The Convent of Pleasure


The Convent of Pleasure is an Early Modern comedy written by Margaret Cavendish. The play is 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 who wish to remove her from the convent, and the Princess, who joins Lady Happy's convent and woos her.
The play was published in London under Cavendish's own name, a rare choice for a woman writer in 1668. As the play is a closet drama, Cavendish did not attempt to have it staged. Two passages in the play are credited to her husband, as denoted by the insertion of "Written by my Lord Duke" above these scenes.

Characters

Several of the secondary characters also appear in Cavendish's play The Bridals: namely, Lady Amourous, Lady Virtue, Monsieur Take-Pleasure, Monsieur Adviser, and Monsieur Facil.

Summary

Act I: Monsieur Take-Pleasure and other Monsieurs resolve to woo the newly-wealthy Lady Happy. Lady Happy and Madam Mediator engage in a lengthy philosophical discourse on pleasure and marriage. Lady Happy resolves to use her wealth to live in a cloister with unmarried women according to principles of pleasure.
Act II: The Monsieurs lament Lady Happy's decision and scheme ways to woo her anyway. On Madam Mediator's advice, they resolve to petition the State to force her out. Lady Happy describes to Madam Mediator in lush detail how much she and her ladies are enjoying their life in the convent. Madam Mediator talks to two married woman, Lady Vertue and Lady Amorous, about a princess who has just joined the convent. The married women wish they could experience the convent's pleasures, but Madam Mediator tells them its delights are unimaginable. The Monsieurs scheme again to force the women out of the convent. They decide to disguise themselves as working-class women to enter.
Act III: The Princess notes that many of the women in the convent have paired off together romantically, and asks to “act Lovers-parts” in male attire with Lady Happy, who gladly agrees. A play-within-a-play is staged, presenting the various woes of marriage and pregnancy. When the play concludes, the Princess expresses mild disapproval, saying that more people are happy in their marriages than are unhappy. Meanwhile, the Monsieurs conclude that the convent cannot be dissolved.
Act IV: Lady Happy wanders sadly dressed as a shepherdess, feeling that her love for the Princess is too much. The Princess arrives dressed as a Shepherd and they embrace and kiss. There is a pastoral scene: another woman dressed as shepherd woos Lady Happy but is rejected; the Princess woos Lady Happy and is accepted; there is a dance with a prize awarded to the best dancers, Lady Happy and the Princess. The pastoral scene closes with verses indicated to be written by Margaret Cavendish's husband. The Princess soliloquizes, resolving to remain with Lady Happy rather than return to the masculine outside world. An extended water-nymph scene begins: the Princess, dressed as Neptune, and Lady Happy, dressed as a sea goddess, sit surrounded by sea-nymphs and describe their luxurious underwater kingdom. A sea nymph sings a song.
Act V: Lady Happy and the Princess arrive at a dance together, with the Princess dressed in masculine apparel. Madam Mediator arrives and announces that a prince is in disguise within the convent. The Princess calmly expects to be above suspicion, but an ambassador arrives, kneels at the Princess's feet, and reports that their kingdom is planning to invade Lady Happy's kingdom because they believe their prince has been kidnapped. The Prince announces: “since I am discover'd, go from me to the Councellors of this State, and inform them of my being here, as also the reason, and that I ask their leave I may marry this Lady; otherwise, tell them I will have her by force of Arms.” The next scene is indicated to be written by the Duke: Madam Mediator weeps to the gentlemen of the town that the reputation of the convent has been destroyed by the discovery of a man within its walls. There is some innuendo mocking Madam Mediator's sexual appetite. She asks the gentleman to keep the Princess's sex a secret; they tell her that the news is already broadly known. Lady Happy and the Prince are married. They dance. The Prince promises to maintain the convent for virgins and widows.

Major themes

Resistance to Marriage

Erin Lang Bonin interprets The Convent of Pleasure as an attempted utopia, one of several plays in which Cavendish "reconfigures traditional distinctions between private and public by creating utopian heroines who take women's sequestration to extremes, completely insulating themselves from men's public spheres." In Bonin's interpretation, Lady Happy begins the play firmly positioned within the heterosexual, reproductive economy as an heiress who is a valuable commodity in the multiple senses of the term. When she withdraws to the convent, Lady Happy angers the patriarchy by taking her body and her possessions out of circulation. Because the convent rejects marriage, Bonin argues, it threatens larger political contexts. Bonin sees this threat voiced by Monsieur Facil, who implies a masculinist conflation of family and state when he demands that Lady Happy be forced out of her convent "for the good of the Commonwealth". Bonin compares The Convent of Pleasure to Cavendish's The Female Academy, another female separatist utopia, to argue that The Convent of Pleasure reinforces its separatist stance through the way the characters talk. 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. To further emphasize the restrictions of marriage, the play includes a play-within-a-play that depicts the physical and emotional pains of being a wife, redirecting female desires toward other spheres.
Kelsey Brooke Smith of Brigham Young University wrote her dissertation on chastity as a political power in The Convent of Pleasure. Her analysis of Lady Happy portrayed her as a "virtuous, wealthy, and beautiful young virgin" who is understandably sought after during this time. Lady Happy does not want to marry because it would only bring her unhappiness. She says in the play that married life would “have more crosses and sorrows than pleasure, freedom, or happiness” Smith notes that despite her original position, Lady Happy consents to marrying the Prince. She believes this is a fluctuation on Cavendish's part between acknowledging marriage as inevitable and believing certain marriages are actually desirable. She notes that Cavendish appeared to have an agreeable marriage to her husband but also notes that he was a large source of her reputation and without her marriage to him she could not have supported her lifestyle.

Utopia

The utopian nature of life within the convent, Bonin argues, are highlighted by the way that life in the convent is presented as a fundamentally different, and better, society. 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". 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 Vertue 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 Vertue 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". 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.

Gender

Line Cottegnies has written on Cavendish from the perspective of Shakespeare in an article called "Gender and Cross-dressing in the Seventeenth Century: Margaret Cavendish Reads Shakespeare." Cottegnies writes, “In The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish uses episodes and devices borrowed from several of Shakespeare’s comedies to reflect on transvestism and its implications.” In particular, Cottegnies believes Cavendish draws on the techniques of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in which a Duke disguises himself as a friar and woos a novice, Isabella. Cottegnies found the endings of the two plays especially similar in the silences of both Lady Happy and Isabella when the Prince and the Duke reveal themselves in their respective plays. However, he found a difference in meaning between the two silences. Lady Happy is silent because she has finally yielded to passion instead of reason. Isabella is silent because she yields to the power of the Duke.

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