ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FROM WROTH TO PHILIPS
domestic counsel into cultural critique, as the voice of Pilate’s wife becomes
indistinguishable from Eve’s, which blends with that of another female speaker,
the “author” as identified on the title page where it can be seen as inseparable
from the Jacobean patriarchy: “Mistris Aemilia Lanyer, Wife to Captaine Alfonso
Lanyer Servant to the Kings Majestie.” Hers is, as it were, the unauthorized
version of the Fall, the Crucifixion, and the present historical moment.
Generically, it is the complaint of female complaints. In what can only be
described as a deeply subversive twist of the usual typological connections made
between the Fall in the Garden and the Crucifixion in Golgotha, Lanyer sees in
the crime that Pilate is about to commit an argument for redeeming women from
their subservient place in the hierarchy. In Lanyer’s new typology, Pilate’s greater
criminality “proves” Eve’s greater innocence. His is crime done out of pure
malice (and pusillanimity, as it turns outs; Pilate is seen to behave like a weak
courtier); Eve’s is done out of ignorance. His is committed in spite of a wife’s
admonition, hers without benefit of a husband’s warning. If, moreover, with
Calvin, Lanyer thinks of Pilate’s wife as propelling, not retarding, the
redemption (and therefore not acting as an agent of the devil), the redemption
Lanyer imagines is more political than eschatological. It is in the here and now,
not at some indefinite point in the future, and it centers specifically on women,
not on mankind generally. The remarkable conclusion to this section is as
follows:
Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weake woman simply did offend,
This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end.
From the point of view of Biblical hermeneutics, some of Lanyer’s arguments are
stronger than others. Her defense that Eve sinned out of ignorance skips lightly
over the fact that Eve also knowingly violated God’s command (Genesis 3:1);
so, too, her claim that Eve’s was the lesser crime because she was the weaker of
the two risks making Eve seem only a reflex of Adam. But if Lanyer’s entrance
into the field of Biblical hermeneutics creates space for further responses, her
attempts to use Eve’s “Apologie” to redress the balance of power between the
sexes is also more than another bid for patronage. The odd squaring, at the
center of Salve Deus, of Pilate’s cruelty to Jesus and the suffering of women at
the hands of men that began with the Fall, takes Lanyer to the outer edges of
traditional Biblical criticism and invites a view of gender equality that, in
Jacobean England, is positively utopian. As Janel Mueller has argued, the
feminist politics of Salve Deus are without immediate antecedents in the
223