Jane Barker - Gender Issues

Gender Issues

Barker’s literary works often involve gender relationships that intrigue literary critics. A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) involves conflicts between the two genders, and the sufferings of separation between lovers.

The theme of celibacy appeared previously in Exilius (1715), which took on the theme of gender relationships in quite different terms: the heroine, princess Galecia, is a highly fashionable character to the seventeenth century aristocratic woman of England and France. A celibate woman, she belongs to the tradition of female martial valor and enjoys her freedom from men.

In particular, Barker’s Poetical Recreations contains Barker’s challenge of the status-quo of female subordination. The collection of poems offers Barker’s own criticism on gender issues, exemplified by the poem "An Invitation to my Friends at Cambridge," which satirizes the exclusion of woman from intellectual life, as the speaker of the poem innocently decides that the "Tree of Knowledge" would not grow in the "cold Clime" of a woman’s body, since the humoral theory suggests that the female sex is cooler and moister than the male sex.

In "To Ovid’s Heroines in his Epistles," Barker expresses her grievances with Ovid’s Epistles, Translated by Several Hands (1680), a text which exhibits feminine abjection, describing the sorrows and despairs of abandoned women; by contrast, Barker’s poem aims to link the idea of dignity with independence, as evidenced in her medical poem "On the Apothecary’s Filing My Bills amongst the Doctors." In this poem, the speaker celebrates her dignified role as a "fam’d Physician," a woman who is emotionally and financially independent. In a mixture of humour and zeal, Barker’s character could "almost bless" a previous lover, who has abandoned her, since this action has now freed her from being the subordinated figure in the relationship who only studied "how to love and please" her partner.