Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century
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Women’s War Drama in England in the Seventeenth Century By Bre ...

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The men’s thinking is at first constricted by received gender categories. Their bigotry is detrimental to marital unity, and it also excludes women from the world of action. Cavendish, therefore, writing her play during the Interregnum, wages war against the Cromwellian idea of citizenship as based on separate gender spheres. The Protector’s reform policy sought to contain a nation divided by factionalism, which led him to force the effete nobility into exile and inaugurate a stout, masculine regime.37

Ultimately, Cavendish suggests a partnership with the male army, rather than setting up a female army to rival the male one. Holmesland offers the view that Cavendish’s project is more of a compromise, a mediation:

For this to happen, one may argue, the play finally tempers the Amazons’ emulative drive. But it is not to make them resume a subservient role in the patriarchy. That, to Cavendish, would breed division. The play must rather be approached in terms of a mediative inquiry—a quest to find out how women’s natural potential for boldness may expand in loving harmony with men—to make one healthy body.38

By the end of Bell in Campo, Lady Victoria has proven that women are capable of military prowess and of forming themselves into a disciplined army. However, as Holmesland suggests, this is “a mediative inquiry”; ultimately, the women are content to accept an increase in power in the domestic realm.

The study of Cavendish’s two plays in chapter 4 extends the theme of war and women’s drama beyond the domestic front, in order to present a hypothetical vision of female combatants in an Early Modern setting. The representations raise some interesting questions about the notion of female warriors, and the idea of Lady Victoria training and leading an Amazonian army would be an empowering image for women who are normally dramatised as passive victims of war.