Читать книгу Roaring Girls - Holly Kyte - Страница 28

Never one to pause for breath, Margaret plunged into her next book with a newfound confidence in both herself and in women. Nature’s Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life, published in the summer of 1656, was another overwhelmingly diverse treasure chest of poems, fireside tales, animal fables, social satires and dialogues that attempted to pack in all of everyday life experience. It was her most ambitious, accomplished and visionary work yet, and the stand-out prose pieces all, in their way, offered revolutionary depictions of women.

In ‘The Matrimonial Agreement’, a woman’s powerlessness in marriage is redressed when a sceptical bride strikes a bargain with her husband: if she suspects him of adultery, she has the right to leave him and take a share of his estate with her. In ‘Ambition Preferr’ed Before Love’ the lady chooses not to marry at all, because ‘Husbands will never suffer their wives to climb [Fame’s Tower], but keep them fast lock’d in their arms, or tie them to household employments.’ And in ‘The Contract’, a morality tale in the ‘romancical’ mould, scholarly women are unashamedly celebrated in the spurned heroine who wins back her betrothed by becoming a paragon of learning and a ‘meteor of the time’.

‘Assaulted and Pursued Chastity’ is Nature’s Pictures’ most interesting fictional offering, though – an allegorical, romance-inflected romp that illustrates the sexual hazards to which women are perpetually exposed. Featuring a gun-toting, cross-dressing, self-educated, gender-fluid heroine who finds herself shipwrecked in fantastical lands and winds up fending off a predatory Prince, outwitting some dangerous cannibals, leading an army into battle in defence of a Queen, making said Queen fall in love with her and ruling her own kingdom, it’s pretty startling stuff for its time.[57] Too timid to fire a pistol herself, Margaret was living out all her heroic fantasies by putting one in the unwavering hand of her heroine – and as the Prince advances on her with a smile, thinking it ‘a shame to be out-dared by a woman’, she shoots him without compunction. Later, when the Queen discovers her crush is a woman, Margaret even dabbles with the possibility of same-sex love – the Queen is ‘angry that she was deceived, yet still did love’. Pushing the boundaries further still, she toys with the fantasy of same-sex marriage, as the Queen concludes that ‘since I cannot marry her, and so make her my husband, I will keep her if I can, and so make her my friend’. The heroine’s revelation to her troops, meanwhile, is met with undiluted approbation and a rousing cry for equality: ‘Heaven bless you, of what sex soever you be’.

The last word, however, sadly goes to convention as the ending plucks our heroine from her boys’ clothes and puts her in a wedding dress, as the wife of her would-be rapist. It’s disconcerting to say the least, but as a woman who flirted with the tropes of masculinity herself, Margaret knew not to push the transgressive image of the warrior woman too far. Amazonian ‘virgin viragos’ had traditionally signalled social disorder and disruption – dangerous, unnatural women who rejected their femininity and threatened to throw the established order of marriage and childbearing into chaos – but Margaret had flipped the idea on its head by using her weaponised virgin not to wreak havoc, but to bring about peace and social order.[58] Behind the smokescreen of the traditional marriage plot, she could argue the subtly radical notion that breaking with prescribed gender conventions might suggest impeccable virtue in women rather than immodesty, and that masculine get-up could be a kind of armour that afforded them empowerment, freedom and safety.

These tales are significant in portraying some of the earliest fictional heroines written by a woman in English, and it’s heartening that in their intelligence, resourcefulness and courage they flouted all the tired rules of femininity and achieved a level of agency that their female audience could only dream of. And Margaret undoubtedly did dream of this stuff. She didn’t fantasise about heroes who would come along to rescue her; she fantasised about being a heroic woman who could rescue herself. With so many autobiographical details filtering into these tales – perilous voyages from home, exile in a foreign land, men whose first wives are conveniently dispatched and whose libertinism is reformed by the love of a virtuous young woman – it’s clear that Margaret was rewriting her own life as a romance adventure, and casting herself in the highly unconventional lead role.

If Margaret’s reinvention of herself as a fictional heroine was ambitious, the inclusion in Nature’s Pictures of her real-life autobiography was positively groundbreaking. Nothing quite like it had ever been published in English by a woman before. Their life writing had previously been either for private consumption or with a religious focus; ordinary, secular female existence was deemed unworthy of public attention. But Margaret begged to differ. At the age of just 33, in ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life’, she set down her life story for posterity.

Aware that she was yet again straying from the well-trodden path, she had her defence ready. Vanity would be the first accusation, but others had done it without censure, so why shouldn’t she? Some readers would consider it presumptuous, and wonder why she had written it all, ‘since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of’. Her answer to this was simple and unashamed: granted, it might be of no interest or purpose to the reader, ‘but it is to the authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs’. Here was a woman who freely admitted that her ambition (which ‘inclines to vain-glory’) was so great that she always had one eye on her legacy, aiming ‘to tell the truth, lest after-ages should mistake, in not knowing’.[59]

This was a fine claim, but like all autobiographies Margaret’s account was highly partial, glorifying her family as courageous, innocent victims of the Parliamentarians, and herself as a shy, melancholic writer who, despite her singularity and ambition, was a dutiful wife and loyal subject. For all her own spin-doctoring, however, here was also a prime opportunity to combat other people’s; to publicly answer some of the gossip and exaggerations that had a habit of springing up around her. She slapped down the rumours that she had stood ‘as a beggar at the Parliament door’ and ‘haunt[ed] the committees’ during her trip to England, and scoffed that ‘report did dress me in a hundred several fashions’. In producing this pioneering account of herself and attempting to set the record straight, Margaret was presciently asserting that women as well as men had a right to self-representation, to tell their own story as they wished, rather than languish at the mercy of other people’s interpretations.