"The World in Reverse:
Sex Roles and Holland
in the English Cultural Imagination."
St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis
First, I broaden this interpretation by emphasizing the imagery's gendered aspects: poets and playwrights of the late-Stuart era such as Aphra Behn and John Dryden portrayed Dutchwomen as viragoes and Dutchmen as the most "tradeful" but least "manly" males of all Europe's nationalities. I show that anti-Dutch writers used these patterns of representation to imply that the republic's repudiation of dynastic authority had disrupted other social hierarchies including male ascendancy and to warn that a similar rejection of kingly rule in England would lead to the emasculation of the nation's males. The Dutch model threatened both the Anglican royalists' vision of a hierarchical society and the construction of masculinity implicit in this vision. Second, I problematize one-dimensional explanations of anti-Dutch discourse by pointing out that some writers embraced Dutch values. The English were repulsed by, but also attracted to, the Hollanders. While English poets and playwrights satirized their North-Sea neighbors as farcical and fantastic figures, other writers such as travelers, mercantilists, and early feminists praised them and recommended that the English emulate their practices. For example, Judith Drake in 1696 wrote: "Let us . . . view our Sex in a state of more improvement, amongst our Neighbours the Dutch." I conclude by arguing that this approbation found no counterpart in imaginative literature until Daniel Defoe's Roxana (1724), a novel rendering a positive valuation of Dutch gender arrangements.
Dissertation advisors:
Professors John Bender and Terry Castle