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Elizabeth Carter's Legacy: Friendship and Ethics

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Elizabeth Carter's Legacy: Friendship and Ethics Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Spring 4-20-2011 Elizabeth Carter's Legacy: Friendship and Ethics Afag S. Fazlollahi Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Recommended Citation Fazlollahi, Afag S., "Elizabeth Carter's Legacy: Friendship and Ethics." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/69 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. LIZABETH CARTER’S LEGACY: FRIENDSHIP AND ETHICS by AFAG FAZLOLLAHI Under the direction of Malinda Snow ABSTRACT “Elizabeth Carter’s Legacy: Friendship and Ethics” examines the written evidence about the relationships between Elizabeth Carter and her father, Dr. Nicolas Carter; Catherine Talbot; Sir William Pulteney (Lord Bath); and Samuel Johnson to explain how intellectual and personal relationships may become the principal ethical source of human happiness. Based on their own set of moral values, such as intellectual and individual liberty and equality, the relationships between Carter and her friends challenged eighteenth-century traditional norms of human relationships. The primary sources of this study, Carter’s poetry and prose, including her letters, present the poet’s experience of intellectual and individual friendship, reflecting Aristotle’s ethics, specifically his moral teaching that views friendship as a human good contributing to human happiness—to the chief human good. Carter’s poems devoted to her friends, such as Dr. Carter, Talbot, Montagu, Lord Bath, as well as her “A Dialogue” between Body and Mind, demonstrate her ethical legacy, her specific moral principles that elevated human relationships and human life. Carter’s discussion of human relationships introduces the moral necessity of ethics in human life. INDEX WORDS: Elizabeth Carter, Nicolas Carter, Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Sir William Pulteney (Lord Bath), Hester Chapone, Human Relationships, Father-Daughter Relationships, Intellectual Friendship, Marriage, Ethics, Virtue, Bluestockings, Stoicism, Epictetus, Letters, Sermons, Poems, Rambler, 2 ELIZABETH CARTER’S LEGACY: FRIENDSHIP AND ETHICS by AFAG FAZLOLLAHI A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2011 3 Copyright by Afag Fazlollahi 2011 4 ELIZABETH CARTER’S LEGACY: FRIENDSHIP AND ETHICS by AFAG FAZLOLLAHI Committee Chair: Malinda Snow Committee: Lynee Gaillet Murray Brown Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University April 2011 5 To my husband and friend, Bijan 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my committee chair Dr. Malinda Snow, whose professional attention and support contributed significantly to the completion of this dissertation. Special thanks to Dr. Snow for being patient with me in reading my drafts and making me a better thinker and a better writer. I would like to thank the members of my doctoral committee, Dr. Lynee Gaillet and Dr. Murray Brown, for their input and assistance. I would like to thank my friend Patricia Chapman for encouraging words and expertise. I have to thank Dr. Tamara Gosta, my dear friend, who was the first reader of my drafts. Tamara was always there for me to discuss my ideas and writings. I had her support at every stage of my writing process. 7 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 INTRODUCTION 9 Chapter One: A Father-Daughter Relationship: A Principal Source of Moral Values 23 1. Introduction 23 2. Dealing with Facts: “They were Father and Daughter and Trusted Friends” 33 2. Elizabeth Carter to Her Father 41 3. Letters: Reflection of Friendship 55 4. “Nobody Knows What May Happen; I never said I would not marry” 59 5. A Husband and Wife Relationship: An Ethical Issue 69 Chapter Two: Behind the Lines of Poetry: Elizabeth Carter and Intellectual Friendship 81 1. Introduction 81 2. Defining Friendship: Intellectual and Individual Freedom 84 2. To Her Friends: Catherine Talbot, Elizabeth Montagu, and the Earl of Bath 92 Chapter Three: Elizabeth Carter: Friendship and Letters 129 1. Introduction: Letters—Stories of Friendship 129 2. Dealing with Letters 131 3. Friendship and the Traditions of the Century 134 4. Individual Liberty in Epictetus’ Teaching 141 5. Writing Letters—Experiencing Friendship 145 6. The Carter-Talbot Relationship 152 Chapter Four: Elizabeth Carter and Samuel Johnson: Colleagues and Friends 181 1. Introduction 181 8 2. They Were Destined to be Intellectual Friends 191 3. Serving Community: Intellectual and Ethical Contributions 200 CONCLUSION 213 WORKS CITED 219 9 INTRODUCTION What can be said of so obscure an individual as I am? And what do you think the world will care about me? Elizabeth Carter (Preface to Letters, 7)1 Modern Western civilization and particularly its set of moral values are based upon ideas and institutions founded by ancient classical philosophies and developed during later periods of Western history, especially during the Enlightenment. The crucial role of literature in this process should not be underestimated. This study focuses on the ethical legacy one of the eighteenth-century intellectuals, Elizabeth Carter (1717-1806), who presented her moral principles and faith in her poems and prose, including letters. Through these writings, Carter contributed significantly to the process of identifying lasting and important aspects of Western ethics. Among those moral principles, the approach to the role of women in society becomes the central concern of eighteenth-century women intellectuals. Even the writer’s nephew, Montagu Pennington, who generally upholds the traditional patriarchal view of women, addresses Carter’s belief “that women had not their proper station in society, and that their mental powers were not rated sufficiently high” (Memoirs, 447-448). For centuries, women’s “station in society” was regulated by traditions according to which women were not equal to men; and ethically, it was acceptable for eighteenth-century British society to treat women as inferior to men. Certain historical circumstances—social, cultural, political, or economic—become the main reasons for the practice of this particular kind of relationship between male and female members of a society. However, this inequality also results from the absence of friendship between males and females, and it is a set of moral values that failed to encourage friendship between men and women. Throughout the history of Western ethics, the significance of friendship in founding a !Montagu Pennington quotes Elizabeth Carter in his Preface to the first volume of A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot (1809). 10 moral society was discussed over and over again,2 but this belief in friendship between members of society did not expand to male and female relationships. I argue that Carter’s entire life, devoted to friendship, as well as her ideas and principles of friendship, should be viewed as her reaction to the absence of friendship in human relationships. Carter challenges the traditional approach to the status of women in a community and demonstrates a possibility of a different lifestyle for women. Carter ignores social restrictions by exercising her rights to study and then to become a well-known Greek scholar, a professional poet, and of course, the best friend to many eighteenth-century intellectuals. Carter’s own image elevated women’s position in eighteenth-century England. Her life-style proved to her contemporaries that women too could devote their lives to learning, and that the set of traditional ethical principles, developed over centuries to regulate a woman’s status in her immediate family as well as in society could be questioned. Of course, there were other professional female writers, female intellectuals, such as Katherine Philips (1632-1664), Aphra Behn (1640-1689), Anne Finch (1661-1720), Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674-1737), Mary Astell (1666-1731), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), or Carter’s contemporaries, like Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800) and Catherine Talbot (1741- 1770). However, Carter’s life experience is an unusual case. She is a woman of high status who managed to become one of the most respected Greek scholars of the century. She consciously rejected marriage and chose to live independently “in a century when marriage was considered universally desirable for women—when marriage was almost their only guarantee of respectability” (Claudia Thomas 27). Unlike most women of her circle, she achieved a satisfying life not through marriage, but through learning, writing, and through her relationships with other intellectuals of the time. "In the next section, I will refer to certain examples of these discussions. 11 By choosing life without marriage, Carter challenges not only traditions and customs, but also herself as an individual: it was extremely difficult for a woman in the eighteenth century to build an independent life. Such a challenging lifestyle does not go without physical and intellectual pain. By embracing all possible actual difficulties, all inevitable moral and
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