The Convent of Pleasure
The Convent of Pleasure is a closet drama and example of an Early Modern text written by a woman. The playwright was Margaret Cavendish and was published under her own name in 1668. An interesting note is that there are two passages in the play which she indicates were written by her husband. The Convent of Pleasure is a play about a group of unmarried women who choose to avoid the pains of men and marriage by creating their own community. The main characters of this play are Lady Happy, the Monsieurs, and the Princess, who is actually a cross dressing prince.
The Convent of Pleasure's heroine, Lady Happy, begins the play firmly positioned within the heterosexual, reproductive economy. But she soon launches a resistance. As an "extream handsome, young, rich, and virtuous woman" who also happens to be an heiress, she is a valuable commodity in the multiple senses of the term. When she announces her intention to "incloister" herself from the "World," Lady Happy angers the patriarchy by taking her body and her possessions out of circulation (p. 3). She founds an institution open only to women on the margins of the patriarchy: maids and widows. Unlike the Female Academy, which expresses defiance through its architecture only, the convent's discourse reinforces its separatist stance. Lady Happy's rhetoric celebrates the convent's paradoxical walled freedom, refashioning marriage into the true cloister. "Marriage to those that are virtuous is a greater restraint than a Monastery," she insists (p. 3). Her incloistered women even stage a convent drama that depicts the physical and emotional pains of being a wife, redirecting female desires toward other spheres (pp. 24–30). Because the convent rejects marriage, it threatens larger political contexts. Monsieur Facil voices a masculinist conflation of family and state; when he hears of Lady Happy's retreat, he declares, "Let us see the Clergy to perswade her out, for the good of the Commonwealth" (p. 11).
Cavendish suggests the convent's pleasures are inaccessible, and even inconceivable to those positioned within the patriarchy. When Monsieur Courtly asks, "But is there no place where we may peak into the Convent?" Monsieur Adviser replies, "No, there are no Grates, but Brick and Stone-walls" (p. 19). Grates are absent by Lady Happy's decree, making her institution more insulated than the Female Academy, where perforated walls enable limited exchange. The convent is sealed not only from men, but from wives as well. As married women, Lady Amorous and Lady Virtue can only wonder about the delights within the convent. Their only glimpse of the convent comes through Madame Mediator, a widow who occupies a position inside and outside both the patriarchy and the convent. Madame Mediator has a limited capacity to describe the convent's rituals and pleasures to those firmly ensconced within the patriarchal economy: men, wives, and sometimes even the play's readers. But Madame Mediator's discourse provides only partial access to the utopian cloister. When Lady Virtue exclaims, "Well might I wish I might see and know, what Pleasures they enjoy," Madame Mediator responds, "If you were there, you could not know all their Pleasure in a short time, for their Varieties will require a long time to know their several Changes" (p. 17). Here, the widow's language is enticingly vague, suggesting the convent's "Varieties" of pleasure are unimaginable to those doomed to live outside its walls.
References
- Margaret Cavendish's Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender By Erin Lang Bonin