Mary Wroth’s Urania (London, 1621) poses profound problems for feminist critics; here we have the first major full-length work of fiction in English by a woman and it contains some of the most graphically sadomasochistic scenes of male domination and female submission that the seventeenth century has to offer. ‘What, then, to make of this … ?’ (Helen Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena’, in Kate Chedgdzoy et al., eds, Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, Keele, Staffs, 1996, pp. 93–110; p. 95). The last twenty years or so have seen a profusion of attempts to deconstruct Wroth’s apparent collusion in the gratification of the male gaze, ranging from interpreting it as an attack on arranged marriage (Sid Ray, Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, Cranbury, NJ, 2004, pp. 53-75) to seeing it as a ‘celebration of a distinctively feminine heroism’ – an integration of ‘previous models of romantic heroines who die for love, Christian martyrs and Stoic heroes’ (Hackett, ‘The Torture of Limena’, p. 97) – and as encoded political commentary: ‘the relentless scenes of feminine anguish, humiliation, and torture in the Urania indicate the extent to which idealized equations of love and suffering can compel subjects to assent to their own abuse’ (Melissa E. Sanchez, ‘The Politics of Masochism in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, English Literary History, 74.2, 2007, pp. 449–78; p. 450).

Compelling and valid as these approaches are, they all acquiesce perhaps a little too readily in a narrative of female submission; even Hackett’s ‘feminine heroism’ has its locus in enduring suffering, in submitting to the will and power of a (masculine) other. Miller, commenting on the fact that Philargus, finally repenting of his torture of Limena, makes his (somewhat redundant) dying wish for Limena and Perissus to promise to marry, asks, ‘can conclusion ever truly bear the signature of a woman, or is she compelled to inscribe it always as compliance with masculine desire?’ (Jacqueline T. Miller, ‘Lady Mary Wroth in the House of Busirane’, in Patrick Gerard Cheney and Lauren Silberman, eds, Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, Lexington, KY, 1999, pp. 115–24; pp. 123–4) and Wagner defines the Urania’s ‘major complementary themes’ as ‘subjugation of the female body through betrayal in love and politics, and resistance to such subjugation via the appropriation of romance conventions that formerly valorized a masculinist social formation of the female body’ (Geraldine Wagner, ‘Contesting Love’s Tyranny: Socially Outcast Women and the Marginalized Female Body in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, English Studies, 87:5, 2006; pp. 577–601; p. 579).

However, the Urania, like all romance and most literature, deals in complicated ways with themes of dominance and submission, of tormentors and victims. It cannot simply be deconstructed as a tale of violent, treacherous men whose women either stand bravely and defiantly or cower pitifully before them, and the subjugation of women in the novel needs to be balanced, first, by its gender-reversed counterparts, and secondly, by the narratives of female empowerment interwoven with the scenes of subjugation.

For example, the Albanian prince Selarinus is a gender-reversed parallel to the victimization of Limena. Selarinus is captured while sleeping and taken as a prisoner to the queen of Epirus, who is determined ‘to manifest hate, scorne and contempt’ towards him. However, ‘seeing his sweetnesse, and louelynesse, his tender youth, his modest countenance’, she softens. Observing how ‘shame to see those braue armes fetterd, and bound, brought some blood into his face, which … made his beauty appeare more delicate’, her compassion is aroused, his flushed face serving ‘as if of purpose to purchase his libertie; thus was hee forced to be beholding to that womanish part, to restore his manly power to liberty.’

This episode is but one of many in which the feminization of the male, the erotic portrayal of the male body, and the subjugation of the male to the female are central features. The queen keeps Selarinus captive, but in a ‘maruellous rich roome’, to which she comes at night and tells him that, if he will ‘yeeld’ to her, she might crown him ‘with the title of a King’. He is already in love with another, and frets at the thought of having to betray her, but two days later, without having forced this issue, she sends for him with another purpose, commanding him to fight Terenius, an unwanted suitor. He has no choice but to agree, but when the time comes Selarinus and Terenius, engaging in a bit of homosocial bonding, stage the fight in such a way that they are both able to escape the princess’s clutches (pp. 255-60).

Urania with begins with a theme of male tyranny – the apparent death of Limena at Philargus’s hands – but this is a tale told second hand (and which the shrewd reader, therefore, will know not to take at face value). All the vividness and immediacy of these opening pages of the novel are overwhelmingly in a narrative of female power, a power which sweeps before it Perissus (whose grief for Limena is dismissed by Urania as ‘woman-like complaints’, and whom she converts from sorrow to a course of bloody revenge), the shepherd lads who dote on Urania, and the wild youths who offer themselves as her servants. There is a single line of descent from the goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome to Wanda in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz (Stuttgart, 1870), and it passes through Urania, the embodiment of a fantasy of womankind as at once consummately wonderful and terrible, its cruelty a casual by-product of its glorious, untrammelled – and always, it seems, essentially southern – nature.

(Adapted from Part Three, ‘Suffering and Gender’, Chapter 7, ‘The Erotics of Suffering and Cruelty’. This chapter is not available for previewing.)

Foucault analyses modern sexual identities as social constructs of fairly recent (mainly nineteenth-century) origin. He contends that, ‘At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was still a certain frankness. Sexual practices were hardly kept secret … people had a certain tolerant familiarity with the illicit’ (Histoire de la Sexualité 1: La Volonté de Savoir, Paris, 1976, p. 9; my translation). Discussion of sex was, he says, expressed in strands interwoven among discourse on other topics, rather than being woven into a coherent discourse of sexuality, and was focused on acts rather than identities. However,  there are some basic weaknesses to Foucault’s analysis.

‘The earliest distinct reference to a masochistic flagellant’ (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 3, 2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1920, p. 132) is considered to be Pico della Mirandola’s anecdote about a sexual flagellant, published in 1496, after the author’s death. The passage occurs as a strand in a discourse on a quite different topic (the nature of astrology), and the flagellant is defined primarily by his acts, rather than by psychological predisposition; ‘he can never be sexually aroused unless he is beaten’  (Disputationes … Aduersus Astrologiã Diuinatricem, Bologna, 1496; edition used, Lyons, 1498, sig. h5r; my translation), Pico tells us, insisting that this supports his belief that one’s fate is not determined by the stars (that is to say, it is an accidental, or circumstantial feature of the flagellant that he is predisposed towards being beaten, not an essential part of his inner nature).

All of this is as Foucault predicts. However, the passage contains some significant details which run counter to Foucault’s theories. Firstly, he relates the flagellant’s behaviour to his overall character, saying, ‘Apart from his unusual sexuality, he is not such a bad person, and he recognizes his sickness and hates it’ (ibid.). This suggests that he would change it if he could, but is powerless to do so, and the description of the flagellant’s behaviour as a kind of sickness (‘morbum’), suggests an equivalence between the relationship of sexual act to sexual identity and that of illness to patient.

The implication that he has picked up something nasty is reinforced by Pico’s attempt to trace the cause of his proclivities to formative experiences during childhood: ‘he was educated with some wicked boys among whom there was a disgraceful agreement to whip each other, bought, as it were, at the cost of their shame’ (ibid.). In some ways, Pico is not so far removed from modern debate on sexual identities, which hinges on the extent to which they are determined by genetic, social and psychological factors, their integration or otherwise with other aspects of the individual’s character and identity, and a general recognition that, once established, such identities are difficult to change (see, for example, ‘Close Relationships’, Ch. 9 of Saul Kassin et al., Social Psychology, 8th edn, Belmont, CA, 2011, pp. 339–88).

Where Foucault’s predictions fall down most badly is in his assertion that early modern discussion of sexuality was uninhibited, characterized by ‘frankness’ and a ‘tolerant familiarity with the illicit’. Pico’s description clearly indicates the flagellant’s shame. Judging from the amount of knowledge he has about the background of his flagellant, it is at least possible that his anecdote is actually autobiographical. If so, he was quite likely motivated to disguise the fact by more than mere reticence. Meibom (whose 1639 treatise on flagellation as a form of sexual stimulation is an early example of specifically sexual discourse) rejoices that no sexual flagellants exist in his native Germany, asserting that should such an abomination be found that person would be burnt to death (Johann Heinrich Meibom, De Flagrorum Usu in Re Veneria, Leyden, 1639; edition used, Leyden, 1643, p. 16).

In general, early modern references to the male sexual flagellant (who by 1673 had acquired the name of ‘flogging cully’ in English) are generally couched in terms that are either shameful, condemnatory, or mocking. A similar admixture of endorsement, adjustment and outright rejection of Foucauldian principles is involved in a close reading of other texts of the period.

Interested in reading more? Click here to download the introduction to the book, from which this extract is adapted.

During the earlier part of the seventeenth century, religious flagellation still survived, even in Protestant England. John Gee (a Church of England clergyman) recounts how, during the reign of James I, Catholic flagellants marched in procession to Tyburn, and partly endorses the practice, declaring himself ‘no enemy vnto austerity of life, and taming or chastening our bodily sinfull members’ (John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare, London, 1624, pp. 86-7). Penitential mortification was not generally sanctioned by Protestant theology, but Foxe’s Actes and Monuments casts its shadow across the century, and the surest sign that one was among the elect was that one was privileged to suffer for Christ’s sake. ‘As affliction is a sign of God’s love, so the absence of affliction is a sign of his wrath’ (Ann Thompson, The Art of Suffering and the Impact of Seventeenth-Century Anti-Providential Thought, Aldershot, 2003, p. 57), and the devout Protestant was ‘bound to be glad that he is afflicted’, because suffering ‘is such a signe of God’s love, that every one that is not chastened, is mark’t out for a bastard, and no sonne [that is, not among the elect]’ (Henry Hammond, A Practicall Catechisme, Oxford, 1645, p. 110).

At the same time as accepting – and even extolling – attitudes towards suffering which most people today would think of as perverse, seventeenth-century society was also engaged in an ongoing debate about these attitudes. Towards the end of the century, this led to widespread rejection of Stoic principles of ‘looking upon all Affections as vitious Perturbations, not endeavouring to rule and use them, but to root them out’ (James Dalrymple, A Vindication of the Divine Perfections, London, 1695, p. 11), and acceptance of the basically Epicurean principle that ‘Pleasure is the Sovereign Aim of all Men, ’tis that which the Soul naturally and justly desires, and for which ’tis made’ (Charles Gildon, Miscellaneous Letters and Essays, London, 1694, preface, sig. A3v). As a result of this change in the perception of the nature and necessity of suffering, the seventeenth century can be considered as a ‘a watershed…in… “the history of pain”’ (Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, ‘Religious Meanings of Pain in early Modern England’, in Dijkhuizen and Karl A.E. Enenkel, eds, The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, Brill, 2009, pp. 189–219; p. 190).

Interested in reading more? Click here to download the introduction to the book, from which this extract is adapted.

John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth Century England (Ashgate, 2013), explores these changing attitudes towards the suffering and infliction of pain. The book covers the topic fairly comprehensively, with sections on differences between Protestant and Catholic attitudes to suffering, cruelty, the sexualization of suffering, and so on. The book is available for purchase here.