When I applied to the NEH summer institute: A Literature of their own? Women Writing— Venice, London, Paris—1550-1700, I mentioned both my experience of incorporating early modern women’s texts into the British literature courses that I taught and my desire to increase that practice by incorporating new and different women’s voices, including those of women from countries other than England. As an English professor my focus was, naturally, on English literature, but the French majors at the University at which I was teaching had informed me that they were required to take one course in British Literature in order to help them see the connections between French and British literature, and it had occurred to me that English majors might also benefit from such an international approach. I was therefore interested in increasing my knowledge of the Italian and French women writers in the hopes of designing a course on early modern women writers which could cross those geographic boundaries. But things don’t always turn out the way one plans, and although I did learn about many fascinating women writers from Paris and Venice, one of the greatest “finds” of the summer for me was in fact an early modern Englishwoman who hit “close to home” for me in more ways than one—Isabella Whitney.
I had, as I mentioned, been in the habit of incorporating a number of early modern women writers into courses such as a British Literature Survey (Beowulf to the late 18th century), but Isabella Whitney had not been one of those women. For one reason or another, when I was making the painful decisions about which writers to include in my whirlwind tour of ten centuries of British Literature in one semester, Whitney had not jumped out at me. But she did jump out at me when we studied her last summer at the NEH institute. She was the first British woman writer we studied, and as much as I’d loved the Venetian section, I was probably partly moved by joy at returning to my own native tongue and area of specialization, but I was also excited at reading a writer who was a working class woman, a woman who had been employed, and unemployed, as a maidservant in London. This excited me because I myself come from a working class background, because many of my students come from similar backgrounds and are first generation college students, and because I have often noticed that while gender and race are beginning to be recognized and discussed in academia, discussions of class are still too often left out of the classroom. Whitney, I thought, would be the perfect vehicle for introducing both class and gender into the classroom of a British literature survey. I hoped that students, who sometimes feel as though they are on the bottom of the academic hierarchy, could identify with the early modern maidservant who was far from the top of either the social or literary hierarchy of early modern London, and I further hoped that Whitney’s ability to invert this hierarchy in her “Last Will and Testament” would provide students with a model of how to take ownership of their own situations and of their own educational experiences. I therefore eagerly submitted a proposal for a paper on teaching Isabella Whitney in the modern classroom.
However, things really don’t always work out as one plans. Just prior to the beginning of the institute I had accepted a new position at a different university, and while I would still be teaching many working class students and first generation college students, I would not necessarily be teaching the same courses. As the most junior faculty member of a small department, I would be paying my dues in another sort of class system, and teaching many introductory and Freshmen level courses. The course in early modern women writers from many countries, while still on my personal agenda, would have to be delayed, as would the idea of incorporating Whitney into an upper division survey of British Literature or more specifically of Renaissance poetry (though I’m happy to say that will happen next semester). For the moment, I would be teaching Freshman courses in Composition and Literature, and the idea of working Whitney into such a course was daunting. Nevertheless, I was enthusiastic about teaching Whitney, and I had spoken with other teachers at the institute who had taught early modern women writers in their lower division courses. One of our cohort, Bernadette Andrea, has even published an article about her experiences with teaching a Freshman writing seminar on early modern women writers. My situation was somewhat different from hers. Rather than teaching a small freshman writing seminar with demanding writing requirements on “Shakespeare’s sister, or Did Women have a Renaissance?”, I would be incorporating Whitney into a second semester Freshman course which is supposed to continue to develop the writing skill students have hopefully acquired in the first semester of Freshman composition, while also introducing them to Literature: poetry, drama, short fiction, and the novel. It is a required course. The students come from all schools and majors, and many of them are resistant to studying literature in any form. Literature by a sixteenth century woman they had never heard of seemed like it might be a stretch. But, I reasoned, if early modern women’s writing could be used to teach writing, and if Whitney could be used to introduce the ideas of gender and class into the classroom, then Whitney could also be used in a Freshman composition and literature course. Besides, since they were Freshmen taking a required course, I thought they might find Whitney’s overturning of a social order which placed her on the lower rungs even more appealing. (And I am not above appealing to the conspiracy theorists among my students if it gets them interested in literature). I decided to plunge ahead.
For those of you considering a similar plunge, let me offer you some cautionary advice. Teaching Whitney to Freshmen is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Freshmen, when first encountering Whitney, are unlikely to find themselves asking, “Did women have a renaissance?” “How did a lower class woman manage to get her work into print in the 16th century?” Or “how do gender and class operate in this text?” They are more likely to ask, as one of my students did, “who is this woman? And why can’t she spell?” Nevertheless, my students did come away from the class with some important lessons about class, about gender, about rhetorical strategies, and about ways of taking ownership of their own lives.
Since the course was organized by genre, I placed Whitney at the end of the first section, the section on poetry. That section was subdivided into poems that illustrated different elements of poetry: metaphor, rhyme, symbol, etc. I put Whitney’s “Last Wyll and Testament” under the category of “Historical Context and Social Criticism,” hoping to show students that studying a text in its historical context can enhance one’s understanding of both the text and the historical period, and, perhaps more importantly, to show them that poetry could be a means of commenting critically upon one’s environment, and even of changing (at least in the imaginative world of the poem) the order of that environment.
To begin with I felt that I needed to offer my students some explanation of why we were studying Whitney—to answer the question one student had voiced, “who is this woman, and why can’t she spell?” and to answer the unasked question I think was implicit in that question as well as in the dazed and confused expressions I saw on their faces—why are we reading this? So I started with an honest confession. I told them that we were reading this poem in order to facilitate our discussion of historical context and social criticism, but also simply because I liked Whitney. They looked at me suspiciously, but I continued undaunted. I reminded them that the early modern period was my specialty, and I pointed out the other early modern poets we had read so far, and also some that were included in our textbook but which we had not covered. I then asked what all the poets except for Whitney had in common, and one student observed, “they’re all men.” I then pointed out that many of the canonical poets in the period, with a few notable exceptions, were upper class, and that if I, a woman from a working class background, were to look just at the writers who made it into this “canon,” I would have to assume that there was no writer in the early modern period who looked like me. I mentioned Virginia Woolf’s, “Shakespeare’s Sister,” briefly summarizing it for them, and then explained how I appreciated Whitney in part because she was a sometimes unemployed, working class woman writer, who wrote about being a lower class woman trying to write, and who criticized the institutions that made it difficult for her. But I didn’t want my students to come away with the idea that I was only teaching Whitney because she was a woman, or because she was a maidservant. So I was quick to point out the other things that I like about Whitney: her wit, her cleverness, and her attitude—an attitude that suggests that while she owns next to nothing and has lost even her livelihood, she can still assert her ownership of the city of London, giving away those commodities which she herself couldn’t afford to purchase, as well as those institutions, the jails and debtors prisons, which would normally have power over the poor, but which, in Whitney’s poem, she controls and can distribute or make her beneficiaries as she pleases.
With that, we began to walk through Whitney’s London. I took them through the poem bit by bit, explaining the references they wouldn’t otherwise understand, and pointing out some of the subtler moments of humor. Though most of the students had found the poem to be a difficult read when they tackled it on their own, they were able to follow it and appreciate it when we moved through it as a group. They liked Whitney’s portrayal of London as a treacherous lover whom the speaker nevertheless has trouble leaving, and as we moved bit by bit through the poem they all recognized that Whitney’s London is made up chiefly of two types of institutions: shops that sell merchandise, and debtors prisons that punish those who cannot participate in the mercantile community. This proved to be useful later in the semester when we read Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream and noted the anxiety which the artisans feel about not offending the Nobles lest they hang them all “every mother’s son” (2.1.64). Since the students were already familiar with some of the class tensions of the period, it took only a little contextualization to allow them to understand the precarious situation of the artisans.
Finally, we concluded the study of Whitney with a writing assignment—the students were to write their own wills, using Whitney’s as a model and incorporating the same type of social criticism. Like Whitney, they were free to give away items they did not actually possess.
I cannot make the same claim that Bernadette Andrea makes of her students, who had an entire semester to study the different rhetorical strategies of early modern women writers. She asserts that “these students learned to fashion pleasing and persuasive prose styles in the ongoing tradition of Shakespeare’s sister” (270). My Whitney assignment was still early in the semester. The students were experimenting with a single rhetorical model. They were not necessarily writing in prose, and, it must be confessed, not all of their styles were pleasing or persuasive. But they did grasp some of Whitney’s wit, and her sense of ownership. One student set his poem four years in the future, near the date of his graduation when he would be leaving our small college town, which he made his beneficiary. Like Whitney, who, prior to declaring that she would make London her sole beneficiary, criticizes the city for having been so cruel, my student expresses some distaste for the town, “I never thought that much of you” but nevertheless decides to leave it “some tokens of [his] gratitude.” Like Whitney, he chooses to leave to the town things it already possesses, including a “Sheetz (a local gas station),/ Cheap gas/ And the only place in [town]/ To offer food after midnight.” (For a college town our town is NOT known for its late night hangouts, a subject of frequent student complaints.) He also imitated Whitney’s advice about acquiring money. While she assures her beneficiaries that if they need money, there is plenty in the mint:
If they that keepe what I you leave,
Aske mony: when they sell it:
At Mint, there is such store, it is
Unpossible to tell it. (109-112)
My student directed his beneficiary to the business office of the University:
Finally I leave to you most of my money
If you want to find it
Journey to the business office of [the] University
Here they will provide you with my money.
Another student, who is working at a job she apparently does not care for, used her will to vent some of her anger at her coworkers and customers. To her coworkers she left:
everything that you can possibly complain about
. . .
The fact that you have to work,
Or that you actually have to help out with something that you weren’t hired to do,
And I also leave you with the lack of being a team player.
To her customers she leaves:
all the rude and nasty attitudes that you can handle . . . all the curse words in the book/. . . the sound of the dial tone when the phone is hung up on you . . [and] anger that can be used on those that have nothing to do with your problems.
I am not expecting to see either of these poems included in upcoming editions of The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, but I am pleased that my students learned to see poetry and literature as a way of reversing power dynamics, and as a means of taking ownership of communities from which they feel excluded or by which they feel oppressed.
Acknowledgements
Andrea, Bernadette. “Teaching (Early Modern Women’s) Writing,” Teaching Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, Ed. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2000. 266-70.
My Thanks to Will Rice, Heather Dunn, and the other students who contributed their poems, comments and questions to this paper.