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.Musidorus admires Pamela’s “heavenly beauty” and “how her soulseemed to fly with her body” when she entered the temple, “as transported withentering so holy an habitation which was too sacred for any other but her self.”168Pyrocles responds by noting that “Philoclea might be admitted with her, so lightlydid she set her feet upon the pavement, lest she should profane it.”169 In thesedescriptions of Pamela and Philoclea, Weamys clearly subscribes to the notions ofthe Neoplatonic ladder of love that women’s beauty and purity should guide men’ssouls to heavenly contemplation.Her words also recall Petrarch’s sonnet 90 inwhich Laura “did not walk in any mortal way, / But with angelic progress.”170Weamys’s male characters who wed these women are ideal courtiers—brave inbattle, articulate in debate, and eternally constant.They thus fulfill Sidney’s ideals and turn a blind eye to the more realistic relationship predicaments that Wrothaddresses.Weamys does, however, make interesting use of ekphrasis that simultaneously honors Sidney’s use of it in the beginning of the Arcadia, where he tells us that“the most excellent workman of Greece” has made the portraits he describes, andechoes Wroth’s emphasis on women’s creative abilities.In this instance, sheportrays a woman as an excellent artist, one as capable of making art as a man.After Pyrocles and Musidorus kill Plaxirtus and Anaxius, rescue Erona, andpersuade her that Plangus should be her husband, Erona decides that she mustmake a special gift for Philoclea and Pamela.We are told that Eronaemployed her inventions about a present for Pamela and Philoclea, which she was very ambitious of., and without delayance, she set all her maids to work the story of their love, from the fountain to the happy conclusion: which by her busy fancy she shadowed so artificially [artfully] that when it was perfected, and she had shewed it to the Princes, they vowed that had they not known by experience those passages to have been goneand past, they should have believed they were then in acting in that piece ofworkmanship.171167 Weamys,78–9.168 Weamys,78–9.169 Weamys,79.170Translated by Morris Bishop, The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol.1, expanded edn., ed.Maynard Mack et al.(New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1995), 2409.171 Weamys,64.Querelle Resonance195Later, we are told that the night before the nuptials, “Erona presented Pamela andPhiloclea with her rare piece of work, which they received with thanks andadmiration; and for the honor of Erona (she being the inventor of it) they caused it to be hung up by the image of Cupid in the Temple.172 Thus, a pictorialrendition of the story of the Arcadia serves as an icon of love, created by a woman and hung beside that of Cupid, in the temple where the couples are to be married.Sidney’s use of portraits of goddesses surrounding that of Philoclea and her parents at the beginning of his Arcadia is echoed in this concluding image of a piece of art in which the whole of the tale is depicted, flanked by Cupid, illustrating thetriumph of Love.Ultimately, Weamys adopts the traditional style of Sidney’s romance to depictidyllic circumstances of courtly society as she knows her royalist audience wouldlike them to be, and it is clear that she is more concerned with depicting thebehavior and ideals of symbolic courtly life and love than she is with the morecomplex, often more negative views of real courtly circumstances that Wrothrelates.To that end, her romance closes in a manner fitting for Petrarchan lovers.Two of them die when they cannot have the loves of their chosen ladies.Claiusresigns “up his breath with her name in his mouth,” and Philisides, who shadowsSidney himself, is found dead upon Claius’s monument, with lines engraved on astone beside him explaining that his “breast is the cabinet” where his beloved’sname is “fixed.”173 In Weamys’s Arcadian world, eternally constant men die forthe love of their ladies, young princes rule wisely, old kings fade gracefully away, and virtuous royal women serve as Neoplatonic guides and muses, a portrait ofNirvana for a royalist coterie audience.It is a portrait strikingly at odds withWroth’s vision of courtly, inconstant men and the women who passionately lovethem, depictions no doubt more familiar to Wroth’s coterie of young womenwriters.Taken together, Sidney’s Arcadia, Wroth’s Urania, and Weamys’sContinuation provide an overview of the diverse authorial intentions and audience analyses employed by these writers.More specifically, these texts reflect salonritual and literary circle concerns at three levels: the influences of the authors’coterie audiences; their literary engagement with traditional topics of debate from such sources as the Querelle des femmes and the questioni d’ amore which are often illustrated in salon-style debates in such texts as the Courtier and the Heptameron; and the intertextual debates that arise when their texts are read in tandem,producing an intertextual extension of the salon ritual itself.The inscription ofliterary circle ritual and querelle rhetoric, then, is multi-layered in these romances.It is richly indicative of how powerful an influence the social institution of the172 Weamys,66.173 Weamys,104–105.196Literary Circles and Genderliterary circle had upon these works, as well as how pervasive the arguments of the querelle were in this genre so strongly associated with women readers.ConclusionIn these chapters that traverse examples of participation in the rhetorical spaces of literary society by an Italian courtesan, an Italian actress, French noblewomen, aFrench bourgeois woman of letters, English noblewomen, and a young Englishgentlewoman, my goals have been to illustrate ways in which the Querelle desfemmes helped to shape the writing of those who participated in literary circles, as well as to observe how women’s interactions in such circles helped to generatenew waves of the querelle.In the process, I have alluded to the rich literary heritage associated with Renaissance women writers and the social institution ofthe literary circle.Of these women, Tullia d’Aragona built her reputation as a writer and acourtesan through salon contacts and chose the setting of her salon as a vehiclethrough which to do her own self-fashioning in print, with her aim being toameliorate the portrait of the courtesan, in this case herself, in salon society.Moving in theatrical, academic, and courtly circles, Isabella Andreini was inspired to author her own debates in her contrasti scenici and to write her pastoral tragicomedy La Mirtilla in response to a work by an admired acquaintance and fellow writer, Torquato Tasso.In doing so, she rebuts Tasso’s version of thestereotypically helpless innamorata.Claude-Catherine de Clermont, the duchesse de Retz, like Antoinette de Loynes and Madeleine de L’Aubespine, passed herwriting around in manuscript, meddled in French politics, and generally made aname for herself as an extraordinarily learned woman based on her literary circleactivities.Retz, Loynes, and L’Aubespine may be considered the foremothers ofsuch seventeenth-century salon hostesses as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame deLafayette.1 Colette Winn and François Rouget point out that the marquise de Rambouillet, famous for her “salon bleu,” was the “petite cousine” of Clermont [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]