Two Feminisms: Mary Astell and Hortense Mancini

Hortense Mancini,
Duchess of Mazarin

It happens more often than I’d like to admit: despite writing an entire dissertation on cross-dressing women in British literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, I find I’ve overlooked a prominent female cross-dresser. Today’s case is that of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, and one of Charles II’s many mistresses.

Mancini’s flamboyant, exciting, and at times perilous life has been documented and described not only in books, like her biography The Mazarin Legacy, by Toivo David Rosvall and in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s The King’s Mistresses, but also in various wonderful blog posts on the blogs Two Nerdy History Girls, The Monstrous Regiment of Women, Wonders and Marvels, as well as MadameGuillotine.

 I, however, learned about Mancini just today as I was considering including Mary Astell, the “first British feminist”, in the Month of Dangerous Women on my own blog. Astell’s Some Reflections UponMarriage was written in direct response to the case of the Duchess of Mazarin and her husband’s suing for divorce after many years of separation.

Protofeminist Mary Astell

Astell’s opinion of the case is tinged with condemnation of Mancini’s behavior; Astell was, after all, a rather conservative feminist. She writes that “Had Madam Mazarine's Education made a right improvement of her Wit and Sense, we should not have found her seeking Relief by such imprudent, not to say Scandalous Methods, as the running away in Disguise with a spruce Cavalier, and rambling to so many Courts and Places, nor diverting her self with such Childish, Ridiculous, or Ill-natur'd Amusements, as the greatest part of the Adventures in her Memoirs are made up of.”

Oh yes, did I mention? Mancini published her memoirs…I can’t wait to get my hands on those!

In any case, however, to return to Astell, I was intrigued, naturally, by her claims. Some quick research into the life of Mancini revealed not only that she frequently cross-dressed as a man, but also that she openly had lovers of both sexes and, at one point, engaged in a duel with swords with Anne Lennard, Countess of Sussex, the illegitimate fifteen-year-old daughter of Charles II by another of his mistresses, Barbara Villiers. Lennard was most likely also one of Mancini’s female lovers at court. 

Whatever Astell thought of Mancini and her “ill-natured amusements,” Hortense Mancini reminds us that there were women in the past who lived life fully, dangerously, and dashingly, with little regard to what the rest of the world thought of them. This is not to say that Astell was wrong about everything either. Astell’s thoughts on marriage and divorce reveal a woman far  beyond her time, one who believed that

“To be yoak'd for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper; to have Folly and Ignorance tyrannize over Wit and Sense; to be contradicted in every thing one does or says, and bore down not by Reason but Authority; to be denied ones most innocent desires for no other cause, but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them, is a misery none can have a just Idea of, but those who have felt it.”

Clearly Astell believed that men and women should have simpler, more direct recourse to divorce in cases where the relationship is of no benefit to one or both of sides of it. In the Reflections, as well as in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Astell eviscerates many of the common marital practices of her time period while advocating for greater educational opportunities for women.

For these reasons, this week’s contribution to the Dangerous Women series is a double-whammy. Hortense Mancini and Mary Astell were both “dangerous women” by my definition—they dared to step beyond the “traditional” role of women, to assert themselves as independent, free-thinking individuals, and to challenge society’s expectations for their sex.

The lives of these women and their writings also made me think about the different feminisms and forms of female empowerment that women espouse today. Feminism is still stigmatized in our society—as are women of strength, independence, power, and intelligence.

 

Another early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, believed like Astell that women needed
education in order to empower themselves and their countries.
This quotation of hers, however, is ambiguous enough to encompass a variety
of different ways in which women today might gain "power over themselves."

Mancini epitomizes women who live as they wish, who use their relationships with men to facilitate and support their lives and interests, who live freely but perhaps without knowledge of or interest in academic debates on feminism. Conversely, Astell epitomizes women who believe that if women want equality and respect, they must be educated, intelligent, and aware of how their behavior may at times contribute to their oppression.

These are only two attitudes, of course, towards female empowerment and feminism, and many men and women’s ideas may fall somewhere in between. Further, many of us draw on both of these women’s attitudes during our everyday lives. I don’t think these ideas and attitudes have to be opposed to each other, either. Contemporary feminism emphasizes choice, and I choose to admire both Mancini and Astell for their determination, intelligence, independence and panache, however they ultimately chose to express themselves.

To the Fair Clarinda: Imagining Aphra Behn

We don’t know much about our friend Aphra and her life (1640-1689), and what we do know is often contested. Unlike some authors who left us copious diaries or whose lives were documented by contemporary historians, Behn and her life are shrouded in mystery. She may have gone to Surinam; we’re really not sure. She was probably a spy for Charles II, Behn was probably her married name, and she was probably the first woman in England—or one of the very first—to make a living with her writing. We know she was a Royalist and a Catholic devoted to the house of Stuart, and the connection between her plays and political views are discernible in her works—although even that line of inquiry is often contentious.

            Even more uncertain, however, are her personal views on a variety of topics that she addresses in her works, which span several genres, from plays to poetry to novels and novellas. What did she think of the native peoples of the Americas? Of black slaves and slavery in general? Was she a feminist? A realist? An imperialist?

            Feminist scholars have held up Behn as an early promoter of women’s rights, a writer for whom the plight of women in the second half of the 17^th century was of utmost importance and critique. Her poem “To the Fair Clarinda” suggests that she may have been sexually fluid (I prefer that term to saying she was bisexual), and in this poem she seems to be writing about loving a hermaphrodite or someone who embodies the traits of both men and women. Her short fictions “The Fair Jilt” and “The Fair Vow-Breaker” and the poem “The Disappointment” each appear to clearly critique the stifling social expectations of women in Restoration England.

Charles II after his
1660 Restoration to the throne

On the other hand, Behn was also at the court of Charles II, a notorious libertine who enjoyed drinking, philandering, and generally having fun. As John Wilmot, 2^nd Early of Rochester and another famous libertine once put it in his satire against Charles II, “thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,/ Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.” Thus, some of the more problematic depictions of women in her plays, such as in The Rover, are often chalked up to the playwright’s need to appease her patron. 

By far her most famous work, the novella Oroonoko, which takes place in Africa and Surinam and contains both New World Indians as well as African Slaves, is often interpreted as an allegory about the fall of Charles I. It is also often faulted for portraying a romanticized view of the tragic African slaves, especially those who were supposedly of "royal" descent in their native Africa, as Oroonoko and his wife Imoinda are. The white female narrator of Oroonoko is usually read as Behn's problematic alter-ego, an Imperialist Englishwoman who at once sympathizes with but also Orientalizes the New World and its non-white inhabitants.

The Widow Ranter, her play which takes place in colonial Virginia, was by all accounts a failure when it was produced (which did not happen after her death). It is also considered by many scholars to be a metaphor for the fall of the house of Stuart in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis. Others see the play as further proof that she really did live in the Americas at some point during her lifetime and that the play’s failure was less about royalist politics and more about the fact that the English just didn’t like or respect Americans, which Behn portrays in both positive and negative lights in the play. The Widow Ranter may be interpreted as having problematic portrayals of Indians while taking the presence of black slaves for granted as merely set-pieces of the English colonies. Conversely, we might interpret the play as critiquing precisely the issues that some scholars believe her to be complacent about.

Was she truly a "feminist," an abolitionist, an adamant critic of imperialism and slavery? Or was she making use of timely topics to make good drama? As a feminist scholar myself, I like to think the former, and I believe that the bigger picture of her works confirms a deep-running vein of critique of the treatment of women and slaves in her works, even if, at times, her depictions of non-white peoples are somewhat romanticized. In the end, however, I think that what makes her works so intriguing is that they seem to epitomize what Barthes would call a writerly text: we as readers construct the text as we read it, and the text and its meaning are constantly eluding us. It is precisely the contradictory elements of Behn’s oeuvre that make her so fascinating to read and return to.

What did she even look like?
This portrait looks quite different than some of the others.

“A poet is a painter in his way, he draws to the life, but in another kind; we draw the nobler part, the soul and the mind; the pictures of the pen shall outlast those of the pencil, and even worlds themselves” 

–Aphra Behn, Oroonoko