ABSTRACT
The weakness of the female so much insisted upon was construed in physical and intellectual terms, as want of strength and judgement, not in psychological terms, as want of character. Women’s characters were in no way deemed to be weak. On the contrary, their unruly temperaments were known to be stronger than their wills could control (a point the poet Wither turns sympathetically (42)). It was precisely because what Baxter calls their ‘natural imbecility’ was believed to be wedded to a passionately determined nature (43) that the century echoes with excoriations of women’s vices and reiterations of their duty to submit their wills to masculine guidance. Only in the last decades of the century do we find increasing reference to woman’s ‘softness’ and detect the early stages of the construction of that pallid, almost diaphanously insubstantial, image which was to characterize the heroine of the age of sensibility (Todd (1986), pp. 11028). Seventeenth-century woman was altogether robuster. The figures of the virago and the Amazon, to which Thomas Heywood devotes one of the nine books of his Gynækeion (1624), was at once so fascinating and so appalling since in them woman’s nature is both writ large and monstrously masculine (see on this subject Shepherd (1985)).
