Part 8: Discussing Question1: Is there a Gender Reveal scene in Cavendish's Convent of Pleasure?

Below is the script for episode 9, the penultimate episode within Season 13 of my Philosophy Fluency podcast. 

For the reference bibliography of works cited in this episode, see the end of this blog post. 

🎧

Hello and welcome to Philosophy Fluency Season 13 episode 9. We've had a heatwave this past week. I hope everyone's been enjoying their holidays and soaking up some of the beautiful sun. 

Yesterday was International Butch Appreciation Day and in this episode we will be appreciating butches in history especially the 17th century.

I've given you all extra time to think about the questions I invited you to mull over in the previous episode because I doubt you'll be in the mood to listen to philosophy when the weather is so amazing.

What have I been doing? I've been enjoying myself working at my art, experimenting with various styles inspired by art sessions that I've attended. I really enjoy interacting with other artists and seeing their work too. 

So over coffees let's return to last week's episode. I left you with several questions. There are no right or wrong answers to those thought provoking questions. So, over our summer ice coffees today, I'll explore the ideas within those questions and sketch out my approach to unearthing possible answers to them. 

My first question was:

1) is this definitely a big gender reveal scene? 

This depends on who the princess really is? A Princess or a Prince? Of course, these royal titles are very gender binary, there isn't an equivalent word for a non-binary person with this title. Neither does such a title account for anyone who is:

1) Outside the gender binary, such as a genderfluid person, as Cavendish was herself. Such a person could be comfortable with being referred to as both a Prince and a Princess. 

2) Trans women are not men. So if the Princess is a trans woman or a trans feminine woman, then the Princess isn't a man, so the mediator is not revealing anything about the Princess's sense of gender, hence no gender reveal. Either the mediator is merely revealing the sex the princess was assigned at birth; or she's simply being sensationalist and anti-LGBTQIA+, in one way or another. 

3) A butch woman. 'Butch' is a gender expression, that nevertheless spans women of various gender identities and sexualities. Some butches are simply gender expansive cis women (sometimes referred to as gender non-conforming women). It is often assumed that all butch women are lesbians, because the butch lesbian is the best known type of butch, but in reality, they may or may not be lesbian. Other butches are also not trans, but may wish to adopt a more masculine identity, such as wearing men's clothes, using male pronouns, a male name, be called their female partner's husband, and so on. For instance, Mathilde de Morny, (born 1863, died 1944) was a cross-dressing noblewoman who became known as "Missy", which was spelt backwards to create her artist name: Yssim; "Max or Uncle Max", or "Monsieur le Marquis". She was fascinatingly portrayed in the 2018 film Colette, which depicts Missy's lesbian relationship with Colette, in which Missy is seen as being like Colette's husband. 

Colette and Mathilde “Missy” de Morny
 (Photo: public domain) 

Although the term butch lesbian wasn't in existence in the 17th century, Margaret Cavendish's era, I think gender identities and sexualities transcend centuries, because they are simply lived, authentic experiences, whether you have a term to attach to that human experience during your lifetime or not. There were, for instance, women who 'passed' as men during the Early Modern period, some of whom did not just do it for personal gain (such as entering a profession barred to women) but rather felt they were living a more authentic life to present their gender as male and to marry a woman, which they somewhat legally did, under their male name.   

One example of a true life story during the 17th century, who lived during the same time period as Cavendish is a person who was assigned female at birth and was named Catalina de Erauso, who was sent to a convent but refused to lead a religious life and escaped after suffering abuse from the nuns. Catalina adopted a male identity and went by the name Antonio instead, amongst other male names. It's an absolutely amazing life story, that's been turned into stories in popular culture, such as comics, films and historical novels. Scholarship is divided on the gender identity and sexuality of Catalina who became Antonio, who was comfortable with presenting in a very masculine way, identifying as a man and was only attracted to and had relationships with women and even married a few women in South America. Was she simply a woman merely 'passing' as a man to survive? Was she a butch lesbian? Was he a trans man? Again, like with Cavendish scholarship, and Shakespeare scholarship on Ariel, there are a variety of scholarly interpretations, arguments and stances, most of which pointing to plausible supporting evidence. Although I think any attempts to deny that Erauso is of great significance to LGBT+ history is really not plausible. 

Here's a 17th century painting and a commemorative bust of Catalina / Antonio de Erauso, both proving Cavendish right that recording a variety of people in history is extremely important, so we do not skew our historical perception of lifestyle, achievements and which identities existed in the past. Hence people assigned female at birth also need access to fame, military work, being preserved in artworks and books during their lifetime, not just for their own benefit or individual glory, but for our collective historical knowledge too. 

Artist believed to be: Juan van der Hamen, c.1626

Statue in Orizaba, Mexico, 
commemorating
Catalina / Antonio de Erauso,
here referred to as 
la Monja Alférez
(Photo: Public domain: 
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike)

I suggest there's parallels to be drawn here between Antonio and Cavendish's character of the Princess. Not only was Antonio in a convent, sometimes referred to as being trapped in a convent, but she also passed so well as a man, that she encountered her relatives as a man and none of them recognised her as their female relative, Catalina. They all believed it was a man who they didn't know. This shows that Cavendish is right to ask whether people could successfully and believably present as the opposite sex and go on being undetected.  

Moreover, when the ambassador addresses the Prince, is he right or wrong? He may be right in one way, wrong in another. For instance, right because the Prince is in male clothing but wrong in that the Prince may have been born a woman, which the ambassador may or may not know. 

After all, Queen Christina of Sweden was first assigned male at birth, then shortly afterwards his biological sex was questioned, considered a mistake, and he was re-assigned female. Nevertheless, her father didn't take that on board too seriously and brought Christina up to be just as highly educated as a boy with manly pursuits such as fencing. It wasn't just that Christina dressed as a man she pulled it off convincingly complete with manly mannerisms and a male voice. She was described as mannish by those who knew her. Here's a guide on how Queen Christina of Sweden might have dressed in the male attire of her era and class. 

She was known to have little patience with women and their feminine demeanour and their obsession with beauty and fitting in with some ideal of womanhood. Indeed, she had an aversion to heterosexual marriage and the whole world of what women said and did. 

She went on to found an academy for Philosophy and Literature and Cavendish writes a play called The Female Academy. There are distinct parallels here between Queen Christina and the Prince/Princess and Cavendish.

Queen Christina's father considered her a female heir, and she was considered a Queen when she ascended the throne. Nevertheless, she would wear male attire, and the official royal title she received on being coronated in 1633, was King. 

So, picture this: during Cavendish's lifetime in the 17th century, a royal who was considered a woman, and called a Queen, could nevertheless be seen to be in male attire and officially titled King on their ascension to the throne. 

So what made Queen Christina's sex at birth so difficult to determine? Was it as simple as a mere mistake? Was it due to misogynistic stereotypes that meant if she presented with certain gender non-conforming physical and personality characteristics, such as being hairier and a louder screamer, you assumed she must be a he? Or was it the same as these days, that people struggle to confidently assign a sex to babies who are intersex? This may explain why her father was more prepared to give Christina a first class education and training fit for the future King she would become, if perhaps he thought she was not entirely female. Nevertheless, this was rather forward thinking of him. 

Since now, in the 21st century, intersex people's bodily autonomy and human rights are disregarded, trampled on and their existence is often erased. They suffer from the extreme end of genderphobia and human rights violations. 

Queen Christina, wanted to escape heterosexual marriage so escaped to Italy in 1654 dressed as a man using a male name to live in a Catholic convent, despite being non-religious, abandoning the throne of Sweden to her cousin. She generally led an unconventional life for a woman and a royal one at that. Furthermore, Queen Christina was active in theatrical communities and was a patron of the arts. So she's highly relevant to the genre of plays. 

Christina stayed with various people along the way to Italy, visiting various countries such as Denmark, the Dutch Republic, and staying with a Jewish merchant in Antwerp. During her travels she was visited by an ambassador by the name of Pierre Chanut who knew Descartes (d. 1650) who, in turn, had corresponded with Queen Christina and visited her in Sweden. Descartes stayed with Chanut whilst also finishing 'Passions of the Soul' (1649) which he surprisingly dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (not Queen Christina) who also studied Philosophy and Astronomy and may have been tutored by Huygens. So, Elizabeth was the recipient of two treatises on the passions one from Edward Reynolds, the other from Descartes.

Elizabeth of Bohemia, like Queen Christina and the Prince/Princess in Cavendish's play, also entered a convent, a Lutheran one in Hereford, Germany despite being a Calvinist. 

Queen Christina relates to Cavendish's play in two ways:

Firstly, the Prince/Princess would appear to have followed just this path: both called male/female royal titles, and abandoning their position of power in a foreign country to enter a convent. And an ambassador visits him at the convent. There's a rebellion which the Prince/Princess has to squash just as Charles I had to raise an army to squash a rebellion. 

Is this rebellion one that is back in the Prince/Princess's place of origin, or has the transphobic Mediator started a civil war within the convent to push out a royal.

Secondly, it's Lady Happy who founded the Convent of Pleasure to find an alternative to marriage and heterosexuality. The purpose of the convent was not to pray, but to live an enriched female experience with broader horizons and opportunities and overcome restricted gender expectations. 

What's the main relevance to Cavendish's play, 'The Convent of Pleasure'? It's easy to assume at the moment, with all this TERF ideology trying to dominate society and school education, that nobody ever questioned biological sex or gender identity or lived unconventional lives outside the gender binary until only a few years ago, when they decided to blame everything on so-called gender ideology raising awareness and giving people a springboard from which to go on a journey of self-discovery about their personal sense of their own gender and which gender they'd like to live as in society. This contemporary stance is hugely problematic for many reasons, two of which are rather fundamental:

1) It's factually inaccurate. Yes, everybody does have a gender identity, because being cisgender is also a gender identity. Access to information has nothing to do with how people authentically feel within their own skin. If they are genuinely cisgender, then no amount of education about the existence of trans people and the diversity of experiences of gender that others have, will change that inner sense of being cisgender for you. And, if you educate yourself about various examples in history and science, then you know that biology simply isn't as clear cut about biological sex as people like to pretend, so that can never be some substitute for gender identity. 

Indeed, if you are ignorant about gender identity theory, you are more likely to mistake yourself as trans or non-binary when you are not. Learning about gender will merely make you more educated, empathetic, tolerant and knowledgeable about the people you meet and maybe even any children you may bring up, who will tell you what they feel their gender identity and expression is, whether or not you try to misinform them and keep them in a cis-heteronormative bubble. 

2) As we can see by these historical examples and literary examples, including Cavendish's play, questions about the nature of gender identity and expression are nothing new, they are age old. 

Indeed, with all this technology and emphasis on ID these days, it's significantly harder than ever before in history to make any changes to your gender expression and identity. So it would be an uneducated and ignorant stance to assume that these gender topics within Cavendish and elsewhere merely superimpose a contemporary lens onto an historical era where it doesn't belong. Many would say: Surely everything was very gendered and binary in those good old days, so researchers should stop foisting their present day LGBT+ trends onto eras where they don't belong. Well, actually, quite the contrary. History has a lot to teach us about gender and sexuality, and a lot to suprise us with! 

Contrary to social expectations, we will continue to misunderstand historical texts if we remain stuck in our 21st century bigotries and superimpose them on eras which had different priorities from ours and were not always more regressive in every way from modern day western societies. 

Hence, Cavendish did intentionally raise awareness and explore important issues about sex, gender and sexuality, and question societal expectations. She was therefore also right to ask to what extent gender expression and gender identity is 'by nature' or not. It's a more timeless question than one imagines. 

Perhaps Cavendish doesn't want to pin the Princess down to a particular gender or pin down the sexuality of both the Princess and Lady Happy. As the LGBTQ+ motto has always been and I've always believed in: Love is Love. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ So who Lady Happy or the Princess/Prince are is irrelevant. All that is relevant is that they've fallen in love.

However, if you ask me what I think the identity of the Princess/Prince in the Convent of Pleasure is I'd say the character was modelled on the societal intrigue surrounding the apparently ambiguous biological sex and gender identity of Queen Christina.

Do join me soon for the final episode of this Season 13. Enjoy the summer weather, and continue to ponder the questions I raised in the previous episode and this one. 

The script for this episode is already available on my Cavendish blog: The Feminist Margaret Cavendish Circle, so do take a look there, I've included some pictures to bring to life just how masculine these women in history were.