III.
GRAPHIC WITIII.
GRAPHIC WIT
M' Lady's "Spots"
If the Mathys imitation-Elzevier ornament of 1670 suggested to Mary Villiers a butterfly and swords, her choice in pseudonym can now be explained. "Ephelia" apparently derives from the Greco-Latin ephelis (spots, marks), as the editors of Kissing The Rod suggested in 1988. But within this new context of Lady Mary's pet name and the butterfly shape of her book's device, it follows that "ephelia" would not translate as "freckles," as Kissing The Rod speculated, but rather "spots," being the decorative speckled patterning on butterfly wings. (M' Lady's "Spots.") As my case goes, Mary Villiers, who as a Catholic convert and a noblewoman classically-trained by Brian Duppa (Bishop of Salisbury, no less), surely knew Latin in the 1670's, and exploited the root of "ephelia" to identify herself as 'papillon ephelia,' the colorful butterfly of the Stuart court (Image 8). While I have not as yet found "ephelis" or "ephelia" in Muffet or in any other seventeenth-century entomological text, I did locate "ephelia" in a classic nineteenth-century text on insects compiled by Dr J. Rudolph Schiner. This entomologist lists "ephelia" in 1864 as the name of a particular order of diptera (two-winged flies) (Type 106, p. 19; Neauve II: 236). Finding the word ephelia in a major entomological source was a significant find, as it provided hard evidence of the appropriateness of the word ephelia to the descriptive language of insects, be they diptera or lepidoptera.
But why would Mary Villiers use a pseudonym at all, in view of her high connections and protected position at Court? As many as four explanations seem reasonable. First, she used a nom-de-plume as a shield against aggressive ridicule of women writers, which marked a fair amount of the literature of her day. Attacks against 'scribbling women' during the second half of the seventeenth century is a subject feminist scholars have energetically examined these last few decades. Readers have only to consult the pages of John Harold Wilson's collection of Restoration court satire (Ohio, 1976) to appreciate the coarseness of most of these antifeminist attacks.
But there were others reasons, closer her heart. By 1678, when Lady Mary made the important decision at the age of fifty-six to go public with her writings, the Villiers name had been publicly smeared. "Villiers" had lost most of its original luster due to the shameful public behavior and political missteps of Mary's younger brother. George Villiers, the second Buckingham, was sent to the Tower in 1666, 1667, and 1676. In 1668, he had killed a man, his mistress's husband, Lord Shrewsbury, in one of the goriest love-duels of the century. In 1678, Buckingham left the Court in disgrace, stripped of all offices and posts. It makes sense that a sister of such a man, especially a sister with ambitions to literary fame, would not wish to publish her work under the Villiers family name.
Religious issues also played a role in this decision. Mary Villiers, herself a Catholic convert, was closely linked to Catholic circles all of her life: she was the daughter and daughter-surrogate of Catholic women; she also married a Catholic in 1664. The creation of a literary alter-ego was a protective shield against ferocious anti-Catholic sentiment in London during the 1670s and 1680s. The horrible public execution of several Catholic peers during the Popish Plot hysteria (the execution of Catholic bishops would not have been Mary's first concern) would have been a constant reminder of the vulnerability of Catholic aristocrats in seventeenth-century Protestant London. One of her Howard in-laws was executed at this time. Finally, there was a simple artistic reason for the pseudonym: the more hidden the writer, the greater the fame.
With my decoding of the graphic wit on the title-page of Female Poems...by Ephelia (1679) now in place, I believe that we can appreciate the page's masterful display of the chief characteristic of the pseudonymous personality: the dual impulse to conceal and reveal identity. The page's pseudonym is meant to conceal the identity of the book's author, of course; but to the alert eye of a reader familiar with the personalities of the Stuart court and the graphic wit of many seventeenth-century English and Continental title-pages, the title-page of Female Poems whispers the name of a certain duchess. (1682 title-page.)
Inspired by her petname of the 1630s, Mary Villiers devised both a pseudonym and personal logo for her special book project of 1679. These were amusing covers which her small coterie, sworn to strictest secrecy, surely would have recognized. Most butterflies, fragile to the eye, yet capable, in some species, of great migrations, live but a few weeks; this curious specimen contrived an ingenious plan for immortality and fame. And when she made herself the dedicatee of her own book, Mary Villiers delivered the ingenious stroke that kept researchers fumbling for centuries. (Self-dedications.) Her public metamorphosis in 1679 from coterie "Butterfly" to the publishing writer, "Ephelia," suitably occurred in spring: for this was the season of her birth (30 March 1622), the season of the butterfly's emergence from the chrysalis, and the season in which her book was issued (Easter-term, 1679; Edward Arber, Term-Catalogues I:150). Dr John Heppner, Director of the Association of Tropical Lepidoptera, in examining the entomological arguments of my case, responded in a letter of 11 March 1996, "Thanks to your project, for the next special butterfly or moth I need to name, I shall propose 'Ephelia' in honor of your poet." In the spring of 2000, Dr. Heppner found this special moth (Mulvihill, TLS, 1 Sept. 2000, 17). (Appendix E.)
