Sovereign Feminine. Matthew Head

effort, it bespeaks a withdrawal from labor. Similarly, the “pretty little hands” of the performer, unsuitable even to the effort of reaching to the octave, emulate those of the aristocrat. They testify to the economic success of the husband or father, and their exaggerated tininess magnifies the gentleman an inch or two beyond his natural size. As a class-emulating activity, female music making represented an appropriation of an ultimately Renaissance courtly ideal of natural grace and ease. Just as Baldassare Castiglione, addressing courtiers of both sexes, had advised that all that involves movement (fencing, dancing, singing, drawing) should be performed as if “without the guiding of any studie or art,” so, in the mid-eighteenth century, a male author admonished young ladies to play music “not like a Business but carelessly, like a diversion.”⁴⁸ The untutored naturalness of the lady’s music was her ultimate artifice.

      PLEASURES OF (NON)CONFORMITY