Remy on Whitney

Wendy Wall, "Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy" (Remy Fisher)

In “Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy,” Wendy Wall argues that Whitney reinforced the language of legacy that eventually became a rhetorical tradition in English literature. Women of the mid-sixteenth century faced obstacles in establishing themselves as public figures and, constrained by typical patriarchal structures within language, were archetypally utilized as corporeal metaphors within male-written prose. Yet still, as Whitney and other female authors prevailed as they produced inheritance-driven prose the tradition of Petrarchism was reintroduced to modern culture.

As death in childbirth was a common feat among women, some utilized the inevitable opportunity to publish final legacies, or wills, that relied upon the “sanctity of the final departure” (38). Acknowledging morality and the perils of childbirth, the sincerity surrounding such an event provided women leeway into publishing. Wall begins by introducing Elizabeth Brooke Joceline’s The Mothers Legacie to her Unborn Child, published in 1624. Printed posthumously, the advice book was written for her daughter in the hopes that it would substitute her living guidance after the persistent possibility of dying in childbirth. When possibilities rang true, Joceline’s grieving husband published the book and although it was taboo for a woman’s work to be published, her untimely death and maternal duties justified her exposure. Carrying the humanist vision, Wall reinstates that because a woman’s “natural” province was the home (39), women could first-handedly explain the role of nurturer. Culturally, Joceline’s publication was seen as acceptable, for she is “merely doing her duty” under fatal circumstances.

Described by Wall as an “exemplary mid-century Tudor moral advice verse” (47), Whitney published A Sweet Nosgay in 1573 that continues the trend of instructing a younger generation. Timely, the Nosgay was published around the time the state began enforcing restrictions on a woman’s ability to make a will. Her anxieties form into tropes of social contamination and she confronts the problems of social exclusion and sexual libel within her culture. For example, in Wyll, the last poem within the Nosgay, Whitney transforms the legal form into an “ironic meditation on property, power and desire” (49). The power of her fabricated will channels the doom of a soon-to-be mother fearing mortality - the anticipated crusade toward death. Opening her work on property transmission by stating, “fayneth as she would die” (49), attention is demanded due to the dramatization of an already controversial subject.

By extrapolating female associations and traditions surrounding mortality, Isabella Whitney strengthened the tradition of Petrarchism in English literature. Using the strategy of over-dramatizing death and by preserving the legacy of motherhood women writers were able to immerse themselves within the publishing world despite gendered backlash.

Wall, Wendy. "Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy," English Literary History 58 (1991): 35-62.