The Convent of Pleasure

The Convent of Pleasure is a comedic play first published by Margaret Cavendish in 1668. It tells the story of Lady Happy, a noblewoman who chooses to reject marriage in favor of creating a community - the titular “convent” - in which she and other women of noble birth can live free from the constraints of patriarchy. Like much of Cavendish's fiction, it explores utopian ideals and questions the expected roles of women in 17th-century English society.[1]

The Convent of Pleasure
Portrait of Margaret Cavendish
AuthorMargaret Cavendish
LanguageEarly Modern English
GenreComedy
Publication date
1668

The play was published under Cavendish's name, which was unusual for a work written by a woman at the time. Cavendish never attempted to have it staged, and instead devised it as something more akin to a closet drama.[2]

Characters
  • Lady Happy: A wealthy noblewoman who inherits her father's estate and decides to seclude herself inside with a group of other women rather than finding a man to marry.  
  • Madam Mediator: A widow and a friend of Lady Happy who does not join the convent, but is allowed to visit.  
  • The Princess/The Prince: An unnamed suitor who joins the convent in the guise of a woman and develops a romantic relationship with Lady Happy. This character is listed as "The Princess" in the first edition list of characters,[3] and for most of the play, stage directions refer to this character as "Princess." Near the end of the play, an ambassador arrives who declares that the Princess is a prince who has gone missing from his kingdom; from this point, the stage directions refer to this character as the "Prince" rather than the "Princess."[4]
  • Monsieur Take-Pleasure: The informal leader of a group of men who oppose the existence of the convent and devise unsuccessful schemes to bring an end to it. He is accompanied by His Man Dick, as well as Monsieur Facil, Monsieur Adviser, and Monsieur Courtly.  
  • Lady Amorous and Lady Vertue: Two married women who live outside the convent. Friends of Madam Mediator.
  • Mimick: A fool in service of Lady Vertue, who delivers the epilogue of the play.  

Several of the secondary characters also appear in Cavendish's play The Bridals: namely, Lady Amorous, Lady Vertue, Monsieur Take-Pleasure, Monsieur Adviser, and Monsieur Facil.[5]

Summary

Act I begins with three Gentlemen discussing the death of Lord Fortunate, Lady Happy's father. They describe their intent to woo her now that she is independently wealthy. Lady Happy tells Madam Mediator that her own plan is to live in retirement with other women and enjoy a life away from men.

In Act II, the Monsieurs disapprove of Lady Happy's plan because it prevents them from acquiring her wealth through marriage. They decide to petition the state to dissolve her convent. Madam Mediator visits the convent and hears from Lady Happy and the other inhabitants how much they enjoy their life inside. She also brings a rumour that an unknown Princess wishes to join the convent. The act ends with the Monsieurs, who have been unable to garner state intervention against the convent, concocting a plan to disguise themselves as working women in order to enter.

The Princess is welcomed to the convent at the start of Act III. The Princess notes that many of the women in the convent have paired off together romantically, with some wearing men's clothes. The Princess asks to "act Lovers-parts" in male attire with Lady Happy, who gladly agrees. The women of the convent then stage a play within the play, depicting the miseries which men cause for women: husbands who get drunk, abuse their wives, and spend or gamble all their money; the physical and mental strain of pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing; the sorrow of children's deaths; the horror of rape. At the end of this play, the Princess expresses mild disapproval, saying that more people are happy in their marriages than are unhappy.

Act IV begins with Lady Happy, dressed as a shepherdess, feeling overwhelmed by her love for the Princess. The Princess arrives dressed as a shepherd and they embrace and kiss. There is a pastoral scene: another woman dressed as shepherd woos Lady Happy but is rejected; the Princess woos Lady Happy and is accepted; there is a dance with a prize awarded to the best dancers, Lady Happy and the Princess. The pastoral scene closes with verses indicated to be written by Margaret Cavendish's husband. The Princess soliloquizes, resolving to remain with Lady Happy rather than return to the masculine outside world. An extended water-nymph scene begins: the Princess, dressed as Neptune, and Lady Happy, dressed as a sea goddess, sit surrounded by sea-nymphs and describe their luxurious underwater kingdom.

In Act V, Madam Mediator announces that the ladies of the convent have been deceived by a man in women's clothing. The Princess calmly expects to be above suspicion, but an ambassador arrives and addresses the Princess as his Prince. The ambassador reports that their kingdom assumed their prince had been kidnapped, and is now planning to invade Lady Happy's kingdom. The Prince(ss) announces: "since I am discover'd, go from me to the Councellors of this State, and inform them of my being here, as also the reason, and that I ask their leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms." In a scene labeled as "written by the Duke," Madam Mediator weeps to the gentlemen of the town that the reputation of the convent has been destroyed by the discovery of a man within its walls. After a conversation of sexual innuendo, she asks the gentleman to keep the Princess’s sex a secret, but they tell her that the news is already broadly known. The play ends with the marriage of the Prince and Lady Happy. They dance, and the Prince promises to maintain the convent of pleasure for virgins and widows.

Major themes

Resistance to marriage

A key interpretive question for The Convent of Pleasure is whether marriage can be desirable for women.[6] The Convent of Pleasure is one of several plays by Cavendish that depict a form of feminist separatist utopia.[1] Life in the convent is presented as a fundamentally different, and better, society.[1] There is additional attention to women’s bodily autonomy and agency, for instance in their experience of myriad pleasures (vestments, culinary delights, art, music). This empowerment sits in contrast to the constraints of society in which the focus of women’s bodies is instead on how they “will be used and enjoyed by others” (p. 654).[7]

The economic inequality of Early Modern marriage, in which a woman's property becomes the property of her husband, is represented as an obstacle to companionate marriage.[8] The early scenes of the play repeatedly make the argument that marriage is a primarily economic relationship, and one in which wives are the losing party.[9] By retreating to a convent with her wealth, Lady Happy removes a valuable commodity (herself) from economic circulation, threatening the patriarchal social order.[1][10] The character Monsieur Facil is responding to this threat when he petitions the state to force Lady Happy out of her convent "for the good of the Commonwealth."[1]

The characters also emphasize non-economic downsides to marriage for women, condemning wives' physical vulnerability to their husbands and the life-threatening danger of childbirth, as well as the emotional limitations caused by their subordination.[11] Lady Happy repeatedly criticizes the social restraint placed on women by their role as wives.[1] The long and vivid play-within-a-play depicting the suffering of marriage is sometimes seen as presenting an inarguable stance against marriage, which Lady Happy's own marriage at the end does not rebut.[11]

Nonetheless, Lady Happy does marry at the end of the play, raising the question of whether her marriage is a desirable ending, and if so, why.[6] Kelsey Brooke Smith believes this is a fluctuation on Cavendish's part between acknowledging marriage as inevitable and believing certain marriages are actually desirable. She notes that Cavendish appeared to have an agreeable marriage to her husband but also notes that he was a large source of her reputation and without her marriage to him she could not have supported her lifestyle.[6][12] Valerie Billing has said, “Her plays The Convent of Pleasure (1668) and The Religious (1662) posit different versions of collaborative marriage experimenting with ways in which a marriage could become a collaboration of bodiless souls rather than a sexual hierarchy that subordinates the wife to her husband.”[13]

Cross-dressing and queer themes

The main plot of the play hinges on cross-dressing, a common trope of Early Modern theatre, especially in Shakespeare's comedies.[14] The Convent of Pleasure is sometimes compared to Measure for Measure (1604), in which a Duke disguises himself as a friar and woos a novice, Isabella. Cottegnies found the endings of the two plays especially similar in the silences of both Lady Happy and Isabella when the Prince and the Duke reveal themselves in their respective plays. However, she found a difference in meaning between the two silences. Lady Happy is silent because she has finally yielded to passion instead of reason. Isabella is silent because she yields to the power of the Duke.[14]

Also notable is Oddvar Holmesland’s observation that Cavendish “inverts gender roles largely according to aristocratic parameters.” [15] Women and their wealth are considered objects to be acquired, and lack merit of their own accord. Thus, the reader witnesses Lady Happy create the convent in an attempt to navigate nontraditional female friendships and upend traditional gender norms.

One result of the Prince(ss)'s cross-dressing is that much of the play appears to show a lesbian romance.[2] Lesbianism in the play is seen as opposition to masculinity and marriage. Scholar Valerie Traub writes that: "Margaret Cavendish [...] had at her imaginative disposal some strong precedents for the figuring of female-female desire. In the Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish explicitly explores the attractions of homoeroticism among women, only to reaffirm the necessity of marital alliance as the price of a harmonious dramatic conclusion" (177).[16] Katherine R. Kellett says "...The Convent of Pleasure addresses this failure for female-female desire to signify by representing lesbianism as a force that threatens patriarchal authority. For Traub, the irony of the play is that it is only when female-female desire threatens to ‘usurp male sexual prerogatives’ that it becomes visible at all."[17] Kellett argues that "[t]heir rejection of the heterosexual economy is successful in the first part of the play, but the entrance of the Princess, who cross-dresses as a man and incites same-sex desire in Lady Happy, complicates their project" (421).[2]

See also

References
  1. Bonin, Erin Lang (Spring 2000). "Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 40 (2): 339. doi:10.2307/1556132. JSTOR 1556132.
  2. Kellett, Katherine (2008). "Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish's "The Convent of Pleasure"". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 48 (2): 419–442. doi:10.1353/sel.0.0002. JSTOR 40071341.
  3. Cavendish, Margaret (1688). Plays, Never Before Printed. p. 390.
  4. Cavendish, Margaret (1688). Plays, Never Before Printed. p. 382.
  5. "Convent of Pleasure". History Matters/Back To The Future. Archived from the original on 8 November 2019. Retrieved 8 November 2019.
  6. Smith, Kelsey Brooke. Perilous Power: Chastity as Political Power in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity. Dissertation, Brigham Young University, 2014. BYU, 2014.
  7. Sierra, Horacio (27 July 2009). "Convents As Feminist Utopias: Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure and The Potential of Closeted Dramas and Communities". Women's Studies. 38 (6): 647–669. doi:10.1080/00497870903021539. ISSN 0049-7878.
  8. Billing, Valerie (2011). ""Treble marriage": Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship". Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. 11 (2): 102. ISSN 1531-0485.
  9. Bonin, Erin Lang (Spring 2000). "Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 40 (2): 347. doi:10.2307/1556132. JSTOR 1556132.
  10. Kellett, Katherine (2008). "Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish's "The Convent of Pleasure"". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 48 (2): 424. doi:10.1353/sel.0.0002. JSTOR 40071341.
  11. Shaver, Anne (1999). "Agency and Marriage in the Fictions of Lady Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle". In King, Sigrid (ed.). Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. p. 177.
  12. Smith, Kelsey (9 June 2014). "Perilous Power: Chastity as Political Power in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity".
  13. Billing, Valerie. “‘Treble Marriage’: Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, [Indiana University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press], 2011, pp. 96, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23242154.
  14. Cottegnies, Line (July 2013). "Gender and Cross-Dressing in the Seventeenth Century: Margaret Cavendish Reads Shakespeare" (PDF). Testi e Linguaggi.
  15. Holmesland, Oddvar (2013). "The Convent of Pleasure (1668): Cross-gendering Negotiation". Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish. Syracuse University Press. p. 116.
  16. Traub, Valerie (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. p. 177. ISBN 0521448859.
  17. Kellett, Katherine (2008). "Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish's "The Convent of Pleasure"". SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 48 (2): 422. doi:10.1353/sel.0.0002. JSTOR 40071341.
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