A few threads for next week:
1. Who or what is Cecropia?
2. King suggests (p. 79) that Sidney’s revisions allow for the resuscitation of the moral and heroic worth of the princes. Do you agree? Do they seem like heroic knights in the end? What might be Hacket's response to this line of reasoning?
3. Look carefully at the debate between Cecropia and Pamela, pp.483-93. What is at stake here?
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I hesitate to read too much into a name, but Cecropia, echoes Cecrops, a mythical early king of Athens who was reputably half man and half snake. Thus, at a stretch, we can read Cepropia as some form of serpent entering Arcadia's Eden, trying to tempt the two princesses.
ReplyDeleteThe suffix 'opia' also suggests some sort of defect in vision (as in myopia) and her 'short-sightedneess' brought on by ambition and a desire for revenge on Basilius seems to align with her character. The 'temptation in the garden' scene on pp. 483-93 would seem to confirm Cecropia as a satanic figure of temptation (even down to her planting doubt of God's existence). Pamela, in true saintly fashion, mounts a defence of God, virtue, etc. and denounces "the filthiness of impiety" spoken by Cecropia.
C. strikes me as being a precursor to the evil step-mother in Cinderella. She is proud (as a daughter of a king, she thinks it her birthright to rule; she only marries Amphialus' father on the understanding that he would rule Arcadia). Thwarted in her own designs on power by the untimely death of her husband, she will stop at nothing to see her son gain the throne -- even if it means murdering the (female) heirs of the king.
All very Lady MacBeth-ish.
In the end, Sidney needs a Cecropia in order to demonstrate the virtues of the other characters -- especially the princesses. She is the mirror-image by which we come to see how 'good' the princesses are -- 'mirror, mirror on the wall who's the saintliest ones of all?'
While, like Kieran, I associated Cecropia with the evil step-mother figure, the obvious problem is that Cecropia is not a step-mother but a mother. Her actions are driven by a natural affection for her son, which becomes unnatural as it displaces virtuous conduct. Cecropia is monstrous, but through a perversion of what is natural. This perversion of the natural makes her actions more terrifying (this, I think, links to the focus on monstrous men rather than monsters). Cecropia is unnatural through her proximity to what is natural.
ReplyDeleteAlthough Cecropia is a temptress, Arcadia is not Edenic. Pyrocles and Musidorus took unnatural poses to win their affection, while Cecropia begins her debate with Pamela by drawing attention to the tension between love and obedience. Pamela insists on her obedience to her parents being natural: “he is my father; and how beautiful soever I be, I am his daughter; so as God claims at my hands obedience, and makes me no judge of his imperfections” (487).
In the debate, this discussion of what is natural leads to discussion of religion and superstition. Cecropia posits that while man strives for the supernatural, “he loseth his own natural felicity” (488). However, Pamela rejects the argument that an individual potential and self-interest should be a person’s primary focus. Individuals add changeableness, but the unchanging world must have “one universal Nature” (490) and that this is only possible with one Creator (491). But, where does the individual fit into this? What is natural in Arcadia?
Why do Argalus and Parthenia die? Their deaths seem to show another side of natural affection. Parthenia’s love for her husband leads to her death, just as Amphialus’ love for Philoclea, and Cecropia’s love for Amphialus, lead to the deaths of many. Perhaps danger of the unnatural is that it points out the very problem of the idea of natural (Philoclea is willing to sacrifice her sister to keep her love pure).
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ReplyDelete3. Chapter 10 of Book III of the New Arcadia begins with an image of Pamela making a purse. The materials she is ordering in the process of her construction are described in terms of what is at first a strange sort of bodily imagery; Sidney describes “the cloth looking with many eyes upon her, and lovingly embracing the wounds she gave it,” as well as how “shears also were at hand to behead the silk that was grown too short” (483). Not only does this scene impute a kind of internal divine majesty upon Pamela so far as she is able to bring order to her rather limited world, prisoner of Cecropia’s as she is, but it also forecasts her later debate with her captor over the merits of her reasons for refusing to yield her hand in marriage without parental consent. When Cecropia has the temerity to suggest that virtue is created for the maintenance of order among the vulgar population, and that slavish devotion to its principles is ill-suited to Pamela, as such a beautiful specimen of the elite few, the language of synecdoche is employed once again as part of Pamela’s defence of providence. Borrowing from the rhetoric of genesis, Pamela asserts the originality of
ReplyDelete"the word, One, being attributed to that which is All, is but one mingling of many, and many ones; as in a less matter, when we say one kingdom which contains many cities, or one city which contains many persons, wherein the under-ones (if there be not a superior power and wisdom) cannot by nature regard to any preservation but of themselves" (490).
Pamela’s proto-Hobbesian view of human instinct in the state of nature notwithstanding, what matters here for her (and for her faith in her righteousness in refusing Amphialus’s suit without her father’s consent) is that providence underlies everything, even if it is not immediately obvious. There is also an implicit recapitulation in these two positions of the critique of miracles we saw in the Reformation debates. Thus in Pamela’s view, god need not provide material evidence of his existence, as his judgement will come in the end (a comforting thought no doubt, given her predicament).
I agree with Emily and Kasim's assessment that Cecropia and Pamela’s debate centers on the definition and assessment of both nature and providence. Cecropia’s arguments are simplistic and hedonistic whereas Pamela’s rhetorical strategies involve more complex and abstract systems of logic. According to Cecropia humankind strives to maintain power using whatever means are at their disposal. While men maintain power through force and intellect “a fair woman shall not only command without authority but persuade without speaking” (485).
ReplyDeleteFollowing Pamela’s oration (which outlines the proof of the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient creator) the importance of reception is highlighted, thus reinforcing the importance of the individual’s ability to obtain knowledge through private introspective study. An example of a morally illiterate figure, Cecropia does not have the potential for spiritual faith. After Pamela finishes her answer about the necessary existence of a creator, which is delivered “with so fair a majesty of unconquered virtue that captivity might seem to have authority over tyranny,” (492) Cecropia’s lack of response is configured as a simultaneously physiological and moral disability: “But Cecropia (like a bat which, though it have eyes to discern that there is a sun, yet hath so evil eyes that it cannot delight in the sun) found a truth but could not love it” (492). Thus the inability to see or hear what is defined in the text as truth is not simply configured as willful blindness, but rather as willfully denying the existence of a valid claim while simultaneously maintaining access to the source of the claim.
What this peculiar moment seems to paradoxically both assert and deny is the possibility of reform. Although Cecropia can recognize the truth she cannot absorb it and in fact is physically and morally unable to absorb it. Does this complicate or solidify the interpretation of Cecropia as an archetypal evil female figure?