Here are some things to kick around for next Tuesday's class:
1. What seems to be the core of the attack against romance by polemicists?
2. Given your brief introduction thus far to the genre, do these attacks seem warranted?
2. What is the particular problem of women as readers of romance?
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Reading Romance is evil and imperils your immortal soul! Don't do it!
ReplyDeleteSo it would seem from this week's readings anyway. On the one hand, the reading of Romance literature is seen as a corrupting influence on morals (particularly, but not exclusively, for women readers). Such books are filled with 'synne and abomination.' On the other hand, Romances are implicated as a threat to 'true' religion by calling into question 'the holy mysteries of Christian religion' and by breeding vanity.
What underlies these worries, I think, is a recognition of the power of Romance writing to influence readers and a fear that they will 'displace all books of godly learning.' It's the old argument for censorship: the young are morally malleable and so should be protected from exposure to ideas that may negatively sway their moral and spiritual development away from some ideal.
With regard to the education of women, they must never be allowed to follow their own inclinations (which, it would seem, are always wrong in these matters), but must be told by 'learned and sensible men' what to read -- which reading will be limited to gospels and epistles for the most part. The focus is to preserve chastity at all costs -- better to keep them illiterate and chaste than to allow them to be well-read, independent thinkers who may be morally deviant (again, from some male ideal of femininity). [Best practice: eyes down and silent].
Within the context of the Reformation debates (in England, at least), earlier Romances are linked to the old Catholic/Popish tradition which is being portrayed by the Protestant polemicists as morally bankrupt. The miracles of the saints and the Eucharist are just as fabulous as the the-sword-in-the-stone, and underlying these falsehoods is a corruption that must be rooted out. A really clear example of this association between the Catholic tradition and Romance is the St. George story from the Golden Legend we read last week.
As Kieran points out, romances are depicted by Ascham in The Schoolmaster as breeding vanity. While arguments that romances promote false judgment and replace the spiritual instruction of Scripture seem logical considering the condemnation of Catholicism, as Kieran discusses, “vanity” is an interesting word. Ascham writes, “suffer not vain books to breed vanity in men’s wills if you would have God’s truth take root in men’s minds” (70). The word “vain” suggests a lack of purpose or a corrupt purpose (taking the Lord’s name in vain). Vain books are full of themselves and thus without spiritual purpose. The books lead to individual vanity replacing God, and God’s truth, with the self (self-conceit, self-importance). At the same time, focus on the self means that “the heaven they desire, is only their own present pleasure and private profit” (71). The implication is that a sense of community is necessary. Despite the protestant emphasis on the individual, this focus has its dangers. Ascham writes that Italian romances carry “the will to vanity and [mar] good manners” (69). Going on to describe spiritual corruption, Ascham begins by associating vanity with its social implications – marring good manners.
ReplyDeleteIf vanity is a danger of romances, then this is multiplied for women readers. Woman “a weak creature and of uncertain judgment” (Vives 72) is already subject to more temptation and weaknesses than Man. Furthermore, a woman’s vanity would be worse than a man’s vanity, since women’s intelligence should be subject to men’s instruction, a view that underlies sentences such as “When she is taught to read, let her peruse books that impart instruction in morals” (71). As a final, somewhat unrelated point, I want to highlight the sentence “women become addicted to vice through reading” (74), which suggests that vice is not only learned but habitualized, creating a dependency (on something other than God or male authority).
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ReplyDeleteBookes of (no) small (moral) price?
ReplyDeleteThe Schoolmaster and the selection from Dering seems more like anti-Catholic propaganda than the account of Vives. Ascham and Dering are concerned with more doctrinal issues than merely the moral corruption of young women as Vives is, as they argue against romances as evidence of popery. There are some subtle differences between Ascham and Dering, however, as Dering’s polemic is solely aimed at anything deifying intermediaries between god and his human subjects – witness his complaint about “theyr Saintes lyues, …which Satan had made, Hell had printed, and were warranted vnto sale vunder the Popes priuiledge, to kindle in mens hartes the sparkes of superstition” (40). Ascham, on the other hand, while proving in his use of bestial imagery to describe British Catholics to be a staunch Anglican, suggests that solely reading romance without accompanying religious instruction can in fact lead to the ultimate apostasy of atheism. His example here is Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, but he even goes on to apologise for it as less morally suspect than “one of these books made in Italy and translated in England” (69). Ascham’s argument appears then as anti-Catholic British nationalism disguised as moralising outrage – British romances are “good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at,” while Italian romances encourage pernicious beliefs that can lead readers to “count as fables the holy mysteries of Christian religion” (68). Meanwhile, Dering and Vives offer converse arguments to that which we saw in the quotation from Hoccleve in last week’s article by Cooper about the dangers of reading scripture. Considering this week’s authors’ use of violent and mutational diction (think of the repeated imagery of pestilence and infection), they all evince an interest in promoting the cause of religious purity by privileging a certain kind of Christian learning over the reading of romance. Historically speaking, this tendency makes a certain kind of sense, as in true polemical fashion, it is clear that their arguments are designed to justify rather than defuse the religious tensions occasioned by the Reformation.