The WSG seminar on the 6 February featured presentations by Pilar Botías Domínguez and Charlotte MacKenzie. The scheduled paper by Amy Solomons and Elizabeth Ingham has been postponed until the 2025–2026 seminar season.
Pilar offered an analysis of Aphra Behn’s play The Rover (1677) through the lens of the masquerade. She suggested that Behn uses the masquerade not only as a dramatic device, but also as a means to explore women’s right of self-determination. The paper was rich in quotation and citation providing contextual depth to the analysis of the play and its internal dynamics. For example, employing Bakhtin’s (1984) idea of carnival time – as being “subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom” – Pilar illustrated how the immersive, carnivalesque setting of the play enables female defiance and transgression.
The use of masks and crossdressing in The Rover highlight the limited social mobility that is usually available for women. In the play, by wearing masks, women are able to defy patriarchy and adopt a new identity while the carnival takes place, as their own identity is disabled for a moment. For example, Hellena can dress as a gypsy, permitting her to act differently than her social station would normally allow. The paper explored the actions and words of Behn’s two very different women – Hellena and Florinda – and their acts of defiance and ultimate compliance. Additionally, Pilar demonstrated how the male characters of the novel were the targets of female wit and satire.
Charlotte MacKenzie offered an analysis of women in Georgian Cornwall and how their learning was facilitated by local knowledge making communities. Charlotte explored three categories of female learning set against the backdrop of Cornwall as a county of technological and scientific discovery. Each of the three categories featured detailed case studies of Cornish women drawn from local manuscript sources, alongside material from women visitors such as Hester Piozzi and the writer Eliza Fenwick.
The first category featured women as household managers, which included running finances and healthcare. Examples were provided of female friendly societies that enabled women to set aside money for financial security, and the role of women in providing rural healthcare. The second category included women as readers, writers, and theatre-goers, exploring (among other things) the role of the Penzance theatre, book clubs and circulating libraries. The third example focused on women and their involvement in natural history. This paper demonstrated the wide range of women’s intellectual involvement in the sharing of knowledge: from friendly female societies to meetings on antiquities to participants in Cornwall’s mining community.
To close the session, there was a lively discussion about both presentations. Pilar was able to explicate that, as The Rover takes place outside of England, the Naples setting heightens the sense of freedom and strangeness, allowing for the presentation of topics not always suitable for the English stage. The conversation also turned to the more sinister and dangerous connotations of the masquerade and how masks could hide pock marks, decay, and signs of venereal disease. Charlotte gave greater detail of the types of society meetings women were attending in Cornwall, such as those related to mining and geology, and there was further discussion of the Penzance book club. Charlotte astutely concluded that women did not have to be literate to make or share knowledge; knowledge could be passed on orally or via demonstration. Both presentations were extremely well-received.
By Louise Duckling and Valerie Schutte
Women's Studies Group 1558 - 1837 