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Mary, Lady Chudleigh: Writing from the Margins
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Lady Chudleigh remains, perhaps the most under-rated poet of the Augustan age. Presently she is chiefly known for being described as a "cow" by that famous misogynist, Alexander Pope, in his much over-rated, "Dunciad." Chudleigh was a close associate of the poet John Dryden but spent most her life in self-exile from a society that marginalized female artists. The most easily accessible of Chudleigh's forms—the simplest, least formal and most openly lyrical—are her songs. The image narrative I find in the first of her songs in Poems on Several Occasions illustrates the unresolved tensions between disembodied reason and physical resignation that mark the life of Chudleigh.
1.
Why Damon, why, why so pressing?
The Heart you begs not worth possessing:
Each Look, each Word, each Smile's affected,
And inward Charms are quite neglected:
Then scorn her, scorn her, foolish swain,
And sigh no more, no more in vain.
2.
Beauty's worthless, fading flying;
Who would for Trifles think of dying?
Who for a Face, a Shape, you'd languish,
And tell the Brooks, and Groves his Anguish,
Till she, till she thinks fit to prize
him,
And all, and all beside despise him?
3.
Fix, fix you thoughts on what's inviting,
On what will never bear the slighting:
Wit and Virtue claim your Duty,
They're much more worth than Gold and Beauty:
To them, to them, your Heart resign,
And you'll no more, no more repine. (Chudleigh
73)
The surface narrative of this poem urges a particular man, Damon, to look beyond the superficial beauty of an unnamed (thus general and emblematic) woman, to see her interior ugliness, to cease his humiliating pursuit of her, and to commit himself instead to wit and virtue, which will never let him down. The leap from specific behavior to a general moral is not a tough one as the speaker directly privileges wit and virtue (reason, both logical and ethical—or in rhetorical parlance, logos and ethos) over gold and beauty (the physical/emotional world—pathos). The last couplet particularly interests because the end rhymes of resign and repine both carry a somber emotional weight in the speaker's recommendation that, if only the man will submit to reason, he will no longer long for the physical world embodied as female, as temptress.
Reading the surface narrative of the poem with the genders reversed really changes only the location of what is generally physically desirable (although it would also relieve the poem of its implicit misogyny, it would do so only by replacing that misogyny with its binary opposite); the argument remains explicitly as strong and the behaviors explicitly as apt to one gender as to the other. The poem's voice, then, is truly androgynous and unlocatable. And isn't that the epitome of pure reason—cold, impersonal, machinelike, mathematical? Yet paradoxically to this day, it is a cliché that such a voice represents a sort of ideal male archetype. Additionally, even as the voice of the poem worships reason, it acknowledges the physical magnet that is desire, and requires a resignation from that desire. It is apt then—given the unexamined assumptions of the age's culture as embodied in its language—that the gender of what is physically desirable is female and that denial and resignation are therefore associated with it.
This song's interior narrative, then, is a dissonant chorus of oppositions. What I see in that braid of opposing registers (for example, we have the playful rhythm—utterly sensual in its insistent insouciance—propelling the ascetic self-denial of the surface narrative) are irresolvable tensions, their disjunctive motions creating points of stress, of potential rupture—loci for conflict, confusion and paradox.
http://www.c18.rutgers.edu/biblio/chudleigh.html
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bibliography
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet64.html
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poetry
http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/march99/chudle.html
a biography