Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1 Albert 0. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1984) 9. 2 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality, and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1982) 13. 3 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford, 1987) 5. 4 My usage is also distinct from the pragmatic application of 'feminization' to describe the growing public prominence of women, notably in literary produc tion. See, for instance, Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution (Oxford, 1993) v. It is closer to Laura Brown's description of the 'feminization of ideology', the polemical association of the 'female figure' with 'commodification and trade', but I will want to distinguish between ef(eminization, the negative version of this nexus, which Brown principally addresses, and arguments in favour of progres sive feminization (see below p. 00); Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca and London, 1993) 3. 5 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 9. 6 William Alexander, The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity to the Present Time (London, 1779) I, 107. 7 Katherine B. Clinton, 'Femme et philosophe: enlightenment origins of feminism', Eighteenth-Century Studies 8: 3 (Spring, 1975) 283-99. 8 Sylvana Tomaselli, 'The enlightenment debate on women', History Workshop Journal, 20 (1985) 101-24; 101. 9 In Elizabeth Eger et al., eds, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge, 2001) 239-56. 10 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810 (Chicago and London, 2000) 14. 11 On the first flowering of the discourse of feminization in France, see Carolyn C. Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976); Ian MacLean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Oxford, 1977); and for later develop ments, Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca and London, 1988); Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, 1992); and Dena Goodman, The Republic ofLetters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994). 12 Goodman, Republic of Letters, 8. 13 In addition to J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), see, for instance, J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985) espe cially 48-50; essays by John Robertson and Pocock in Istvan Hort and Michael Ignatieff, eds, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983); and Shelley Burtt, Virtue Transformed: Political Arguments in England 1688-1740 (Cambridge, 1992), who argues for 179 180 Notes to pp. 5-8 the development in the early eighteenth century of 'a privately oriented conception of civic virtue', 35. 14 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven and London, 1986) 10. Barrell here makes reference to Stephen Copley's positing of a 'bourgeois' humanism in Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1984) 3-7. 15 Lycurgus, Cato and Lucretia have in common their connection with efforts to cleanse the body politic of tyranny, corruption or effeminacy. Further reference to these narratives will be made elsewhere in this text, but special mention should be made here to Ian Donaldson's valuable study The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford, 1982), which emphasises the dual private and public dimensions of the Lucretia story. After her rape by Sextus Tarquinius and subsequent suicide, her kinsman Lucius Junius Brutus swore vengeance on the Tarquins who reigned as tyrants in Rome, and led a popular uprising against them which resulted in the reinstatement of the Roman republic. Donaldson suggests that the two acts of the drama, the sexual and the political, are sepa rated in certain eighteenth-century renditions, notably Clarissa; in chapter 5, I shall argue to the contrary. 16 On the vocabulary of civic humanism, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, ix. 17 John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollet (Baltimore and London, 1977) 75. The more recent The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation by Christopher J. Berry (Cambridge, 1994) contains a rather less incisive account of classical and eighteenth-century ideas. For a brief overview, see Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, 'The rise and fall of the luxury debates', in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003) 7-27. 18 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989) 3-4. 19 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, vii-viii. 20 The essays in Mary Peace and Vincent Quinn, eds, Luxurious Sexualities, Textual Practice 11: 3 ( 199 7) and in Berg and Eger, eds, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, suggest a momentum towards re-evaluation. 21 Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, 114; see also 99-100, 235, and in Machiavellian Moment, 37, 41, 96. 22 The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (London, 1900) 216-17, cit. Gutwirth, Twilight of the Goddesses, 4. 23 Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth Century Learning (London and New York, 1993) 9. 24 For a summary of his thesis, which has been put forward in several articles, see Ronald Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago and London, 1998) 3-18. For dis cussions of the limited validity of his characterization of 'effeminate' man, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 166-1800 (Harlow, 2001) especially 144-7; and the essays by the same author, 'An effeminate or efficient nation? Masculinity and 18th-century social commentary', Textual Practice, 11:3 (1997) 429-44; and 'Men about town: representations of foppery and masculinity in early eighteenth-century urban society', in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York, 1997) 31-57. Notes to pp. 9-12 181 25 Michael McKeon, 'Historicizing patriarchy: the emergence of gender difference in England, 1660-1760', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28: 3 (1995) 295-322; 320. 26 See also Carter, Men, chapter 4; and G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago and London, 1992) chapter 3, both of which range more generally through the century. Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven and London, 1995) chapter 5, covers three centuries, but with no purchase on the socio-political con notations of 'effeminacy' deriving from the classical era. On effeminacy and franco phobia, see Michele Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York, 1996) which includes a brief but valuable introduction to the concept and a review of recent work on it, 4-10. 27 Williams, Pope, 102, 103. 28 Ibid., 36-7. She notes that in The Iliad Paris's effeminacy is based on his affinity with women, 97-9. 29 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1990) 124. 30 Ibid., 123. 31 Williams, Pope, 111-14, cf. 47 on the Cyprians in Pope's Homer. 32 Ibid., 115, referring to Pope, Iliad, XII, 455.; cf. xii, 381-5. 33 Virtue, Commerce, and History, 114. 34 Laqueur, Making Sex, 5-6. 35 Ibid., 6. Erin Mackie has suggested that already, at the start of the century, Addison and Steele were preparing the way for this ideological transition; Market a Ia Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in 'The Tatler' and 'The Spectator' (Baltimore and London, 1997) 164-202. 36 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 7. 37 Lawrence E. Klein, 'Gender, conversation and the public sphere in the early eighteenth-century England', in Judith Still and Michael Worton, eds, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester and New York, 1993) 100-15; 104. For other work challenging the idea of separate spheres, see Amanda Vickery, 'Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history', The Historical Journal 36: 2 (1993) 383-414; Lawrence E. Klein, 'Gender and the public/private distinction in the eighteenth century: some questions about evidence and analytical procedure', Eighteenth-Century Studies 29: 1 (1995) 97-109; Daria Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, eds, Shifting the Boundaries: Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1995); Paula Backsheider, ed., The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England (London, 1996); Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Novel: Women's Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington, 2000). 38 'The Parisian salon does not seem to have been imitated in London until after 1750 (though it is unclear whether that impression reflects historical actuality or simply our historical ignorance), and even then salons functioned differently in the two capitals'; Klein, 'Gender', 103. 39 Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eigtheenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990) 121-50. 40 Gary Kelly, 'General introduction', in Gary Kelly, gen. ed., Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 6 vols. (London, 1999) ix-liv, especially xlv-xlviii, and 'Bluestocking feminism', in Eger eta!., eds, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 163-80. 182 Notes to pp. 12-15 41 Evidence of the discourse of CIVIC humanism in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) can be found passim in her praise for 'masculine virtue' and her remarks on the effeminacy of professional soldiers and the effects of consumerism.