"Mourning" and the Gender Politics of Cavalier Joy

Abstract

Definitively reading the Chlora of Marvell’s “Mourning” as Mary Kirke, the married mistress of Francis Villiers, this essay utilizes Marvell’s depiction of Kirke in “A Poem Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers” as an intertext for “Mourning.” Focusing on the turn from mourning to rejoicing in both poems, it shows how Marvell’s critique of Cavalier joy in the Villiers elegy, exposing its violent narcissism and incoherent amorousness, informs a similar critique in “Mourning,” made through the figure of a weeping Chlora-Kirke. As I argue, the poem critiques the Cavalier ethos by having male observers project onto the lachrymose Chlora-Kirke their own notion of lusty joy, which had lost its pretensions to military glory by 1648. Such an argument reveals the misogynistic paradox at the heart of the Cavalier ethos: adulterous relations are valorized, but women’s tears are compulsively scrutinized, so Cavalier mistresses are unable to mourn the death of their lovers even as the culture makes it seem possible. The essay concludes by suggesting that Marvell’s depiction of Chlora-Kirke’s tears in “Mourning” informs the poet’s experiments with the gendered dynamics of weeping in his Commonwealth encomia, including “Upon Appleton House” and “The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector,” as he grows tired of negatively associating women with weeping.