Comparing the Female in Andrew Marvells To His Coy Mistress and The Garden - Research Paper Example

of Comparing the Female in Andrew Marvells ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Garden’ Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was a well-known metaphysical poet of the Restoration. During his career, he was associated with John Donne and George Herbert and also had the opportunity to work with John Milton. Some of his better known poems include, ‘An Horatian Ode’ written in praise of Cromwell upon his return from Ireland, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘The Garden’, and ‘Upon Appleton House’, a country house poem. Marvell also wrote a number of prose works, many of which were anonymous, as he chose to write articles and pamphlets criticizing Catholicism and the monarchy. Marvell wrote in the style of metaphysical poets and his verses are often witty and rich in descriptions and metaphors. His style is elaborate and elegant and some of his poems like ‘The Garden’ are written in a pastoral style. This paper attempts to study the treatment of women in two of Marvell’s poems ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Garden’. A lot of Restoration and earlier Renaissance love poetry reveals a strand of misogynist thought, on closer readings. In Michael Drayton’s ‘How Many Paltry Foolish Painted Things’ for instance, all of womankind is addressed in the insulting title and even the object of the poet’s affection, the mistress, is only to be considered superior because of the poet’s ‘superfluous praise.’ There is nothing inherently of worth in the lady; she is immortalized by virtue of the poet’s song alone. A similar strain of misogynist belief can be noted in Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ which uses the vocabulary and style of the Petrarchan sonnet that was popular among Renaissance poets like Thomas Wyatt, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser (Wald 2). The poet begins with hyperbolic descriptions of the length of time he would be willing to wait to love and possess her. But this lofty speech is undone in the second stanza, when the poet claims to feel the imminent end of available time and urges her to shed her ‘coyness’. Far from the chivalric, excessively polite address that the vocabulary of the lines suggests, there is actually an almost leering, threatening quality in them. The poet uses horrible imagery – ‘then worms shall try\ That long preserved virginity’ – to coax the mistress into submitting to him. In the poem, there is enlisted a praise of several female body parts, a device known as the blazon. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. (13 – 18) Not only does the blazon serve to objectify the woman, Marvell uses it in this poem without even the pretext of the ‘romantic sincerity’ of the Petrarchan tradition (Wald 3). Marvell declares in this poem that he would have loved her at this ‘rate’ had there been time, effectively saying that the woman does not deserve even this hyperbolic, exhibitionist claim of love. The only virtue allowed to the woman, the possession of beauty, itself is undermined when Marvell evokes images of ‘ashes’, ‘dust’ and ‘worms’, emphasizing not the timelessness of beauty but its transience. This emphasis on the lack of time, the urgency with which he asks her to submit to him is exaggerated for effect and directed to the only purpose of possessing her. Possession of the woman is also drawn in violent, ‘cannibalistic’ (Wald 4) terms. Their lovemaking is visualized as the sport of ‘birds of prey’ and the poet urges the woman to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife’ (43). ‘To His Coy Mistress’ then, preaches the life-affirming carpe diem philosophy at the price of reducing the woman to an inventory of body parts, a ‘Lady’ whose beauty shall soon be reduced to dust and who should give up her ‘quaint honor’ and submit to the poet because ‘Time’s winged-chariot’ draws near. Even the act of submission of the mistress is problematic. Metaphysical love poetry, especially those conceived in the Petrarchan tradition, almost always conceives of the woman as either a virgin or a whore. The mistress is praised and idealized for her star-like, distant, condescending and unapproachable state and at the same time berated for being merciless, cruel, or as in this poem, for being much too ‘coy.’ Should the lady give in to the poet’s amorous desires however, she loses her position immediately. The virtue of being cruel and unattainable is the beloved’s claim to the poet’s love and rage. She can neither ‘sport’ like ‘amorous birds of prey’, for fear of losing that exalted state and being reduced to a common ‘paltry thing’; nor can she retain her place on the pedestal without being called the poet’s tormentor. This dichotomy makes the situation of the woman impossible. In ‘The Garden’, Marvell reveals a different kind of misogynist tendency. There is no overt criticism or insulting of woman but the poet continues to feel nostalgic about a pre-Eve Eden – ‘Such was that happy garden-state,\ While man there walked without a mate’ – and ascribes the qualities traditionally associated with women to trees and plants. Not only does he sexualize vegetation, Marvell actually places them on a higher scale than women. Fond Lovers, cruel as their Flame, Cut in these Trees their Mistress name. Little, Alas, they know, or heed, How far these Beauties Hers exceed! (19 – 22) As is made evident in the final line, Marvell claims that the natural beauty of the trees is marred by the etching of the names of their mistresses by besotted lovers. Lawrence Hyman, in his essay on ‘The Garden’ reveals how by craftily using myth to suit his purposes and by transferring human qualities on to plans, the poet successfully undermines any positive or active role enjoyed by female sexuality. Marvell creates an Eden out of the garden he describes, but an Eden before The Fall. Eve is conspicuously absent in this ‘delicious solitude.’ But not only is the woman eradicated entirely from the garden of pleasure, her function is substituted by the plants. The Adam in the poem is an androgynous Adam, before God used his rib to create woman (Hyman 14). The plants reflect this androgyny or asexuality since they contain both sex organs within themselves. The garden therefore becomes a place where the poet and the plants are sufficient, woman is not required. Not only is woman not required, she is to be actively avoided. The ‘quiet repose’ of the plants is enough to substitute any dalliances with woman. Marvell manipulates the myths of Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx to make them now appear triumphant. Daphne’s transformation into laurel and the nymph Syrinx turning into reed, are made to seem not like the ‘defeat’ that they are traditionally accepted to mean but as triumphant assertions of the superiority of an asexual love of plants over the baser, sexual love of women (Hyman 17). Both these poems and work of Restoration and Renaissance poets in general, must be viewed against the larger backdrop of societal conceptions of women and gender. As Merry Wiesner reveals in her book Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, before 1500 women had largely been regarded as inferior to men, by both secular and religious writers. Since such a large majority of thinkers agreed on this view of womankind as being the inferior, this was accepted almost unanimously by people at large (Wiesner 14). Wiesner also mentions the several Biblical and mythical women stereotypes that helped to propagate the idea of women as sinners: Delilah, whose sexuality could tempt even the strongest man; Rebekah, whose love for one of her sons led her to deceive her husband; Lot’s wife (his name is not recorded) who was changed into a pillar of salt for disobeying God and her husband (Wiesner 16). The New Testament, for instance, emphasized the role of the twelve male apostles, while the influence of the female followers like Mary Magdalene was downplayed. Christian history reveals even more vicious indictments of women, for instance the second-century Tertullian, a Church Father, wrote to women, ‘You are the Devil’s gateway. You are the first deserter of the divine Law… You destroyed so easily God’s image, man’ (Wiesner 17). But Christianity was not the only shaping influence that contributed to a negative image formation for women. Aristotle’s conception of woman as an imperfect man also perpetuated the notion of woman’s inadequacy. Jacques Duval’s 1601 treatise on women and sexuality On Hermaphrodites, Childbirth, and the Medical Treatment of Mothers and Children records a few anecdotes of inexplicable sex change, such as that of the woman Marie le Marcis who turned into a man, ‘Marin’ who then appealed to be allowed to marry Jeanne, a woman he loved. The case was decided in favor of Marin. The prevalent notion of sexuality at this time was that individuals contained both sexual organs but with one fundamental structure, expressed visibly in men and remained inverted and hidden in women (Greenblatt 76, 78). This model proposed initially by Galen held that both men and women were essentially hermaphrodites, but even this theory held the ‘inversion’ of sexual organs in women as an aberration. The visible expression of sexual organs in man was still considered the ideal and the norm. But in comparison with the theory of the Aristotelians, that of the Galenists granted greater agency to the female. Early modern theories of sexuality and gender trace the rise and fall of misogyny but relevant to a study of Marvell is his own engagement with women and sexuality. Michael Jon DiSanto suggests that Marvell was ambivalent towards adult sexuality and traces a strain of near pedophilia in some of his poems including ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Garden.’ DiSanto quotes from ‘Upon Appleton House’ to suggest that Marvell is threatened by adult sexuality: Before Juliana returns, the speaker means to murder the ‘flowrs, and grass, and I and all,’ invoking an apocalyptic scene wherein he must destroy everything to save himself from a woman. Rather than encounter Juliana, everything must perish. Suicide is preferable to Juliana and the adult sexuality she represents. This reveals a deep fear of women, adult sexuality, and all of the physical and mental elements inextricably interconnected with them (DiSanto 165). The third stanza of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ assumes a greater significance, viewed in this light. Marvell’s harking back to the ‘youthful glew’ and ‘morning dew’ of young love appears a more urgent cry, motivated by a genuine fear of adulthood. Victoria Silver stresses a similar point in Marvell’s ambivalence towards adult sexuality in her essay ‘The Obscure Spirit of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell’s Pastorals’. She claims that the orgiastic experiences of the poet in ‘The Garden’ represent a desire of the poet to return to an infantile state. […] the speaker of ‘The Garden’ subsides into copious, infantile luxury-embraced, fondled, and fed by greenery, which services him with a distinctly erotic enthusiasm, dropping its apples, crushing its grapes, reaching its peaches and melons and flowers around, into, and about his body. He is obliged to do nothing but simply be a ‘happy vegetable’ himself, without any need to cultivate his pleasure since all of it urgently descends upon him (Silver 41). DiSanto suggests that viewed from this perspective, the total absence of women in ‘The Garden’ becomes more disturbing (165). We see therefore, that misogyny and negative images of female sexuality pervade Marvell’s poems ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘The Garden’, and that they appear motivated by different factors. Whether it is Marvell’s inherent misogyny that draws him to use and satirize the Petrarchan love sonnet or his fear of adult female sexuality that lends his poems a strange preoccupation with ‘nymphets’, it is evident that Marvell does reflect the larger misogynic thought that is prevalent during the Restoration. References: Berger, Harry. Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print. Carpenter, Margaret A. ‘Marvell’s ‘Garden’.’ The English Renaissance 10.1 (1970): 155-169. Print. DiSanto, Michael John. ‘Andrew Marvells ambivalence toward adult sexuality.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 48.1 (2008): 165+. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 4 Dec. 2010. Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print. Hyman, Lawrence W. ‘Marvell’s Garden.’ English Literary History 25.1 (1958): 13-22. Print. Richardson, Mark. ‘Such was that happy Garden-state, while Man there walk’d without a mate.’ The Era of Casual Fridays. 5 Nov. 2009. Web. 3 Dec. 2010. Silver, Victoria. ‘The Obscure Spirit of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell’s Pastorals.’ English Literary History 68.1 (2001): 29-55. Print. Wald, Margaret. ‘Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: A Feminist Reading.’ VirtuaLit. PDF File. Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Zwicker, Steven N. ‘Virgins and Whores: the Politics of Sexual Misconduct in the 1660s.’ The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell. Eds. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins. Vermont: Scolar Press, 1990. Print. Read More