‘Ah Famous Citie’: Women, Writing, and Early Modern London

Abstract

This article explores aspects of the textual relationship between women and early modern London by examining three verbal ‘snapshots’ of the city in works either written by women or focusing on women in their urban environment. The first text, Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573), addresses London from a rural perspective, treating the city as a fickle male to whom she wants to hand back all his treasures. The poem constructs a vivid and ironic social topography, giving a glimpse of the roles of men and women in the Tudor city. The second text is by Mary Carleton, the roguish Restoration figure who defended her apparently ‘counterfeit’ life in the prose of The Case of Madam Mary Carleton (1663). Carleton's London is a place of unwanted seduction and sexual intimidation, highlighting a gendered moral geography even while the memoir itself titillates the reader with the account of her bizarre experiences. Finally, in a coda to the discussions of Whitney and Carleton, early eighteenth-century London is viewed through Jonathan Swift's satirical mock-pastorals of squalid urban life, in which female identity, like the city itself, is a site of violence, disgust and deception. Together, these textual representations of women and early modern London indicate the complex interactions of gender, literature and the early modern city. The analysis of the texts also suggests the significance of the ironic voice as a quintessentially urban literary mode, the prevalence of the idea of woman as a commodified topographical site, and the function of metaphors of courtship or marriage as indicators of the paradoxical attractions of the city.

The Brief Ovidian Career of Isabella Whitney: From Heroidean to Tristian Complaint

“…65 "It is," as Helen Wilcox pertinently discerns, "from this perspective of looking back on the city, in actual or imaginary exile from it, that Whitney constructs a remarkable early modern cityscape" in the collection's concluding "Wyll and Testament." 66 This final portrait that Whitney (whose persona has only her "bookes and Pen" to sustain herself) offers of her alienation and forced banishment from London is intrinsically related-and, indeed, replies upon-what has been called the "carefully calibrate[d] … marginalized and disenfranchised poetic voice" that she cultivates throughout earlier sections of the work. 67 Socially, this "louyng … Sister," "poore Kinsewoman," and "vnfortunate Friend" is "all sole alone," spatially disconnected from her own family members and lacking "a Husband, or a house."…”