Erika Carbonara

View Abstract

In the broadside ballad “The Seaman of Dover,” the female character is sequestered to her bedroom for “twelvemonth or more” (105) upon her father’s discovery that she wishes to wed a lowly seaman. In fact, her father’s vehemence regarding her betrothment is so strong that he insists he would “rather follow her corpse to the grave” (28) than allow her to marry outside of her class. This is not a unique occurrence within Dianne Dugaw’s 1989 unpublished index of “warrior women” ballads, as at least six of the collection of 113 ballads specifically involve the physical confinement of a young woman by her father, though many more involve other representations of confinement to some degree, such as in one variant of the ballad “New York Streets” in which thirty-seven sailors are almost comically confined to a single longboat. ¹ However, what I am particularly interested in is the relationship between the involuntary confinement of the women and their eventual crossdressing. Specifically, what about their physical confinement enables them to become warrior women? Of the six ballads in which the titular character is confined, all six portray the women escaping their confinement, crossdressing, and following their lover. This relationship between confinement, class, and crossdressing in these ballads is a complex one that demands further investigation beyond the scope of this paper, but I’d like to begin the work here by arguing that female confinement within the ballads is a queer catalyst, in which confinement predicates crossdressing and enables the woman’s willingness to go to war to find her lover. Furthermore, I suggest that confinement in these ballads has a seemingly paradoxical relationship with queerness, as it works both to police and to provoke queerness. I find that confinement in warrior women ballads functions both literally—in terms of spatial restriction—and socially—in terms of gender presentation and that this spatial restriction ultimately enables these women to “[find] out a way to follow [their] dear” (111).

In this paper, I will first contextualize the themes of confinement and familial relationships, focusing primarily on the critically neglected relationship between fathers and daughters, as changing family dynamics in the period complicated a father’s need to police his daughter’s sexuality. Second, I will turn to the central tenet of my argument by analyzing the relationship between confinement and the potential for queerness by historicizing the moment in which these ballads were written and published by looking at medical notions of deviant female bodies and actions in the period. I am interested in the lack of displayed symptoms of greensickness and female hysteria within these ballads. Both were common female maladies of the period, and confinement a likely outcome for women who were deemed mad or hysterical. However, in these ballads, the warrior women display no signs of greensickness or madness, perhaps indicating their non-normative displays of gender. In historicizing these broader themes of confinement, parental and romantic relationships, and nonconsent, I hope to situate these ideas within an early modern queer framework.

Gwen Seabourne discusses the trope of female confinement in literature: “From the stories of Persephone and Danaё onwards, imprisonment or abduction of women is commonplace in European literature” (3). Though Seabourne is focused on medieval representations of confinement, this trope continues throughout the early modern period and beyond, largely as an act committed by fathers against their daughters. One such example of this is found in “The Tragical Ballad,” which was published in the mid-18^th century, though considering the genre of the broadside ballad, it was probably circulated well before the print date. In this ballad, a young girl falls in love with her serving-man and arranges to go to sea with him; however, her maid overhears this plan and informs the girl’s father. Her father’s response is typical of the genre:

Daughter since you say so,
He shall to prison go,
And I’ll confine also
You to your room.

(149-152)

In the more than 200 lines of this ballad, the daughter’s mother is never mentioned, nor is there a mention of any parental figure other than her father. Though there are a myriad of possibilities to account for the mother’s absence, (her death being a very real possibility), it is certainly important to note that the majority of these ballads rely on the intervention of the father, not the mother or the parents together, to postpone the young woman’s marital plans. This depiction is explained in part by the concept of pater patriae, which is the Roman notion that fathers are the kings of their households and that the household is, in essence, a microcosm of the nation. In these instances, the mother’s agency is largely erased, and her role in the domestic sphere is diminished by her husband’s usurpation of it. Furthermore, the total erasure of the mothers is echoed in the confinement of these warrior women.
This sexual regulation was less prevalent for sons, who were at no risk of becoming pregnant themselves and therefore were much less of a threat to domestic harmony. However, because fathers would have been responsible for securing a proper husband for their daughters, the imperative that she retain her sexual purity is something fathers were deeply invested in maintaining. This policing of daughters’ sexuality is further complicated in “The Tragical Ballad,” as the lovers’ initial plan involves the crossdressing of the woman:

Tomorrow when ‘tis light
I’ll marry my delight
Then straitway I will go
Along with thee, my dear
And man’s apparel wear.

(110-114)

Despite this seemingly simple plan, these lines open up a myriad of questions. Up until this point in the ballad, there has been no mention of the man having to travel or go to war; presumably, he will have to flee because of his marriage to his lover. However, it is not clear why they choose to wait until the morning or why the woman will need to crossdress after her marriage. Again what foils their plans is the maid’s intervention, as she immediately tells her lady’s father everything she has heard, including the crossdressing plan. This policing of the daughter’s confinement is thus twofold: a restriction of her as a cisgender woman whose lover is a cisgender man outside of her class, but also as a means of restricting her potential queerness. Read in the first way, the father’s confinement of his daughter in “The Tragical Ballad” acts as a trial run, or preparatory restriction, for her future confinement by both her husband and society’s ideals of womanhood. Read in the second, it restricts her very real desires to present as a man. 

Having established the relationship between the policing of queerness and the perceived need for confinement, we can turn to understanding how confinement acts to produce or provoke queerness. It is useful to turn here to contemporary theories of incarceration and confinement. Stephen Dillon argues that the perceived necessity of incarceration shares similarities with queerness: “The prisoner’s non-normativities make her a threat to the prison state, and one way this threat is regulated is by controlling and abolishing her ability to perceive the world” (165). Although Dillon focuses on twenty-first century practices of imprisonment, the idea that one’s deviance from the normative must be eradicated is palpable in these ballads. In order to preserve the natural order of the world, the threat is placed behind closed doors. For Dillon, this sensory deprivation is crucial to queer readings of the prison: “The prison not only produces non-normative genders and sexualities but also non-normative bodies and minds. It captures queer bodies and shuts down queer ways of being, but it also produces queer experiences of space and time” (166). It is in this way that the young women’s confinement in “The Seaman of Dover” and “The Tragical Ballad” can be understood; each girl’s confinement restricts her spatially and prohibits her queer way of being, whether that is her desire to crossdress or the “queerness” of courting outside of her class and social status. However, within this confinement, these women can recognize and exhibit their true queerness by embracing their agency and complicated gender presentations. It is in these moments of absconding their father’s house that I suggest these crossdressed women shed the notion of heteronormativity and begin to embrace their potential queerness, in whatever form of gender presentation and identity that means for them.
Despite the young women’s obvious desire for agency and individuality, the nature of the ballad genre makes it difficult to read interiority and complexity in the characters, as they are many times one-dimensional and flat. This is due in part to the fact that ballads were not high culture; they were written and printed quickly and were often written anonymously. Ballads were considered street literature, and authors were therefore unconcerned with creating depth for the most part. Because of this superficial nature of the ballads, I am hesitant to make bold declarations regarding the crossdressed women’s gender identities. However, I think it is possible to analyze their gender presentations in order to complicate readings of their potential gender identities. Returning again to “The Tragical Ballad,” I want to reiterate and expand on the lines cited earlier:

Then straitway I will go
Along with thee, my dear
And man’s apparel wear,
No one can us ensnare,
Nor can us know.

(112-116)

This reading evokes the notion of “gender labour,” as discussed by Simone Chess who extends the work done by scholar Jane Ward. Chess states: “the notion of ‘gender labour,’ in which a cisgender partner (not crossdressed or trans*) participates in co-creating his or her partner’s queer gender” (146). The establishment between the two partners is essential here. Although the cisgender man in this ballad is not given an opportunity to respond to his lover’s plan, it seems logical to assume that he is a willing participant in her plans, as she uses the first-person plural pronoun “us” twice: “No one can us ensnare, / Nor can us know” (115-116). Line 116 is of particular curiosity, as it suggests that they are both complicit in this secret; it is not only hers.
Unfortunately, this plan is ultimately foiled by the serving-maid who discloses the pair’s plans to the young woman’s father, who immediately confines his daughter to her room.  However, after the cisgender man is sent to war, the daughter is able to escape and carry out their initial plan:

And in short time we hear,
She cross’d the ocean fair
In man’s apparel there
She met her dear:
A soldier was he also,
Yet his love did not know.

(181-186)

This is a commonplace occurrence in early modern literature: the deception of a lover by a simple disguise. Though this strains credulity, this interplay between the two soldiers can be understood through the notion of forgetting, which Chess argues is crucial to the nature of gender labour: “This sort of truth is the essence of the labour of forgetting, in which one partner makes active decisions to not know something about the other” (162). Considering the performative elements of female-to-male crossdressing were typically quite superficial, it seems unlikely that he would not recognize his lover from such simple accoutrements, especially considering that lines 187-188 read: “She being his comforter too / As we do hear.” Evidently, the relationship between the cisgender man and the crossdressed lover is intimate to some degree, which makes the cisgender man’s inability to recognize his lover incredibly suspect. Unfortunately, the ballad’s climax occurs quite quickly, as the lovers are immediately drawn into a battle in which she is wounded: “Dying she did declare / Her grief and woe” (95-96). The audience is left to imagine what this declaration entails, as “grief” and “woe” are not explicitly detailed. Though it is possible that this includes a gender reveal to her cisgender partner, the audience cannot know for sure. However, the cisgender lover quickly genders her with female pronouns, indicating he is aware of her identity: “He suck’d her bloody wound, / Crying, My dear is gone, / With her sweet charms” (98-100). ² The diction of these lines is an interesting juxtaposition between both male and female sex references. While the verb “suck’d” is clearly coded phallically, her “bloody wound” is a clear vaginal reference, with the play on both the “blood” of menses and “wound,” which was an early modern euphemism for the vagina. Furthermore, the long “S” of the period is a further indication that the text is insisting on a complicated gender reveal. These lines are the clearest moment in “The Tragical Ballad” in which the crossdressed sailor’s gender presentation becomes so muddied that the gender identity of the crossdressed sailor is unclear.

Finally, I want to situate these notions of queerness and confinement within the medical discourse of the period and the historical medicalization of queer bodies. Greensickness, a disease that coincided with a young virginal girl’s coming of age and menstruation that resulted in a severe melancholy, was traditionally seen as a sign that the girl was ready for marriage, as this affliction was cured by heterosexual intercourse with one’s husband. Interestingly enough, however, these ballads do not appear to depict young women afflicted with greensickness. They are not depressed or irrational; they are angry at their father’s disavowal of their agency. In fact, greensickness would have been associated with a reduction of movement, as women who were afflicted with this disease were typically lethargic and listless; greensickness certainly would not have inspired these young women to abdicate their father’s house and go seek out their lover in such drastic ways. ³ While greensickness could be cured by heterosexual intercourse in the confines of marriage, confinement would be an acceptable method of handling another common female malady: madness and mood disorders. Unsurprisingly, confinement was often recommended for such “disorders” in which women demonstrated any signs of a mood imbalance. In a 1675 pamphlet, The Westminster Doctor, or, Speedy and Pleasant Cures for Most Diseases Incident to Maids, Wives, and Widows, confinement is suggested as a cure for the “sullens”:

The Sullens is a disease very incident to the female sex, the usual symptomes of it
are scowling, frowning, pouting and lowring, sometimes an obstinate dumbness, and refusal to eat, and sometimes an insufferable raveing and crying; it proceeds
from superfluity of spleen, a bad liver, and a worse heart that occasions it, for the cure the onely way is to lockup the patient when the disease comes upon her, for Eight and forty hours together without meat, drink, fire, or Company; in which time the malignant Humours will be dispersed, and the party in a fair way of amendment.

(4)

This pamphlet provides an excellent depiction of society’s attempt to restrict the emotional displays of women, which are believed to be the result of their bodily excesses. Understood in this lens, the father’s immediate spatial restriction of his daughter is a clear attempt to cure her of her female weaknesses. However, in these ballads, this weakness is quite different than what is described above. These young women are not insufferable or raving; rather, this weakness is primarily demonstrated through their desire for agency and companionate marriage, which would have been a direct affront to their father. If confinement would have been the natural recourse for a sullen or greensick heterosexual woman to bring her to “a fair way of amendment,” is it not possible that confinement would have the opposite affect on a queer woman and lead her to further push back against these patriarchal notions and embrace her queerness?
Dianne Dugaw’s catalogue of “warrior women” ballads provides a unique look into literary portrayals of young women who crossdress to follow their lovers to war. Although a substantial number of the 113 ballads in her collection involve displays of crossdressing, these six ballads I have mentioned here that depict female spatial restriction by a father allow a complicated reading of traditional crossdressing narratives. Issues of consent and confinement, medical understandings of the female body, and portrayals of queerness are all crucial to understanding these portrayals of crossdressing in ballads such as “The Seaman of Dover” and “The Tragical Ballad.” Read through the lens provided here, the spatial confinement of these young women is integral to their propulsion into crossdressing and queer relationships. It is through these moments of restriction that these female characters embrace and complicate their own gender presentations and identities.

Works Cited

Chess, Simone. “‘Or whatever you be’: Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender Labour in John Lyly’s Gallathea.” Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 145-166.

Dillon, Stephen. “The Prisoner’s Dream: Queer Visions from Solitary Confinement.” Qui Parle, vol. 23, no. 2, 2015, pp. 161-184.
Seabourne, Gwen. Imprisoning Medieval Women: The Non-Judicial Confinement and Abduction of Women in England, C. 1170-1509, Routledge, 2011.

“The Seaman of Dover,” The Dugaw Catalogue, 570-577.

“The Tragical Ballad,” The Dugaw Catalogue, 585-590.

The Westminster Doctor, Or, Speedy and Pleasant Cures for most Diseases Incident to Maids, Vvives, and Widows; Or any Other Good Vvomen that are neither of all Three. Conteyning Sic]Admirable Receipts, and Remedies Against the Following Distempers … with Many Other Wonderful Secrets Never before Published. London, Printed for Benjamin Mawson, 1675.

Notes