The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England by Paula R. Backscheider Timothy Dykstal

Author:Paula R. Backscheider, Timothy Dykstal [Paula R. Backscheider, Timothy Dykstal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780714642758
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1996-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

Eroticizing the Subject, or Royals in Drag: Reading the Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett

DONNA LANDRY

Memoirs are undoubtedly personal, but to what extent might they also be political? This is another way of saying, what prompts the memoirist to write? British autobiography began suddenly to flourish in the seventeenth century: Only twelve known autobiographies were written in Britain before 1600; over two hundred survive that were written between then and 1700.1 One of these consists of fragmentary memoirs by Anne Murray (1623–99), wife of Sir James Halkett. By inscribing herself in her narrative of Stuart loyalist intrigue as an independent agent and a heroine of romance, Anne Murray Halkett2 illuminates the fundamental interconnectedness of the private and the public spheres. In Gayatri Spivak’s terms, she reveals the extent to which “each compartment of the public sector also operates emotionally and sexually.” We might say that Halkett demonstrates “that the domestic sphere is not the emotions’ only legitimate workplace.”3 Her boldest and most erotically charged actions stem from her desire to serve not a lover but her king and the House of Stuart. Could the so-called public and the so-called private be more tellingly revealed as, in fact, interdependent and interwoven constructions?

Halkett’s narrative begins with questions of her family’s genealogy and breaks off in 1656 with her trying desperately to intercede for her new husband with the President of the Council in Edinburgh – from family and childhood to marriage, her story seems to follow the traditional narrative structure of a woman’s life in the early-modern period. How does a woman become the subject of her own written discourse? Significantly, Halkett only begins to write these memoirs during her widowhood, in an act of remembering that reassembles the many dramatic and romantic scenes that led up to her marriage, and a re-membering of the late body of Sir James into whose legal and political being she has been completely absorbed as a married woman, in the tradition of the feme covert. Born 4 January 1623 to Thomas Murray, Provost of Eton, formerly tutor to Charles I, and Jane Drummond Murray, subsequently governess to the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Elizabeth, she marries Sir James in 1656, at the age of thirty-three, and begins to write in 1677, seven years after his death, when she is fifty-four.

Her autobiography owes much to an older tradition of spiritual self-inscription. As in so many cases of seventeenth-century Englishwomen’s life-writing, in hers “The particularly female experience of vulnerability to persuasion leads to a defensive desire for accuracy of reputation – the commodity of truth – a desire heightened by” her “awareness of [her] own textuality.”4 As Sandra Findley and Elaine Hobby claim regarding Halkett’s memoir, “It is written out of the twin motives of confession and vindication.”5 Indeed, Anne Murray Halkett first enters her own narrative as a dramatic figure, and first inscribes her scene of action as a dramatic situation, with her first disobedience (she is writing ten years after the publication of Paradise Lost):

In

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