of cultural contextualization precisely because they contain the potential to question or unsettle "fixed" identifies of language, culture, and even artistic practice. Because this essay's core issue is the relative neglect of Scotland and its associated early modern women's writing, if ends with the consideration of one obvious but often overlooked means to gradually nurture visibility--pedagogical practice. The present status of the Scottish early modern female subject en proces implies that the impulses of scholarly exploration and teaching may be linked to an unusual and productive degree. Can both be united in the effort to redress the marginality of early Scottish women's writing that, ironically, some forms of feminist and other revisionary critical practices have not made visible? This investigation is at heart an attempt to pinpoint the present location and identity of a number of disparate critical desires and, through the process of their unraveling, to begin to suggest some necessary resolutions.
Unraveling the Double Tresses
In their epochal collection, A History of Scottish Women's Writing (1997), that contained no fewer than forty-three commissioned essays, the editors Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan succinctly identified the principal thorn in the side of Scottish women's writing, that it "arguably suffers from the double bind of being Scottish and being by women." One of the most incisive debates about the theoretical insecurities that may afflict any attempt to construct a canon of women's literary history, Gifford and McMillan's introduction openly confesses the impossible disinterestedness, or want of innocence, in any such enterprise. In the context of discussing "tradition-building" works by Betsy Erkkila, Elaine Showalter, and Margaret Ezell, they concede that "the feminist effort to shape a tradition of women's writing needs to claim difference to validate its activity but persistently runs the risk of being trapped by the very difference that it claims." The paradoxical consequence of instituting difference within a particular body of writing is pertinent not just to the position of early modern Scottish women's writing but to Scottish literary studies as a whole. It is the predicament of being caught on several thresholds, of being suspended in a state of liminality, that repeatedly haunts the subject of Scottish literature. If this literature can be regarded as a discipline, a term used to signify the demarcation of a recognized and institutionally sanctioned field of scholarship, then it has such credibility within Scotland but far less assuredly within Europe and North America. Gifford and McMillan's introductory essay serves as a valuable theoretical anchor for any desire to recover and recontextualize early modern women's writing. So too is Catherine Kerrigan's preface to her groundbreaking anthology, published in 1992, that addressed the desirability of balancing the need to establish a separate and autonomous tradition of linguistically distinct Scottish women's writing with an alertness to its transcultural, even transhistorical, resonance. (3)
This vexed notion of difference is illuminated by the parallel view offered by a comparative interdisciplinary perspective. The complaint articulated by Gifford and McMillan, to which Kerrigan's anthology bore eloquent witness, that orthodox anthologies, collections, and histories of women's writing have excluded Scottish women and material, finds uncanny echo in trenchant observations made by the revisionist Scottish historian, Elizabeth Ewan. In her recent article, Ewan explicitly draws attention to the lack of scholarly research and interest in women and gender in the period before 1600 within the field of Scottish historical studies. She...
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