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Here are my thoughts as I navigate this padlet.
1. Overall, the thesis needs development and revision. When you say that "they challenged heteronormativity in the way that they wrote," it is not clear what you are talking about. How did they do this--with word choice? imagery? genre choices? their creation of characters/figures? It needs clarification.
2. An entry on lesbian salience is interesting but not very constructive as I have no idea how you want it to connect to the project, nor have you analyzed it. Inserting a quote without explanation of its relevance is not helpful.
3. Your Andreadis pod does not illustrate an understanding of her article/arguments and an ability to apply her theories to Behn's work.
4. In your "Invitation to the Country" pod, you have not included line numbers, nor have you included analysis of the lines.
5. Your slides on the authors show an overview of the poet, but the information is not tailored to this project. In other words, details about their poetry or publication history that would support your thesis are not included.
6. There is an inconsistency in the level of scholarship across the project. For example, the pod on "Song to a Scottish Tune" shows an attention to detail and critical analysis that is absent in other pods.
7. The project needs a hard edit. See, for example, the slide on Jemmy.
8. Depth and development. While the presentation attempts to tackle a lot of information by incorporating several poems, in doing so much of it reads at surface level. For example, the explanation of Dorothy Mermin's article mentions the influence of Sappho but leaves it unaddressed. I wonder why it is being included, if the idea of influence is not going to be explored. This approach characterizes many of the entries in the presentation. Rather than zeroing in and digging down deep, many of the entries touch the surface as if checking a box. As a result, I don't see the kind of analytical probity I was hoping for in a 300-level English project.
9. Focus. While I liked the inclusion of the Youtube video, for example, at the end of the entry it mentions Menge's ideas about Philips' use of friendship as liberating. It is not clear how the reading of the poem is connected to this point. It makes it difficult for the reader to understand the nature of the pod. Overall, the format was challenging to follow respect to the significance of the pods. It was not clear how they were organized.
10. Finally, level of scholarship. Compared to other projects in the class, this one did not have the degree of analysis that I was hoping for. For example, in your similarities slide, your points are facts and not arguable points that illustrate close comparative work. I wonder, for example, "how" in point two. You need to dig deeper on the whole and show me specifically how these authors "write" desire and why it is important and/or significant for us as readers to consider this idea. I think the project, unfortunately, reflects the fact that members of your team were absent during the in-class sessions and as a result the project feels disjointed and under-developed. I think the level of effort in the project was also not consistent which is unfortunate for the members who really worked hard on this. I wish you would have sought out my help in class and during office hours as repeatedly suggested. I think there is a lot of potential here.
Grade: C+

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It is said that Jemmy referred to the king of Scotland. So, it cam be speculated that the speaker was involved with him prior to him going to take his place of the throne. Reading the poem in the framework that Jimmy is the prospective king shifts the perspective a lot. This poem suddenly starts to take the role of political commentary. It could be read as Aphra showcasing a lack of respect for the throne. By having a speaker who views Jemmy as only a sexual partner rather than a superior, Aphra brings him down on the same level as the civilians.

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By: Cornelia, Ryan Baldwin, Joe, and Sebastian

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By: Cornelia, Ryan Baldwin, Joe, and Sebastian

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Orinda is the name that Philips would use to refer to herself, her close peers would refer to her like this.

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In the heart of the City of London, at the corner of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street, stands a striking modernist pink stone building. No. 1 Poultry Street is the youngest listed building in the country (it was granted grade II* status in 2016), but the site it occupies has a long history. Tucked around the back of the building a plaque tells us that here once stood St Benet Sherehog, a medieval church memorably named which stood for over 500 years before it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, never to be rebuilt. Among those who were buried there, their graves now lost, were the poet Katherine Philips and her son Hector. He had died in 1655, having lived a mere forty days. Of his death she wrote, in one of her most memorable poems, 'Orinda upon little Hector Philips':

She herself died young in 1664, aged 33, of smallpox, just two years before her place of burial was destroyed in the Fire. Yet probably she would not have been moved by such a turn of events. In 'Wiston Vault' she writes of the vanity of tombs and epitaphs:

Ah, false vain task of art! ah, poor weak man
Whose monument does more than's merit can!
Who by his friends' best care and love's abused,
And in his very epitaph accused;
For did they not suspect his name would fall,
There would not need an epitaph at all.

For Philips, the things of the heart were of greater permanence than any man-built monument. This the theme and the ambition of her poetry.

Katherine Philips (1631-1664) is a case study in the fall and rise of posthumous reputations. In her day she was the 'Matchless Orinda'. That was how her admiring peers referred to her, and what a splendid a title it is. 'Orinda' was the name that she gave to herself in her poetry, giving similar classical names to the family and friends to whom she frequently addressed her poems, among them 'Antenor' (her husband James Philips), 'Rosania' (her childhood friend Mary Aubrey) and especially 'Lucasia', the name given to Anne Owen, to whom nearly half her surviving verse was addressed. She was the daughter of Puritans, who then married a supporter of Cromwell, but whose political persuasions turned increasingly royalist. She was raised in London, but spent much of her adult life in Cardigan, Wales, her husband's seat, where she chafed at her remote location and the poor society, while doing her best to rationalise her situation in verse (from 'A Country Life'):

She responded by developing an intense communication through poetry, shared in manuscript form with friends and the literary cognoscenti of the time, augmented by letters which debated philosophical ideas. She became one of the most highly respected poets of her age, championed for her lyric gift and intellectual insight. She was praised in particular as a woman writer, whose work was distinctive because of her fresh insight ("We our old Title plead in vain; / Man may be Head, but Woman's now the Brain" writes Abraham Cowley, in one of the many lavish commendatory verses written following her untimely death). It was a reputation gained almost entirely without publication, since she circulated her poems through manuscripts, which were read and shared by the intellectual few. Only in the last year of her life was a collection of her poems published (a few verses had been published in 1651), and that a pirated version to which she objected strongly (in public, at least). An official collected poems only appeared posthumously, in 1667. Samuel Pepys records reading it in his diary entry for 16 September of that year.

Thereafter, despite further championing by John Dryden and John Keats, her reputation faded. It revived to a degree following the publication, in 1905, of George Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, which reproduced the 1667 collection in its entirety. Her poems were thereafter to be found in anthologies, often of so-called minor or lesser poets, compiled by such diligent editors as Norman Ault ( Seventeenth Century Lyrics), H.J. Massingham ( Seventeenth Century English Verse), J.C. Squire ( The Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets), or John and Constance Masefield, whose Lyrists of the Restoration was where I first came across her, transfixed in particular by the startling opening lines of 'Parting with Lucasia':

But despite the anthologies, she remained almost invisible. A biography appeared in 1931, The Matchless Orinda, by Philip Webster Souers, but though he investigated her life and works in depth and sympathetically, he stated her reputation was not, and now could never be, what it once had been: "she is merely a minor poet of the seventeenth century, whose glory has departed". My revered Penguin Companion to English Literature (1971), through which I found so much to explore and cherish, had no entry on her at all.

But with a growth of interest in women's literary heritage, driven by an imperative to rebalance the traditional understanding of our literary inheritance, her name came into the ascendant once more. Germaine Greer's 1989 Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse did much to excite interest in her work. Now, though much of what is written about her is in highly academic, specialist texts, she is once more revered by the cognoscenti. No volume of her poetry is currently available, but a new edition of her poems and plays is in preparation (Greer's Stump Cross Books published a three-volume set of her writings in 1990/92, but all are out of print). She has the character, insight, euphony and relevance to guarantee her wide appeal. She could be once again be as revered, and understood, as she was when alive.

So, what is so special about Katherine Philips?

Obviously, there is her unusual status as a female writer in the seventeenth century; once a figure of curiosity, now a key figure in a feminist revision of literary history. There were very few women writers (in Britain or elsewhere) at the time, simply through a general lack of education and opportunity. Philips was not the first British woman to write poetry or to be published, but she was arguably the first prominent such figure (poet and prose writer Margaret Cavendish published before her, and yes, Queen Elizabeth wrote poetry, but she became prominent for other reasons). She broke through in part through exceptional intellectual ability (a brilliant child, she is said to have read the whole of the Bible by the age of four). There must also have been a degree of family support, but chiefly she wrote because she had to write. Philips thought and communicated poetically. Her poems are conversations carried on by other means, often responding to events personal or political. She lived at a time when manuscript poems were often circulated and read with close attention for content and style. She was accepted and admired in her time for so eloquently expressing herself in the modes of the time.

Here, for example, are the opening stanzas of 'Friendship in Emblem, or the Seal, to my Dearest Lucasia':

In its ingenuity of argument combined with an elegant elusiveness, this owes much to the metaphysical poets (Philips admired Donne, was Marvell's contemporary, and knew Cowley and Vaughan). In the way that it plays with the image of an emblem as visual metaphor it turns the idea of friendship into something abstract yet at the same time deeply felt. It quickens the senses even as the versification beguiles.

Friendship was her great poetic theme. She cultivated the idea of a society of friendship, and expressed an intensity of feeling towards her women friends that has led to inevitable speculation about her sexuality. It is only speculation, much of it based on an interpretation of language and emotion that would have been seen quite differently in the seventeenth century. Reading her biography, one does sense that the target of much of her poetry, Anne Owen ('Lucasia'), was on occasion somewhat taken aback by the strength of Philips' expression of friendship, as in the raw opening to 'Orinda to Lucasia parting, October, 1661, at London', written in a fit of despair at the news that Owen was moving to Ireland to marry:

Adieu, dear Object of my Love's excess,
And with thee all my hopes of happiness,
With the same fervent and unchanged heart
Which did its whole self once to thee impart,
(and which, though fortune has so sorely bruis'd,
Would suffer more, to be from this excus'd)
I to resign thy dear converse submit,
Since I can neither keep, nor merit it.
Thou hast too long to me confined been,
Who ruin am without, passion within.

Concise expressions that memorably marry thought and feeling such as that last line are found throughout Philips' poetry. Her concept of friendship was highly conceptualised. She wrote frequently of the intermingling of souls, viewing friendship as a mystical goal, expressed through elegantly contrived metaphor. The idealist poet was tied to drab, remote Cardigan, but in her mind she could reach for Arcadia, through verse and female friendship. In the beautifully constructed 'Content, to My Dearest Lucasia', she lists, describes and rejects all forms of contentment, save that of content in its ideal form, which is friendship:

... Then, my Lucasia, we who have
Whatever Love can give or crave,
With scorn or pity can survey
The Trifles which the most betray.
With innocence and perfect friendship fir'd,
By Virtue join'd, and by our Choice retir'd;

Whose Mirrors are the Crystal Brooks
Or else each other's Hearts and Looks,
Who cannot wish for other things,
Than Privacy and Friendship brings,
Whose thoughts and persons chang'd and mixt are one
Enjoy Content, or else the World has none.

She wrote on public affairs as well, in particular the return of the monarchy following the Civil War and Protectorate, though her royalist sympathies clashed with her husband's parliamentary role and could have put him in danger, before Charles II's return. One poem in particular, 'Upon the Double Murder of King Charles I', set tongues wagging, leading to the worried tone of 'To Antenor, on a Paper of Mine which J. Jones Threatens to Publish to Prejudice Him' (Antenor is her husband, J. Jones the puritan cleric Jenkin Jones):

It is remarkable the degree to which Philips would express her private thoughts for sharing as manuscript poems. Of course, they were for sharing among friends, but there is an unguarded quality to them that is surprising to find written down and distributed. She could not help but speak her thoughts, only half-protected by the formalities of verse. However, though she could be unguarded, she was also subtle. Souers, her biographer, speculates that the royalist enthusiasm of her post-Restoration verse could have been intended to protect her husband, who had been Cromwell's man, through expressions of loyalty. If so, the stratagem worked, as James Philips survived to serve as MP for Cardigan in the Cavalier parliament (though political machinations caused him to lose his seat within a year).

There is dull stuff among her poetry, with some formulaic panegyrics, while some discussions of events are little more than chit-chat. That must be inevitable when poetry has become, to a degree, how you speak. The best of it, however, charms and elevates, filled as it is with the clear-cut cadences and rhythm that so distinguish the best poetry of her era. Few poems from her century are so gently crafted, so astutely expressed, as 'To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship', given here in full:

Katherine Philips was once a minor poet, but we no longer have such things in our literary histories. The old hierarchies have gone, freeing matters up to permit multiple viewpoints and fresh perspectives. She is anyone's equal, and should be. Yet there is part of me that regrets the loss of those 'minor' and 'lesser' labels. They pointed to history's modest corners, to people whose charm lay in part that they had been overlooked. Philips quite liked the idea of being overlooked, or claimed as much:

That private shade, wherein my Muse was bred,
She always hop'd might hide her humble head ...

Those lines open what was her last poem, 'To his Grace Gilbert, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, July [sic] 10, 1664' (she died on June 22, so the month must be a misprint). Lesser poets speak not to the crowd but to us alone. We find them in musty volumes, long neglected on the shelves, discoveries to cherish as our own. They are tucked around the back of things, most comfortable in their modesty.

So do read Katherine Philips; but also keep her to yourself.
This is the third in an occasional series of posts on favourite poets of mine Links:

The best-available volume for discovering Philips' poetry is Sarah C.E. Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), Women Poets of the English Civil War (Manchester University Press, 2018), which has a good selection of her poetry with helpful background history and notes

Germaine Greer's Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (Viking, 1995) has an illuminating chapter on the differences between the manuscript and printed versions of Phillips' poetry, questioning where the poet's authentic voice lies. For example, the original printed version of 'Orinda upon little Hector Philips' (quoted at the start of this post) has the line 'I did but pluck the Rose-bud and it fell'. In manuscript it reads, 'I did but touch the rosebud and it fell', which I have preferred. All the difference in the world

A 1770 edition of Philips' poetry, plays and translations can be found on the Internet Archive; George Saintsbury's Minor Poets of the Caroline Period vol. 1 with poems and songs from the plays is available on Hathi Trust, as is Philip Webster Souers' biography The Matchless Orinda

The British Library's Discovering Literature site has a short biography of Katherine Philips and an essay 'Print and perception: The literary careers of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips' by Tamara Tubb

There is a listing of her extant manuscripts on the Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450-1700

And she has a Twitter account. Of course.

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In the heart of the City of London, at the corner of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street, stands a striking modernist pink stone building. No. 1 Poultry Street is the youngest listed building in the country (it was granted grade II* status in 2016), but the site it occupies has a long history.

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Philips, or as she would call herself Orinda, writes a poem about the sufferable wait she goes through before meeting her soulmate once more.

starting with birds yearning for the night to be over and the sun to rise, "Observe the weary birds e’re night be done" (Line 1) Philips explores the idea of the birds waiting for the sun to rise to continue their lives.

As Lucasia to Philips is just as the sun is for the birds, thus the night time for the birds is connected to Lucasia's absence.
From thee I’ve heat and light,
Thy absence makes my night.

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A poem dressed with platonic and court vocabulary, meant to disguise an underlying desire the speaker is trying to convey to the “friend.” We are introduced to the friend only known as Rosania, who we can assume is facing the challenge of living away from her friend under the court.

“There we search nature and its authour too;

Possess’d with freedome and a reall State

Look down on vice, on vanity, and fate.

There (my Rosania) will, we mingling souls”

In these few lines from the poem, the speaker conveys the desire to the friend. While remaining playful “there we search nature and its authour” and  “We mingling souls” can be interpreted as a sexual invitation to the friend.

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Women becoming poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch

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Women becoming poets: Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Anne Finch

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Mermin writes about Philip's career as a writer and the complications that coincide with being a writer at the time. “The matchless Orinda” was able to achieve her recognition through her literary works which Mermin argues is because “They flourished in literary contexts that gave openings to a female voice: The sexual freedom and gender ambiguities enjoyed during the Restoration, which allowed women to speak as erotic subjects.”

Orinda was heavily influenced by her only precursor Sappho

Mermin also argues “Their poems are made to appear spontaneous and artless…they usually write of a world remote from politics and the hierarchy of gender.”

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Similarities between Aphra Behn & Katherine Philips

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Similarities between Aphra Behn & Katherine Philips

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Both Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips are pioneers in the literary world as they achieved fame as poets and broke through the patriarchy that dominated at the time.

Both Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips challenged existing norms related to gender and sexuality.

Both Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips wrote poems that described sexual desire and passion.

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The speaker in this poem by Katherine Philips describes a passionate connection with her soulmate-a women

In this reading of the poem, the passion and desire are effectively communicated.

Line 10 " Thy breast is thy private cabinet" demonstrates Hillary Menges' theory that Katherine Philips views friendship as a safe haven.

Hillary Menges makes the argument that within the privacy of friendship Philips felt protected and free to be herself.

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Katherine Philips - L'amitie, To Mrs M Awbrey

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In this poem, Behn describes the relationship between a female speaker and man referred to as Jemmy.

From lines 1 to 16, the speaker talks about how Jemmy captivated her. She says things like “he was the finest swain” and “I could not say him nay”. This showcases a sort of infatuation that not many women in the 1800s discussed. This is pure, unbridled lust.

Behn goes on to vividly describe their sexual interactions. She describes the things that Jemmy would do to the speaker and the things that the speaker would do to Jemmy. This is something that would have been seen as scandalous and disgraceful in Behn's time.

“And Jemmy every grace displ[ay]'d,

Which were enough I trow,

To conquer any princely Maid:

So did he me I vow.”

By the end of the poem, it is revealed that Jemmy must leave to go fight in the war. Also leaving the speaker by proxy. Causing the speaker to be very upset. However, the speaker does not appear to be upset for the typical reasons. In line 32 the speaker states “What becomes of me”. This indicates that rather than being fearful for Jemmy and his life, she is more upset that she will no longer have anyone to have sexual relations with him.

This is a very progressive concept because it is very rarely that we read about a self serving woman. A woman who is “selfish” and thinks about herself and what she wants. Typically women are thought of in relation to men. However in this poem, the woman is her own individual and the man is thought of in relation to her.

Their relationship was purely physical and did not subscribe to typical heteronormative ideals. The speaker was not obsessed with her honor nor was she interested in becoming Jemmy's domesticated housewife. She is just concerned with her own happiness and pleasure.

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Difference in Approaches to the Game of Sexual Politics

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Difference in Approaches to the Game of Sexual Politics

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Aphra Behn uses more erotic language and erotic images in her poems.

Katherine Philips uses the language often used by male poets in their writings about love and courtship but she directs it at women.  In this way her approach is less direct than Behn's.

Philips describes the connection of souls to disguise her sexual desire. Desire is masked by eloquent use of language that describes an unleashing of ecstasy that comes from the connecting of soulmates.

Behn provides a more vivid visualization of the sexual act between partners-both heterosexual and homosexual.

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In The Disappointment, Aphra Behn challenges traditional sexual politics

Cloris is disappointed by Lisander's impotence. She wants to be fulfilled sexually but also wants to maintain her virtue as a virgin.

In this poem, Behn uses vivid images of nature such as the "melting snowy breasts" and "finding beneath the verdant leaves a snake".

Using nature not only provides a strong visualization for the sexual encounter between Cloris and Lisander but also conveys the message that sex is a natural thing

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Harriette Andreadis (1989) The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664

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Harriette Andreadis (1989) The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664

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In this article, Andreadis argues that Philips uses conventional images of the heart, spirit and soul which were "stocks in trade of the male discourse of metaphysical passion for women" to describe her erotic feelings, desires, and passion for women.

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To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship by… | Poetry Foundation

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To my Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship

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To my Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship

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In this poem Katherine Philips expresses her close relationship with her friend Lucasia. As the start of the poem ,"I did not live until this time" (Line 1), would represent the significance their relationship had.

Philips throughout the poem explains how her connection with Lucasia is so close, that their souls are connected forever "Never had Orinda found, A soul till she found thee" (Line 11) Immortal as our soul (Line 24)

This poem was one of the earlier presentations of a relationship between women.

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To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship by… | Poetry Foundation

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Katherine Phillips and Aphra Behn both challenged heteronormativity in the way they wrote about desire.

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The term sapphic refers to an often romantic infatuation between two women. It stems from the poet Sappho who's poems often illustrated acts of lesbianism. This intertwines with imagery when a poet utilizes abstract language and symbolism to showcase intimate interactions between women.

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In Aphra Behn's  "To the Fair Clorinda", the speaker professes her romantic and erotic feelings for a woman.

The woman is described as both a fair maiden and a lovely charming youth (Behn's hermaphroditic ideal)

"And without Blushes I the Youth persue; so much beauteous Woman" - the speaker is not ashamed or embarrassed by the fact that she is erotically attracted to the female body.

In this way Aphra challenges heteronormativity and sends a message of sex positivity.

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"Aphra Behn’s work is evidence of a moment of explosive lesbian salience not just through her poetic expressions of female-to-female eroticism but in challenging the prevailing ideas of heteronormativity and women’s place in the world, both in her work and as one of the first women to earn a living through writing at a time when most women were defined by the men they married." (from  Aphra Behn and the Poetics of Lesbian Salience in the Seventeenth Century. by Jane White, 2015.

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Jane White

MA Dissertation

University of Brighton

2015

[1]Anne Finch, Friendship between Ephelia and Ardelia, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180926(accessed 18 August 2015).

In her essay 'The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography ' Valerie Traub summarizes the post-Foulcauldian debate between what she describes as 'alterity versus continuism.'[1] In other words between the Foucauldian view that it wasn't until the latter part of the nineteenth century that the idea of sexual identity was born ;- : '[t]he sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species'[2] - versus the continuity of expressions of lesbian sexuality throughout history expressed by gender historians such as Lillian Faderman in Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) and Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian (1993). While Faderman's theories of romantic friendship appear to shy away from specifically sexualizing women's relationships, Faderman was writing, like Adrienne Rich'[3], in the context of 1970s lesbian feminism, at a time when it was felt that obsessing about what women did in bed distracted from wider issues. Castle, despite her opposition to Faderman's desexualized image of the 'romantic friend', still 'reiterated her continuist premises by provocatively collapsing eighteenth-century representations with twentieth-century cultural formations.'[4] Similarly, Bernadette Brooten in Love Between Women (1996) presents female eroticism in the ancient Roman world within a 1970s lesbian context.[5] Traub believes that the debate between 'acts' and 'identities' has outlived its usefulness and argues for a new direction for lesbian history that she calls 'cycles of salience.' Traub suggests that forms of lesbian identity recur throughout history, continually emerging, disappearing, re-emerging and re-configuring over time and under different social conditions. In the past, historians have looked to classify female-to-female desire within types such as "tribade", "invert" or "butch."[6] Traub suggests we should now: 'investigat[e] the cultural conditions that render such types culturally salient at particular moments'[7] rather than simply attempting to 'join up the dots' in order to attain historical continuity. 'Analyzing recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviours, and meanings of women who erotically desired other women across large spans of time', Traub suggests, 'could result in a new methological paradigm for lesbian history.'[8] Following Traub, I use the word 'lesbian' in its widest sense to describe women desiring women, women loving women, intimate relationships between women and women's political commitment to women.[9] I have not required evidence of genital contact as a definition of 'lesbian', believing, like Sheila Jeffreys, that 'if we accept that proof of genital contact is required before we may include any relationship between two women in the history of lesbianism, then there is a serious possibility that we will end up with no lesbian history at all.'[10] Focusing primarily on the poetry of Aphra Behn (1640? - 1689) this dissertation considers how women writers negotiated a femocentric space and how they used the pastoral idiom to confront the language of desire and knowledge of self. Setting Behn's work within the context of other seventeenth-century women writers this dissertation briefly explores the work of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, An Collins, Sarah Davy, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Ephelia,[11] Anne Finch and Delarivier Manley. Following Traub's suggestion to analyse 'recurring patterns', this dissertation finds four elements that recur throughout these women's writing: the creation of feminized pastoral/utopian spaces away from men, the feminization of Christianity, triangles of desire that destabilize expectations of gender binary normativity and evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy where women do not have the language to express their desires or are unable to do so through fear of censure.
The first element that this dissertation identifies as occurring throughout women's writing of the seventeenth century is feminized pastoral spaces. In Women, Space and Utopia, 1600-1800 Nicole Pohl quotes from Lucy Irigaray:
I was your house. And, when you leave, abandoning this dwelling place, I do not know what to do with these walls of mine. Have I ever had a body other than the one which you constructed according to your idea of it? Have I ever experienced a skin other than the one which you wanted to dwell within?[12]

Davy was not the only seventeenth-century woman to admit love for another woman; in France authors such as Mme. De La Fayette and Mlle. De Scudéry have been depicted by historians as having female lovers.[83] Moreover, female to female desire in all-women communities appear in a plays by both James Shirley, The Bird in a Cage (1632 - 1633) and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle's The Convent of Pleasure 1668. In The Bird in a Cage an over-protective father is planning to marry his daughter to the Duke of Mantua. The father confines his daughter, princess Eugenia, and her ladies to a tower where the women decide to stage a play to pass the time. The play depicts Jupiter's seduction of Danae and while playing the part of Jupiter, one of Eugenia's ladies, Donella, admits to an erotic desire for Eugenia. Annoyed by the interruption of a bell, Donella speaks the lines '[i]f you had not wak'd as you did Madam, I should ha' forgotten my selfe and play'd Jupiter indeed with you, my imaginations were strong upon me; and you lay so sweetly.....'[84]
Margaret Cavendish, first Duchess of Newcastle (1623- 1673) 'flouted the stereotypes of women's fashions and accomplishment, particularly by writing and publishing.'[85] Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure 'explicitly explores the attractions of homoeroticism among women.'[86] Like The Bird in a Cage, it is set in a cloistered environment. The main character, Lady Happy, inherits her father's estate and, in an effort to avoid potential suitors and the enslavement of marriage, sets up a 'convent of pleasure.' In the 'convent' she lives with a number of female companions. The play consists of a number of vignettes where the women act out their discontent by describing the abuse they have suffered from men including: 'physical abuse at the hands of alcoholic husbands, poverty caused by male gambling and whoring, and the horrors of repeated childbirth and infant mortality.'[87] The community that Cavendish depicts is dedicated to female pleasure and eroticism. During the course of the play a foreign princess arrives at the convent and seduces Lady Happy. Lady Happy and the princess kiss each other, embrace, eventually marry and celebrate their marriage by dancing around a maypole. Cavendish's audience tolerates the female-to-female eroticism in the play because it is revealed at the end that the princess who marries Lady Happy is actually a cross-dressed prince. Also, by enclosing the women within a 'pastoral' space, away from the 'real' world the story does not challenge cultural anxieties of patriarchy, property laws, marriage or children. The New Historicist orthodoxy however, would suggest that 'literature of the Renaissance period, particularly literature meant for the public theatre, deliberately produces subversion in order to contain it.'[88] By the inclusion of these subversive acts in her play Cavendish is 'domesticating and incorporating alien elements which thereby lose their subversive power.'[89] However, I believe this approach to be too simplistic and to suggest that authors such as Cavendish included these subversive acts within their work specifically in order for them to 'lose their subversive power' is 'in large measure a function of the angle from which one looks and the assumptions that enable the investigation' and 'the historically-minded critic must increasingly be willing to acknowledge the non-objectivity of his or her own stance and the inevitably political nature of interpretive and even descriptive acts.'[90]
Women of the upper and middle classes spent much of their time separate from men and were encouraged to devote their time to their female friends. Intimate friendships, sharing beds and passionate avowals of love caused little or no anxiety or disapprobation as long as they did not threaten patriarchal alliance or marital reproduction.[91] While these often intensely emotional and affectionate relationships were not generally thought to be of a sexual nature, 'awareness of women-to-women sexual practices circulated in a subterranean way.'[92] However, women dressing or behaving like men or women with too much power fell under suspicion. While this suspicion can be attributed to a fear of women assuming inappropriate masculine power it does also suggest that 'absolute ignorance of sexual possibilities between women cannot be assumed.'[93] Educated seventeenth-century women 'learned from Renaissance writers the ideas of Platonism, in which perfect friendship was seen as superior to sexual love.'[94] The most well known poet writing in this tradition is Katherine Philips (1632 - 1664) whose life and writing Harriette Andreadis describes as: 'emblematic of the ways in which seventeenth-century women self-consciously appropriated the ancient, enduring forms and rituals of friendship.'[95] Despite being born into the Puritan ruling class and marrying a Puritan, Katherine Philips was a Royalist. Left in Wales while her husband was in Parliament in London, Philips's 'emotional focus was primarily on other women and [her] passionate involvement with them guided much of her life and inspired her most esteemed poems.'[96] In Philips's early work she appropriated male homoerotic, platonic conventions to describe her relationships with women and while this poetic form was unremarkable for men, it 'is the earliest printed example of a woman's poetic expression of intense same-sex love between women.'[97] Embracing the courtly fashion of the time Philips called herself 'The Matchless Orinda' and gave the members of her 'society of friendship' pastoral nicknames. As mentioned earlier, Traub describes Philips's "society of friendship" as looking:
a lot like an avatar of the late nineteenth-century Boston marriage; both social forms spiritualize female emotional bonds; both derive sustenance from women's intellectual capacities; both arise from within the confines of feminine domesticity; both defer to class decorum in matters of the desiring body.'[98]

Male poets of the period were also keen to avoid of the responsibilities of marriage as demonstrated in an extract from a poem by Charles Cotton (1630 - 1687) where the man is far more interested in sex than marriage:

In Alexander Brome's (1620 - 1666) poem A Wife the speaker doesn't want a wife to live too long and in fact would rather not have a wife at all :

William Wycherley (1641 - 1715) would clearly prefer a 'one night stand' to the commitment of marriage:

If all prove not right,
Without an Act, Process, or Warning,
From Wife for a night,
You may be divorc'd in the morning.[137]

While Spenser uses the hermaphroditic form to describe the sexual union of Amoret and Scudamour, he is also describing 'a golden mean between masculine and feminine forms of dominance and the consummation of an ideal Christian marriage.'[143] The idea of the hermaphrodite representing equality between men and women is something that would have undoubtedly appealed to Behn.
Roberta Martin argues that Behn 'uses the sexually ambiguous figure of the hermaphrodite to undermine accepted notions of gender and sexuality.[144] Despite the fact that the one-sex Galenic model of anatomy had been superseded by this time and men and women were now generally identified as distinctly different sexes[145] Jennifer Frangos suggests that: 'Clarinda's sexual ambiguity or doubleness, also resonates deeply with early-modern and Restoration discourses about the nature of the human body, particularly its sexual anatomy'.[146] However, Traub argues that: 'it is less that the binary sex/gender/sexuality system is subverted by Behn's use of indeterminacy than it has yet to be concretely formed.'[147] Read together with Behn's use of ungendered pronouns I believe her use of the hermaphrodite is both a device to describe the strength of the union between the lovers and to deliberately problematize binary definitions of gender. Behn's reading of Spenser inspired her use of the hermaphrodite image. However, it is also an excellent trope to describe her ambivalence towards prevailing gender binary assumptions. Moreover, in this poem, as in other poems, Behn avoids gendered pronouns when referring to Clarinda thus extending the possibilities of Clarinda's sexuality. In the preface to her play The Lucky Chance Behn asks her readers: 'All I ask, is the Privilege for my Masculine Part the Poet in me.'[148] This comment by Behn is made in the preface because she wants to be taken seriously as a woman but knows this is almost impossible. Behn appeals 'to all unbyast Judges of Sense, if they had not said that Person has made as many good Comedies, as any one Man that has writ in our Age; but a Devil on't the Woman dams the Poet.'[149] However, as David Roberts suggests, Behn:
is not afraid to play the vulnerability card, but the paradoxical effect of doing so is to suggest that it is precisely because she is a woman - literally without a 'masculine part' - that she should be allowed to write, since it is always ungallant to attack a defenseless woman.[150]

Behn 'talks about her self in bi-sexual terms. She has a "masculine Part" (her professional writing), linked to her desire to be a "hero" but the "I" who writes is clearly and self-consciously a woman. She thus suggests a radical split between her work and her private self.'[151] 'My Masculine Part' is a very specific point and, in the light of the way Behn disrupts assumptions about gender throughout her work, the comment is extremely revealing. Behn knows that she has to 'play the part of a man' to be recognized as a writer and this foreshadows Judith Butler's argument that gender is performative and that our 'performance' as male or female is imposed on us by 'normal' heterosexuality. Butler believes that people are not divided into two clear- cut groups of male and female. Rather, gender should be fluid and variable, with the ability to change in response to different times and different contexts. In other words your gender is what you do, not what you are:
Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts with in the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.[152]

Continuing with the pastoral in On a Juniper-Tree, cut down to make Busks, the persona of the poem is a tree which allowsallowing Behn a degree of detachment in her examination of social identity. The tree is proud: 'The Pride and Glory of the Wood,';[210] wealthy: 'My Wealth, like bashful Virgins,'[211] ,where the tree is describing thus his wealth rather than claiming ownership of the virgins, and does not even rely on the sun: "nor need any tribute pay/for bounties from the God of Day.'[212] through this description of By describing the tree, like this Behn would appear to be representinggendering the tree as male although typically for Behn she does not gender itthe tree through the use of grammar or female/male gendered pronouns. As the lovers Philocles and Cloris shelter under itthe tree, the lovers and the tree become interdependent and the planttree even participates in their love making: 'And every aiding Bough I bent/So low, as sometimes had the bliss/To rob the shepherd of his kiss.'[213] Behn combines the pastoral setting, in the form of the tree, with human sexuality: 'blurring the issues of the tree's individual gender identity into its larger social identity.'[214] The planttree enjoys the voyeuristic thrill of watching the lovers: 'I saw 'em kindle to desire/Whilst with soft sights they blew the fire.'[215] Then the tree in effect it becomes part of a ménage á trois[216] as it joins in with the Philocles and Cloris's love making: 'The Shepherdess my Bark carest/Whilst he my Root, Love's pillow, kist.'[217] At this point the tree becomes both male and female, both 'Bark' and 'Root.' A close reading of this line suggests that Behn disrupts traditional ideas of binary oppositions. Cloris (female) is caressing the female part of the tree while Phiocles (male) is kissing the male part of the tree, assuming that 'root' is a phallic image. At the end of the poem, when the tree grieves that it will no longer be part of the lovers, it decides it may as well die: 'When all abandon'd I shall be/Doom'd to a silent Destine.[218] However, Cloris cuts down the tree and has it made into busks: 'My body into Busks was turn'd'[219] so the tree ends up as the wooden front piece of Cloris's corset that covered the centre of her torso down to her genitalia. The new role that the tree is given is to literally guard Cloris's 'Love Temple' or sexuality: 'Where I still guard the Sacred Store/And of Loves Temple keep the Door.'[220] Through the relationship between the lovers and the tree Behn 'opens and expands the possibilities of love and its connections with the natural world moving it beyond a relationship of opposition to one of community.'[221] Within this poem we find Behn's use of the tree to articulate what could not otherwise be said and a triangle of desire between the tree and the two lovers.
While the lovers in On a Juniper-Tree appear to find mutual enjoyment in their pastoral paradise, Behn does suggest that Cloris hasn't give her full consent to their lovemaking: 'Nor would the shepherd be deny'd/Impatient he waits no consent'[222] and she refers to being 'conquered' by the shepherd: 'Yeilds to the Conqueror all her Charmes.'[223] Moreover, Cloris has to subdue her shame 'With love and Shame her Soul Subdu'd.'[224] Similarly in the poem The Willing Mistress, despite the poem's title, and the seemingly mutual lovemaking, the use of the words 'betray'd' and 'fear' appear in the first stanza.
Amyntas led me to a Grove,
Where all the Trees did shade us;
The Sun It self, though it had strove,
It could not have betray'd us:
The place secur'd from humane Eyes,
No other fear allows.....
But when the Winds that gently rise,
Doe Kiss the yielding Boughs.

Additionally, in The Willing Mistress the fact that the speaker cannot name what is happening to her at the end of the second stanza,: 'That which I dare not name'[226], suggests an element of fearfulness. In both the poems the women appear to inhabit parallel worlds, one is the pastoral world where nature is protecting them -: 'Where all the Trees did shade us'[227] - and the second is the real world where men have seduced them into making love and where, in order to be socially acceptable, the speaker in The Willing Mistress cannot even name what they do: 'Ah who can guess the rest?'[228]
The interpretation of The Willing Mistress is further complicated by its inclusion in Behn's play The Dutch Lover. In the play Francisca, a maidservant, sings the poem to her mistress Cleonte. In the context of the play the song is about Silvio's obsessive love for Cleonte. Silvio is Cleonte's (presumed) half brother so the love is both transgressive in terms of incest and an expression of triangular desire as, within this immensely complex plot, we ponder the relationship between Cleonte and Clarinda (who is also ignorant of her brother's identity). The fear of betrayal and the inability to 'name' what she is 'going to receive' in this context becomes related to the taboo of incest. Prior to inclusion in Poems Upon Several Occasions, 'The Willing Mistress' is thought to have undergone several changes. While we might assume that the lovers in the play's version of the poem are heterosexual, a year earlier in 1672 'The Willing Mistress' was included in The Covent Garden Drolery entitled "Song". This earlier version of the poem begins 'I led my Silvia to a Grove' and the first line of the third stanza reads 'My greedy eyes' rather than 'His charming Eyes'.:

Here we find another triangle of desire between Behn, Hoyle and Mr Ed and although Behn must have acknowledged that Mr Ed. stood in the way of Hoyle's love for her, she showshas total acceptance of the beauty of homosexual love, describing the passion between the men as strong as the heat of the sun as Philander's eyes turn to Lycidas 'As sympathizing Flowers to the sun'[252] and to the extent of asking who would not be able to see how the love between the two men improves their beauty: 'Who would not under two such Suns as those?':

This poem is informing us that love is a game where only men get to play leaving women impotent and even taking away their desire.
If Love Arm'd is about a woman suffering because of a man's imposition, from a man's power over her then The Disappointment is the opposite, a woman suffering from 'one form of powerlessness specific to men, sexual impotence.'[261] Rather than a male lover contemplating the loss of his sexual capacity, Behn's poem, like the Willing Mistress, is about how sex will always be a disappointment within a society where power is disproportionately in the hands of men. Behn begins by describing Lysander's lack of control, his 'impatient passion swayed.'[262] sheBehn does not make it clear whether Cloris 'Who could defend herself no longer'[263] is defenseless because she is overpowered by passion or physically overpowered by Lysander. However, Behn's description of her as: 'that loved maid' would suggest that she has a degree of sexual experience. Cloris's experience, together with the last two lines of the stanza: 'And left no light to guide the world/But what from Cloris' brighter eyes was hurled', suggest that Cloris could have power? Could be powerful? the power could be with Cloris as she has the 'light to guide'. In the second stanza, Cloris would appear to be in control, as her hands 'draw him on'[264] but her dominance control is tempered by social convention as she 'permits his force'[265] and she 'wants' but doesn't have the power: 'She wants the power to say - 'Ah! What d'ye do?'[266] It would appear that Cloris is an experienced woman who has the ability to control the situation, while Lysander lies 'trembling at her feet'[267] but social convention restricts her from taking the lead.
In a lone thicket made for love,
Silent as yielding maid's consent,
She with charming languishment,
Permits his force, yet gently strove;
Her hands his bosom softly meet,
But not to put him back designed,
Rather to draw him on inclined:
While he lay trembling at her feet,
Resistance 'tis in vain to show:
She wants the power to say - 'Ah! What d'ye do?'[268]

In the third stanza Cloris is confused, she wants to encourage Lysander but thinks she shouldn't: 'Where love and shame confusedly strive.'[269] In the following three lines the dashes suggest panting and excitement but also a continuation of Cloris' confusion:
She cried - 'Cease, cease - your vain desire,
My dearer honour even to you
I cannot, must not give - retire,[270]

In the fourth to six stanzas Lysander begins to make love to Cloris in earnest and there are moments of equality and reciprocity: 'Their bodies, as their souls, are joined/Where both in transports unconfirmed.'[271] By the seventh stanza Cloris is offering herself as a sacrifice to him: 'A victim to love's sacred flame'[272], but Lysander is 'Unable to perform the sacrifice.'[273] Lysander is paralyzed because he is not completely in control:, although Cloris abandons herself to him it is too late, she has already revealed her own erotic desires and this is not what social conventions suggest she should do. Despite his desperate passion, there is nothing he can do: 'In vain he toils, in vain commands'[274], his body doesn't respond and as Cloris sees this,: 'Finding that god of her desires/Disarmed of all his awful fires'[275], she runs asway leaving Lysander 'fainting on the gloomy bed.'[276] By leaving Lysander behind Behn reverses conventional gender expectations, Cloris is not sympathetic or understanding, rather she is actively angry while he is passive. Male 'imperfect enjoyment' poems were generally focused on the man whereas Behn's 'centre of attention shifts from male to female, and from penis to vagina'.[277] In her poetry Behn seeks equality and reciprocity between her lovers. H however, she: 'frequently depicts relationship of equality that degenerate, perhaps because it is so hard for her to imagine reciprocity and equality in a society devoid of it.'[278] At a time when male poets were writing 'imperfect enjoyment poems'[279] about masculine identity where women were marginalized and usually at least partly to blame for their impotence, Behn wrote The Disappointment[280] about power. When Cloris says 'She wants the power to say - 'Ah! What d'ye do?' Behn highlights the inability of women to articulate their desire, not simply because they do not have the linguistic ability, but rather for fear of censure in a society that found women's admission of desire problematic.
In her poem On Desire Behn articulates the difficulty for women of suppressing desire 'Oh tell me, how you do remain discreet/How you suppress the rising sighs/And the soft yielding soul that wishes in your eyes?'[281] At the beginning of the poem the speaker is impervious to desire:
Not beauty could invite thee then
Nor all the arts of lavish men!
Not all the powerful rhetoric of the tongue
Not sacred wit could charm thee on;
No the soft play than lovers make,
Nor sigh could fan thee to a fire,
Not pleading tears, nor vows could thee awake,
Or warm the unformed something - to desire.[282]

The bird continues desperately to escape until it is offered death, the only escape:

Fluttering in endless cercles of dismal
Till some kind hand directs the certain way
Which though the casement an escape affords
And leads to ample space the only Heav'n of Birds[297]

Manley's greatest success came with her 1709 novel The New Atalantis about which D.M. Robinson states: 'no non-pornographic English or French writer in the hundred or so years previous had had as much to say about lesbians and lesbianism as Manley.'[302] The novel describes a variety of differing lesbian narratives: 'that demonstrate that far from being unimaginable or imaginable only in a single, dominant form ("the hermaphrodite", "the tribade", "the passing woman") lesbianism was imagined and depicted quite boldly and in an astounding variety of forms in the early eighteenth century.'[303] However, jJust as Louis Montrose suggests that 'Pastorals that celebrate the ideal content function to articulate and thereby, perhaps to assuage - discontent'[304] Adreadis states:
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, imputations of female same-sex relations were coming to be used as instruments of social control, to silence female erotic expression, and to enforce a sexual imperative that was gradually moving towards the notion of the exclusivity of sexual orientations and binary, heteronormative identities.[305]

This dissertation has sought to analyse Valerie Traub's 'recurring patterns'[306] within seventeenth-century women's writing in order to show that there was an underlying lesbian presence throughout the century. In The Apparitional Lesbian Terry Castle asks: 'Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian - even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been "ghosted" - or made to seem invisible - by culture it self.' [307] Like Andreadis, I am:
deeply aware of how difficult it is to rely on texts from the period to provide a vocabulary to describe relations of intimacy between women, partly because women rarely refer to their own sexual experiences in explicit terms and partly because many of them were struggling to find a language with which to define their love for one another in opposition to the strongly hierarchical and phallocentric model of heterosexual relations.[308]

The women represented in this dissertation range from respectable women writing within the safe confines of marriage, who developed a coded language of erotically charged female same-sex friendship, like Katherine Phillips, to other more radical writers, for example Aphra Behn, who wrote more explicitly. Acknowledging Mary Sidney as beginning a tradition of women's writing, I have discovered four recurring themes in the writing of the women I have chosen to examine infor this dissertation. The first theme is the creation of feminized pastoral and /or utopian spaces away from men as for example in Aemilia Lanyer's poem Description of Cooke-ham, An Collins's poem Divine Songs and Meditacions and Margaret Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure. The second is the feminization of Christianity as expressed in both Lanyer's poem Salve Deus Rex Judæorum and An Collins's Divine Songs and Meditacions. The third recurring theme is triangles of desire that destabilize expectation of gender binary normativity, evidenced in the work of Lanyer and Behn. The final theme that occurs in all the writing from these women is evidence of linguistic epistemological indeterminacy, from Ephelia's erotic ellipses to Aphra Behn's dashes and Katherine Phillips's use of nature to encode her physical love for women. While identifying these elements across women's writing of the seventeenth century, I have found, unsurprisingly, that it was the Restoration Period in particular that produced a 'conflation of forces'[309] allowing poetic and dramatic works to flourish, celebrating love and friendship between women, written by women. As Henrietta Andreadis states:
a change in discourse about female same-sex eroticism in England in the mid-seventeenth century took place in rough coincidence with and following the Restoration. The language of literature and respectable society becomes more evasive as the existence of female same-sex transgressive behaviours is increasingly acknowledge by other dimensions of public discourse.[310]

The work of Aphra Behn in particular transcends the binary definition of male and female through theher image of the sexually ambiguous hermaphrodite, non-gendered pronouns in her poetry and triangles of desire. 'Behn used the conventions of libertine discourse to interrogate its underlying misogyny and rigid gender hierarchies'[311] while also offering 'a provocative challenge to the underlying principles of libertine discourse even as she continued to speak its language.'[312] Behn's work incorporates most of the elements I have identified as recurring throughout women's writing examined in this dissertation from the creation of pastoral, edenic spaces, to triangles of desire and linguistic epistemological indeterminacy evidenced through her erotic ellipses, or in Behn's case dashes: 'Or if we shou'd - thy Form excuses it.[313] Moreover, critical examination of her poetry leads me to suggest that Behn would have had sympathy with the pro-sexuality movement within feminist theory's view that: 'sexuality is always constructed within the discourse of power, where power is partially understood in terms of heterosexual and phallic cultural conventions.'[314] Behn's take on gender sits well with the work of Simone de Beauviour. Simone de Beauvoir's suggests in The Second Sex that 'one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one,'[315] in other words that gender is constructed and that women are compulsively drawn by society to become such? to behave like society wants them to?women. I believe that the ideas put forward by modern feminist theorists resonate deeply in Behn's work and that she was quite unbelievably ahead of her time in terms of how she both interpreted and represented gender, gender fluidity and constructions of gender. In conclusion I take issue with the absence of Aphra Behn from Traub's paper The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography. I believe that Behn's work constitutes the most salient cycle of lesbian poetics in the seventeenth-century. In the words of Terry Castle in her search for a lesbian history: 'once we begin to look, we may find her looking back at us: making eye contact, delighted to be seen at last.'

Bibliography

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5. Aphra Behn and the Poetics of Lesbian Salience in the Seventeenth Century

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 Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips both utilize sapphic imagery in their works; however, there are some significant differences in their approach. 

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 Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips both utilize sapphic imagery in their works; however, there are some significant differences in their approach. 

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Katherine Phillips (1632- 1664) was an English poet who wrote 125 poems on a variety of subjects. She used friendship and the relationships in her life as a driving point for many of her poems. Her poems often commented on the intricacies of society and the monarchy that she lived under. She was said to be an inspiration to later poets and dramatists, both male and female.

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Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was a English poet and playwright who broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women. A majority of her poems discussed progressive ideas that many people of her time frowned upon. Ideas regarding female honor and female sexual autonomy are common in her work. She also challenged traditional relationships by showcasing unorthodox love affairs.