2. JUEGOS DE CÍRCULO
2.2. B) PÓQUER DESCUBIERTO EN LA VARIANTE SEVEN STUD POKER 1. Denominación
One of the virtuous models to which Cavendish would have her female readers aspire is that of the chaste widow. Like writers of conduct manuals, Cavendish posits the widow as being in a prime position to show strength of character and constancy. ‘Widowhood’, as Barbara Todd remarks, ‘became a unique stage in a woman’s life, a time of female virility when legal independence gave her an opportunity to demonstrate her equality of virtue’.253No longer pressured by the imperative to marry nor shielded by her husband’s physical presence, the chaste widow is an autonomous individual, choosing to
252Cavendish opens NP 1656 (Wing N855) with four comic tales in prose, ‘The strict Associate’, ‘The
Judgment’, ‘The Vulgar fights’, and ‘The Tobacconist’, calling this section ‘Her Excellencies Comical Tales in Prose: The first Part’, distinguishing it from the first book. It is possible that the ‘first Part’ was added after the book was published given that in book 11 Cavendish provides instructions for where to place many of the pieces in this section.
253Barbara Todd, ‘The Virtuous Widow in Protestant England’, Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern
adhere to her prescriptive role and continuing to emphasise her relationship with her husband by living as though he were still alive. In the tenth book of Natures Pictures, ‘She Anchoret’, a female sage, advances a position on widowhood that echoes throughout many of Cavendish’s works. A woman asks the Anchoret ‘if it were not allowed in Honours Laws for Widows to marry’. The anchoret emphatically replies, ‘[B]y no means; for Widows do both cuckold their dead Husbands, and their living Husbands’.254
In the first poem of ‘Her Excellencies Tales in Verse’ (book 1), titled ‘Of the faithfull Widow, or mournfull Wife’, Cavendish introduces a widow who represents the ideal of widowhood described in character sketches and conduct manuals. One of Cavendish’s storytellers, a man who blows his nose and spits before he begins the tale,255 presents the widow as one who is chaste and constant; she remains faithful to her husband even after his death. Phantom-like, she appears at her husband’s tomb every night to grieve, and a traveller, the poem’s speaker, in search of a constant woman, discovers that a widowed woman lives alone in the house and has ‘shunn[ed]’ all company. The stylized description of the widow reflects the deportment Cavendish and conduct book writers might expect of a grieving widow. Tears flow from her eyes as she kneels to pray, softly pleading with the Gods to allow her spirit leave to join her husband. She prefers death to life without her husband. She also wishes not to bring him disgrace while she remains in the world: ‘Grant I may honour to my Husband give’.256
The faithful widow embodies the virtues conduct book writers expected of a woman in her position. Her behaviour follows the counsel Juan Luis Vives extends in De Institutione feminae christianae: ‘al saintes and holy men with one voice and opinion say, that
254NP 1656 (Wing N855), p. 345.
255The spitting, nose-blowing storyteller may be a reference to Margaret’s husband, William Cavendish,
who ‘colourfully [recorded] his experiences of spitting, removing gum from his eyes, blowing his nose, extracting earwax with an ear-pick, his “lecherous sweating”, his “greatest pimple” and his “buttocks married to his open close stool” during a bout of diarrhoea’ (Worsley, p. 3).
256Cf. PF, ‘A Register of Mournful Verses’, pp. 193-197. (Note: the page numbers are out of sequence in
weeping and mourning, solitarines, and fasting be the moste precious doures and ornamentes of a Widowe’.257 The pious widow is to bury her pleasures with her husband,
conducting herself as though her husband still lives and guarding her chastity accordingly: ‘A goode Widowe ought to suppose, that her husband is not utterly dead, but liveth, both with life of his soul, which is the very life, beside with her remembrance’.258 She is to go
out into public rarely, and when she does, she is to wear mourning garments and adopt a severe countenance to avoid tempting other men and exposing her chastity to danger.
Other authors, writers of guidance manuals as well as of plays and popular literature, also offered opinions regarding the widow’s proper behaviour. John Webster’s ‘A vertuous Widdow’ appears in Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters. The widow, Webster259
says,
is like the purest gold, onely imploide for Princes medals, shee nevrer receives but one mans impression . [. . .] Her maine superstition is, shee thinks her husbands ghost would walke, should she not performe his Will. [. . . She] hath laid his dead bodie in the worthiest monument that can be: Shee hath buried it in her owne heart.260
Cavendish’s widow likewise remains true to her husband, whom she venerates and sees as generous, noble, prudent, temperate, well-spoken, honest, and pious. The poem’s speaker would have the widow partake of pleasures she must reject, but her life resides in her husband.261 That the teller of this tale appears to lack manners and that the speaker
inexplicably hides behind the tomb add a comical note to the verse and constitute a nod to variety in nature. The crude and the ridiculous coexist with the virtuous. Their presence
257Vives, ‘Of the Chastity and Honesty of a Widowe’, p. 384. 258Vives, ‘Of the Minding of her Husbande’, p. 380.
259Webster contributed thirty-two characters to Overbury’s book, which contained sketches of personality
and occupational types.
260Sir Thomas Overbury, His Wife, With New Elegies Upon His (Now Knowne) Untimely Death (London: 1616),
STC 18909, sig. L3.
261See letter LII, in which the author says, ‘[T]hose that are truly Noble, that is, have Noble Souls and
Honourable Natures, can never be Forced, Perswaded, or Inticed to do a Base Action . . . where Honour and Virtue takes a thorow Possession, they never leave their Habitation (pp. 106-107).
does not signal the author’s dismissal of the virtues the widow possesses. Indeed, Cavendish ascribes the same virtues to her mother and perceives her as one of the naturally good and wise. Her mother, Elizabeth Lucas, lost her husband262when Cavendish was only two. She describes her widowed mother in her autobiography:263
my Mother [. . .] having lived a Widow many years, [. . .] never forgot my Father so as to marry again; indeed he remain'd so lively in her memory, and her grief was so lasting, as she never mention'd his name, though she spoke often of him, but love and grief caused tears to flow, and tender sighs to rise, mourning in sad complaints; she made her house her Cloyster, inclosing her self, as it were therein, for she seldom went abroad, unless to Church.264
Cavendish goes on to describe her mother as having a ‘Heroick Spirit’ in facing the losses her family incurred during the English Civil War. She ‘suffered patiently’ when ‘sequestred [. . .] from [her] Lands and Livings. [. . .] She was of a grave Behaviour, and had such a Majestick Grandeur, as it were continually hung about her, that it would [. . .] command respect from the rudest’.265
Along with character sketches of the grieving widow, Cavendish also draws on elements of the ‘wise man’ as described by the humanist and classical scholar Justus Lipsius. For Cavendish, the word ‘constancy’ has embedded in its meaning the idea of fidelity to one’s partner as well as strength of mind, which Lipsius defined as ‘judging and acting from right reason’. One learned to judge from right reason through the ‘cultivation of patience’, and having patience meant one would ‘deliberate more rationally’ and, as a result, act with more equanimity and stability. Cavendish claims that her mother ‘suffered patiently’ through the troubles the civil war brought her, suggesting that she adopted the
262Thomas Lucas died in September 1625 ‘after a sudden and severe illness’ (Whitaker, p. 11). 263Jonathan Goldberg discusses the distinction between early and modern autobiographers, saying,
‘Modern autobiographers discover unique selves by focusing their attention on their inner lives; early autobiographers are wont to come to self-understanding through generic models’ (‘Cellini's Vita and the Conventions of Early Autobiography’, Modern Language Notes, 89.1 (January, 1974), p. 71).
264NP 1656 (Wing N855), ‘A true Relation’, p. 377. 265Ibid.
attitude of the wise man who recognizes that ‘violence is perennial’ and that refuge can only be found in recognizing ‘what is beyond one’s external control’.266
The steadfast widow represents the ideal, the woman who behaves in concert with nature’s gendered design, but the author suggests that the ideal rarely manifests itself. The ability to cultivate patience exists naturally only in the select few who are strong-minded enough to remain virtuous in the face of the multiplicity of situations and characters nature metes out. The widow exhibits the self-restraining, angelic deportment Cavendish admires. ‘Those that are Continent’, she says, ‘are like what we imagine the nature of Angels to be, that is, Incorruptible’.267 Cavendish’s speaker gives the impression that the search for a constant woman, the speaker’s purpose for wandering about, has been unsuccessful for quite some time. When the traveller does find the widow, she is ethereal, ghostlike, and almost unreal. The widow emerges after dark, wearing white,268 with only one candle to light her way. She thinks only of her husband and cannot be convinced of the futility of her tears or of her yearning.269 Cavendish’s juxtaposition of the nose-blowing, spitting storyteller and the angelic widow seems to be an invitation to take the widow less seriously. However, this juxtaposition serves as a reminder that the situation is as it should be: widows should be virtuous even in a world populated with bad-mannered ruffians. Through this tale in verse, Cavendish upholds the paradigm of the grieving widow while also acknowledging the rarity of such a woman and tolerating the cynics and the spitters. She upholds the lady-in-white’s chastity and constancy, even attributing similar behaviour to her widowed mother, but because she believes most women cannot live up to this ideal, the widow is ethereal, ghost-like, almost unreal.
266Garrett, pp. 242-243. 267WO, ‘Of Chastity’, p. 74.
268Dorothea Kehler writes that Albert Dürer, while visiting Antwerp (1520), reports having seen a church
procession in which a group of widows dressed in white participated. Kehler suggests the white dress is symbolic of the widows’ purity (Shakespeare’s Widows (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 20). Margaret might have seen one such procession during her exile in Antwerp.
In this sentiment Cavendish resembles the ancient philosopher Diogenes of Sinope and the early modern poet John Donne.270 Diogenes the Cynic reportedly walked about with a lantern during the day seeking an incorruptible man. The performance suggested such a man did not exist.271 Similarly, John Donne, in ‘Song: Go, and Catch a Falling Star’, comments on the unlikely existence of ‘a woman true, and faire’.272He suggests one is more likely to ‘catch a falling starre’ or discover ‘who cleft the Devils foot’273than to find a beautiful woman who remains true to her husband. He catalogues a list of implausible wonders but none compare to the difficulty of finding a constant, chaste woman. Though Cavendish shares in the fun, by emphasising variety she actively supports the virtuous widow in the face of male cynicism (and spitting).
From this vision of the chaste widow emerges the advice Cavendish would extend to her readers: adherence to nature’s gendered design can preserve the balance between the sexes. Nature, however, rarely works so perfectly and is more likely to dash about wildly, introducing disorder and excess through variety. But variety is not always malignant and can in fact give rise to behaviours that, while outside gender expectations, are still virtuous. Cavendish’s recognition that people possess a wide range of differing capacities that do not conform to seventeenth-century gender mores makes her more likely to imagine possible ways of living beyond those promoted in conduct manuals, ways of living, especially for women, that do not pose threats to familial or political stability.
270Margaret refers to Diogenes the Cynic in ‘She Anchoret’ (NP 1656 (Wing N855), p. 289) and to Donne
in ‘Of Light, and Sight’ (PF, p. 39). Lara Dodds traces Donne’s influence on William and Margaret Cavendish in ‘“poore Donne was out”: Reading and Writing Donne in the Works of Margaret Cavendish’, John Donne Journal, 29 (2010), 133-174. According to Dodd, ‘Cavendish attributes quotations to Donne by name three times in her many works’. She alludes to him ‘in Poems and Fancies (1653), [and] she quotes a couplet from ‘The Storm’ in Plays (1662) and a line from ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion’ in Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy (1666)’ (p. 148).
271 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. II (Loeb Classical Library), trans. by R. D. Hicks
(London: William Heinemann, 1925), book VI, pp. 25 and 43.
272John Donne, ‘Song’, Poems by J. D. with Elegies on the Authors Death (London: 1635), STC 7046, line 18, p. 3. 273Donne, ‘Song’ lines 1 and 4, p. 3.