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Susan Bordo: The Creation of Anne Boleyn
Sep. 12th, 2018 12:53 pmIt is a fact that when Henry VIII of England had his second wife executed, he tried to erase all record of his life with her. He was eager to wed his choice for wife number three, anxious to forget the woman who made him do a great many things he might not have wanted to do, and then failed to give him the one thing he desperately wanted, a son. Even though his agents did not succeed in making Anne Boleyn disappear completely, there are few primary sources that remain to tell us who she really was - letters, portraits, documents. We see Anne, always, through the eyes of others, often enemies. And throughout the past five centuries, those remaining sources have been used, weighed, interpreted, reinterpreted, endlessly. There are many ideas about Anne Boleyn, who she was, what she did, her choices, her motivations, her guilt or innocence.
In The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’ Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo attempts two rather different goals: the first, to examine the multitude of representations of Anne Boleyn, to show the many ways in which she has been imagined, and to attempt, as well as may be done, to tease out of what remains of the historical record, a sense of who she might actually have been.
“One goal of this book is to follow the cultural career of these mutating Annes, from the poisonous putain created by the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys—a highly biased portrayal that became history for many later writers—to the radically revisioned Anne of the Internet generation. I’m not such a postmodernist, however, that I’m content to just write a history of competing narratives. I’m fascinated by their twists and turns, but even more fascinated by the real Anne, who has not been quite as disappeared as Henry wanted. Like Marilyn Monroe in our own time, she is an enigma who is hard to keep one’s hands off of; just as men dreamed of possessing her in the flesh, writers can’t resist the desire to solve the mysteries of how she came to be, to reign, to perish. I’m no exception. I have my own theories, and I won’t hide them. There are so many big questions that remain unanswered that this book would be very unsatisfying if I did not attempt to address them.”
Bordo begins with the main contemporary source, Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Henry’s first wife Katherine of Aragon. His letters and dispatches are extensive, and invaluable to an understanding of certain elements of the English court. They are also, and perhaps predictably, extremely critical of Anne, who is consistently referred to as ‘the concubine’ and ‘the whore.’ It is from Chapuys that the images of the saintly Queen Katherine, the licentious, seductive Anne, and the besotted, helpless Henry are derived. Chapuys’ extreme dislike and distrust of Anne is relentless, and in fact, he suggests that he nay have assisted in the gathering of charges against her when she fell out of favour; he certainly exulted at her downfall. He can hardly be considered an impartial witness, and yet he has shaped the way we see Anne and interpret her relationship with Henry. As Bordo notes in looking at the numerous historians’ treatment of Anne in biographies and histories of the Tudor era, “It’s virtually standard operating procedure for historians to warn the reader, in an introduction or the beginning of a chapter, about Chapuys’ biases and tendencies to believe the most vicious court gossip about Anne, and then go on to use him liberally and without qualification all the same.”
Setting aside as much of the biases as possible, and examining known facts in the light of what we known about the cultural roles and expectations, the ways that people thought, acted and expressed themselves, and the cultural milieu of the time, which was one of religious and philsophical ferment, with many intellectuals - with whom both Henry and Anne would have been familiar - engaged in questioning the traditions of the church and the proper relationship between God and men, Bordo attempts to reconstruct a probable narrative of their relationship and of Anne’s ultimate fate.
It is one that begins with a deep personal attraction, based in common interests, both intellectual and social (dancing, hunting) on both parts. They met at a time when Henry, deeply concerned that there was something wrong in his marriage that had prevented Katherine from bearing a male heir, was emotionally, and perhaps sexually, detached from Katherine but not yet prepared to set her aside. The arrival at court of a vivacious, European-educated and influenced, intelligent and witty young woman, who loved to dance and ride out and engage in witty conversation, not particularly beautiful but notably different in many ways not only from his older, modest wife but also from most of the other ladies of the court, would have been an irresistible challenge to Henry. Though at first he may have sought an ordinary affair, it is likely that the kind of attraction that developed, one based on personalities as much as sexuality, one that we might in our times call romantic love, in combination with a growing sense on Henry’s part that God was telling him to set Katherine aside, would have led to a desire to marry, to make Anne not just lover but partner.
It did not happen all at once. In the handful of letters from Henry to Anne that survive, despite his courtly protestations of eternal submission and devotion, he is asking her to be his official mistress, not his wife. But Anne’s role probable in bringing to his attention the new thinking about the relationship between kings and the church, which led to the strategy of establishing the Church of England and sidestepping the Pope’s refusal to nullify his marriage to Katherine, brought them closer, and when Anne eventually did become his lover, and soon after became pregnant, marriage was inevitable.
But marriage was the trap that failed Anne. She was the perfect companion, but not raised to be a queen, and not by nature suited to become what Henry and the rest of her world expected in a wife. She was not submissive, she did not behave with humility and did not accept being left out of any part of Henry’s life. And what was irresistible in a mistress was unacceptable in a wife. When she was unable to produce the crucial male heir, it was easy for enemies at court to use the very things Henry had fallen in love with to tarnish her reputation and lead to her death.
Bardo argues that in the end, Anne herself recognised this as the real reason for her downfall: “Anne recognized that she had overstepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge not only her “jealous fancies” but also her failure to show the king “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.” Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the king enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two transgressions, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had overstepped the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression also was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.”
After making this attempt to find a narrative that makes sense of Anne’s journey from a lady-in-waiting at the French court, to the English throne, to the gallows, Bardo turns to the ways that the facts of Anne’s life have been interpreted over the years, to produce images that range from a heartless, manipulative and grasping hedonist to a much maligned and virtuous innocent. One of the most significant factors, certainly for the first few centuries following Anne’s death, was religion; Catholics despised and demonised her, Protestants praised and sanctified her. By the 19th century, she was becoming, to some on the side favorable to her, a tragic heroine, one of the first women to be pictured as such in her own right.
The had always been some recognition of the gendered nature of the trap Anne found herself in, that her intellectual bent and desire to be a partner in ruling, not an appendage, were issues that an aging Henry, losing some of his athletic vigour, resented as a challenge to his supreme authority. But this level of analysis became more common as Anne became a subject of consideration as an agent in the English Reformation. At the same time, however, many historians - mostly men, as the women in this era who wrote about history were generally not granted the name of scholar - seemed content to make of Anne a doomed romantic heroine.
By the mid-twentieth century, Anne is a popular feature of histories, plays, novels, and films, with as many permutations on the key elements of her life and personality as authors. Anne becomes a mystery, an almost blank slate that each author writes their own creation on. Bardo summarises the significant elements of the many portrayals, from Margaret Campell Barnes’ Brief Gaudy Hour and Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of a Thousand Days (the play that was the source for the film starring Genevieve Bujold) to Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne in the television series The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl - all with different perceptions of Anne’s character and motivations.
In many ways, what emerges from Bordo’s analysis is a concept of Anne Boleyn as a ‘woman for all seasons,’ whose actions, because so little exists to give us clues to her interior life, can be interpreted to suit the individual biases and needs of the interpreter. Her recorded actions give the suggestion of a multifaceted and complex individual, neither angel nor devil, victim nor villainess, saint nor whore, and perhaps that is the truest representation of all.
In The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’ Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo attempts two rather different goals: the first, to examine the multitude of representations of Anne Boleyn, to show the many ways in which she has been imagined, and to attempt, as well as may be done, to tease out of what remains of the historical record, a sense of who she might actually have been.
“One goal of this book is to follow the cultural career of these mutating Annes, from the poisonous putain created by the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys—a highly biased portrayal that became history for many later writers—to the radically revisioned Anne of the Internet generation. I’m not such a postmodernist, however, that I’m content to just write a history of competing narratives. I’m fascinated by their twists and turns, but even more fascinated by the real Anne, who has not been quite as disappeared as Henry wanted. Like Marilyn Monroe in our own time, she is an enigma who is hard to keep one’s hands off of; just as men dreamed of possessing her in the flesh, writers can’t resist the desire to solve the mysteries of how she came to be, to reign, to perish. I’m no exception. I have my own theories, and I won’t hide them. There are so many big questions that remain unanswered that this book would be very unsatisfying if I did not attempt to address them.”
Bordo begins with the main contemporary source, Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Henry’s first wife Katherine of Aragon. His letters and dispatches are extensive, and invaluable to an understanding of certain elements of the English court. They are also, and perhaps predictably, extremely critical of Anne, who is consistently referred to as ‘the concubine’ and ‘the whore.’ It is from Chapuys that the images of the saintly Queen Katherine, the licentious, seductive Anne, and the besotted, helpless Henry are derived. Chapuys’ extreme dislike and distrust of Anne is relentless, and in fact, he suggests that he nay have assisted in the gathering of charges against her when she fell out of favour; he certainly exulted at her downfall. He can hardly be considered an impartial witness, and yet he has shaped the way we see Anne and interpret her relationship with Henry. As Bordo notes in looking at the numerous historians’ treatment of Anne in biographies and histories of the Tudor era, “It’s virtually standard operating procedure for historians to warn the reader, in an introduction or the beginning of a chapter, about Chapuys’ biases and tendencies to believe the most vicious court gossip about Anne, and then go on to use him liberally and without qualification all the same.”
Setting aside as much of the biases as possible, and examining known facts in the light of what we known about the cultural roles and expectations, the ways that people thought, acted and expressed themselves, and the cultural milieu of the time, which was one of religious and philsophical ferment, with many intellectuals - with whom both Henry and Anne would have been familiar - engaged in questioning the traditions of the church and the proper relationship between God and men, Bordo attempts to reconstruct a probable narrative of their relationship and of Anne’s ultimate fate.
It is one that begins with a deep personal attraction, based in common interests, both intellectual and social (dancing, hunting) on both parts. They met at a time when Henry, deeply concerned that there was something wrong in his marriage that had prevented Katherine from bearing a male heir, was emotionally, and perhaps sexually, detached from Katherine but not yet prepared to set her aside. The arrival at court of a vivacious, European-educated and influenced, intelligent and witty young woman, who loved to dance and ride out and engage in witty conversation, not particularly beautiful but notably different in many ways not only from his older, modest wife but also from most of the other ladies of the court, would have been an irresistible challenge to Henry. Though at first he may have sought an ordinary affair, it is likely that the kind of attraction that developed, one based on personalities as much as sexuality, one that we might in our times call romantic love, in combination with a growing sense on Henry’s part that God was telling him to set Katherine aside, would have led to a desire to marry, to make Anne not just lover but partner.
It did not happen all at once. In the handful of letters from Henry to Anne that survive, despite his courtly protestations of eternal submission and devotion, he is asking her to be his official mistress, not his wife. But Anne’s role probable in bringing to his attention the new thinking about the relationship between kings and the church, which led to the strategy of establishing the Church of England and sidestepping the Pope’s refusal to nullify his marriage to Katherine, brought them closer, and when Anne eventually did become his lover, and soon after became pregnant, marriage was inevitable.
But marriage was the trap that failed Anne. She was the perfect companion, but not raised to be a queen, and not by nature suited to become what Henry and the rest of her world expected in a wife. She was not submissive, she did not behave with humility and did not accept being left out of any part of Henry’s life. And what was irresistible in a mistress was unacceptable in a wife. When she was unable to produce the crucial male heir, it was easy for enemies at court to use the very things Henry had fallen in love with to tarnish her reputation and lead to her death.
Bardo argues that in the end, Anne herself recognised this as the real reason for her downfall: “Anne recognized that she had overstepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge not only her “jealous fancies” but also her failure to show the king “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.” Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the king enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two transgressions, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had overstepped the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression also was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.”
After making this attempt to find a narrative that makes sense of Anne’s journey from a lady-in-waiting at the French court, to the English throne, to the gallows, Bardo turns to the ways that the facts of Anne’s life have been interpreted over the years, to produce images that range from a heartless, manipulative and grasping hedonist to a much maligned and virtuous innocent. One of the most significant factors, certainly for the first few centuries following Anne’s death, was religion; Catholics despised and demonised her, Protestants praised and sanctified her. By the 19th century, she was becoming, to some on the side favorable to her, a tragic heroine, one of the first women to be pictured as such in her own right.
The had always been some recognition of the gendered nature of the trap Anne found herself in, that her intellectual bent and desire to be a partner in ruling, not an appendage, were issues that an aging Henry, losing some of his athletic vigour, resented as a challenge to his supreme authority. But this level of analysis became more common as Anne became a subject of consideration as an agent in the English Reformation. At the same time, however, many historians - mostly men, as the women in this era who wrote about history were generally not granted the name of scholar - seemed content to make of Anne a doomed romantic heroine.
By the mid-twentieth century, Anne is a popular feature of histories, plays, novels, and films, with as many permutations on the key elements of her life and personality as authors. Anne becomes a mystery, an almost blank slate that each author writes their own creation on. Bardo summarises the significant elements of the many portrayals, from Margaret Campell Barnes’ Brief Gaudy Hour and Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of a Thousand Days (the play that was the source for the film starring Genevieve Bujold) to Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne in the television series The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl - all with different perceptions of Anne’s character and motivations.
In many ways, what emerges from Bordo’s analysis is a concept of Anne Boleyn as a ‘woman for all seasons,’ whose actions, because so little exists to give us clues to her interior life, can be interpreted to suit the individual biases and needs of the interpreter. Her recorded actions give the suggestion of a multifaceted and complex individual, neither angel nor devil, victim nor villainess, saint nor whore, and perhaps that is the truest representation of all.