―THE ALPHABET OF SENSE‖: REDISCOVERING THE RHETORIC OF

WOMEN‘S INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY

by

BRANDY SCHILLACE

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Dissertation Adviser: Dr. Christopher Flint

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2010

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of

______Brandy Lain Schillace______candidate for the __English PhD______degree *.

(signed)_____Christopher Flint______(chair of the committee) ______Athena Vrettos______

______William R. Siebenschuh______

______Atwood D. Gaines______

______

______

(date) ___November 12, 2009______

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

ii

Table of Contents

Preface ―The Alphabet of Sense‖……………………………………...1

Chapter One Writers and ―Rhetors‖: Female Educationalists in Context…..8

Chapter Two Mechanical Habits and Female Machines: Arguing for the Autonomous Female Self…………………………………….42

Chapter Three ―Reducing the Sexes to a Level‖: Revolutionary Rhetorical Strategies and Proto-Feminist Innovations…………………..71

Chapter Four Intellectual Freedom and the Practice of Restraint: Didactic Fiction versus the Conduct Book ……………………………….…..101

Chapter Five The Inadvertent Scholar: Eliza Haywood‘s Revision of the Richardsonian Heroine……………………………………...138

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………....179

Appendix A Chronology…………………………………………………196 Appendix B Figures 1-4………………………………………………….201

References. ……………………………………………………………...204

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List of Figures (To be found in Appendix B)

FIGURE 1………………………………………………………………………….201 Extraction of child from uterus with forceps, Tab. XVI. Smellie, William. A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery, with a view to illustrate a treatise on that subject, and collection of cases. London: [s.n], 1754. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

FIGURE 2………………………………………………………………………….202 Tab IV: ―Foetus in utero‖ Hunter, William. The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures, by William Hunter, physician extraordinary to the Queen, professor of anatomy in the Royal Academy, and Fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies. Birmingham: By John Baskerville, Sold in London by S. Baker and G. Leigh, in York- Street; T. Cadell in the Strand; D. Wilson and G. Nicol, opposite York-Buildings; and J. Murray, in Fleet-Street, 1774. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

FIGURE 3………………………………………………………………………….203 Tab. XVI. Smellie, William. A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery, : with a view to illustrate a treatise on that subject, and collection of cases. London: [s.n], 1754. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

FIGURE 4………………………………………………………………………….203 Chart, demonstrating rhetorical progression.

iv

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my dissertation adviser, Dr. Christopher Flint, and my dissertation committee, Drs. Athena Vrettos (English Dept.), William Siebenschuh (English Dept.), and Atwood Gaines (Anthropology Dept.) for their help and support throughout the process. Their time and attention has been much appreciated.

I would also like to acknowledge a number of readers who kindly offered feedback and inspiration: Nadia El-Shaawari (CWRU), Dr. Robin Inboden (Wittenberg University), Stephanie McClure (CWRU) and Anne Ryan (CWRU).

Finally, I would like to recognize the invaluable support provided by the Baker Nord Center, the Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fund and the Arthur Adrian Dissertation Fellowship. I would also like to acknowledge and thank the Special Collections Library at Glasgow University, Glasgow, UK and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Oxford, UK for access to their collections.

To all, thank you.

v

List of Abbreviations (in order of appearance in the text)

PWS A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies, Jane Barker

ICM Instruction of a Christian Maide, Juan Luis Vives

ERAEG Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, Bathsua Makin

IED Instructions for the Education of Daughters, François Fénelon

ST Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke

SP A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Mary Astell

EDFS Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, Judith Drake

LD The Ladies Defence, Lady Mary Chudleigh

SACV The Strange Adventure of Count de Vinevil, Penelope Aubin

LMB The Life of Madam de Beaumount, Penelope Aubin

BT The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Eliza Haywood

TS The Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

vi

―The Alphabet of Sense‖: Rediscovering the Rhetoric of

Women‘s Intellectual Liberty

ABSTRACT

by

BRANDY SCHILLACE

“The Alphabet of Sense”: Rediscovering the Rhetoric of Women‟s Intellectual Liberty redresses a critical blind spot in current scholarship on early British women‘s writing on female education. In the prevailing critical paradigm, only treatises directly addressing women‘s rights have been considered part of the ―feminist‖ tradition. The result has been the neglect of authors who do not produce self-conscious feminist discourse, but subtly merge proto-feminist goals with a more conservative discursive approach. This neglect has led to a perceived ―gap‖ between the works of an early writer such as Mary Astell (educationalist and proto-feminist) and later acknowledged feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. For many critics, 1740 marks the point after which the history of feminist educational reform begins, an approach that elides seventeenth-century polemical, rhetorical and narrative projects, and overlooks radical explorations of (and alternatives to) developing ideological constructs. This project examines the rhetorical landscape of this earlier period in order to explore proto-feminist responses to educational inequality—and reassess the frequently politic method adopted by educationalists such as Astell and her contemporaries, Bathsua Makin, Judith Drake and Mary Chudleigh. By resisting narrow conceptual categories for proto-feminist contributions, this work recuperates early modern women‘s rhetorical productions and their use of innovative strategies that do not merely mimic those of men. Additionally, it traces those strategies in eighteenth-century fiction where claims for women‘s moral and intellectual equality were employed by a rising generation of female fiction writers. In charting this historical process, the first part of the dissertation offers a detailed exploration of proto-feminist rhetoric, while the second part demonstrates the transition (and transmission) of this rhetoric in later fictional forms, offering a corrective to the supposed hundred-year silence in pro-woman rhetoric between Astell and Wollstonecraft. The Alphabet of Sense thus contributes to the current rhetorical and feminist reclamation of early women writers; coupling rhetoric with feminism enriches both concepts, allowing us to see these authors in their proper light as pivotal advocates for women‘s intellectual advancement.

vii

“The Alphabet of Sense”: Rediscovering the Rhetoric of Women’s Intellectual Liberty

Brandy Lain Schillace ______

Preface “The Alphabet of Sense”

…Command of both Words and Sense […are] Advantages the Education of Boys deprives them of, who drudge away the Vigour of their Memories at Words, useless ever after to most of them, and at seventeen or eighteen are to begin their Alphabet of Sense, and are but where the Girls were at nine or ten. — Judith Drake, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex

I have chosen to title this project ―The Alphabet of Sense,‖ a christening borrowed from an obscure 1696 polemical tract. The phrase was coined by Judith Drake, a relatively unknown writer from the late seventeenth century, and refers to an education in social relations and the maturity of common sense. As the designation for a reclamation of female rhetoricians and educationalists, however, this choice of title requires some explanation. Drake‘s polemic (which I will treat more specifically in Chapter Three) essentially questions the primary importance of a ―masculine‖ education in Greek and

Latin, suggesting instead that a woman‘s introduction to society, to manners, and to the conversation of her elders teaches her the invaluable ―alphabet of sense‖ as the core of rational understanding. Young men, by contrast, are thrust into the wide world ―without a

Compass to steer by.‖1 In Drake‘s account, women are presented not only as gaining wisdom more quickly than men, but also by a different—and inherently ―feminine‖— means: the inculcation of conversational rhetoric (also called sermo).2 Drake thus exonerates a female form of education, and further demonstrates its efficacy by making

1 Judith Drake, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex. In a letter to a lady. Written by a lady. (The fourth edition, corrected. London, 1721), 52. Hereafter cited in the text as (EDFS p) except when refering to the dedication, which records no pagination. 2 A more full description of sermo and its counterpart, contentio, appears in chapter one. 1 revisions to—and even reinventing—a more masculine rhetorical form.3 Drake‘s innovative means of ―reducing the sexes to a level‖ (EDFS Dedication) is radical, and her use of rhetorical strategies skillful, yet, she—like many of her female educationalist contemporaries—remains generally neglected.

One way of familiarizing Drake is by situating her in a group of female advocates surrounding a better-known figure: Mary Astell. Astell‘s published discourse on marriage, her revisions of John Locke and her own political works appear more often in rhetorical and feminist histories, though she, too, is best known through comparisons to another later writer. Often coupled with Mary Wollstonecraft, Astell serves as a kind of marginal and conservative progenitor, despite the fact that Drake and Astell—along with

Bathsua Makin and Lady Mary Chudleigh—published pro-woman polemics a hundred years before A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. My own interest in these writers resulted from this tacit recognition of their importance; having seen Astell‘s name associated with Wollstonecraft‘s in critical works, I began to wonder, not why she was mentioned, but why so little was said. I began researching women‘s issues and eighteenth-century pedagogy, but though I had little difficulty gaining access to primary sources, I found a paucity of critical materials on these early women writers. Current critical reception seemed, strangely, to parallel contemporary dismissive responses; these writers were women, and as women, they were not rhetoricians. Similarly, because in many respects they were conservative, religious, and modest in their demands, they were not feminists. Even more inclusive rhetorical reclamation projects tend to be narrowly

3 Drake, I will argue in Chapter Three, reinvents the rhetorical form of querelles des femmes, a series of arguments that pitted examples of exceptional women against ―bad‖ and ―inconstant‖ females. This traditional form used exceptions to prove the rule, and so was (in its original form) unhelpful to projects for women‘s education. 2 genre-focused, so that writers like Chudleigh, whose polemic is offered as a narrative poem, receives much less attention than a ―clearly‖ polemical writer such as Astell. In falling outside of recognized categorical boundaries, these rhetorical productions seem to garner less interest, and even less respect—and this, ironically, returns us to Judith

Drake‘s ―alphabet of sense.‖ Despite its pragmatic usefulness in providing ―Command of both Words and Sense‖ (EDFS 51), the conversational, social education allowed to young women is considered by Drake‘s assumed audience ―too feminine‖ to be worthwhile.

Drake‘s argument and the arguments of Astell, Makin and Chudleigh do not deny women‘s place in the domestic sphere; rather, they seek to promote it, and by doing so to promote the value of a woman‘s rational, self-educated and ―liberated‖ mind.

This dissertation, then, has two objectives, both of which seek to vindicate the

―alphabet of sense‖ and to demonstrate the arc of proto-feminist discourse from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. First, it examines the rhetorical landscape of the period (including medical and educational rhetoric) to examine and categorize the frequently politic strategies of female advocates like Astell, Makin, Drake and Chudleigh.

Second, it traces those strategies into eighteenth-century women‘s fiction where claims for moral and intellectual equality were adopted by a rising generation of female fiction writers. The “Alphabet of Sense‖: Rediscovering the Rhetoric of Women‟s Intellectual

Liberty thus explores these contributions and connects female educationalists to those acknowledged ―feminists‖ of the 1790s, for whom they have at times served as distant, reserved and even passive predecessors.

Chapter One, Writers and “Rhetors”: Female Educationalists in Context, more fully addresses the limitations of current rhetorical and feminist reclamation projects,

3 those studies which, while seeking to include lesser-known rhetorical voices, nonetheless recreate categorical exclusion. This chapter defines terms and introduces new ones, notably proto-feminism and female advocacy, to replace the more problematic and exclusionary ―feminism.‖ Chapter One also maps the rhetorical landscape of pedagogical discourse in the late seventeenth century, describing the works of Locke, Bernard Lamy,

René Descartes and François Fénelon among others, with whom the female educationalists engage and against whom they position their own pedagogical concepts.

A key term for pedagogues in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was habituation, but this concept had radically different pedagogical outcomes for men and women. Chapter Two, Mechanical Habits and Female Machines: Arguing for the

Autonomous Female Self, continues the examination of seventeenth-century rhetoric by revealing the relationship between ―Custom‖ and legitimation in the works of male pedagogues. By analyzing the discourse of ―mechanical‖ habits, I reveal not only the pedagogical frameworks but also the biological and medical assumptions that privileged behavior over reason in the education of women. This chapter also explores concepts of the ―mechanical mother‖ and limitations on women‘s intellectual liberty based upon their

―reproductive destinies‖4 in order to highlight the mindlessness, transparency, and passivity of mechanized women.

Building upon Chapters One and Two, my third chapter,“Reducing the Sexes to a

Level”: Revolutionary Rhetorical Strategies and Proto-Feminist Innovations, catalogues proto-feminist response to their male contemporaries. This chapter is important thematically but also methodologically, as I introduce four rhetorical strategies and their

4 Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Qtd. in Bonnie Blackwell, "Tristram Shandy and the Theatre of the Mechanical Mother," ELH 68, no. 1 (2001): 81-133, 90. 4 permutations that are subsequently applied in Chapters Four and Five. For each of these strategies—the rhetoric of revolution (and empire), the rhetoric of reversal, the rhetoric of evasion and deflection, and the rhetoric of accommodation—I demonstrate not only the dialectic engagement between female educationalists and their male counterparts, but also the flexibility of proto-feminist innovations. As female educationalists argued for intellectual emancipation, they also engaged in a gradual redefining of rhetoric to establish their own purchase on the emerging discourse about human nature and individual rights.

Chapters Four and Five offer an application of my methodology, as I demonstrate the continuance of female educationalist strategies in the eighteenth century. Chapter

Four, Intellectual Freedom and the Practice of Restraint: Didactic Fiction versus the

Conduct Book, scrutinizes the period before 1740, when educational polemics were largely replaced by conduct books on the one hand and didactic fiction on the other.

Though critics often consider the conduct book as the primary educational tool for women, this chapter demonstrates that didactic fictions by Jane Barker and Penelope

Aubin inherit the educationalists‘ discourse and employ their strategies as a means of enlarging a woman‘s mental empire. Conduct manuals, by contrast, follow the more constraining rhetorical mandates of seventeenth-century pedagogues. By examining

Barker‘s politics of apology and Aubin‘s reversal of roles in the fashioning of selfhood, I demonstrate a transmission of the ―alphabet of sense‖ from polemic to fiction.

Chapter Five, The Inadvertent Scholar: Eliza Haywood‟s Revision of the

Richardsonian Heroine, continues to explore the competing rhetorical concepts of intellectual freedom and behavioral restraint. Rather than perceiving Haywood‘s shift

5 from the amatory to the didactic mode as a capitulation based on the marketability of

Richardson‘s Pamela and Clarissa, I demonstrate her persistent focus on mental acuity and self-reflection as the mark of character. Betsy Thoughtless‘ (re)education as a properly modest female figure is best understood not as a surrender to patriarchy but as the establishment of her honor and worth as a female self. As an ―inadvertent scholar,‖

Betsy gains experience as an autonomous individual through complex strategies of deflection and evasion, while reinventing the educationalist concept of human ―rights‖ through the rights of a wife. The continued popularity of Haywood‘s works into the latter part of the eighteenth century serves as a useful bridge between early writers like Astell and those ―domestic fiction‖ authors of latter mid-century—a process I continue in the conclusion with a brief examination of Frances Burney‘s 1778 novel, Evelina.

Throughout this work, I have sought to populate the supposed hundred-year lacuna between educationalists such as Astell and Drake and late eighteenth-century

―feminists‖ such as Mary Wollstonecraft. I have also endeavored to reveal a female legacy of rhetoricians, educationalists and fiction writers who participated in the creation and development of genre-bending rhetorical strategies. In this work, I seek to extend the current rhetorical and feminist-historian reclamation of early modern women writers by coupling rhetoric with feminism, opening up both concepts to (re)discover early advocates for women‘s intellectual opportunities.

6

Chapter One Writers and “Rhetors”: Female Educationalists in context

Let such therefore as deny us the improvement of our Intellectuals, either take up his Paradox, who said, That Women have no Souls; which at this time a day, when they are allow‘d to Brutes, wou‘d be as unphilosophical as it is unmannerly; or else let them permit us to cultivate and improve them. —Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part 1

Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner best calculated to promote their happiness? —Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Dedication

Though writing one hundred years apart, Mary Astell (educationalist and proto-feminist) and Mary Wollstonecraft pursued remarkably similar discursive agendas. Both writers confront a rhetoric that privileges men as rational and free-willed, and both attack the apparent paradox that grants such privileges on the basis of gender. But though their names are sometimes coupled in feminist histories, Astell repeatedly appears as the less prominent progenitor, a foremother who, shadowlike, remains ensconced in the traditional, religious and ―unfeminist‖ context in which she operated—unmoored from women before her and disconnected from those who came after. Wollstonecraft, by contrast, often figures as the ―first feminist,‖ a trailblazer whose polemics and political stance on the rights of women seem to have sprung Athena-like from the strictures of late eighteenth-century society. The century between them—though the supposed scene of several ideological and narrative ―rises‖—seems to begin, for many critics, in the 1740s.

Such approaches truncate polemical, rhetorical and narrative projects birthed in the seventeenth century and expurgate or abridge the sometimes radical explorations of and alternatives to developing ideological constructs. Yet the period before 1740, particularly the years between educational discourses like that of Astell and didactic fiction published

7 prior to Richardson‘s Pamela or Clarissa, witnessed enormous changes in the perception of individual human rights, offering a transitional moment in which customary boundaries could be tested. Women, and particularly women educationalists, seized this historical moment to re-examine and even redefine the concept of intellectual liberty, establishing a foothold not only for individual rights but for a reflective female selfhood.

This project, through a focus on the rhetorical innovations of such women, examines the historiography of proto-feminism before the mid eighteenth-century—not by perceiving women writers as unusual and isolated feminists, but by tracing the rhetoric of the liberated female mind through the supposed hundred-year lacuna that separates Astell and Wollstonecraft.

Though popular in their day (and in some cases prolific), female educationalists are still generally considered marginal figures. They fit neither into histories of the novel nor into histories of rhetoric, a discipline traditionally defined as public, contentious and dominated by men. And yet, these women produced works that received both accolades and censure, and which were reprinted, imitated, and even lampooned during and after their lifetimes. Many of them also served as central figures around whom other female writers and advocates gathered. Educationalist Bathsua Makin, for instance, had a long- standing correspondence with Anna Maria van Schurman, and acted as tutor to Princess

Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. Like Makin, Astell corresponded with notable female intellectuals, including Elizabeth Elstob, Mary Wortley Montagu and contemporary educationalists Judith Drake and Lady Mary Chudleigh. These ―female worthies‖ (as they were sometimes considered) also engaged with the male rhetoricians and pedagogues who figure most prominently in the very rhetorical histories that exclude

8 women. Makin‘s revolutionary polemic, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of

Gentlewomen (1673), entered into discourse with the educational theories of humanists like John Amos Comenius, Thomas More, Erasmus, and Juan Luis Vives.5 Mary Astell, writing two decades later, responded to writers like John Locke and François Fénelon; her 1694 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (which suggested an intellectual female retreat) identified with both Christian Platonist and Cartesian thought—while retaining a concomitance with humanist concepts of the soul. Judith Drake‘s Essay in Defence of the

Female Sex [sic] (1696) engaged with popular querelles des femmes discourse, and Mary

Chudleigh‘s poem The Ladies Defence [sic] (1701) responded to John Sprint‘s tyrannical

Bridewoman‟s Counselor. Each of these works addressed the pedagogical limitations for women, each demonstrated the paradoxical rhetoric of culture and nature in arguments against women‘s intellectual liberty, and each established innovative means of responding to that unreasonable and often contradictory tradition. And yet, with the exception, perhaps, of Mary Astell (who began receiving renewed attention in the early

1990s), these women are largely unknown.

It is true that studies of rhetoric have striven, recently, to become more inclusive,6 recognizing the fainter strokes of female pens in ―silent collaborations,‖ under pseudonyms and in secondary and fleeting accounts by men.7 But this inclusiveness has not yet resulted in sustained critical inquiry for many of these writers, and even then,

5 Paula A Barbour, ―Introduction‖ An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen [1673], (Los Angeles: The Augustan Reprint Society, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California Press, 1980), iv-v. 6 Cheryl Glenn lists a number of other scholars: JoAnne Campbell, Vicki Tolar Collins, Drema Lipscomb, Shirley Wilson Logan, Yvonne Day Merrill, Joyce Irene Middleton, Catherine Peaden, Krista Radcliffe and Jacqueline Jones Royster, to which I would add Eve Tavor Bannet (The Domestic Revolution 2000), Harriet Guest (Small Change 2000), Mary Spongberg (Writing Women‟s History Since the Renaissance 2002), and Christine Mason Sutherland (The Eloquence of Mary Astell 2005). 7 Molly Meijer Wertheimer, "Introduction: Roses in the Snow." In Listening to their Voices. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 2. 9 rarely extends beyond strict polemics into fiction or other forms of discourse. Only treatises directly addressing women‘s rights are generally considered part of the

―feminist‖ tradition. This narrowly perceived category for women‘s influence neglects authors who do not produce self-proclaimed or self-conscious feminist discourse—who, in fact, may not write non-fiction polemics at all—and has been largely responsible for the perceived ―gap‖ between Astell and Wollstonecraft.8 Unfortunately, rhetorical study tends to focus primarily on more traditional rhetorical and polemical tracts, and so likewise ensures that the apparent lapse between educationalists and late-century feminists remains—especially as such polemics appear with increasing rarity by the mid- eighteenth century (replaced by fictive narratives and conduct manuals). Mary

Wollstonecraft‘s early fiction serves as an example, and the tendency to demote her fiction is criticized by Jamie Barlowe‘s work on ―feminist dialogics.‖ Considered less polemical than her later works, novels like Mary: A Fiction (1788) provoke critical ambivalence and even embarrassment—despite the use of rhetorical strategies deserving

―attention, acknowledgement, and action.‖9 Rhetorical study, even of this late-century

―feminist,‖ refuses to embrace the possibilities of narrative fiction—even as feminist studies tend to miss the rhetorical, proto-feminist underpinnings of turn-of-the-century writing. Considered an uncomfortable fit for rhetorical reclamation or feminist histories of the novel, neither educationalists nor early-century didactic authors figure as progenitors of a female tradition of writers and ―rhetors.‖

8 Sylvia Myers described this gap in the introduction of the Bluestocking Circle, and Nancy Armstrong‘s Desire and Domestic Fiction denies that eighteenth-century authors of the intervening period were part of a feminist tradition. 9 Jamie Barlowe, "Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics," In Reclaiming Rhetorica (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 127. 10

Despite the variety of methodologies recently employed for uncovering women writers—both rhetorical and feminist—positions nonetheless polarize between those who wish to insert women into the existing (masculine) tradition and those who want to change the principles underlying that tradition. One group tends to focus on the exceptional women who managed, against odds, to produce valid work (the isolated feminist), the other on the cultural biases and ―oppressive forces that have kept women silent.‖10 This dualist positioning may itself be ―an artifact […] instigated by a genre of scholarship that makes polemic an obligatory part of scholarly work‖11—a form of rhetoric that replicates the classical rhetorical tradition and is, for that reason, unhelpful to the larger project. Pluralism has been offered as the most effective solution to this problem, and Cheryl Glenn relates what has become a familiar sentiment: ―whatever theoretical, practical, or political challenges—whatever agreements, disagreements, or locations—feminist rhetoricians bring to the map of rhetoric, their contributions are moving us beyond the restoration of women to rhetorical history,‖ they are, in fact,

―revitalizing‖ rhetorical theory by questioning its foundations.12 Briefly, then, the strategies for reclamation are multiple, but not always complementary. Feminist historiography should be (as Glenn suggests) performative, embodying ―a promise of connecting women and history and rhetoric, a nexus that enables us to write contexualized rather than merely separatist rhetorical histories.‖13 Molly Meijer

Wertheimer further suggests that feminism can provide ―important kinds of enrichment‖ for widening rhetoric‘s overly narrow scope and reclaiming a rhetorical history for

10 Wertheimer, "Introduction,‖ 3. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1987),10. 13 Glenn, Rhetoric Retold, 11. 11 women;14 but it is also true that rhetorical reclamation projects can enrich feminism. To effectively examine the output of female educationalists and the authors that follow them, it therefore becomes necessary to observe the reclamation of women writers at the intersection of rhetorical and feminist literary criticism. To that end, this project considers both perspectives, redefining a middle space in which these proto-feminist figures asserted their influence and deconstructing narrow categories that delimit what constitutes rhetorically valid work.

By tracing a pedagogic rhetoric of mental autonomy, which often subtly merges proto-feminist goals with more traditional, conservative values, into the eighteenth century, I demonstrate that Astell and Wollstonecraft are not bookends of a hundred-year silence. Rather, the claims for women‘s mental and educational equality made by Astell and her near contemporaries, Bathsua Makin, Judith Drake and Lady Mary Chudleigh, were adopted and nurtured by a rising generation of female fiction writers. I will argue that proto-feminist rhetoric (that is, innovations of rhetoric for use by and for women) continues in the period through these fictions, whose authors adapted earlier prescriptions for self-education and mental equality. Coupling rhetoric with feminism allows us the freedom to seriously consider women‘s rhetorical productions and the use of rhetorical strategies that do not merely mimic those of men, but are qualitatively different. In this chapter, I will outline a more nuanced approach both to rhetoric and to ―feminism‖ that allows for the resurrection of important female polemicists, hereafter called the female educationalists. I will also describe briefly why this pedagogical focus is useful—and how it illuminates the rhetorical landscape in which the educationalists wrote.

Between Feminism and Rhetoric

14 Wertheimer, "Introduction," 2. 12

Establishing a critical foothold in the ―space between‖ rhetorical and feminist reclamation projects requires a brief look at what these models offer—and the patriarchal tradition against which they respond. This ground has been well covered in the past decades, and much of the work once considered ground-breaking has become absorbed into the critical milieu. These works are not, however, any the less useful, even or rather especially for those studies which attempt to move beyond them. Cheryl Glenn remarks that, for roughly twenty-five hundred years, Western cultural norms have required the

―ideal‖ woman to embody ―a closed mouth (silence), a closed body (chastity), and an enclosed life (domestic confinement).‖15 Feminist literary studies have been carefully unearthing and restoring these closeted figures, shoring up gaps in the literary tradition for at least the past thirty-five years. Rhetorical reclamation projects have, by contrast, come somewhat late. Patricia Bizzell remarks in a 1992 article for the Rhetorical Review that the ―canon-busting‖ happening in English studies had failed to spark much attention in the field of rhetoric—that, in fact, histories of rhetoric were still reproducing traditional, classical (and patriarchal) narratives to the complete exclusion of women. As neither citizens nor public entities for much of history, women were, with few exceptions, prohibited from the public display generally required by (and recognized as constitutive of) classical rhetorical tradition. Moreover, significant contributions made by women were often—in their own time periods and well into the twentieth century—attributed to men. Rhetoric‘s definition as a ―public‖ political discourse became the means of acquiring and safeguarding patriarchal authority; understanding this has underscored both the need for rhetorical reclamation and for a broader perspective of rhetoric—particularly of sermo or conversational rhetoric over contentio. This lesser known and often less

15 Glenn, Rhetoric Retold,1. 13 respected rhetoric is a critical blind spot for feminist projects as well, its use of indirection generally mistaken for embarrassing capitulation. The differentiation of these two terms thus serves as a useful point of entry into a discursive tradition that has been considered neither significantly rhetorical nor appropriately feminist.

Contentio is typical of the public, persuasive oratory practiced in courts of law and has ―an adversarial flavor.‖16 Sermo is, by its nature, more private. Cicero describes their relationship as follows: ―[t]he power of speech in the attainment of propriety is great, and its function is twofold: the first is oratory; the second, conversation… There are rules for contentio laid down by rhetoricians; there are none for sermo.‖17 According to Christine Mason Sutherland, sermo is anterior to contentio, though contentio often makes up the whole of rhetorical history. The more private, informal sermo has not been taken seriously as an essential part of rhetoric for most of its history, and scholars like

Andrea Lunsford (Reclaiming Rhetorica, 1995) and Wertheimer (Listening to their

Voices, 1997) have commented on the necessity and difficulty of raising this and other more feminine rhetorical forms to critical attention. Wertheimer claims that feminist historians must engage in ―intellectual dexterity‖ if they are to turn the ―faint image[s]‖ of women rhetoricians, ―tissuelike in their thinness‖ into the history of women‘s rhetorical activities.18 Lunsford further explains that ―the realm of rhetoric has been almost exclusively male not because women were not practicing rhetoric—the arts of language are after all the source of human communication—but because the tradition has never recognized the forms, strategies, and goals of many writing women as

16 Christine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), xviii. 17 Ibid. Cicero is here quoted from John Tinkler‘s ―Renaissance Humanism and the genre eloquentiae.‖ Rhetorica 5.3 (1987): 279-309. 18 Wertheimer, "Introduction,‖ 6. 14

‗rhetorical.‘‖19 Motivating more recent rhetorical reclamation, then, is the recognition that rhetoric ―as a human activity‖ has been too narrowly defined—and for this, the rhetoricians are indebted to feminism‘s reassessment of the worth and value of women‘s contributions to literature and history.20 For the purposes of this project, which seeks not only to uncover the rhetoricians but also to trace the use of rhetoric into fiction, rhetoric will be defined more broadly as persuasive discourse intending to effect change in its audience, whether that audience be a public and political one, or a private and domestic one. In fact, I intend to question the assumed closed boundary between public and private, between political action and domestic preoccupations: ―Tea-table‖ society could be, as Jane Barker‘s introduction to A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) attests, composed of as many different political distinctions as any court, with “Sentiments …as differently mix‟d as the Patches in their Work: To wit, Whigs and Tories, High-Church and Low-Church, Jacobites and Williamites, and many more Distinctions.‖21

Additionally, the application of rhetoric may be more broadly perceived as both the use of existing rhetorical models and the innovation of new models, as well as the plot-based maneuvers that prose fiction writers employ for rhetorical effect. Rhetoric, then, is the purview not only of the feminist polemic of the 1790s, but also of the mid-century domestic novel, of early-century didactic as well as amatory fiction, and of the educationalist discourse of the late seventeenth century. To grasp this arc, however, and to see the connections among early women‘s polemics, fiction and later feminist/political

19 Andrea Lunsford, "On Reclaiming Rhetorica,‖ In Reclaiming Rhetorica (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1995), 6. 20 Wertheimer, "Introduction,‖ 2. 21 Jane Barker, A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies; or Love and Virtue (London: Printer for E. Curll, over against Catherine Street and T. Payne, near Stationers-Hall, 1723), v. Hereafter cited within the text as PWS. 15 discourse, we must also question the narrow or exclusionary categories of critical feminist attention.

In describing the problems faced by feminists, Gerda Lerner summarizes the ways in which women have been both ―excluded through educational deprivation from the process of making mental constructs,‖ and ―defined out and marginalized in every philosophical system‖ causing them to ―struggle not only against exclusion but against a context which defined them as subhuman and deviant.‖22 The lack of legitimate rhetorical outlet and ―systematic educational disadvantages‖ damaged women‘s ability to conceive of alternatives;23 and yet, feminist reclamation has been haunted by similar assumptions about women‘s inferiority. The prevailing critical paradigm still relies on—even while refuting—certain assumptions about what works qualify as respectably ―literary‖ and about what constitutes a feminist (or even a female) rhetoric. Part of the difficulty lies in the admittedly attractive technique of defining oneself against existing paradigms; the oppositional nature of many feminist reclamation projects necessarily recreate interiors and exteriors—and new lists of those included or excluded from the canons being created. The neglect of authors who do not produce self-proclaimed or self-conscious feminist discourse, but rather subtly merge certain feminist goals within more traditional, conservative values, reifies the ―gap‖ between early and late female polemicists. Over the past decade or so, some scholars have cautioned against such exclusionary practices.

Carole Pateman warns that we should not view ―feminist political thought…as beginning with Wollstonecraft,‖24 yet Harriet Guest, in a 2003 article for Reconsidering the

22 Gerda Lerner. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. 23 Ibid.,10. 24 Qtd. in Harriet Guest, "Bluestocking Feminism." In Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2003) 61. 16

Bluestockings, suggest scholars become ―more tolerant of what could seem disappointing about women,‖ including their seeming aversion to public, political discourse [my italics]. 25 The register of tolerance in the face of disappointment is noteworthy here; the standard for ―feminist‖ discourse (and I will return presently to what that term means to this project) remains shadowed by the male standard of public discourse, public argument, and, by implication, a ―male‖ form of rhetoric. The unwillingness to define conservative rhetorical accounts as feminist often results in the exclusion of women writing with more localized and conservative goals. For instance, though Sylvia

Harkstack Myers‘ The Bluestocking Circle (1990) was crucial to re-engaging interest in the bluestockings (resulting in the 2003 Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edited by

Nicole Pohl and Better Schellenberg), Myers maintains that Elizabeth Carter and other

Bluestockings were disconnected from women writers who had come before, and does not regard them as inheritors of a ―feminist tradition.‖26 And yet, women authors from the late seventeenth century onward were working to advance women‘s interests through education and intellectual emancipation—albeit through often private and less political means. As contemporaries of John Locke and François Fénelon, these female educationalists developed rhetorical strategies that were later adopted and nurtured by a rising generation of women fiction writers (bluestockings included). As this project seeks to explore the effect of late seventeenth-century female educationalist discourse, it requires a critical re-evaluation of terms like ―feminism‖ and ―feminist discourse,‖ even as it requires a re-definition of rhetoric.

25 Ibid, 59. 26 Sylvia Harkstack Myers‘ The Bluestocking Circle (Oxford: Clarenon Press, 1990) 122. 17

Instead of seeking out a ―feminist‖ tradition, I propose to focus on a history of pro-woman advocacy that honors contribution to a later feminist consciousness, while not discounting the nuances, contradictions and strategic accommodations of earlier works, or the conservative and (seemingly) patriarchal nature of the authors‘ more localized pedagogical goals. The terminology that will be most beneficial will be proto-feminism and female advocacy. The early educationalists are sometimes described as ―proto- feminists‖—and their discourse as ―women‘s rhetoric‖ (rather than feminist rhetoric).

The term proto-feminist allows us to discuss these writers as progenitors of those

―politically articulate‖27 feminists of the 1790s rather than as their hand-maidens and credits them with a more powerful relationship to subsequent discourse. At the same time, it avoids the pitfalls of unnecessary polarization—such as that introduced by Eve

Tavor Bannet in The Domestic Revolution28—or of making overly broad assumptions about the unity of the ―feminist‖ tradition. Bannet and other feminist critics sometimes rely heavily on double discourse as a model,29 yet, to apply double discourse to all women writers, or to suggest such a pervasive political unity, creates an unrealistic and anachronistic expectation. Responses to patriarchy vary considerably among authors

(including novelists) in the period, and while some used strategies of adhering to

27 Guest, "Bluestocking Feminism," 61. 28 Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Bannet uses such tactics to amend what she perceives as the exclusionary practices of Second Wave feminism: ―when visible at all, Enlightenment women writers‘ representations… seemed not only conservative and unprogressive but blinkered and unfeminist as well‖ (Bannet, 20). The benefit of such an inclusiveness is that Bannet can read Wollstonecraft as writing within an already existing feminist tradition, (42) but in order to critique the liberal (feminist)/conservative (unfeminist) binary she finds restrictive, she creates one of her own: Matriarchs/ Egalitarians (where Matriarch‘s argue for women‘s supremacy, but retain the concept of power hierarchies, and Egalitarians argue for equality and a deconstruction of power hierarchies). These additional categories may help to include more conservative writers in the feminist tradition, but they also allow Bannet to make considerable assumptions about the unity of that tradition and the intentions of the writers themselves. 29 Bannet, The Domestic Revolution, 46. Double discourse generally refers to a seripticious means of speaking on two levels, the production of radical or subversive subtexts within a more conservative framework. 18 accepted norms while subverting patriarchal ideology, many more wrote ―merely‖ to argue against a particular, local constraint, or to defend women against attacks on their mental and moral virtues from a conservative standpoint. These early and mid-century women were not part of a specifically unified feminist force, but they were arguing for educational opportunities for women and, by implication, a certain amount of intellectual autonomy. As this study traces the rhetoric of women‘s intellectual rights in early eighteenth-century fiction, these often-excluded voices figure importantly as historical representations, especially as they employ a similar rhetoric to that of the seventeenth- century female educationalists. Rhetoric, particularly the rhetoric promoting the intellectual rights of women, is thus part strategy and part ideology: form as well as content. I will endeavor to give primacy to neither, as the formal strategies are both required by and constitutive of argumentative content, but for the purposes of clarity, the following distinction will be made throughout: rhetorical strategies will refer, in general, to the specific innovation of form employed by educationalists. Proto-feminist rhetoric will refer, more specifically, to the rhetorical ideology of pro-women arguments for intellectual parity with men.

Female advocacy, on the other hand, is not directly linked with rhetorical form or ideology. Rather, it includes both the writers of proto-feminist works and those who supported them, financially or socially. In 1700, a short tract titled The Female Advocate, was published anonymously (by ―Eugenia‖) as a defense of women against John Sprint‘s

Bridewoman‟s Councellor, the same sermon that Chudleigh attacks in The Ladies

Defence. It was not the first publication by this name (another appeared in 1686 and was thought to be authored by Sarah Fyge Egerton), and it would not be the last; Mary Scott

19 wrote a response to Duncombe‘s Feminead in 1774 by that title, and Anne Radcliffe published The Female Advocate; or an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from

Male Usurpation in 1799. A ―female advocate‖ was, in these iterations, both an advocate for women and a woman herself—female advocacy might therefore be perceived as both a practice and a permutation of the patron system, a web of female connections. The friendship between Makin and Anna Maria van Schurman, the circle of associates surrounding Mary Astell, or patrons like Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings and Lady Catherine Jones have crucial roles in the success of proto-feminist aims.

The tradition of ―feminist‖ polemic is, therefore, less ―submerged‖30 than is traditionally thought in the century between Astell and Wollstonecraft. Rather, the claims for women‘s mental and educational equality made by Astell and her contemporaries,

Makin, Drake and Chudleigh, were adopted and nurtured by a rising generation of women fiction writers. These four educationalists serve as the mainsprings of the female legacy, as their complex rhetorical innovations create the strategies for continuing female advocacy into the subsequent century. And yet, the female educationalists are surprisingly unknown, recognized neither for their contributions to women‘s intellectual emancipation nor for the innovative rhetorical strategies employed in the service of educational aims. Rather, male educationalists like John Locke or Bernard Lamy are given the greatest share of credit for reforming education for the purpose of wider dissemination among the non-aristocratic classes—and for reviving sermocinal rhetorical strategies. The reasons for this male-centered focus are multiple. First, as vessels of

―weak discernment,‖ women were in need of ―control by the superior members of the

30 As is suggest by Jane Spencer. 20 species, man.‖31 Education, as Nancy Armstrong argues, remains the ―preferred instrument of social control.‖32 As the recipients of an educational program developed by men—one which privileged the unthinking vessel rather than cultivating the potentially threatening figure of the female pedant—women could not also be recognized as participants in or innovators of educational discourse. Control, obedience, habit and silence were the key elements in women‘s education so that, even as women were being

―taught,‖ their training recreated the closed mouth, mind, body and space. Female authors were often aware of the gender hierarchy and its limitations upon women‘s intellectual and moral growth; The Progress of the Female Mind (1764) complains that ―[women] seem given up implicitly to tread a path in which education happens to have introduced them, doomed never to cast a glance beyond it, nor ask whence it derives, or where it leads.‖33 The rhetoric of habit and its emphasis on containment colludes with customary forms of female education and gives rise, interestingly, both to the urgency of female educationalists‘ argument for autonomy and to the denigration or dismissal of their works on gendered grounds. And yet, as Lerner explains, ―it was through an argument for women‘s education that women thought their way towards a theory of women‘s emancipation, a feminist theory‖34—or, I would suggest, a proto-feminist consciousness of their wrongs.

Women, reasoning from their ―shared educational deprivation‖ began to recognize that they were a group with ―definable and collective grievances‖ so that, by

31 Nancy Weitz Miller, "Ethos, Authority and Vitrue for Seventeenth-Century Women Writers: The Case of Bathsua Makin's Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen." In Listening to their Voices, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997,) 274. 32 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 17. 33 Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism 1750-1810. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 137. 34 Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, 192. 21 the end of the seventeenth century, women began to demand greater equality of educational and intellectual opportunities.35 Rather than merely contending with traditional rhetorical ideology, however, the female educationalists sought to revise strategies for re-employment in women‘s discourse. Such innovations, substitutions and reversals to existing forms were made possible in part by revolutions in the conceptions of rhetoric and pedagogy in the period; the mid- and late- seventeenth century saw rhetoric (as strategy) evolve as a tool of education rather than education itself, the means rather than the end. Clear, conversational means of communicating were lauded as appropriate to science and business. Moreover, as class divisions shifted and the bourgeois middle-classgentleman rose to a position of power in England, sermo rhetoric

(by implication conversational, private and potentially feminine) re-emerged and was, for the first time, given precedence. The rise of sermo alone did not, however, provide immediate access for women. By the time female educationalists were entering pedagogical discourse, rhetoric had been absorbed into the fabric of newly emerging disciplines, particularly the sciences. Cemented by the Royal Society‘s insistence upon

―plain language‖ in 166736 and the advent of mechanical and materialist thought, new concepts of rhetoric‘s utility were being developed. This new form of rhetoric would become crucial to the cause of female educationalists, for though it served masculine scientific endeavors and an ever-changing concept of ―Reason‖ (in which women were thought to be deficient), it nonetheless inaugurated rhetoric‘s fall from classical presentation. The movement away from ornate, florid, Latin and towards a

―perspicacious‖ vernacular gave women rhetoricians the opportunity and, through the

35 Ibid.,198.

22 employment of sermo, the ability to speak authoritatively about uses of language. At the same time, because of sermo‘s intersection with pedagogy as a means of clearly transmitting knowledge, women had a unique chance to effect changes for the intellectual advancement of women—a space for developing proto-feminist rhetoric in support of female autonomy. The coupling of sermo and a renewed interest in and respect for the vernacular thus created a marginal space for female rhetorical discourse, though that space was never uncontested. Tracing the evolution of rhetoric through the seventeenth century reveals the historical moment that made female participation in the discourse possible, but it also highlights the necessity for rhetorical innovations in order to circumvent the narrow conscriptions of custom.

Revolutions of Rhetoric and the Advent of Vernacular Pedagogy

Perhaps surprisingly, the early seventeenth century was in many ways more constraining for women—in terms of rhetorical practice—than foregoing periods, which, through the influence of Christian humanism and the promotion of equality of souls, had loosened the strictures on women‘s rhetorical production. During rhetoric‘s periodic resurgence in the Renaissance, however, the works of Quintilian and Cicero revived the definition of rhetoric as public and active. This return to classicism led to the ideal of humanity as ―fully engaged with the world,‖ and thus to a disregard for women as spiritual entities.37 Thomas Farrell, in Norms of Rhetorical Culture, explains that classical rhetoric is essentially dogmatic in nature: the rhetorical theories of Aristotle, Cicero and

Quintillian, Augustine and George Campbell (from ethical, political, religious and philosophical perspectives) are ―unmistakably prescriptive.‖38 Combinations among these

37 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, 14. 38 Thomas C Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. 23 masters were possible, however, demonstrating an inherent flexibility that allowed even these earlier forms to serve utilitarian ends. Erasmus combined ancient and modern sources depending upon his objective; for beginning students, he joined ―the humane attitudes of Quintilian‖ with the ―humanist pedagogy formulated in fifteenth-century Italy by Guarino, Vittorino da Feltre and others.‖39 Erasmus also draws from Cicero, and modeled himself on his and Quintilian‘s work, particularly in questions of style, argument and structure.40 Erasmus‘ contemporaries, William Lily, who published his famous (and infamous) Grammar in 1513 and Juan Luis Vives, who composed

Instruction of a Christian Maid (Orig. De Institutione Christianae Femina) in 1523 were also influenced by more than one classical master. Lily quotes from and suggests as models Cicero and Virgil, and Vives argues against, but is also influenced by,

Aristotelianism and Stoicism.41 These mixed sources and varied approaches helped to expand rhetoric‘s influence and to make it flexible, to adapt it ―to the specific audience to which it is addressed, to their capabilities, life-interest, and concerns‖ and to allow for arguing both sides of a case, in utramque parteen disserere, which served as the ―basic injunction in all manuals of rhetoric.‖42 Individual differences did, however, affect the way rhetoric was conceived and who was considered worthy of its practice—particularly as it concerned issues of gender.

Sutherland argues that the negative effects of classical rhetoric were ―mitigated‖ by Vives, Erasmus and also Thomas More and Thomas Elyot, writers who maintained

39 Brian Vickers, "The Recovery of Rhetoric: Petrarch, Erasmus, Perelman," In The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 35. 40 Ibid., 36. 41 Lorenzo Casini, ―Aristotelianism and Anti-Stoicism,‖ In Vol. 57, Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (New Synthese Historical Library: Springer Netherlands, 2005). 42Vickers, ―The Recovery of Rhetoric,‖ 33. 24

Christian humanist views. 43 But while these men all felt that women should be educated, they balked at allowing women rhetorical power; instruction was intended only to make women better wives and mothers and was, in many ways, oblivious to their individual development apart from these roles. Thus, though Vives writes ―Of maydes …some be even borne unto [learning], or at lefte not unfete for it…and thofe that be apt, shuld be herted and encouraged,‖44 he nevertheless stresses that women have no need for eloquence—or for rhetorical skills. Given this limitation, it was considered incorrect (and even implausible) to teach women Latin, which thus became the closed door between women and the toolkit or ideology of rhetoric. As Ann Moss explains, control of Latin likewise became an obstacle to education itself: as the ―zeal of fifteenth-century Italian humanists‖ made its way through the rest of Europe in the first part of the sixteenth century,

the curricula of all schools and universities were reformed so as to give to the arts of verbal expression a prestige as foreign to the purposes of late medieval logic and theology as it is now to the concerns of modern science or economic enterprise… It also produced an elite of readers imprinted with certain stereotyped approaches to inquiry in all intellectual disciplines, educated to admire verbal dexterity and display, and also sharpened by their own practice in rhetorical composition to recognise rhetoric at work, in speech and writing, for good or ill.45

Moreover, manipulation of rhetorical devices became the hallmark of having any education at all—and the language of that education was, almost exclusively, Latin.46 As women were educated in neither Latin nor rhetoric, the ethos so necessary to maintaining an argument before an audience was impossible. The three categories of that ethos were

43 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, 14. 44Juan Luis Vives, A Very Fruteful and Pleasant Booke called the Instruction of a Christen Woman, made first in Latyne. (London, 1557), Cap. iii, lines 1-5. Hereafter cited in the text as ICM. 45 Ann Moss, "Common-Place Rhetoric and Thought-Patterns in Early Modern Culture." In The Recovery of Rhetoric (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 49. 46 Ibid. 25 intelligence, integrity and goodwill; for a writer to speak upon any subject he had to possess the authority of a well-informed, rational human being with moral integrity and goodwill toward the audience.47 Women were considered ―deficient‖48 in at least two of these categories; as Sutherland remarks, ―deficiency in reason—or intelligence, the first element in classical ethos—involved necessarily a deficiency also in morality, or integrity, the second element.‖49 Without the first two, goodwill toward the audience hardly mattered; a woman would have no audience at all. Even for the rare woman who had been amply educated, rhetorical practice excluded the only form of speech she was allowed: sermo (rather than the favored contentio). Thus, despite the influence of early

Christian humanists, women‘s participation in rhetoric was essentially precluded until classical rhetoric began its ―long, painful and complex descent from its position of power and influence‖ in the seventeenth century.50

This descent does not mean that male writers of the early modern period ceased to practice or theorize about rhetoric; neither does it mean that women were encouraged to do so. Rather, the elements of classical rhetoric lauded in the Renaissance—the manipulation of language and use of florid Latin prose—began to seem suspiciously unscientific, or at least unsuitable for communicating the findings of objective observation. Several distinguished thinkers, some rhetoricians themselves, initiated the separation of rhetoric from its more ornamental Latinate roots, including Francis Bacon

(1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), René Descartes (1596-1650), John Locke

47 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, 4-5. 48 Thomas Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle the idea that woman was ―a deficient form of man.‖ This concept prevailed in the late medieval and Renaissance periods (and, one might argue, most periods before and after). 49 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, 5, 6. 50 R.H., Roberts and J.M.M. Good, The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 3. 26

(1631-1704) and Bernard Lamy (1640-1715). The shift from Latinate and floral language to the more pragmatic rhetoric employed by pedagogues began, in many ways, with

Bacon‘s ―new science‖—and had gender-inflected consequences unintended by its practitioners. Miriam Brody describes the Royal Society‘s scientific debates as

―comprising an essay literature by clerics and courtiers‖ that reflected ―the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.‖51 The material world had become ―available to scrutiny‖ through the invention of the microscope; its ―secrets‖ were available to the onlooker‘s gaze.52 Bacon describes this production of knowledge as dependent upon ―an eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature.‖53 Traditional philosophy had only generated words—that is, it was in many ways ―strictly‖ rhetorical—but Bacon ―realized that printing, gunpowder, and the compass had changed man‘s relation to the material world.‖54 It became necessary to have a fact-based vernacular, and thinkers like Bacon urged others not to be misled by mere ―dreams.‖ These dreams Brody interprets as fantasy pleasures—often feminine by nature. Thus, even as rhetoricians began to dismiss older epistemologies as ―naïve,‖ and ―figures of speech as ‗mists of the world,‘‖55 they ascribed to them gendered qualities. In an age-old means of preserving hegemony, the florid Latin rhetoric once denied to women took on strangely feminine qualities; as a result, it was no longer suited to the masculine acquisition of knowledge and objective reason.56 Bacon, through his new science and the practice of strict observation, sets in

51 Miriam Brody, Manly Writing, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 39. 52 Ibid. 53 Qtd. in Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid, 40. 56 ―Reason‖ is a complicated and loaded term. Traditionally linked to Christian apologetics and Right Reason, reason also begins to approximate logical deductions from objective observations. The trajectory of reason‘s usage is tracked by a number of critics, including Robert Hoopes , Barbara Shapiro, Christopher Hill and Stuart Brown. 27 motion a process that eventually raises the transmission of ―clear and distinct ideas‖ (via

Descartes) to a new level. Communication must be as clearly observable as the objects about which it speaks, and applications to flowery, complex forms of rhetoric, as opposed to perspicuity, are increasingly labeled as undesirable and ‗feminine.‘

It should be clear that a perceptual shift concerning the process of reasoning motivated this shift in rhetorical ideology and practice. In a summary of work by recent historians, Lotte Mulligan demonstrates that the seventeenth century is typically characterized as a time of transformation ―in epistemology, not only in natural philosophy, but in all areas of intellectual endeavor.‖57 Robert Hoopes, Barbara Shapiro and Christopher Hill58 all emphasize that reason became a stand-in word for the ―unaided operations of the mind to make logical connections in all fields of knowledge‖—such that the ―triumph of ‗science‘‖ also meant ―the victory of mechanical reasoning to the exclusion of other forms.‖59 Florid verbal antics were traded for perspicuity; to be easily understood, to possess a clearly articulate style, becomes—in Hobbes, especially—both indispensible and responsible, and by the time he writes Leviathan, perspicuity has evolved into ―a code word for intellectual and political order.‖60 Similarly, in the

Principles, Descartes defines the necessity of clear and distinct ideas. Clear is described as ―that perception which is present and manifest to an attentive mind: just as we say that we clearly see those things which are present to our intent eye,‖ and distinct as ―that perception which, while clear, is so separated and delineated from all others that it

57 Lotte Mulligan, "Robert Boyle, 'The Christian Virtuoso' and the Rhetoric of 'Reson'" In Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 97. 58 Robert Hoopes, Right Reason in the English Renaissance (1962), Barbara Shapiro Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (1983), Christopher Hill Change and Continuity in 17th Century England (1991). 59 Lotte, ―Robert Boyle,‖ 97. 60 Ibid. 28 contains absolutely nothing except what is clear."61 To be clear and distinct is necessary to reason and become the hallmarks of scientifically valid rhetorical practice.

Additionally, however—and crucial to the cause of female educationalists—the emphasis on clarity, on practical and mechanical reasoning, allowed for movement away from

Latin as the language of science. When Descartes communicates his ideas about mechanics in his native French, he ―unwittingly began a process that would enable women to participate in the intellectual life of their times.‖62 It is no surprise, then, that

Cartesian thought was adopted by several of the educationalists, most notably Judith

Drake and Mary Astell,63 because in elevating the vernacular to a level acceptable for scholarly discourse, it opened that discourse to those who were denied classical education. At the very least, the new perspective on rhetoric and reason, along with the use of the vernacular, allowed women access to knowledge; at most it also offered additional freedom to communicate without the linguistic maneuvers of the high

Renaissance—an obstacle that had handicapped transitional women writers like Margaret

Cavendish.64

Through these subtle shifts—helped in many ways by a changing class and economic structure—rhetoric begins to serve pedagogical ends, rather than being both the means and the ends of pedagogy. But this movement away from Latin, with its

61Descartes‘ Principles, (I ,45). Qtd. in Ron Bombardi, How the Rationalists Construe "Clear and Distinct Ideas.” Middle Tennessee State University Department of Philosophy. http://www.mtsu.edu/~rbombard/RB/Spinoza/cnd.html (accessed June 15th, 2008). 62C.M. Sutherland, "Mary Astell: Reclaiming Rhetorica in the Seventeenth Century" In Reclaiming Rhetorica, 93-116 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 106. 63 The greatest use of Descartes in the service of liberating women, however, was not made by the female educationalists, but by François Poulain de la Barre (1647-1725), an ex-Jesuit Cartesian philosopher. He published De l'Egalite des deux Sexes in 1673; in it, he demonstrates the equality of the sexes by using Cartesian method. 64 Cavendish‘s reliance on a style beyond her training limited the force of her work—even if it did not curtail her output. Christine Mason Sutherland describes her struggle with the high style in "Aspiring to the Rhetorical Tradition: A Study of Margaret Cavendish" In Reclaiming Rhetorica, 272-287. 29

Aristotelian echoes and the expectation of ornate rhetorical moves, simultaneously allows for the revival of more utilitarian sermo rhetoric as a valid means of communication. In

Locke‘s conversational Some Thoughts Concerning Education, for instance, ―rhetoric‖ all but disappears as a subject and is instead the (often submerged) means by which a parent or guardian might persuade youth to behave. The resurrection of sermo in the work of

Locke and also of Bernard Lamy is pivotal; Catherine Hobbs Peaden argues that the idea of rhetoric as social and public becomes displaced by Locke‘s notion of a privatized language concerned with transmitting meaning.65 Conversations, letters and other forms of private communication become more important as this concept gains a foothold in the seventeenth century. Sermo, while never replacing contentio as the primary term for rhetoric, nonetheless moves more ―toward the centre,‖ becoming, as Sutherland suggests,

―more important in the formulation of ideas about both politics and art‖—and developing into an ―art‖ itself by the late eighteenth century.66

The works of Locke, Lamy, Descartes and others are, however, generalizable only to a male audience. At their very best, they arrive at a kind of gender neutrality, unconcerned with or unaware of implications for women‘s education. Despite Locke‘s emphasis on sermo or the various pedagogues‘ use of vernacular prose for perspicacious ends, at the time, there was simply no consistent theory that ―advocated women‘s intellectual as well as social parity with men;‖ as Ekaterina Haskins maintains, neither

Descartes nor Locke ever ventured to ―apply their egalitarian premises to a serious

65 Catherine Hobbes Peadon, "Understanding differently : re-reading Locke‘s Essay concerning human understanding." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1992): 75-90. 66 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, xviii. 30 questioning of the socially entrenched sexual inequality.‖ 67 In fact, education for women had been and remained rhetorically distant from such philosophies, and was still mainly rooted in a spiritual/religious language of saving the female soul. While Locke was using his sermo rhetoric to describe a general course of education for men, men such as Richard

Brathwaite (The English Gentlewoman, 1631), Robert Codrington (Youths Behavior,

1664) and George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (Lady‟s New Years Gift, or Advice to a

Daughter, 1688) were addressing the problem of woman‘s fallen nature—ascribing to them the naiveté, dreaminess and lack of moral seriousness that had been, interestingly, newly ascribed to classical rhetoric. The liberation from Latinate structures and the publication or translation of works into the vernacular did allow women access to the intellectual discourse of the time, because while women could now read rhetorical works in their own language, they were not necessarily at liberty to practice rhetoric. The assumptions about women‘s capacity to reason raised ethical concerns about giving them

―linguistic power‖ in a culture that believed in the ―authoritative power of language.‖68

The female educationalists thus wrote their pedagogical, polemical works not in confluence with a new female rhetorical tradition, but in opposition to a continuing masculine tradition which used the rhetoric of control to establish women‘s education through habit and ―proper‖ conduct. Conduct manuals do proliferate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, such that educationalist programs often had to contend with the prerogatives of this behavior-modeling literature even as they contended with more pedagogical works written by men.

67 Ekatrina V. Haskins, "A Woman's Inventive Response to the Seventeenth-Century Querelle des Femmes." In Listening to their Voices (Columbia: University of South Caronline, 1997), 297. 68 Miller, "Ethos, Authority, and Virtue,‖ 274. 31

Given that a significant amount of eighteenth-century conduct literature aims primarily at a female audience, the training of women might be presumed as the genesis of the form. On the contrary, early versions of conduct material appeared for both men and women, and many were even published as companion pieces, such as Brathwaite‘s

The English Gentleman (1630) and The English Gentlewoman (1631). There were serious differences between the two, however; gentleman‘s conduct manuals dealt with more diverse issues of education and commerce, while women‘s conduct manuals concerned themselves more particularly with dress, manners and social propriety. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century would see a steady increase in such conduct literature, and the female educationalists lamented the popularity of works that taught women only to ―to curl their hair, to put on a Whisk, to wear gay Clothes.‖69 In addition to such manuals, however, is the more systematic work on women‘s education published by François Fénelon: Instructions for the Education of a Daughter. This work claimed to offer a more serious education for women than the conduct manual, but it nonetheless proposes habit-based control as a means of preventing the female soul from falling into error. Interestingly, the Instructions actually serve as a recurring model for and influence on later conduct materials—something I will return to in Chapter Four. It is important to note here, however, Fénelon‘s reliance on habit and obedience, particularly as his strictures for female behavior serve as the context for female educationalist response in the latter part of the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century.

Fénelon, a Catholic theologian, published his work around the same time as

Lamy (and may have been influenced by him—his Dialogues, as least, are indebted to

69 Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen [1673]. Edited by Paula. A. Barbour. (Los Angeles: The Augustan Reprint Society, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California Press, 1980), 22. Hereafter cited in the text as ERAEG. 32

L‟Art des Parler).70 The treatise, Education des Filles, was published in Paris in 1687, and this first edition was so popular (even in England) that it made up part of John

Locke‘s private library.71 Written as a set of pedagogical directives accompanied by prayers and devotions suitable for young ladies, Instructions had an important impact on contemporary concepts of women‘s education in England. Still considered by some to be one of the ―most significant theoretical and institutional achievements‖ of the seventeenth century,72 Instructions offered a complete program of study for producing industrious and dutiful wives—as opposed to court ladies or wit-scholars. Fénelon‘s celebration of simple, dutiful, obedient womanhood represents a reaction against the politesse of court life and the intellectual culture of the salon. England‘s own political unrest (the

Interregnum of 1649-53) and the laissez-faire policies of Charles II resulted in similar indictments against courtly life; this backlash—helped, most probably, by the literature of the Renaissance, in which female characters ―fall into sin with a suddenness that exceeds…dramatic credibility‖73—created an atmosphere primed for Fénelon‘s concerns.

―What Intrigues‖ he asks ―what Subversions of Laws and Manners? What bloody Wars?

What Innovations in Religion? What Revolutions in State have been all caused merely or chiefly by the Irregularities of Women!‖74 The solution to these outrages against custom

70 John T. Harwood, The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 132. 71 The small first volume, published in Paris in 1687, resides in Locke‘s library collection at the Bodleian, Oxford, with Locke‘s name inscribed on the inside cover. M l‘Abbe de Fénelon . Education des Filles. (Paris: Chez Pierre Aubouin, fur le Quai des Augustins, 1687). 72 Carolyn C. Lougee, "Noblesse, Domesticity, and Social Reform: The Education of Girls by Fénelon and Saint-Cyr." History of Education Quarterly 14, no. 1 (Spring 1974), 87. 73 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence, 7. Sutherland cites Haywood‘s A Woman Killed with Kindness and Middleton‘s Women Beware Women and More Dissemblers Besides Women as examples of the widespread conviction that women were deficient in both reason and morality. 74 François Fénelon, Instructions for the Education of a Daughter. First edition. (London: Printed for Jonah Bowyer, 1707), 7. The first edition was accessed through the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Due to time restrictions, however, additional research was gathered from the 1708 edition available through Eighteenth- 33 and religion is, interestingly, an education—and in that sense, his reasoning is not unlike that of Mary Astell, who also argues against the irreligion and potential intrigues of the vain and bored. But whereas Astell wants women to exercise their reason more, Fénelon desires they should exercise it less—for he believes their reason is so immature as to be easily corrupted. The education he therefore provides is meant to constrain rather than enlighten the female subject.

Fénelon‘s imposition of controlling habits on the female student is driven largely by his religious faith. After the Council of Trent (1545-1563), Catholic reformers recognized that the education of young women might be an influential tool for regaining the ―religious allegiance‖ of the people.75 As future mothers (and therefore, future instructors of the very young), women could be drawn into the service of Catholic promotion and counter-reformation sentiment—but they must be prevented from perverting Catholic doctrine. New programs for women‘s education were being developed in France, and theologians and educators (like Fénelon and also Claude

Fleury) proposed new curricula. These curricula did not include higher education, however, on the grounds that such subjects for a women would be useless and ―pure vanity.‖76 Fénelon was willing to accept subjects for women such as literature, history and even Latin, but only if these studies were used in the service of Catholic faith and were carefully monitored and controlled.77 In fact, control is one of the key elements of

Fénelon‘s pedagogy. As Lerner explains, in order to ―quiet fears that women, once

Century Collections Online (ECCO). Hereafter, this work is cited in the text as IED [year] to differentiate editions. 75 Martine Sonnet, "A Daughter to Educate," In A History of Women (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1991), 104. 76 Ibid., 107 77 Ibid. 34 educated, would abandon their maternal and domestic duties,‖ limitations on women‘s behavior became a necessary part of educational practice, and even of the argument for their ―intellectual emancipation.‖78 Though developed first for use in Catholic France,

Fénelon‘s work translated easily into the British discourse on education, prescribing as it does Locke-like habituation, meant to correct a woman‘s too malleable nature—or her

―Irresolution and Inconstancy‖ (IED [1707] 252). The popularity of the treatise in

England demonstrates that many of Fénelon‘s warnings about the female sex resonated among Protestants; women were morally fallible, and their minds—and indeed, their souls—had to be protected from error.

Religious belief also inspired the educationalists, who often leaned heavily upon the moral and the spiritual in their arguments for women‘s education. For Astell, God- inspired reason was a lynch-pin on which to hang the rest of her arguments for education.

However, it was dangerous for the proto-feminist to employ theology too specifically.

Suspected already of moral inconstancy, women had to be very careful of potential heresy, specifically because combining religion and reason/rationality was made problematic by authors like Baruch Spinoza and Nicolas Malebranche. Because reason was touted by Spinoza and Malebranche, and because rational providentialism could be dangerously close to deism, any author writing for the emancipation of women‘s intellectual lives had to be careful not to tread into the ―errors‖ Fénelon warns of—a misstep that would only give credence to warnings about the learned women‘s fallen nature. The new ―rational theologies,‖ influenced by the same perspicacious rhetoric of

Baconian science, argued for the ―ultimate intelligibility of nature, and its logical dependence on a (Christian) God‖—a kind of rational providentialism in which

78 Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness,198 35 mysterious doctrines could be viewed as ―built on rational foundations.‖ 79 As Robert

Crocker suggests, this occasionally involved reviving a concept of natural religion, and by ―taking up some of its more secular and skeptical implications, ‗natural religion‘ also became the basis for arguing for a broadly based ethical dispensation.‖80 Thus, though rational providentialism began as a rhetorical support for Christian doctrine, early libertine thinkers used this ―dispensation‖ as the grounds for skepticism and deism81— concepts which were attacked by both conservatives and moderates, and which engaged a kind of backlash against the possibility of heretical rhetoric. The reception of Mary

Astell‘s Letters Concerning the Love of God82 can serve as a useful example of this danger. A High-Church Anglican and Platonist, Astell supported a conservative theology and was ardently committed to modesty and humility. Yet, with the publication of

Letters, Astell drew fire from Damaris Masham, who complained that Astell‘s desire for the novel philosophies of post-Cartesians shook the grounds of ―True Piety.‖83 Though a dedicated Anglican, Astell was accused of near heresy—of being linked to dissenting religious views that were springing up in England.

Masham‘s critique likely refers to Astell‘s claim toward the end of Letters that if all things exist in God then his creatures can merely be used ―as an Occasion…and with that Indifferency that is due to it‖—a recasting of Malebranche‘s occasionalist philosophy, implying that God was ―corporeal and thereby no different from the things of

79 Robert Crocker, "Introduction" In Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), xiv. 80 Ibid., xiv. 81 Ibid. 82 Letters Concerning the Love of God was a series of letters between Mary Astell and John Norris, a Cambridge Platonist who also supported Malebranche. 83 Qtd. in Ellenzweig, Sarah, "The Love of God and the Radical Enlightenment: Mary Astell's Brush with Spinoza," Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 3 (2003): 388. 36 the universe.‖84 Such claims were potentially godless, and Ellenzweig suggests that it was for this reason Astell wrote the final letter just before publication disclaiming occasionalism and protesting that ―God is the only efficient Cause of all our

Sensation…renders a great Part of God‘s Workmanship vain and useless [..and] does not well comport with [God‘s] Majesty.‖85 This letter was added as an appendix just before printing; however, the fact that Astell returns to near-occasionalism in 1705 with

Christian Religion, when charges of heresy had been turned in a different direction, suggests that her retreat was ―tactical,‖ the stratagem of a flexible rhetorician.86 It may also explain why religious rhetoric, though by no means absent in the works of female educationalists, is subtle and at times generic. Already attacked for their bold educational program for women—of intending to ―stir up Sedition,‖ ―undermine the Masculine

Empire,‖ and ―blow the Trumpet of Rebellion to the Moiety of Mankind‖87—Astell and her contemporaries had to be careful of potential aspersions. Reason and morality must be balanced and employed with care in educationalist rhetoric; the strategies arguing for reflection and will over habit and automatic behavior also had to consider male educationalist‘s arguments for women‘s fallen nature—especially their tendency to fall into moral and theological errors. Such philosophical traps encouraged occasionally surreptitious or even circular reasoning—something which Fénelon attributes not to the rhetorical gymnastics necessary to circumvent custom but to the inconstancy of female nature.

According to Fénelon, women ―deliberate, but never resolve. Their motion is not

84 Ibid, 386. 85 Qtd. in Ellenzweig, "The Love of God,‖ 386. 86 Ibid., 390. 87 Contemporary responses to Reflections on Marriage, Qtd. in Ellenzweig, ―The Love of God,‖ 380. 37 progressive, but Circular: They advance no more, than the Person who walks in a

Labyrinth‖ (IED [1707] 252). Likewise, women are naturally ―Fickle‖ and have a

―Softness and Timorousness,‖ which renders them ―incapable of firm and regular

Conduct,‖ (IED [1708] 13,184). Possessed of ―a natural Flexibleness,‖ they must be carefully trained ―from their most tender infancy,‖ even before they ―are perfectly able to speak‖ (IED [1708] 186,13, 14). This early instruction was meant, therefore, to take advantage of the soft and tender quality of the infant brain; right behavior and proper moral precepts were to be carved into the very tissues before they cooled and hardened with age (IED [1708] 21). Fénelon‘s method for accomplishing this end was indirect education, an ―Insinuating Way of teaching them their Duty.‖ Women are ―weaker‖ and may ―turn their brains‖ with study, whereas ―Habits grow insensibly‖ upon them (IED

[1708] 3, 20). Habit becomes the most useful method for internalizing constraint and of keeping women‘s ―tongues,‖ their ability to speak and their linguistic power, modest, discreet, and in line with cultural expectations. It also makes actions of the will and of reflection less necessary. Locke would claim in Some Thoughts on Education that habits are, in effect, prereflexive, requiring no thought to achieve useful behavior. I will examine the nature of habit and mechanical response in the next chapter, as these become a focus of female educationalists‘ arguments for intellectual advancement. Allowing habits to replace conscious thought and action, the educationalists warn, inspires

―habitual inadvertency,‖ and renders women ―incapable‖ of reason.88 Though it was very

88 Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Grestest Interest. Part I. First Edition (London: Printed for R. Wilkin at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1694), 48. The first edition was accessed through the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Due to time restrictions, however, additional research was gathered from the 1697 edition available through Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Hereafter, this work is cited in the text as SP [year] (to differentiate editions), volume number and page. 38 often used to thwart female attempts at intellectual emancipation, the rhetoric of habit was too deeply ingrained in pedagogical discourse for the educationalists to avoid entirely. Proto-feminists therefore became adept at employing the concept of habitual behavior—but with a difference. Their own constructions of habit and will supported the idea that, for true moral growth, women must be able to choose and decide for themselves.

In most accounts of the period, the ―thinking woman‖ of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century is assumed to have spent a great deal of her intellectual life arguing with what Gerda Lerner calls the ―great man‖ in her head. With seemingly little contact with their ―foremothers,‖ women relied on male interlocutors to ―test‖ their ideas.89 As a result, women are generally considered to be have borrowed—or perhaps parroted—male thinkers from Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian and Saint Augustine to the period‘s Neo-

Platonists, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Barre, and Lamy. This assumption is supported by the fact that, for many female educationalists, these ―great men‖ were actual correspondents and mentors;90 yet, these women were also rhetorical innovators. In order to re-employ rhetoric for the strategic defense and ideological promotion of women‘s education, revision to existing rhetorical forms was necessary. The female educationalists recognized the power differential involved in women‘s education; they recognized also that, to preserve a credible ethos with their audience, they would have to find ways of addressing or subverting elements like habituation that were an essential part of the

89 Lerner, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. 90 Makin, for instance, was befriended by Sir Simonds D‘Ewes, and maintained a (not-always positive) correspondence with her brother-in-law, Dr. John Pell. Mary Astell and Lady Mary Chudleigh were both mentored by John Norris and Damaris Cudworth Masham by John Locke. Additionally, Descartes, we know, conversed regularly with Queen Christina of Sweden; Henry More with Anne Finch, Viscountess Conway; and Joseph Glanville with Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. From Sutherland, Christine Mason. The Eloquence of Mary Astell. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 41. 39 discourse. Theirs was an ongoing project of developing a theory of rhetoric and pedagogy within the established framework provided by male interlocutors, one that could accommodate the realities of (and thus the limitations imposed on) women‘s intellectual life. The accommodating nature of these rhetorical strategies has led, perhaps, to the critical dismissal of educationalists as part of a tradition of pro-woman activists. The same methods, however, allowed for necessary participation in the rhetorical discourse of the seventeenth century—and for a recasting of relationships between habit and will, educational control and female autonomy that serves as the proto-feminist legacy.

40

Chapter Two Mechanical Habits and Female Machines: Arguing for the Autonomous Female Self

The great Thing to be minded in Education is, what Habits you settle: And therefore in this, as all other Things, do not begin to make any Thing customary, the Practice whereof you would not have continue and increase. —John Locke, Some Thoughts on Education, section 18

Nothing is so ubiquitous in late seventeenth-century pedagogical rhetoric as habit, the inculcation of which was an ―essential part of pedagogical procedure‖ well into the eighteenth century.91 Habits, or customs (the two are often used interchangeably), were meant as a check on the passions and a means of clearing the mind for tasks of greater importance. Most educationalists were concerned with the staying power of these early impressions; Richard Barney explains that pedagogues and physicians of the period believed that brain material might be too rigid after a certain age to accept any further instruction.92 Early habituation was therefore essential to creating a lasting impression on the soft wax of the mind—even or especially before a pupil could reason for himself or make moral decisions. It is in this sense that habits are prereflexive, evinced by John

Locke‘s claim that ―constant Custom‖ requires ―no Thought, no Reflection‖ to translate into good habits.93 Repeating an action for a student ―till it be grown habitual‖ makes the behavior as natural ―as breathing‖ (ST [1695] 79, 80). Pierre Bourdieu‘s concept

(following Marcel Mauss) of habitus perhaps comes closest to this form of conditioning; it is the ―system of dispositions, that is of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and

91 Richard Barney, Plots of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 52. 92 Barney, Plots, 52. 93 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. (London: Printed for A. and J. Churchill, at the Black Swan in Pater-noster-row, 1695), 82, 80. The first edition was accessed through the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Due to time restrictions, however, additional research was gathered from the 1705 edition available through Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Hereafter, this work is cited in the text as ST [year] to differentiate editions. 41 thinking,‖94 a ―prereflexive level of practical ability.‖95 Habits of this kind are not, however, natural—they are imposed upon nature, through education, mimicry and a general practice that becomes incidental and unremembered. Mauss calls them techniques of the body, the ―actions of a mechanical, physical or psychochemical order‖;96 Bourdieu sees them as a set of ―acquired characteristics‖ which are the ―product of history, that is of social experience and education.‖97 For the pedagogues of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, however, these habitual behaviors serve to inculcate custom as lex loci (that is, common law or practice) and, ―woven into the very Principles of [the pupil‘s] Nature,‖ become the foundation for his future intellectual pursuits (ST [1695]

57).

The unthinking internal constraints facilitating this acquired ―nature‖ may seem to contradict much of John Locke‘s pedagogical focus on reason, as well as his political doctrines about free will. As Joseph Carrig points out, Locke‘s Second Treatise of

Government suggests that an individual is only free when directed by his ―own reason‖; yet, the habit-born ―reasoning‖ of most pupils remains insufficient to free them from the

―empire of habit.‖98 Habitual response seems, in many ways, antithetical to the freedom of the individual—though it reinforces the ―well-being‖ of society. Nonetheless, eighteenth-century theorists, especially Locke, considered habits as antecedents to reason, since mechanical behaviors ensured a man‘s observance of common customs and freed him from the labors of everyday moral or social decisions. Locke intends that the pupil,

94 Pierre Bourdieu, ―Habitus‖ Habitus: A Sense of Place. (Padstow: TTJ International Ltd., 2005), 43. 95 Jean Hiller and Emma Rooksby, ―Introduction to the Second Edition.‖ In Habitus: A Sense of Place. 2nd Edition. (Padstow: TTJ International Ltd., 2005), 11. 96 Marcel Mauss, Sociology and Psychology Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 105. 97 Bourdieu, ―Habitus,‖ 45. 98 Joseph Carrig, "Liberal Impediments to Liberal Education: The Assent to Locke," The Review of Politics 63, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 41-76, 63-64. 42 when of age, will attain the power to reason on his own; internalized habits are merely the amelioration of man‘s constant moral supervision. By taking away the pressure of minor decisions, mechanical habits cleared the way for the male pupil to engage in the greater debates of his day—to use his reason for larger purposes of state. There was, however, a crucial oversight in this pedagogical reasoning. As Barney explains, ―if the habitus is a complex disposition composed of both unconscious reflex and rational capacity,‖ then female educationalists feared that custom would ―make them creatures mainly of the first element and barely of the second.‖99 The work of female educationalists could not promote the autonomy of the female mind without first addressing (and redressing) the inherent consequences of a habitus for women.

The lack of thought and reflection required by habitual behavior was dangerous for women because women were barred from those larger discourses and purposes for which habitual thought was meant to prepare men. The period‘s female pedagogues and educationalists also observed the relationship between habit and reason, but argued that the relationship was causal and reversed. As Mary Astell writes in part I of A Serious

Proposal (1694), ―by an habitual inadvertency we render ourselves incapable of any serious and improving thought, till our minds themselves become as light and frothy as those things they are conversant about‖ (SP [1694] I:48). Astell‘s reaction is instructive; first, it showcases her use of sermo, or conversational rhetoric over contentio. Astell participates in the dialogue with her reader, using the shared personal pronoun

―ourselves‖ to critique Locke‘s authoritative position as an instructor observing the behavior of another. Second, it demonstrates Astell‘s acceptance of Cartesian dualism, or the separation of the mind from the physical body. The mind, through limited

99 Barney, Plots, 56. 43 acquaintance with knowledge, becomes ―lighter‖100 than the physical substance of the biological body, even as the habits of that body become automatic. For the female educationalists, habit without reflection—that is, mechanical habituation or habitus— serves as a tool of mental subjugation and threatens to turn the ―thinking woman‖ into an unthinking machine. Social relations among actors structure and are structured by ―the social relations of power among different positions (of class, gender etc,)‖101 and an education based on habitus serves more often to ―maintain rather than reduce social inequality.‖102 Conversely, habitude, what Mauss calls ―(habit or custom), the ‗exis‘, the

‗acquired ability‘ and ‗faculty‘ of Aristotle,‖103 reflects what female educationalists aspired to when they encouraged habits of behavior. Habitude consisted of the conscious repetition of an action, a habit of study or of reflection. Thus, gender informs how one maps out the relationships between habits, mechanical response, reason and common custom. As I argue in this chapter, female educationalists countermand the assumptions about habitual learning in the pedagogical principles of male theorists, principally by making subtle distinctions in terminology. By carefully reconstructing the terms, these women critique the often contradictory assumptions held by male pedagogues, for whom habit and custom are changeable and—ironically—inconstant.

Custom (or common custom) is an extraordinarily versatile term in the rhetoric of seventeenth-century education and polemics; ―custom‖ could denote tradition, culture and collective habits, as well as local practice and common law. As a result, custom

100 Astell claims that, ―by an habitual inadvertency we render ourselves incapable of any serious and improving thought, till our minds themselves become as light and frothy as those things they are conversant about.‖ Astell, A Serious Proposal Part I, 4th ed. (London, 1697 [1701]), 29. 101 Hiller and Rooksby, ―Introduction to the First Edition,‖ 20. 102 David Swartz, ―Pierre Bourdieu: The Cultural Transmission of Social Inequality.‖ In Pierre Bourdieu Vol. II (London: SAGE Publications, 2000), 207. 103 Mauss, Essays, 101. 44 attained, as Bathsua Makin contends, ―the force of Nature itself‖ (ERAEG 2). This is a recurring complaint among female educationalists, who personify custom as a ―Tyrant‖ in their works. For male writers such as Francis Bacon, however, an education in custom is represented as man‘s ―second nature,‖104 his induction into the traditions and practices of mankind and his means of ensuring the continuance of those same practices. Through socialization and education, ―relatively permanent cultural dispositions‖ were internalized, structuring both individual and group behavior so as to ―reproduce existing class relations.‖105 Sociologist David Swartz interprets this reproduction using Bourdieu‘s formulation of higher education; the dominant group controls the ―socially valued and legitimate cultural meanings,‖ and ―when inculcated through education, these meanings tend to elicit assent and encourage respect by subordinate groups for the social order.‖106

Education becomes necessary to the maintenance of custom, even though custom is thought to be the means and even the content of education. These permutations of terminology are important, especially considering the redefinition of rhetoric in the period (also once the means and content of education) as subordinate to the transmission of knowledge. It is custom, therefore, that represents both the collective behaviors culturally internalized as tradition and the tradition itself. As habits generally may mean either habitus or habitude, so custom may mean either Custom-as-Nature (the tradition) or custom-as-practices/behaviors (the habit-born education that inculcates it).

By 1696, six years after Locke published Some Thoughts and one year before

Astell published A Serious Proposal, Samuel Carter‘s Lex Custumaria made an attempt to sub-divide and clarify custom‘s protean definition, separating it into four parts:

104 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common. (New York: New York Press, 1991), 2. 105 Swartz, ―Pierre Bourdieu,‖ 208. 106 Ibid. 45 antiquity (the history of the practice), continuance (the persistence of the practice), certainty (the benefits-based correctness of the practice) and reason (the ―reasonableness‖ of the practice):107

For a Custome taketh beginning and groweth to perfection in this manner. When a reasonable Act once done is found to be good, and beneficial to the People, and agreeable to their nature and disposition, then do they use it and practice it again and again, and so by often iteration and multiplication of the Act, it becomes a Custome. 108 Custom is three parts tradition and one part behavior or practice in this formulation.

Whenever male pedagogues warn against custom, as when Locke counsels his readers not ―to make any Thing customary, the Practice whereof you would not have continue, and increase,‖ they caution against the power of ―customs‖ as bad practices (or habits) rather than ―Custom‖ as tradition, the rational force of culture (ST [1695] 25). But custom as behavior or practice may be redeemed as Custom, Nature or tradition. As stated by the

Lex Custumaria, any custom ―being continued…obtaineth the force of a Law.‖109 Using the word ―C/custom‖ therefore facilitates the ―rhetoric of legitimation‖ in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-centuries.110 The relationship between the elements is fluid and circular rather than hierarchical, and one term may stand in for another. Douglas

Hay and Nicholas Rogers describe this practice at the social level: Custom ―seemed both part of a natural social order, and a guarantee of collective wellbeing.‖111 As such, those things which threatened Custom also threatened society by unfixing perceived ―natural‖ boundaries. Pedagogues commonly used this relationship between nature and custom in their arguments barring women‘s higher intellectual pursuits. Through the dual usage of

107 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, 97. 108 Qtd. in Ibid., 97 109 Samual Carter, Lex Custumaria, qtd. in Thompson, Customs in Common, 97. 110 Thompson, Customs in Common, 6. 111 Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers. Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 95. 46 the term, male pedagogues were able to claim first that customary habits remove the necessity of conscious rational decision, and second that broader (rational) education for women would violate Custom. The resulting pedagogy trained women to behave rather than to reason. As Francois Fénelon suggests, it was best to ―Insinuate‖ women into

―their Duty‖ through habits that ―gr[e]w insensibly‖ upon them (IED [1708] 3, 20). A mechanical obedience, likened to breathing, controlled their ―flexible‖ natures and removed the possibility of ―Revolutions‖ against traditional order (IED [1707] 7). The habitus enforced the utter otherness of women, and by doing so ensured a gendered intellectual hierarchy.112 Thus, when female educationalists call Custom a tyrant and suggest that women are moral equals by nature—all the while addressing their works to an audience primarily composed of women—they are engaging in nothing less than a social and intellectual (though not yet political) revolution. The ―Tyrant Custom‖113 must, however, be differentiated from customary practice and habit before it can be effectively deposed.

Through a subtle delineation of terms, female educationalists call a host of pedagogical assumptions into question. Custom, in female educationalist discourse, represents the power of tradition, the force of nature and/or the force of law, while mechanical habits (or behavior without reflection) become, by contrast, a mere tool of mental subjugation. In this sense, the female educationalists employ their terminology more carefully than their male counterparts and avoid the error evident in the work of

Locke and his forebears on habit and free will. As Bacon before her and Locke after her,

112 A modern demonstration of the ―dominated habitus‖ may be found in anthropological post-colonial accounts; Fay Gale assesses the use of habitus as social and cultural restraint in ―The Endurance of Aboriginal Women in Australia.‖ In Habitus: A Sense of Place. 113 Makin, An Essay 3; Astell, A Serious Proposal, Part I (1697), 28. 47

Makin recognizes the power of custom in early education—but she questions its legitimacy. By explaining that ―great is the Force of the first Tincture any thing takes, whether good, or bad,‖ she suggests first that the power lies in early inculcation of habits rather than in custom or tradition itself, and second that the consequence may be negative rather than positive (ERAEG 7). Makin further argues that ―the Barbarous custom to breed Women low, is grown general amongst us, and hath prevailed so far, that it is verily believed […] that Women are not endued with such Reason, as men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they are‖ (ERAEG 3). She therefore refutes Custom‘s claim to antiquity by demonstrating—through a catalog of historical examples—that there are historical precedents for women‘s education. Women once participated in public life and were part of civil society with the attendant rights it granted. Only recently, she argues, have women been ―bred low‖ by a newer and more ―barbaric‖ custom. Using historical examples of women ―formerly Educated in the knowledge of Arts and

Tongues,‖ she demonstrates that the ―under-breeding‖ of women is both a foreign practice (of ―Heathen‖ and ―Barbarous‖ people) and a false custom, for ―Women are not such silly giddy creatures, as many proud ignorant men would make them‖ (ERAEG 22,

29). Far from seeing it as a ―reasonable Act once done‖ and ―found to be good,‖114 Makin considers the custom of constrained female education through which ―women [are] kept ignorant, on purpose to be made slaves‖ as one which ―ought to be broken‖—and by doing so she firmly demotes custom[s] from tradition or nature to habitual behavior

(ERARG 5, 31). Custom has attained a power akin to nature, but cannot be conflated with nature, she argues, because the sexes in their natural state have equal shares of intellect.

Only customary practice has raised men above women. Makin‘s task, as Nancy Weitz

114 Carter, Lex Custumaria, qtd. in Thompson Customs in Common. 97 48

Miller explains, is one of ―universalizing—uniting—that which has been for too long separated into gendered space,‖115 but the force of lex loci still determines the female role.

In both legal and philosophical terms, women were not considered persons; they had few rights and—even if proven men‘s equals in ―nature‖—few practical alternatives to their role as mothers and (secondarily) as wives. They were instead understood as

―more or less exclusively biological beings.‖116 The works of seventeenth-century male writers inscribe paradoxes in the period‘s discourse on human rights ―when their aspirations for humanity confronted their beliefs about the female half of humankind.‖ 117

As John McCrystal foregrounds, Locke‘s theory of rights ―was based upon [this] flawed version of individualism.‖118 Makin may have argued for women‘s intellectual pedigree, but Astell is the first woman to publically address the inconsistencies in Locke‘s epistemological writings, particularly to denounce his political arguments about the position of women in civil society.119 She observes that there remains a ―mutual Relation between the Understanding and the Will,‖ and to ―be able to repeat any Person‘s Dogma without forming a Distinct Idea of it…is not to Know but to Remember‖ (SP [1697]

II:32, 81). Repetition without understanding potentially leads women into error ―e‘re we are capable of examining the Reasons of our Choice‖ (SP [1697] II:219). While Locke finds habits anterior and supportive to reason and free will, Astell fears that the

115 Miller, "Ethos, Authority and Vitrue for Seventeenth-Century Women Writers: The Case of Bathsua Makin's Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen," 280. 116 John McCrystal, "Revolting Women: The Use of Revolutionary Discourse in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared." History of Political Thought 14, no. 2 (1993): 189-203, 194. 117 Ibid., 193. 118 Ibid., 194. 119 Cynthia B. Bryson, "Mary Astell: Defender of the 'Disembodied Mind'." Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 13, no. 4 (1998): 40-62, 40. In addition to critiquing Locke for this contradiction, Astell also attacks his sensationalist psychology. 49 prereflexive ―frequent repetition‖ of habitus makes such unreasoned behaviors

―[c]ustomary to us, and consequently [will give] a new and wrong bias to our inclinations‖ (SP [1697] II:219). Astell‘s vehement attack on this custom maintains that men—who are the sole beneficiaries of education—are yet ―very often guilty of greater faults‖ than women, which, ―considering the advantages they enjoy, are much more inexcusable‖ (SP [1694], I:17). Women‘s supposed incapacity is therefore ―acquired not natural,‖ and could easily be corrected if not for the ―mistakes of [their] Education, which like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill influence through all [their] Lives‖ (SP

[1694], I:23, 25). Custom, now separated from nature, becomes a personified evil, and

Astell reverses Locke‘s assertion that custom ―grow[s] into habit‖ by suggesting:

―Ignorance and a narrow Education lay the Foundation of Vice, and Imitation and Custom rear it up. Custom, that merciless torrent that carries all before it, and which indeed can be stem‘d by none but such as have a great deal of Prudence and rooted Virtue‖ [my italics]. (SP [1694], I:44). Custom is presented as the core of ―Sin and Folly‖ and ―the grand motive to all those irrational choices which we daily see made in the World‖—thus Astell‘s counter attack, as with Makin‘s, is both gendered and universalized (SP [1694], I:46). This custom of under-educating women is exacerbated by all the ―noise‖ and distraction of the world, keeping women from ―attend[ing] to the Dictates of [their] Reason‖ (SP [1694], I:47).

The combination of Custom and customs (or habits) results in the mechanical habitus

Astell decries, and which she fears may lead to a loss of understanding and free will—but it is still Custom-as-tradition that serves as the progenitor and, in a manner, the parent or tutor, ―rearing up‖ ignorance in place of reason.

Custom continues to be addressed in the works of the other female educationalists, particularly Judith Drake and Lady Mary Chudleigh, though the attacks

50 are less direct. In her Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, Drake uses the image of slavery to describe the condition of women under Custom‘s conscribed system: ―Fetters of Gold are still Fetters, and the softest Lining can never make ‗em so easy as Liberty.‖120

Drake also universalizes her arguments; her essay asserts that impertinence, inconstancy, vanity and many other ―feminine‖ failings are ―equally common to both Sexes,‖ and therefore the failings not of gender but of mankind (EDFS 49). Chudleigh‘s The Ladies

Defence, a fictional dialogue in verse rather than a formal polemic, never directly addresses ―Custom‖ at all, but rather embodies it in the form of Melissa‘s three opponents: the Parson, Sir John Brute and Sir William Loveall. The Defence was written in response to John Sprint‘s Bridewoman‟s Counselor, itself a kind of conduct or education tract delivered as a wedding sermon. Chudleigh‘s three male characters don‘t only represent Sprint himself, however, but also traditional views and the joined forces of ecclesiastical law (the Parson employs religion to suggest women ―Give up their Reason and their Wills resign‖), manorial law (Sir John—a lord of the manor—considers women as unintelligent burdens to a man‘s liberty) and fashionable behavior (Sir William regards women as beautiful objects that ―should content themselves with being Fair‖).121 Male pedagogues, not unlike the ―Parson,‖ consider Custom and reason as potentially cooperative because tradition-preserving habits are only the smallest part of a man‘s public, political and rational duties. The implicit infantilizing underlying the male concept of the female ignores or even elides the limited opportunities available to actual women. Because they are unable to contribute to public matters of society or state,

120 Judith Drake, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex Fourth Edition (London: Printed for S. Butler, next Bernard's Inn in Holborn, 1721), 22. Hereafter cited in the text as EDFS. 121 Mary Chudleigh, The Ladies Defence: or, The Bride-Woman's Counsellor Answer'd. (London: for John Deeve at Bernard's-Inn-Gate in Holborn, 1701), 3.1, 2.1-15, 17.23. Hereafter cited in the text as LD; text references are to page and line of this edition. 51 women are robbed of rational duty beyond everyday moral decisions—and because of prereflexive habits, women are robbed, too, of any rational decisions that might remain.

Yet the concept of habit is so deeply engrained in the rhetoric of pedagogy that it becomes almost impossible to discuss education without invoking habituation—which once more treads upon the incongruity of nature and custom.

The aim in most pedagogical tracts is to make instruction ―habitual‖ so that, as

Locke puts it, ―the Performance will not depend on Memory or Reflection…but will be natural in them‖ [my italics] (ST [1695] 79-80). Thus, when the ideological rhetoric of habit is employed in the service of women‘s education—either by men or women—it performs a precarious balancing act between what is ―natural‖ and what is ―cultivated.‖

Locke‘s use of horticultural rhetorical tropes makes this plain: ―one by one you may weed [faults] out all, and plant what Habits you please‖ (ST [1695] 78). This image of the

―garden plot‖ was a favorite eighteenth-century construct that combined ―the essential operations of Nature with the salutary application of human artifice.‖122 As Fénelon warns, while a ―learned‖ woman is both ―ridiculous‖ and ―vain‖—an untrained or

―natural‖ one is dangerous (IED [1708] 2-3). For women, natural growth must be restricted to espalier horticulture, carefully pruned by the ever-watchful male pedagogue.

Thus, Fénelon (like most other male pedagogues) intends that women be trained from

―their most tender Infancy‖ to behavior that borders on mechanized parroting, and the insensible means of ―indirect Instruction‖ is the favored method (IED [1708] 14, 31-32).

―The Ignorance of Children, in whose Brain nothing is yet imprinted…renders them pliable,‖ and parents, content to ―follow up and help Nature,‖ may ―form in them an exact Relish, and make them sensible of true Decencies‖ (IED [1708] 28, 23, 29).

122 Barney, Plots, 32. 52

―Helping‖ nature is, in a manner, supplanting it with culture, and young women were insinuated into proper behavior without ever needing to reflect or exercise their reason.

Nonetheless, women in their natural or untrained state were thought to be deficient in reason, so this form of education was meant mainly to provide the ―appearance of rationality‖ [original italics].123 Unlike Locke‘s mechanical habits, which were meant merely to clear the way for greater acts of reason, this appearance stood in for actual

(conscious) understanding. Women need not be reasonable if they could but know what to say and when to say it. This sort of ―cultivation‖—like the dancing, music-playing, manners and poise taught at finishing schools—was ornamental, and the rhetoric of habit pointed to this ―human artifice‖ nearly as often as to the garden plot.

Interestingly, artifice is a recurring theme in most pedagogy and, as a term denoting artificiality and deception, it is, of course, decried by most. However, artifice is also related to the ladies‘ toilette, and at the junction between body, dress and ornament, habit takes on additional meaning. Mauss described habitus in terms of body techniques—and the body itself as ―man‘s first and most natural technical object.‖124 The automatisms, or assembled unconscious physical and mechanical actions, of the subject are put in motion not only by the individual ―but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies it.‖125 Moreover, these behaviors are reflected on as well as practiced by the body, imparted by the posture, poise and even the adornment—the habit—an individual wears.126 Paul Connerton, with Mauss, argues that clothing both conveys social messages and helps to mold character by influencing

123 Carrig, "Liberal Impediments,‖ 63. 124 Mauss, Essays, 104. 125 Ibid., 105. 126 Andrew Strathern, Body Thoughts (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 29. 53 body movement, citing the Victorian corset as the embodiment of ―straight-laced‖ moral significance.127 In the seventeenth-century pedagogical tracts, a dichotomy emerges from the resulting play between what is natural and what is cultivated, but nature, though often employed as a means of ratifying custom, is never given precedence over the domesticated, cultivated space. The female educationalists did not (and possibly could not) disagree with the benefits of cultivation; rather they re-employed habit as dress first to demonstrate that all cultural learning is engrafted or cultivated and second to reverse the social message conveyed by clothing alone. A woman‘s failings, in this paradigm, are the result of mismanaged cultivation rather than nature, and the male-directed emphasis on learning to dance and dress the body becomes the representation for idleness and amorality.

In the dedication to his treatise on education for women, poet and pedagogue

Richard Brathwaite boasts that his gentlewoman‘s education ―hath so enobled her, as shee can converse with you of all places…and discourse most delightfully on all fashions.‖128 Brathwaite further blends speech and dress in his discussion of attire in the main text: ―Decency shee affects with her Cloathes, affability in her Discourse,‖129 and

Robert Codrington (a contemporary pedagogue) goes so far as to equate clothing with mental capacity: ―Soft cloathes introduce soft minds.‖130 The charge that clothing and mental degeneration are somehow linked is a relatively common one, and women are often chastised for their predilection for fashion. Fénelon warns that this ―Excess‖ of

127 Ibid., 29 128 Richard Brathwaite, The English gentleman and the English gentlewoman : both in one volume. (London: Printed for Iohn Dawson, 1641), 264. 129 Ibid., 265. 130 Robert Codrington, Youths Behaviour: or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women, (London: Printed for W. Lee, 1664), 21. 54 vanity is perhaps the most dangerous of female faults; not only does it ―overthrow the

Distinction of Conditions‖ (a very real fear in the period and one well documented by

Harriet Guest131), but it also ―disturb[s] all the Rules of Manners‖ (IED [1708] 200). All the same, women are encouraged to wear and discourse about fashionable apparel, prompted, even by pedagogues, to attain a knowledge that carried them no further than discussions of fashionable habits—and then reprimanded for learning the lesson so well.

As Chudleigh complains, women were ―Debarred from knowledge, banish‘d from the

Schools‖ and ―kept from knowing what would make [them] priz‘d‖ (LD 14). Given this

Gordian knot, the female educationalists had to re-invent the rhetoric of habit in order to

―wear it well,‖ and they began by reviewing the very habit-laden education recommended to them by men. Through such critiques, these educationalists develop and employ the concept of positive habitude, a system of repeated—but not thoughtless—behaviors for the betterment of the female pupil.

Proto-feminist educationalists‘ response to habitus often begins by criticizing habits of dress and demonstrating that such habits are ―cultivated‖ behaviors under the direction of men. Makin examines the customary education of women, who are taught only to ―to wear gay Clothes,‖ and concludes that such ornaments do not serve to adorn

―but to adulterate their Bodies; yea, (what is worse) to defile their souls‖ (ERAEG 22). A discussion of women‘s reasoning capacities immediately follows: ―Had God intended

Women onely as a finer sort of Cattle, he would not have made them reasonable‖ [sic]

(ERAEG 23). Far from adding a moral dimension to the female body (as the ―straight- laced‖ or corseted and controlled body), the emphasis on dress robs women of their moral

131 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism 1750-1810. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 55 character. The female educationalists after Makin seek not only to decry the fashionable habit, but also to overturn and re-employ it for moral ends. Through Astell‘s focus on

―clothing‖ oneself with righteousness (after the fashion of Pauline letters in the New

Testament), habit as dress takes on a new social significance for women‘s education.

Astell begins by expanding upon the benefits of a rational education, stating that it is ―a

Matter infinitely more worthy...than what Colours are most agreeable, or what‘s the

Dress that becomes you best‖ (SP [1694] I:7). Education is a kind of dress in this figuration, and shortly becomes a substitute toilette: ―Your Glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own Minds, which will discover

Irregularities more worthy your Correction‖ (SP [1694] I:7). Her aim is not to repeal ornamentation, but to redirect it, to ―fix that Beauty, to make it lasting and permanent‖

(SP [1694] I:3). In Astell‘s work, habitude is intentional and virtuous, and becomes something the individual can ―put on‖ to beautify her character: ―Vertue…has certainly the most attractive Air, and Wisdom the most graceful and becoming Meen‖ (SP [1694]

I:8).

Astell‘s use of metaphor and structure is, as Christine Mason Sutherland explains,

―masterly‖; she is ―preparing the ground‖ by making an appeal to social value—taking every advantage of persuasive technique.132 ―How can you be content,‖ she asks, ―to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew and be good for nothing‖ (SP

[1694] I:11). Through a re-appropriation of both the habit and garden plot metaphors,

Astell promotes a new kind of education, one that privileges reason over the insensible means through which women were ―habituating [them]selves to Folly‖ (SP [1694] I:121).

In both of these reconstitutions the aim is to allow women—through an education in

132 C.M. Sutherland, Eloquence. 55, 55, 61. 56 reason—to ―know and reflect on [their] own minds‖ (SP [1694] I:124). Women should endeavor to leave superficiality behind and form firm habits of study, so that ―their

Reason [may] dictate to their Will‖ (SP [1694] I:124). The habitude considered here turns habit and reason inside out—women‘s habits (of virtue and of study) are meant to inform their reason, which in turn, allows them to exercise free will rather than merely appear rational.

Custom and habitus may, in Locke‘s case, promote the reasoning power of men, but as women were considered incapable of reason, their education provides only the show—the appearance of mental activity. The goal, in either case, is to make these behaviors in some sense automatic, so that the action is continued in response to stimuli or situations that require it. Bourdieu writes in Outline of the Theory of Practice that

―Every group entrusts to bodily automatisms those principles most basic to it and most indispensible to its conservation‖; or to put it another way (as does Paul Connerton)

―Every group, then, will entrust to bodily automatisms the values and categories which they are most anxious to conserve.‖133 The automated body technique serves to reinforce the social hierarchy—the status quo—but Astell suggests that by inculcating only habit

(as opposed to thinking and reflection), women will not only continue in their lower

(other) position, they will also lose what reason they possess: ―if therefore we make little or no use of our Understanding, we shall shortly have none to use‖ (SP [1694] I:124). (SP

[1694] I:80-81). The ―inadvertency‖ that Astell describes threatens to unseat the soul and deny women access to the private, reflective mind. Worse, ―such an unthinking mechanical way of living‖ contracts the mind until improvement is no longer possible—

133 Bourdieu‘s 1977 Outline of the Theory of Practice and Paul Connerton‘s 1989 How Societies Remember, qtd. in Strathern, Body Thoughts, 29. 57 learning disappears and women become ―Machines… condemn‘d every day to repeat the impertinencies of the day before‖ (SP [1694] I:120). L‟Homme Machine—trained as it is by mechanical habits—only functions as a rational human being so long as it is given at least some measure of free will. This free will is assumed in educational treatises meant for young men who would soon enter the wider world of politics, theology, philosophy and science. Gender thus challenges the rhetorical rigor of Locke‘s purportedly universalist theory by showing its logical blindspot: the ―bodily automatisms‖ encouraged for women served not to promote reason but to reproduce or ―conserve‖ the mechanical and unthinking behavior of the female ―Machine.‖

Anatomy, Automation and the Mechanical Mother

Automation, mechanics and the ―female machine‖ must, however, be placed into the context of philosophical and physiological debates of the period. Though the educationalists viewed mechanical behavior as detrimental to the development of the female mind, the analogy was nonetheless increasingly used to describe the actions of the human body. The emergence of artificial or mechanical life in the eighteenth century was ―crucially informed‖ by the materialist/mechanist understanding of life that evolved out of Rene Descartes‘ mechanistic philosophy. But though Cartesian dualism essentially reinforced the separation between mind and body, Cartesian mechanics, characterized by its hydraulic imagery and concrete visual metaphors, was an essential rhetorical figure for connecting mind and body.134 As a result, Materialists used Descartes‘ imagery to repudiate dualism, insisting instead ―that all the functions that might be ascribed to mind

134 John T. Harwood, The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 136. 58 and soul actually resided in the stuff of which living creatures were made.‖135 Mechanists argued that interaction among the body‘s parts, its ―animal machinery,‖ was responsible

―for all vital and mental processes.‖136 These materialist/mechanistic accounts did shape how people thought about living creatures but, as Jessica Riskin explains in her work on

Le Mettrie‘s L‟Homme Machine, it also worked ―reciprocally‖ to change how people thought about the mechanism: ―If life was material, then matter was alive, and to see living creatures as machines was also to vivify machinery.‖137 Buttressed by the Royal

Society‘s mechanical philosophy and informed by scientists like Pierre Gassendi138 and political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, the rhetorical trope of mechanization proliferated in science, medicine, pedagogy and politics—but it was in the medical theatre that the machine took its more literal form. As early as 1700, ―birthing machines‖ were being built to serve as mechanical rather than flesh-and-blood representations of the female anatomy, a replacement that further eliminated the separation—so important to the educationalists—of mind and body, form and function.

A woman‘s primary function (in the eighteenth century, but certainly before it and alarmingly well after it) was reproduction. She was useful as the begetter of sons, of heirs, of new English subjects. It was her moral obligation and her duty; to defy it was to reject reason and morality. Defoe, in Congugal Lewdness, or Matrimonial Whoredom

(1727), for instance, considers contraceptives as perversions of the true meaning of marriage—and that meaning was procreative.139 Ruth Perry provides some statistics for

135 Jessica Riskin, "Eighteenth-Century Wetware." Representations 83 (Summer 2003): 97-125, 99. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Often considered one of Descartes sources, along with Kepler. 139 Ruth Perry, "The Veil of Chastity: Mary Astell's Feminism." In Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 148. 59 the period: during her ―fifteen or so fertile years,‖ a woman was likely to become pregnant up to twelve times and to deliver at least six or eight times. 140 From the London bills of mortality, lying-in hospitals and polls, records suggest that for every sixty deliveries approximately one woman died;141 thus, if a woman was facing her first delivery, her chances were sixty to one.142 Most women, however, faced these risks many times over—if she delivered only six children she faced at least a ten percent chance (or higher) of dying on her childbed.143 Even worse were the complications that did not kill:

Torn anal sphincter muscles and lesions between bladder or rectum and the vagina made continence impossible. The loss of iron from repeated bloody deliveries and from nursing must have meant serious widespread anaemia. Women lived on with ruptured and prolapsed uteruses, with the organ torn loose and hanging visible between the legs.144

Such was the primacy of this function that prospective brides were brought to see pregnant wax models ―in preparation for their reproductive destinies.‖145 But women‘s reproductive equipment was still more or less a mystery, with its ―horrifying fecundity.‖146 Half of London was ready to believe Mary Tofts, a poor uneducated woman from Godalming, who claimed to have given birth to rabbits in 1726, and London papers frequently carried strange tales of monster-births.147 One in particular is suggestive of the horror of the womb; a woman supposedly gave birth to a dead child half eaten by live snakes. The hero of the story is the husband, who ―took courage and

140 Ibid. 141 These figures are uncorrected for variables and fluctuate a great deal even for the same period. Perry therefore provides the most conservative of estimates. 142 Perry, ―The Veil,‖ 148. 143 Ibid. 144 Ibid., 149. 145 Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. Qtd. in Bonnie Blackwell, "Tristram Shandy and the Theatre of the Mechanical Mother," ELH 68, no. 1 (2001): 81-133, 90. 146 Perry, ―The Veil,‖ 150. 147 Ibid. 60 enter‘d the Room with a Stick and destroy‘d them‖ when the female midwife fled.148

Perry maintains that these stories speak of ―helplessness and fear in the face of women‘s unpredictable and powerful reproductive capacities,‖ but they also reflect men‘s desire to control female fecundity, shake off the horror of childbirth, and make the entire birthing process a clockwork and timely affair. It is precisely the unpredictable (and potentially indiscreet) nature of the actual woman in labor that led medical professionals to create the first female birthing machines, to ―manufacture the kind of woman they could not find in the world.‖149 The body as an instrument, a ―technical object, and at the same time technical means,‖150 becomes truly automated—mechanical behavior is reified and vivified by the machine.

Automation as a means of demonstrating the workings of the body was both science and spectacle in the early part of the eighteenth century—in fact, the popularity of machines depended in part upon this fusion. Jacques Vaucanson‘s Flute-player debuted in 1738; this mechanical man did not just move automatically as though playing—it actually ―breathed‖ into the flute, mouthing it with flexible lips and tongue.151

Another innovation of Vaucanson‘s and, oddly, the one which drew the largest crowd of excited onlookers, was the ―defecating Duck.‖ This tiny machine affected to eat and excrete as any biological creature, and though the mechanism was later proven to be a hoax, such scatological contrivances demonstrate the interest of designers, engineers— and later, medical practitioners—in ―[p]hysiological correctness.‖152 In 1739, surgeon

Claude-Nicolas Le Cat published a description of ―automaton man‖—a teaching tool he

148 Qtd. in Ibid. 149 Blackwell, ―Tristram Shandy,‖ 87. 150 Mauss, Essays, 104. 151 Riskin, "Eighteenth-Century Wetware," 103. 152 Ibid. 103. 61 proposed to build (but never completed)—―in which one sees executed the principle functions of the animal economy,‖ including circulation and various ―secretions.‖153

However, the birthing machine—the ―mechanical mother‖ that was introduced in France around 1700 for the instruction of male midwives—remains the strangest and most suggestive of these mechanical models.154 Though the first of these female machines was created by Gregoire at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, it was Dr. William Smellie—often referred to as the father of British midwifery (and unfortunately named for the job)—who made the birthing machine popular in Britain.155 Having copied Gregoire‘s design,

Smellie is credited with having trained, through its use, nine hundred man-midwives in ten years.156 Smellie would stand behind and operate the mechanism, while a student—in front of a theatre of onlookers—would attempt to deliver a leather doll from the cavity using forceps. It is important to note that, with no living woman to ―critique the dexterity or gentleness‖157 of these deliveries, speed was the most important factor. Smellie‘s female machine, according to Bonnie Blackwell, ―acclimates the man-midwife to the idea of the clockwork delivery.‖158 In addition, however, the creation of the mechanical mother took the mechanical imagery of female ―clockwork‖ and transformed it into a suitably efficient replacement for the laboring woman—a machine that could give birth multiple times an hour with speed and efficiency, passively brought to bear by the forceful methods of male midwives.

153 Ibid., 114. 154 Blackwell, ―Tristram Shandy,‖ 81. 155 Ibid., 91. 156 Ibid., 92. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid., 93. 62

The mechanical delivery machine had a variety of names in the period that demonstrate the spectacle-like nature of its reception: ―this most curious machine,‖ ―this mock woman,‖ and the ―celebrated Apparatus‖ among them.159 The original machine, created by M. Gregoire, was little more than a basket, and Mme. Du Coudray‘s machine, built in the mid-eighteenth century, presented only the stumps of legs protruding, along with the vaginal canal, from a curtain.160 Blackwell describes Smellie‘s machine as a corset, hoop skirt, abdominal cavity and vaginal canal that opened between the legs.161 It, and its counterparts, diverged from the original wax models (another kind of training

―machine‖) in a number of ways, two of which are extremely suggestive when taken together: 1) the birthing machine was not inert, but moved with contraction-like motions through the use of levers and 2) though often possessing legs, trunk, and organ, it never included a head. Severed and piecemeal, the ―mock woman‖ is still able to serve a procreative if not creative purpose—and the delivery of such mindless (and headless) apparatus surely merits inclusion in the lists of monster births.

An important caveat should, however, be mentioned concerning anatomical models of the eighteenth century. Blackwell suggests that such piecemeal contrivances were potential (and perhaps intentional) slights of flesh-and-blood women, but sectioned and partial anatomies were common in medical practice, particularly for training purposes. Smellie wrote about and extensively illustrated the female anatomy, particularly the womb with child [see fig 1, Appendix B]—and William Hunter (1718-

1783), anatomist, male midwife and physician to Queen Charlotte, famously made a

159 Qtd. in Ibid., 91. 160 An image of this machine is available in Nina Rattnew Gelbart‘s The King‟s Midwife: A History of Madame du Coudray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 62. The image is of the only preserved birthing machine made by Coudray, and is on display at the Musée Flaubert, Rouen. 161 Blackwell, ―Tristram Shandy,‖ 91. 63 three-dimensional cast of the ―gravid uterus‖ from his book of the same name. Neither anatomist provided entire forms—there was no expectation that they should. A comparison of Smellie and Hunter is suggestive, however, and illustrates the ways in which science yields to spectacle with potentially damaging consequences. Unlike

Smellie‘s illustrations, Hunter‘s figures are rendered with bloodied cross-sections of the stumped legs [see fig 2, Appendix B]. These details are not present in earlier anatomical models, which often included sheets of cloth to hide, but also to suggest, extremities

[compare fig 3, Appendix B]. There is some debate about whether Hunter deliberately tried to achieve artistic or visceral impact,162 but it is noteworthy that the casts were—like the birthing machines—purposed for exhibition. The medical theatre, in displaying such models, rendered the female form more than denuded—it was naked of flesh, severed in places, the internal matter laid open for observation.

It is doubtful, of course, that Astell or her contemporaries could have imagined what considerable use would be made of the female birthing machines by mid-century; yet, the mechanistic representations just before and immediately after 1700, coupled with ever-increasing uses for mechanical imagery, would have intensified their fear of becoming ―little useless and impertinent Animals‖ or ―meer Machines‖ repeating a series of automatisms (SP [1694] I:73-74, 25). The constraints of education, the mechanization of habitus, and the ―management‖ of men (from the over-seeing pedagogue to the 900 man-midwives) was a constant reminder of how little autonomy remained to women.

With the advent of female machines, Cartesian mechanics (which offered a separation between body and soul that female educationalists encouraged) and

162 McCulloch, N.A., D. Russell, S.W. McDonald. "William Hunter's casts of the gravid uterus at the University of Glasgow." Clinical Anatomy 14, no. 3 (2001): 210-217. 64 mechanism/automation diverged. The automated body becomes primary, and the medical theatre reinforced the visible, objectified role of biological presence. It is important to note that habitus, even as it is constructed by modern thinkers like Mauss and Bourdieu, is antithetical to Cartesian dualism. In one of his late works, Bourdieu reemphasized this divergence, stating that the habitus philosophy ―is opposed to the Cartesian philosophy of action which is revived today in the tradition of homo oeconomicus as a rational agent, who chooses the best means, the best strategies by a conscious calculation oriented towards the maximization of profits.‖163 Descartes considered that ―the soul/mind had no physical extension (res non extensa) yet possessed the capacity to think (res cogitans) while the body had physical extension but no capacity to think,‖ and so set up the ―realm of the physical, or material‖ as that which could be apprehended ―objectively as a ‗thing‘ and studied by the transcendental capacities of the soul/mind.‖164 The potential and unfortunate consequence was that women were in danger of being relegated to the body only, while the mind—preserved from analysis—became the province of men. In order to assert, instead, that the female mind was likewise free from the restrictions of the body, female educationalists, as early proto-feminists, had to re-appropriate the concept of mechanism even as they re-employed habitus as habitude.

Locke and Hobbes tended, in their celebration of Man, to relegate women to the position of what Cynthia Bryson calls ―chattel‖165 (or, as Bathsua Makin would have it,

―Cattle‖ (ERAEG 23)). Bryson argues that, for Astell, ―the body was unimportant to philosophy; for her and other Cartesians, all that really mattered was the ‗freedom‘ of the

163 Bourdieu, ―Habitus,‖ 44. 164 Strathern, Body Thoughts, 3. 165 Bryson, ―Mary Astell,‖ 41. 65 disembodied mind for ‗self‘-determination.‖166 Being a ―good Cartesian,‖ Astell does not believe that matter can think (thus her ties to Malebranche and occasionalism), and therefore the mind, like the soul, remains separate from the body—even

―disembodied.‖167 What the female educationalist wished to avoid through Cartesian dualism was the devaluing of women‘s minds because of their bodies—to escape the correlation between weak bodies and weak minds and, alternatively, between mechanical habits and female machines. An awareness of this issue appears in the work of other female educationalists as well—notably Drake, who draws on the relationship between animals and machines. Drake attempts to prove the equality of the sexes by referring to

―Brutes,‖ who are ―under no Constraint of Custom or Laws,‖ but remarks on the inefficacy of this method due to philosophers

[who] have held Brutes to be no more than meer Machines, a sort of Divine Clock-Work, that act only by the Force of nice unseen Springs, without Sensation, and cry out without feeling Pain, eat without Hunger, drink without Thirst, fawn upon their Keepers without seeing ‗em (EDFS 13). This is very nearly the definition of Descartes‘ bête machine (animal or beast-machine), which ―act[s] naturally by springs, as does a watch…by instinct, without thinking about it.‖168 Descartes held that the bête machine and l‟homme machine were distinct. But by the early eighteenth century, the challenge to Cartesian principles by materialist thinkers provided new force to the primacy of reason—and to the belief in women‘s (supposed) lack of it.169 Materialists of the early and mid century insisted that mind and soul were

166 Ibid., 44. 167 Ibid., 47. 168 Qtd. in Keith Gunderson, "Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, and Machines." Philosophy 39, no. 149 (July 1964): 193-222, 204. 169 By Le Mettrie‘s 1748 L‟Homme Machine, the means of telling man from machine rests almost entirely upon the ability to reason: ―although machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps better than any of us can do, they infallibly fall short in others, by the which means we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but only from the disposition of their organs.‖ Qtd. in Gunderson, ―Descartes, La Mettrie,‖ 198. 66 dependent entirely upon the ―physical properties of matter,‖ and by the 1770 publication of Baron Paul d'Holbach‘s La Systeme de la Nature ("The System of Nature"), even moral action had been reduced to enlightened self-interest, matter and motion. Thus, the drift away from a humanist perception of soul, as distinct from matter, and a conscious effort to systematize philosophy resulted in the application of Descartes‘ mechanical concepts about the organism to the social and spiritual world. In many (perhaps unfortunate) ways, Le Mettrie‘s L‟Homme Machine was made possible by Descartes‘

L‟Homme; the latter‘s influence at the ―broad conceptual level‖ allowed mechanics to take firm hold in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imaginations.170 Man as ―machine‖ benefited from mechanical habits—but woman as machine was reduced to the composition of her body and the ―disposition of [her] organs‖—and the display of those same organs in medical theatres. 171 Women, through the rhetoric of male educationalists and, increasingly, the unintentional rhetoric of obstetrical science, faced the danger of being literally mechanized. Though these female machines are realizations of Astell‘s greatest fear, they also confirm her chief argument: life without reason results in the mechanization, and, indeed, replacement of the thinking women (such fears may also explain her tenacious grasp on original Cartesian principles). Through these machines, the tension between autonomy and automation is represented as a physical and visual trope; the mechanical mother becomes, by midcentury, the inadvertent symbol of patriarchal education. This female machine, in its way, also refashioned the female form as transparent, with a glass womb and bags (for organs) hanging in plain view. Even the activity of the female machine is operated and controlled invasively by men—levers in

170 Thomas Steel Hall, "Introduction." In Treatise of Man: Harvard Monographs in the History of Science. (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1972), xxix. . 171 Qtd. in Gunderson, ―Descartes, Le Mettrie,‖ 198. 67 the abdomen are squeezed to give a ―mechanical sense of the actions of the womb,‖172 and throughout the demonstration, the focus is on the ―physician‘s courageous performance,‖ as the ―sole intrepid, hardworking body in labor.‖173

While perhaps not intended as symbols for a woman suffering what Astell called

―an unthinking mechanical way of living,‖ the combined features of these mother- figures—the mindlessness, transparency, and passivity—suggest the unreflective, unknowing activity of the habituated mind (SP [1694] I:120). The female body, like the female mind, appears to require outside intervention. She must be activated, put right, her mysterious, messy, inefficient apparatus controlled and contained, just as her

―Innovations […] Revolutions […and] Irregularities‖ (Fénelon‘s aspersions) must be controlled by habit (IED [1707] 7). Though perhaps inadvertently, the ideological rhetoric of containment expressed by medical men promoted the fully mechanical woman, turning her into a symbol of what female educationalists protested against.

Female educationalists created their rhetorical strategies by exposing the blind spot of male pedagogical rhetoric, first by questioning the primacy of custom and nature and second by obviating mechanical habits as the sole, unreflective means of female education. The habitus, being, as Bourdieu remarks, ―a product of history,‖ may be

―changed by history,‖ through a ―process of awareness and of pedagogic effort.‖174 In providing a response to the most powerful and limiting pedagogical rhetoric of the period, the female educationalists—and particularly Mary Astell—begin this effort, offering a framework of female advocacy and proto-feminist resistance on which other

(more conservative and less polemical) writers would build.

172 Blackwell, ―Tristram Shandy,‖ 91 173Ibid., 93. 174 Bourdieu, ―Habitus,‖ 45. 68

Chapter Three “Reducing the Sexes to a Level”: Revolutionary Rhetorical Strategies and Proto-Feminist Innovations

By honoring self-reflection as chief among human virtues, educationalists argued for the autonomy of the female self and introduced an early modern discourse on female identity.

As I reconstruct in the following chapter, the specific rhetorical moves and strategic accommodations employed by educationalists in the service of intellectual liberty (and against the unthinking female machines of male-directed pedagogy) promote this moral and intellectual equality of the sexes—often in revolutionary ways. Judith Drake, for instance, claims that she has ―only endeavour‘d to reduce the Sexes to a Level‖; yet, to

―only‖ overthrow centuries of intellectual tyranny, and to do so not by raising women but by lowering or ―reducing‖ men, is a radical concept (EDFS, dedication). Such

―revolutionary‖ rhetoric was surprisingly common to male pedagogues and educationalists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, evolving as it did in the context of the 1688 revolution in England175 and contemporary attacks on a rank-based social hierarchy.176 Yet in all of these arguments, the revolutionary subject remained a man—a citizen of the empire, not a woman with relative non-person status under the law.

As female educationalists began seizing the rhetorical ―implements of virtuous warfare‖ to argue for intellectual, if not political, emancipation, they participated in a revolution against the status quo—an inversion of certain established moral and social hierarchies.177

Bathsua Makin tells her female readers to use her discourse as a ―Weapon‖ for defense (ERAEG 4); Mary Astell exhorts women to ―regain [their] Freedom‖ (SP [1697]

II:9) and Drake to ―break the Neck of that unreasonable Authority,‖ (EDFS 20) while

175 McCrystal, "Revolting Women,‖ 189. 176 Barney, Plots, 23. 177 Ibid., 77-8. 69

Mary Chudleigh asks ―Must Men command, and we alone obey (LD 3.5)?‖ This framework of female advocacy and proto-feminist resistance built largely upon the power of self-reflection, which begged the question of a pre-existing female ‗self‘ capable of regulating her own desires (as opposed to the inconstant woman envisioned by Fénelon and other male pedagogues). In arguing for access to the ―unseen Empires‖ (LD 18.22) of the mind, these educationalists were also demanding that women be treated as the intellectual and moral equals of men.178 Educationalist polemics were therefore unlike more traditional ―ladies defenses,‖ which took the form of querelle des femme debates.

These debates occasionally countered attacks on women‘s moral integrity, but very often the rhetorical repartee served merely as demonstrations of the authors' wit. Such models drew fire from female educationalists on the grounds of duplicity; Drake complains that authors of ―female defenses‖ only compliment the female sex in order to show their ―own good Breeding and Parts‖ (EDFS 4). They did not question the social status of individual women, but rather presented didactic models of ―good‖ women upholding certain ideals of obedience and piety in opposition to the ―bad,‖ inconstant, erring female. In many works by men, women‘s status as autonomous individuals is the source of inconstancy, a great evil related implicitly to society‘s immanent moral decline. For the educationalists, by contrast, women‘s intellectual and spiritual degradation results from already corrupted societal customs. Thus, important perceptual and practical differences separate the educationalists‘ discourse from similar debates over women—not least because traditional defenses failed to provide a language for overthrowing intellectual tyranny.

Conduct materials, debates about good and bad women, and the habit-based educational theories of Fénelon supported and sought to preserve contemporary social

178 McCrystal, "Revolting Women,‖ 200. 70 hegemony; the rhetorical models typically employed in arguments for or about women therefore failed to serve female educationalists‘ goals. By contrast, the discourse of human rights, revolution and freedom provided a much more useful rhetoric for women‘s intellectual emancipation. Such language was, however, generally unavailable to women, for whom such rights did not apply. To avoid violating ethos—intelligence, integrity and goodwill—proto-feminists therefore needed to test the ―validity of applying revolutionary logic to the ‗private sphere‘‖ rather than the public one.179 Because revolutionary rhetoric required tailoring to suit the circumstances of writing women, the educationalists‘ rhetorical innovations developed in conjunction—and even in agreement—with evolving expectations of women‘s private, domestic role. By conceding the ―Throne‖ of public and political action to men (LD 18.21), and by emphasizing the internal nature of the female empire, female educationalists could revise and re-employ existing revolutionary strategies as well as innovate rhetorical strategies of reversal, evasion and accommodation.180 Such works revised contemporary rhetorical strategies supporting the public, political rights of men in order to effectively promote a female autonomy that was largely private and introspective. Makin, Astell, Drake and Chudleigh engaged in a gradual and sometimes intermittent process of redefining rhetoric through their polemics—establishing their own particular purchase on the cultural dialogue about human nature and individual rights even as they petitioned for intellectual freedom. The rhetoric of revolution so useful to writers like Locke in his treatises on government therefore becomes a rhetoric of re-volition, a way of legitimizing the internal, reflective

179 McCrystal, ―Revolting Women,‖ 189. 180 These strategies involve, interestingly, both arguments for inherent female difference and for natural equality of mental ability. While women were not arguing for parity at the social level, they were arguing for the equal use of language, equal access to rhetorical strategies and thus the possibility of effecting ideological change through equal educational opportunities. 71 mind and of re-establishing an autonomous female will.

Rhetoric of Revolution

The power of individual will—the volition not of states and nations but of mankind in general—was actively re-evaluated in the seventeenth century, especially as the gradual secularization of political discourse introduced an increasing reliance upon human nature (rather than Scripture) as the measure of social justice.181 However, the human nature in question was distinctly masculine. When Man became the author of his social arrangements, it followed that ―it was immediately from [man] than authority flowed‖ and that he ultimately ―authorized those who came to hold and exercise power.‖182 This kind of reasoning reframed the relationship between the government and the governed, making it possible to perceive revolutions of state as reasonable and according to the ‗law of nature,‘183 but again, such revolutions could be undertaken only by reasonable men. ―Natural‖ individual rights thus become more important throughout the period—by the late seventeenth century, John Locke‘s Two Treatises of Government

(1690) established a revolutionary rhetoric highlighting the reasonableness of political subversion partly on that basis—but women were not part of this political vision. It is important to understand this conceptual unavailability, for it serves as the basis for educationalist innovation; the latent possibilities for human rights (as opposed to man‘s rights) had to be actively reconstructed from Locke‘s work.

In the Treatises, Locke first questions the basis for monarchical authority and for political inaction on the part of the governed; he then promotes a ―rights-based‖ justice

181 McCrystal, "Revolting Women,‖ 190. 182 Ibid. 183 Ibid., 191. 72 that sets limits even on those in power, essentially invoking a social contract.184

Ultimately, this revolutionary rhetoric suggests that man has the right—even the duty—to overthrow authority when it violates the contractual social arrangement. Locke essentially conceives of the Glorious Revolution (1688) as a reasonable step taken by reasonable men, or what John McCrystal calls ―an assertion by subjects of their rights against an authority that had infringed [them]‖185; reason and rationality here become the foundational elements of a rights-based government. There are three important tenets of this ideology: first, it conceives of reason as an authority greater than governmental authority. Second, it relies upon the authority of the governed and the law of nature rather than upon God. Third, it pertains exclusively to men as the only recognizable citizens.

While Locke refers to the relation between the government and the governed as

―conjugal,‖ he nonetheless refrains from making revolution an option for women in the domestic ―state.‖ The tenuous relationships between reason and habit, custom and tradition lend themselves to this one-sided argument by obviating the female as a meaningful category. However, as John McCrystal maintains, if anyone once accepts the premise that men in their natural state are equal ―by virtue of their rational capacity,‖ then it becomes reasonable to afford rational women those same rights.186 The subsequent failure on the part of Locke or his followers to acknowledge this logic serves as Astell‘s primary grievance with the social theory he promotes. By showcasing the logic of rational equality—in those very circumstances men could and did defend—women writers strived to convince their readers of a rhetorical and ideological equivalence for women‘s intellectual liberties.

184 McCrystal, ―Revolting Women,‖ 191. 185 Ibid., 195 186 Ibid, 194. 73

The rhetoric of revolution that availed men of ―human rights‖ thus provided women the foundation for similar rights—and yet, the educationalists also endeavored to ameliorate the potential threat of subversion inherent in the discourse. Astell might compare women to the Emperor Domitian and encourage them to obtain empires, but she nonetheless maintains that these empires are internal, mental, and private. Her use of

Locke‘s ideology is therefore at once proactive and defensive, and Astell frames her argument for the existence of female autonomy and will with language that makes women culpable for their own subjection. As with Locke‘s arguments against the passivity of men in government, Astell argues that women have allowed the continuation of tyranny through inaction—aligning their silence with a kind of political apathy. She upbraids her female readers for continuing in ―servitude and folly,‖ arguing that they have ―Power to regain [their] Freedom, if [they] pleased but t‘endeavour it‖ and indicating a natural right to overthrow oppression (SP [1697] II.4, 9). Astell‘s general purpose is to prove that women are ―as capable of Learning as Men,‖ and that a rational creature kept in ignorance is also kept in unjust servitude (SP [1697] II.4). As in Locke‘s second Treatise, it is the educationalists‘ prerogative to prove the inefficacy of old monarchical habits, and Astell regards reason as both the means of power and the proper motivation for overthrowing it when it is corrupt. She tells her readers that ―She who forsakes the Path to which Reason directs is much to blame‖ and those who resolve upon inaction because of custom ―shall never do anything Praise-worthy‖ (SP [1697] II.6). By making women responsible in part for injustices committed against them, however, Astell emphasizes their active, rather than passive, roles. She takes advantage of women‘s supposed faults and need of correction to mitigate the threat of ―revolting‖ women, but

74 also to reveal their roles as self-directed participants in their own education. By calling women to ―Disengage‖ themselves from ―Opinion of Names, Authorities, Customs and the like,‖ and to give credit to things not because they ―have once believed it, but because it carries clear and uncontested Evidence along with it,‖ Astell calls on them to correct their own faults through a rational education (SP [1697] II.41). This contrasts sharply with male-authored conduct and educational materials of the late seventeenth century, which offered to show women their faults and direct changes to their behavior. Through

Astell‘s enlightened perspective, women may ―Conquer the Prejudices of Education‖ and enjoy the ―Glory‖ of victory, rather than being passively instructed by men (SP [1697]

II.56-7).

In this manner, the rhetoric of revolution allowed women to make use of the concept that ―right derived from the human faculty of reason.‖187 In their application of reason to rights, however, female educationalists retreat from the more secular arguments of men. Women were neither ―author[s] of [their] social arrangements‖ nor the authority from which power ―flowed,‖ 188 and so the argument from rights presented a paradox that allowed men to determine the means of justice, but denied women just such capabilities.

As a result, educationalists were forced to derive authority first from the use of male revolutionary dialogue and second from the same spiritual authority that rights-based ideology had to a certain extent left behind. Astell, for instance, begins with a secular argument from nature, suggesting that ―Natural Logic‖ is found in women‘s ―Own

Minds‖ (SP [1697] II.19). But following this, she claims that ―God does nothing in vain, he gives no Power or Faculty which he has not allotted to some proportionate use,‖ and if

187 McCrystal, "Revolting Women,‖ 194. 188 Ibid. 75 therefore ―he has given Mankind a Rational Mind, every individual Understanding ought to be employ‘d in somewhat worthy of it‖ (SP [1697] II.19). Astell also suggests that the

―Meanest Person [i.e. the poorest in understanding] shou‘d Think as Justly, tho‘ not as

Capaciously, as the greatest Philosopher‖ (SP [1697] II.19). Any human of any class has not just the right, but also a Christian duty to use their reason. Astell comes nearest to a comprehensive picture of human rights by substituting ―humanity‖ for ―man,‖ but she has done so by relying on the authority of a paternal God. As a high-church Anglican and moralist, Astell‘s spiritual and scriptural foundation appears as a defining characteristic of her work; such convictions may have kept her, on one hand, from completely formulating rationality (as opposed to spirituality) as the abiding characteristic of humans, but it also authorized her work for an audience concerned with female piety.

(Ironically, the critical inattention to Astell‘s revolutionary rhetoric is often based upon the same religious conservativism—as though identification with high-church moral strictures destroyed political and social efficacy.) Astell does, however, make use of a secondary dimension of revolutionary rhetoric, one authorized by national identity and colonial expansion rather than religion. The rhetoric of empire, joined or elided with the rhetoric of revolution, had greater implications for social (trans)formation.

Unlike the rhetoric of revolution, the rhetoric of empire promoted unity and expansion rather than secession or overthrow. It was the language of national identity, but the formation of that identity was complicated by what Richard Barney calls ―a dual emphasis on egalitarianism and hegemony in the attempt to define individual [British] citizenship.‖189 Pedagogy tended to be a common stage for dramatizing this competition,

189 Barney, Plots, 13. 76 especially as educators were aiming to construct a ―national identity‖ for their students.190

The rhetoric of empire was a means of consolidating or normalizing power, and in that sense is perhaps closer to Hobbes‘ ideology than to Locke‘s. As Barney explains, however, in addition to this push towards hegemony there was the potential to ―resist, alter, or perhaps even transform the status quo.‖191 This possibility is particularly important in terms of the female educationalists‘ ―revolutionary‖ goals. Makin, Astell,

Drake and Chudleigh all use the language of empire to varying degrees, alternately shaming the English empire for the plight of women and promoting a female empire of the mind. When employed by male authors, the implications of this rhetoric are unmistakably political. Educationalists revise the employment of this strategy for use by female authors by emphasizing the superiority and civilized beneficence of the British empire, rather than arguing from their (questionable) position as British citizens. The nation, then, becomes the authorizing mechanism, allowing for some level of political exigency in matters of female education.

The subjugation of women as ―slaves‖ to be ―tyrannized over‖(ERAEG 5, 23) must be overturned precisely because it maligns British identity. As Bathsua Makin claims: ―this under-breeding of Women began amongst the Heathen and Barbarous

People; it continues with the Indians, where they make their women mere slaves‖

(ERAEG 22). Makin infers that, as a great empire, Britain should rise above its colonies and be as well known for educated women as it is for educated men. Such an arrangement would be a benefit ―to the Nation‖ (ERAEG 28). The values of the British

190 Barney, Plots, 20. 191 Ibid. 77 empire here serve ―as a way to advance the cause of female prerogative,‖192 mainly by appealing to national pride and to a sense of masculine fair play. Just as Makin contends that it ―favours not at all of a Manly Spirit, to trample on those that are down,‖ (ERAEG

5). Judith Drake complains that arguing against women‘s reason while not permitting them an education is like ―beating a Man when his Hands [are] bound‖ (EDFS 18). In a like spirit of competitive sportsmanship, Drake compares English women to Dutch women, who are ―in a State of more Improvement‖ (EDFS 14). In Holland, she claims, women are trained in mathematics and accountancy so that they may help with the business of their merchant husbands. The better ―breeding‖ of Dutch women thus shames

Britain and potentially gives Holland an economic edge; the ―blame‖ falls upon

Englishmen, who ―breed our Women so ignorant of business‖ (EDFS 15). By joining the normalizing power of shame with the rhetoric of empire, Makin and Drake portray the state of women‘s education as an inhibition to the very national identity Britain is trying to build. By contrast, Astell and Chudleigh use the language of empire and expansion to resist the status quo; they promote a purely female empire—one that is private, often internal and based on a woman‘s capacity for self-reflection.

Astell wants women to enjoy the freedom of a ―discerning mind,‖ to recapture

―such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited, where you shall feast on Pleasures, that do not like those of the World, disappoint your expectations‖ (SP [1697] I:23, 40). Astell calls this a ―Religious Retirement,‖ a place where women can go either to await or to avoid marriage, to be industrious and to evade the horrors of uneducated poverty (SP

[1697] I:36). This physical retreat, like a small empire, would be ruled only by other women—female advocates—who would ―watch over each other for Good, to advise,

192 Barney, Plots, 76. 78 encourage, and direct‖ (SP [1697] I:86). Chudleigh‘s proposed ―Empire,‖ by comparison, is more inward yet. While the character of the Parson states women should wear a symbol of the man‘s foot on her head, Chudleigh‘s heroine, Melissa, wishes to keep the head— even more than the body—free from bondage (LD 11.32). She would have women

―search all the close Recesses of the Mind,‖ (LD 15.33) where they would ―Rule alone/Those unseen Empires‖ (LD 18.20-21). She suggests a system of reading, from moral philosophy to history, poetry and geography, ―that the Men may have no just

Cause to upbraid them‖ (LD Epistle Dedicatory). Her system is proactive; women must be prepared to defend and educate themselves: ―‗Tis we alone hard Measure still to find;/But spite of you, we‘ll to ourselves be kind:/Your Censures flight, your little Tricks despise,/And make it our whole Business to be wise‖ (LD 21.32-35). And yet, once in possession of the inward empire of mind, Chudleigh‘s heroine intends to leave the public stage of the world to men—to ―fly‖ from it, in fact—in preference of intellectual rather than physical freedoms.

By emphasizing women‘s rational ability to correct their own errors and

―overthrow‖ the tyranny of ignorance, the educationalists at once assume a woman‘s willingness and capacity to receive instruction. Moreover, by re-employing the rhetorical modes of ―revolutionary‖ men and using this language as the foundation for women‘s educational rights, educationalists make it impossible for detractors to disagree without calling their own logic into question. In this manner, ―revolutionary‖ strategies supporting women‘s education participate in a kind of ideological as well as rhetorical reversal. Nearly every revisionist strategy employed by the educationalists supports the concept of female rationality and mental autonomy by making it corequisite with the

79 rationality of men, essentially turning (as Drake maintains) ―[Men‘s] own Artillery upon them‖ (EDFS 52).

Rhetoric of Reversal

I began this chapter by referencing Judith Drake‘s An Essay In Defence of the Female Sex

[sic]. Like Astell, Drake intends to redeem the reasoning power of women through a logical deconstruction of male argument strategies, though the debate she critically addresses (and reverses) is the controversy querelle des femmes.193 The use of this debate was widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance; it fostered a debate over women—their abilities and capacities versus their faults and follies—and often presented a Theophrastean gallery of character portraits meant to depict a particular fault or virtue. Joseph Swetnam‘s 1615 (and often reprinted) Arraignment of leuud, idle, froward, and vnconstant women…pleasant for married men, profitable for young men, and hurtfull to none [sic.] essentially ―educates‖ men by warning them against marriage, explaining that woman ―was no sooner made, but straightaway her mind was set upon mischief.‖194 As Drake complains, however, even works meant to defend women were often mere witticisms; the typical ―champion‖ for women ―has taken more care to give an

Edge to his Satyr, than Force to his Apology‖ and ―fights under our Colours, only for a fairer Opportunity of betraying us‖ (EDFS 4). Wonders of the Female World (1683) is another example of this duplicity. It purports to ‗defend‘ women by asserting the rights of

―Injur‘d and Abused Ladies.‖ An addition to the text even argues for the ―Pre-eminence

193 As noted earlier, this debate appears in many different forms. It exists as a rhetorical exercise, it appears in conduct material, defenses, and in witty ‗warnings‘ against marriage. Certain aspects of the querelle des femmes also appear in more systematic educational materials. 194 Joseph Swetnam. The Arraignment of leuud, idle, froward, and vnconstant women or the vanitie of them, choose you whether : with a commendation of wise, vertuous and honest women : pleasant for married men, profitable for young men, and hurtfull to none. (London, 1615), 1. 80 or the Dignity and Excellency of that Sex above the Male.‖ However, the author writes his defense in hyperbole bordering on farce, only thinly disguising the accusations against his chosen subject: ―Tis not for want of power than these Indignities have been so long born with, no! I would have you to know [women] have an Uncontrollable Power; they have Thunder, loud Thunder, roaring Thunder, enough to shock the foundations of the Universe, you may hear it sometimes from Billingsgate all over the Town.‖195 As

Linda Woodbridge maintains, most authors who ―delicately and wittily defended the fair sex against hypothetical slanders would have been merely baffled‖ by talk of women‘s actual rights.196 The essential flaw in querelle des femmes arguments as a means of proving women‘s capacities therefore resides in its purpose: it was formed not to question the role of women, but to promote certain kinds of women—typically, the virtuous, dutiful, generally mute and often martyred female figures of mythology and history.

Either side of the debate could potentially weaken the argument for women, with the

―misogynist side‖ using jest as an attack to force advocates or defenders to waste time in rebuttal.197 Joan Kelly remarks that even the ―feminists‖ of the genre were ―caught up in opposition‖ and ―bound by the terms of that dialectic.‖198 Female champions were forced into parroting their opposing counterparts, offering up pious female examples to counter inappropriate ones. In order for the querelle des femmes to be useful for the female educationalist, the essential parameters of the genre would therefore have to be turned in upon themselves—reversed and rewritten. By complaining that ―tis very ill logick to

195 The wonders of the female world, or a general history of women… To which is added, a pleasant discourse of Female pre-eminence, or the dignity and excellency of that sex above the male (London, 1683), the Preface [no pagination]. 196Qtd. in Ekaterina Haskins, "A Woman's Inventive Response to the Seventeenth-Century Querelle des Femmes." In Listening to their Voices, 288-301. (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1997), 290. 197 Ibid., 292. 198 Qtd. in Ibid. 81 argue from particulars to General, and where the Premisses are singular, to conclude

Universally,‖ Drake offers the first serious challenge to the controversy tradition (EDFS

122). It is this critique, based in rationalism, that allows Drake to reintroduce the querelle des femmes as a useful tool for the intellectual emancipation of women, and this serves to illustrate the means by which female authors invert rhetorical strategies employed by men.

Drake begins the task of reversing the controversy genre by refusing to ―Dispute whether Men or Women be generally more Ingenious‖ (EDFS 5). The intent of the querelle des femmes is to provide a list of exceptional women—but as exceptions, such characters cannot be representative; they cannot demonstrate the problem of women‘s educational disadvantage, nor can they offer any solutions. Drake therefore proposes an amendment to the controversy genre; she claims that the point over male or female supremacy ―must be given up to the Advantages Men have over us by their Education,

Freedom of Converse, and Variety of Business and Company‖ (EDFS 5). She appears to be conceding a point to her opponents, but as with Astell‘s discourse about human rights,

Drake is using this language to assume that differences between men and women are based upon education and training, rather than upon natural deficiencies. She also uses this point to unhinge the general aim of the controversy genre by refusing to argue about the ―Pre-eminence of our Vertues,‖ on the grounds that ―there are too many Vicious, and

I hope a great many Vertuous of both Sexes‖ (EDFS 6). Drake strengthens this argument by examining not good or bad characters but the vices themselves, objectifying the slander rather than trying to disprove it with virtuous female exceptions. ―They tax us,‖ she remarks, ―with a long List of Faults and Imperfections, and seem to have taken a

82

Catalogue of their own Follies and Vices‖ (EDFS 52). The ―most familiar‖—that is, those most often attributed to women—are ―Vanity, Impertinence, Enviousness, [and]

Inconstancy,‖ and Drake intends to ―survey‘em in their proper Colours‖ as the darling faults of most men (EDFS 53). She compares, for instance, the slander against women speaking of nothing but ―vain‖ or ―impertinent‖ household affairs to the male ―Coffee- house Politician‖ who knows the details of political intrigues but nothing of his own household, or better, the ―Virtuoso‖ who knows a great deal about shells and insects but nothing of any practical value (EDFS 77-78). Drake also universalizes faults, refocusing her critique on the human, rather than the male or female character: ―Vanity [is] almost the universal Mover of all our Actions‖ (EDFS 74); impertinence is ―common and familiar‖ (EDFS 84); envy is found in all persons, though proportionally greater among men whose ―Ambition‖ is less bounded than a woman‘s (EDFS 107), and inconstancy, while still a female fault, is equally the fault of men who fix their affections on women‘s impermanent beauty rather than upon their intelligence (EDFS 117). By these means,

Drake intends that ―the Burden‖ of each ―good Quality will not hereafter be laid upon us alone, but that Men will be contented to divide the Load with us‖ (EDFS 75). By portraying only recognizable and representative figures from seventeenth-century society,

Drake‘s Theophrastian gallery ―reduces men to a level‖ equal with women, rather than cataloguing women who more closely approximate equality with men.

This reversal of the querelles des femmes‟ usual list of privileged, historical or royal figures allows Drake to give the domestic sphere greater attention—and also greater importance. She describes the conversations, the visits, the various roles and expectations of the private sphere as empowering. Young girls who take part in this sermo culture of

83 conversation and polite society are ―reckon‘d as ripe as a Boy of one and twenty,‖ while a young man shows his ―Wisdom best by his Silence, and serves his Country most in his

Absence‖ (EDFS 51, 31). In addition to equalizing and universalizing faults, the inverted focus demonstrates the power of the domestic to cultivate reason and the ―Alphabet of

Sense,‖ the knowledge of life and society missing from masculine education (EDFS 51).

It is therefore foolish, Drake maintains, to upbraid women for speaking only of the private ―Domestick‖ sphere when, first, they ―are rarely suffer‘d to interpose [their]

Sense‖ outside of it and second, it is such a useful and important sphere of influence

(EDFS 51). With such a foundation, women—as equal sharers in humanity‘s faults and as rational creatures capable of amendment and instruction—had as much right as their male counterparts to proper education and intellectual liberation. Revisions of male rhetorical strategies allowed women access to the revolutionary discourse, but such innovations also allow for a more nuanced perspective on the separation of spheres.

Drake‘s method of reversing the controversy genre might be considered, along with Astell‘s revision of revolutionary rhetoric, a true innovation of a recognized rhetorical strategy and also a powerful ideological argument for women‘s mental equality. However, many educationalists participate in wholesale borrowing from their male counterparts; the ―reversal‖ is less a matter of form than of content. Makin‘s Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen is representative of this practice. The

Essay‘s structure represents an epistolary dialogue between Makin‘s persona—a ―Man myself‖ and a champion of women‘s education—and one or more opposing interlocutors known only as ―Your affectionate Friend‖ (ERAEG 5-6). The antagonistic letter which begins the dialogue claims that 1) ―Women…are of low parts, soft fickle natures,‖ 2)

84 women will ―abuse their Education, and be so intolerably proud,‖ 3) ―Learning is to fit one for publick Employment, which Women as not capable of,‖ and 4) it goes ―against custom‖ (ERAEG 6). These arguments are easily pieced together from a variety of sources; Fénelon‘s arguments against women‘s ―Inconstancy and Irresolution,‖ Vives‘ insistence that women have no need for ―eloquence,‖ and any number of published harangues against the ―learned woman.‖ To reverse these claims, Makin sets up the opposing argument and then deconstructs it by turning the argument against men.

The objecting ―Friend‖ in Makin‘s Essay begins by arguing about the nature of women. They are considered to be ―of low Parts‖ and ―softer Natures‖ that ―do not desire

Learning‖ (ERAEG 34, 32). Moreover, as in the Friend‘s second point, women are considered to have ―ill Natures‖ which would lead to various abuses of education

(ERAEG 32). The nature of women generally remains at the center of all arguments against the intellectual emancipation of women, though this argument is often contradictory: women are both naturally ignorant and naturally devious and scheming.

Makin‘s answer addresses these logical flaws but also reverses them, for if ―Women are of low Parts […] So are many Men‖ (ERAEG 34). Similarly, if women do not desire learning, then ―Neither do many Boys […] yet I suppose you do not intend to lay Fallow all Children that will not bring Fruit of themselves, to forbear to instruct those which at present do not thank you for it‖ (ERAEG 33). If education is to be denied woman on the grounds that they will abuse it, then, Makin argues, ―By this Argument no men should be liberally brought up; strong drink should never be used any more in the World, and a hundred such like things,‖ for it is ―egregiously simple‖ to ―[argue] against the use of a necessary or very convenient thing from the abuse of it‖ (ERAEG 32). Every argument

85 against education for women ―may be turned upon Men,‖ and educationalists emphasize the double standard applied to vice and virtue in male models (ERAEG 32). Chudleigh, for instance, demonstrates how differently vice appears when men speak of their own faults:

For every Failure you a Covering find;/ Rage is a Noble Bravery of Mind:/ Revenge, a Tribute due to injur‘d Fame;/ And Pride, but what transcendent Worth does claim: Cowards are Wary, and the Dull are Grave,/ Fops are Genteel, and Hectoring Bullies Brave:/ Such as live High, regardless of Expense,/ Are Generous Men, and ever bless‘d with Sense:/ Base Avarice Frugality you call,/ And he‘s a prudent Man who grasps at all:/ […] Thus to each Vice you give some specious Name,/ And with bright Colours varnish o‘re your Shame (LD 3.17-26, 30-31.

In order to overturn these erroneous conceptual standards, the educationalists universalize the argument from vice—again emphasizing their general application to humanity. As

Makin claims, ―whatever [men] answer for themselves, will defend Women,‖ and ―what- ever is said against this manner of Educating Women, may commonly be urged against the Education of men‖ (ERAEG 32, 30). The reversal allows women to argue that if education improves the many faults of the ―rougher‖ sex, then it ought to improve those of the ―softer‖ one.

Even in these figurations, however, educationalists do not argue that a woman‘s

―nature‖ should be considered the same as man‘s; rather they use the nature/culture argument to buttress educational goals by emphasizing women‘s natural capacity for impression: ―If [women‘s] Natures are soft, they are more capable of good Impressions; if they are weak, more shame for us to neglect them, and defraud them of the benefit of

Education, by which they may be strengthened‖ (ERAEG 34). Drake also re-employs the

86 rhetoric of ―natural‖ bodily weakness to advocate female education: ―the very Make and

Temper of our Bodies shew that we were never design‘d for Fatigue; and the Vivacity of our Wits, and Readiness of out Invention […] demonstrate that we were chiefly intended for Thought, and the Exercise of the Mind‖ (EDFS 16). The opposition of nature and culture/cultivation thus becomes the means by which female educationalists argue against their educational deprivations. If anything is ―wanting‖ in the female sex, Drake argues, then ―it must be either because Nature has not been so liberal as to bestow ‗em upon us; or because due Care has not been taken to cultivate those Gifts‖ (EDFS 8). She uses the authority of ―learned Physicians‖ as well the relative gender equality among ―Brutes‖

(and the lower classes) to argue that ―there is no Difference in the Organization of those

Parts which have any Relation to, or Influence over, the Minds…I see therefore no natural Impediment in the Structure of our Bodies, nor does Experience or Observation argue any‖ (EDFS 11). Female error has its genesis in culture and custom, therefore, and in the mismanagement of men.

As Astell remarks, ―the Incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural;‖ men and Custom have employed ―all the artifice they can to spoil, and deny us the means of improvement‖ (SP [1697] I:15, 13). The power men have over women is not denied, but rather made the cause of folly; in a base misuse of ―husbandry,‖ men spoil potentially fertile minds. The rhetoric of the garden plot described in Chapter Two returns in these pronouncements, from the ―fallow‖ field of Makin‘s discourse to Astell‘s exclamation that women‘s souls are ―suffer‘d to over-run with weeds, lie fallow and neglected, unadorn‘d with any Grace‖ (SP [1697] I:9). But in all of these arguments, ―Nature‖ remains egalitarian and ―produces Women of such excellent Parts, that they do often

87 equalize, sometimes excel men‖ (ERAEG 23); the ―Soil is rich and would‖ if not neglected by male prerogatives for a very limited female education, ―produce a noble

Harvest‖ (SP [1697] I:16). The failing, then, is not in women but in their cultivation; from their ―Infancy‖ reared up ―in Ignorance and Vanity, and taught to be Proud and

Petulant‖ (SP [1697] I:9). As a result, female educationalists demonstrate that women are imbued with ―natural‖ reasoning capacities and that the vices attributed to women are equally applicable to men; moreover, these vices are the products ―of [men‘s] own folly‖ in keeping women uneducated (SP [1697] I:19). Given the limited scope of female activity, women were prey to any number of tragic circumstances, from affronts to their virtue to economic hardship and destitution. ―The World‖ Drake claims, ―is too full of

Craft, Malice and Violence, for absolute Simplicity to live in it. It behoves therefore our

Sex, as well the other, to live with so much Caution and Circumspection‖ [sic] (EDFS

100). But this caution and circumspection could only be achieved through an education in experience and knowledge of the very vices women were meant to avoid. As with Nancy

Armstrong‘s argument about the power of sexual plots in authorizing female response, the educationalist discourse defends female autonomy—not only of mind but also of action—by deflecting blame onto the masculine perpetrator. From dissimulation to apology to scapegoating, the female educationalists practice a form of rhetoric that we might call the rhetoric of deflection or evasion. As a pragmatic means of diffusing tension inherent in the other rhetorical strategies employed, deflective/evasive rhetoric is the least structured. It is less a rhetorical strategy than a means of prevarication, allowing the educationalist (and the author of domestic fiction who followed) to evade the rhetoric of legitimation when it could not be made to serve female goals.

88

The Rhetoric of Evasion/Deflection

It might be argued that in beginning her Essay to Revive the Antient Education of

Gentlewomen with a letter attacking the educational project, Makin is already deflecting attention—or, at the very least, diffusing tension. She asserts repeatedly that she does not intend to prove female preeminence, and she agrees that women should be steady in their life station and refrain from public employment. Makin also practices a form of evasion by writing in the persona of a man ―who would not suggest anything prejudicial to [his own] Sex‖ (ERAEG 5). Mitzi Myers calls this ―resigned pragmatism,‖199 and Nancy

Weitz Miller suggests that these strategies allow for an ―identification with the masculine

[…] aimed at achieving what Kenneth Burke (1962) calls ‗consubstantiality‘—a oneness with the dominant group, which, in this case, consists of gentlemen with potentially educatable daughters.‖200 By cutting off her identification with women, Makin avoids appearing as ―an irate woman speaking for a radical few‖201 and so expands the credibility of her argument. This sort of evasion—as in Makin‘s disguised gender or

Drake‘s claim to put ―out of Breath‖ anyone who threatens her anonymity—may also take the form of deflection, appearing as apology (diffusion of tension) or scapegoating

(dispersal of blame). The bidirectional approach to diffuse and disperse gives the educationalists latitude to work within the context of a hostile male audience, one already prejudiced against projects for female emancipation and unfairly discriminate about proper female behavior.

199 Myers, Mitzi. "Domesticating Minerva: Bathsua Makin's 'Curious' Argument for Women's Education." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 14 (1985): 173-192, 175. 200 Miller, "Ethos,‖ 277. 201 Ibid. 89

Language that diffuses hostility often begins by agreeing with or assuming the opposing viewpoint. One example well used by both men and women of the period was the prefatory apology; many authors disparaged their abilities at the beginning of their works. This trope was not meant to be taken quite as ingenuous deferral to the greater skill of the audience; authors generally humbled themselves in order, first, to highly praise those to whom their work was dedicated and second, to elicit praise from their audience. For early modern women authors, however, this became a powerful means of diffusing tension and dodging censure. Drake, for instance, claims that her defense was

―occasion‘d by a private Conversation between some Gentlemen and Ladies, and written at the Request and for the Diversion, of one Lady more particularly‖ [my italics] (EDFS iii). Because she never meant it to be public, she first aligns her work with the proper domestic sphere of feminine influence and second suggests that it is not fitting for

―Candid and Ingenious‖ men to ―quarrel with me for any thing in this little Book‖ (EDFS viii). By recoding public texts as private conversations, Drake authorized her social program by basing it in the domestic sphere, diffusing the stigma attendant upon the too- public nature of circulating text. Drake continues this apology in her dedication to

Princess Anne, stating that ―If in adventuring to lay this little Piece at your Highness‘s

Feet, and humbly to beg your Royal Protection of it, I have presum‘d too far, be pleas‘d to impute it to your own most gracious goodness‖ (EDFS Dedication). At one and the same time, she claims to ―presume not so far upon the Merits‖ of what she has written, and yet—since it was done with the intention of humble service—she claims that there is no need to make an ―Apology to my own Sex for the Meanness of this Defence‖ [sic]

(EDFS iv, vii). The use of apology, in this instance, is to remove the occasion for it; men

90 are encouraged not to argue with so ―mean‖ a production, while women are presumed to support it (or at least to support the spirit in which it was composed). Mary Astell and

Lady Mary Chudleigh make similar apologies for ability in the prefatory materials of their work—Astell by (rather disingenuously) claiming that ―The very offer is a sufficient inducement, nor does it need the set-off‘s of Rhetorick to recommend it, were I capable, which yet I am not, of applying them with the greatest force,‖ (SP [1697] I:5) and

Chudleigh by claiming (like Drake) to have done it only in honor of other (better) women

(LD Epistle Dedicatory). Through the means of these apologies, the hostility toward writing women is softened, abated by the modesty and humility in which the works are presented.

The second means of deflection, that of dispersing blame or scapegoating, has affinities with the rhetoric of reversal. In Chudleigh‘s apology, she states that, though unfit for the task of defense, she could no longer ―stifle [her] Resentment‖ at the mistreatment of women by men (LD Epistle Dedicatory). Thus, it is not her writing ability that causes her to break silence, but the unmet need for female defense occasioned by the malicious attacks of The Bridewoman‟s Counselor—Sprint‘s didactic sermon, later published as a conduct manual.202 As with earlier strategies of reversal, Chudleigh claims to be galvanized into action only by the failings of men, and as with arguments against the ―Tyrant Custom‖ or with the insufficient education of women that ―dispos[es] them to Inconstancy,‖ the rhetoric of blame makes men the agents of folly (SP [1697]

I:69-70). As Chudleigh complains to her male interlocutors, ―If we less Wise and

Rational are grown,/ Tis owing to your Management alone‖; It is because men are comparatively so bad that women cannot be good (LD 19.9-10). Who, Drake asks, would

202 Published sermons were very popular as conduct material. 91 be so foolish as to ―blame our Sex for the Use of an Art so necessary to preserve ‗em from becoming a Prey to every designing Man‖ (EDGS 100)? The vices ascribed to women in this figuration, while not turned into virtues, are at least excused on the grounds that men are ―ungenerous Adversaries, that deal more in Scandal than

Argument‖ (EDFS 52). The unseemly behavior of women—their supposed deviousness, thoughtlessness and dissimulation—are attributable to circumstances engineered by designing men. Even as it is not the ―natural‖ failure of women‘s reason but the mismanagement of men that leads to female ignorance, it is not predilection for folly but life in a world of ―Craft, Malice and Violence‖ that leads to female vice. This state of affairs makes vices such as dissimulation a ―main Ingredient in the Composition of

Human Prudence‖ (EDFS 99). Drake minimizes culpability, maintaining that

―Dissimulation is nothing but the hiding, or disguising, our secret Thoughts or

Inclinations under another Appearance,‖ and defends the practice by blaming men for making it impossible for women to safely speak their minds (EDFS 100). The use of the scapegoat to excuse folly (often presented as unavoidable or unintentional) is thus one of the most important methods of retaining sympathy and of gaining a kind of ethos in the face of moral failing; it is especially useful when the protagonist is surrounded by a supporting fiction, where behavior—rather than strict rhetoric or polemic—is the means for establishing and judging female character.

Chudleigh‘s poetic defense in some ways approximates this fictive context; unlike the other female educationalists, Chudleigh puts her polemical arguments in the mouth of a fictional character: Melissa. The argument is therefore highly particular and localized, yet Melissa‘s responses reflect the same universalizing arguments about human nature

92 demonstrated by Astell or Drake. The essential difference is that Melissa‘s discourse is placed literally within the context of a clash of spheres, where the richness of the private female sphere is defended as more worthy and more longstanding than worldly trifles— for ―Empires rise, and Monarchies decay‖ (LD 18.7). Chudleigh intends to show how worthy women are of this (domestic) empire, where women will be ―as much admir‘d for the Comprehensiveness of their Knowledge, as they are now despis‘d for their

Ignorance‖ (LD Epistle Dedicatory ). If Melissa oversteps in her argument or infringes upon the ―natural‖ rights of her male opponents, however, the excuse for her behavior is readily at hand in the blameworthy nature of the ―Brute,‖ the Beau and the Parson— characters as vicious and vapid as any in Drake‘s Theophrastean gallery. The domestic space, the private mental empire, must be defended against intrusion by the public (and dangerous) sphere of men.

Female educationalists manage to refigure the private sphere as a place of importance not only to women but also to the nation, while excusing women for the surreptitious means by which that sphere is defended. Collectively, these arguments address the final objection of Makin‘s interlocutor, that the ―end of Learning is publick

Business, which Women are not capable of‖ (ERAEG 33). It is important to note, however, that though it is addressed, it is not reversed—or even rebuked. Reason, philosophy and natural science were not considered useful in the domestic sphere, and as with Solomon‘s ―good House-wife‖ a woman was meant to be content in ―rising early, imploying her Servants, [and] making Garments [sic],‖ with no use for ―Arts or Tongues‖

(ERAEG 31). The educationalists‘ primary response to such an objection is a seeming capitulation; rather than arguing for entrance into the public sphere, educationalists

93 portray the domestic, private sphere as a space for practical employment, one in which a rational education would be of great use. Makin‘s own response essentially accepts the limitations of female purpose. She agrees that women ―may not speak in Church,‖ and maintains that ―they may inquire of their Husbands at home; it is private instruction I plead for, not publick Imployment‖ [sic] (ERAEG 33). Makin suggests, however, that a housewife ―accomplished with Arts and Tongues…would have more reverence from her

Servants,‖ and (with a knowledge of economics) she might know ―better how to manage so great a Family‖ (ERAEG 31). As with the revised revolutionary rhetoric employed by

Astell, arguments promoting female education nonetheless work within the limited scope of women‘s activity.

The Rhetoric of Accommodation

The surrender of certain ―rights‖ in the hopes of attaining more humble (but equally important) goals might be considered the rhetoric of accommodation—as Makin maintains, ―To ask too much is the way to be denied all‖ (ERAEG 4). However, it is erroneous to think of this as a systematic or even entirely conscious process; though

Makin‘s phrase suggests a certain intentionality behind the ameliorations and capitulations, Makin was writing, in this instance, as though she were a man giving advice to women seeking greater freedoms. Men advocated against intellectual attainments for women because they feared women would seek parity at the social and political level. The dialogue about individual human rights did not include a perceptual model for equality between the sexes—and such a concept would remain intellectually unavailable even to the proto-feminists until the late 1790s. Instead of envisioning the dissolve of gender boundaries, the educationalists promoted and endorsed the domestic

94 sphere, intending that women nurture the private, reflective mind in a manner that honored their more private role. Education was therefore sought in order to enrich the female sphere as much as to expand its boundaries; the accommodating nature of these strategies reflects a desire not to imitate or supplant men, but to establish a moral and mental equity as a foundation for educational rights.

Accommodation rhetoric essentially assuages audience concerns by reducing tension and the perceived impropriety of the educational project. Makin‘s assertion in her preface that women are ―helps to [their] Husbands,‖ and that ―God hath made the Man the Head‖ are exemplary, as is her further assertion that ―if you be educated and instructed, as I propose, I am sure you will acknowledge it, and be satisfied that you are helps…and that your Husbands have the casting vote‖ (ERAEG 4). By acknowledging that her aim is not ―to equalize Women to Men, much less to make them superior,‖

Makin is both conceding a point and very likely stating a fact. The educationalists were not attempting a political revolution—most were not aiming directly at a social one, either. Even Drake acquiesces to the separation of spheres, and Astell calls women to purity not to dominance. Accommodation rhetoric has two purposes, therefore. It is meant to allay concerns over female preeminence and pride, and to allow women a useful retreat from the language of revolution, controversy, and defense when those claims threatened to consume the didactic purposes of their work: to call women to introspection, to a sense of self, and to rational moral decisions. ―We pretend not,‖ Astell argues, ―that Women shou‘d teach in the Church, or usurp the Authority where it is not allow‘d them; permit us only to understand our own duty, and not be forc‘d to take it upon trust from others‖ (SP [1697] I:50). These accommodations thus participate in the

95 project of creating a private, separate sphere as a place of unique privilege and also of practical social value. If women were provided an education above the ―Toyes and

Trifles,‖ Makin claims, then ―the whole Nation [would have the] Advantage‖—a return to the rhetoric of empire and the authority of social and economic value (ERAEG 5).

The concept of profitability is a complex one; the greatest argument for female education‘s social value was less concerned with fiscal economy that with the inhibition of wickedness and folly in the private ―economies‖ of life (a concern equally present in the less liberating aims of conduct manuals). Astell, for instance, agrees with the male indictment about foolish females, admitting that women are ―unprofitable to most, and a plague and dishonor to some Men‖ (SP [1697] I:19). Women‘s ignorance causes ruptures in family harmony, needless expense of the family economy, and a general petulance between husband and wife. A woman educated in reason, however, ―who rightly understands wherein the perfection of her Nature consists,‖ will lay out her ―Thoughts and Industry in the acquisition of…Perfections‖ (SP [1697] I:21). The ―value‖ of a woman‘s balanced mind, in these accounts, actually prevents subversions against social hegemony; it keeps women from being coquets or domestic tyrants and equally hedges against foolishness and pedantry. In this manner, such an education would be worth more than a dowry, and Astell suggests it would increase the marriageability of poor daughters because they would make much better wives than ―she whose mind is empty tho her

Purse be full‖ (SP [1697] I:93). An education would at once protect women from the snares of vice and ensure their ability to manage (rather than destroy) a future home, and through the means of Astell‘s female retreat, those not destined for a future home would nonetheless prosper, saving their family from expense and themselves from hunger and

96 want. Astell thus accommodates her rhetoric to the private sphere of family and female piety—and to economic valuations—but it is important to consider that the only sure means of avoiding vanity and folly is active introspection.

The educationalists repeatedly encourage their female readers to look into

―themselves,‖ to be ―acquainted at home and no longer the greatest strangers to their own hearts‖ [my italics] (SP [1697] I:37). This may be contrasted to the ―reflection‖ encouraged by John Brinsley, whose 1645 sermon/conduct book A Looking-Glasse for

Good Women provides the reflection (and the correction) for a passive female reader through his textual ―mirror.‖203 Though Astell and her contemporaries acquiesce to the limitations of their sphere and scope of influence, they nonetheless insist upon self- reflection, so that a woman ―cleaves to Piety, because ‗tis her Wisdom, her Interest, her

Joy,‖ and not because ―she has been accustomed to it‖ (SP [1697] I:32). Astell asks

―Whence is it but from ignorance, from a want of Understanding to compare and judge of things, to chuse a right End, to proportion the Means to the End, and to rate ev‘ry thing according to its proper value, that we quit the Substance for the Shadow, Reality for

Appearance?‖ [sic] (SP [1697] I:24). Habit steals the substance; intelligent reflection returns it and yet maintains the value of the domestic sphere. The validation of separate spheres and the emphasis on introspection as a means of maintaining them thus become integral to the educationalists‘ project for female education. Revolutionary rhetoric and rhetorical reversals and evasions allow women to call the logic of female subjection into question, but it is the language of accommodation that provides the means for ameliorating the more subversive elements of the discourse. Because accommodation

203 Dedicated to the ―well affected, but ill advised of the weaker Sex,‖ this text is an earlier example of Sprint‘s Bridewoman‟s Counselor. Brinsley uses scripture to accomplish his purpose, citing Biblical examples for proper dress and demeanor, and recommending a pious silence for women. 97 requires certain surrenders, it is often the least recognized—or most denigrated—of educationalist strategies. Despite its apparent capitulation to male arguments about women‘s limitations, however, accommodation rhetoric supports the autonomous female mind by making it the necessary means (in place of habit) of maintaining masculine hegemony.

These revised rhetorical strategies serve to conceptualize an autonomous female self with the reason and moral efficacy required to direct her own behavior, but without forfeiting her valued place in the domestic sphere. The discourse of individual human rights did not suspend gender division or gender hierarchy; it did, however, provide the necessary rhetorical foundation for honoring feminine nature and the domestic space as a necessary component to the construction of national identity. The autonomous female self does not approximate a political citizen fully engaged with the world, but in attempting to prove the efficacy, necessity and value of educating women, female educationalists could not avoid increasing what Barney calls their ―social franchise‖—even within the limits of domesticity. The power of separate but morally equal spheres develops a narrative arc through the eighteenth century, and though educationalists‘ insistence upon equal moral standing might arguably serve as the seedbed for later, more political, revolutions, it was the strategic accommodations of their rhetoric that laid the foundation for writers of domestic fiction. As the century progressed and the main genre for women‘s pedagogical output transitioned from polemics to conduct manuals and didactic fiction, these strategies provided a necessary rhetorical toolkit.

98

Chapter Four Intellectual Freedom and the Practice of Restraint: Didactic Fiction versus the Conduct Book

Through a focus on the private, reflective mind, the proto-feminist rhetoric of female educationalists provided a renewed sense of intellectual purpose and cultivated national, political pride in the sphere of domestic influence. That this revised perspective on social value succeeded might be inferred from the continued popularity of educationalists‘ works: Drake‘s An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex was published again in 1721 and

Chudleigh‘s Poems on Several Occasions reached a third edition in 1722; Astell‘s A

Serious Proposal saw five editions, and a fourth edition of Some Reflections on Marriage appeared as late as 1730. Astell‘s popularity also earned her a place in George Ballard‘s mid-century Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. This honorable mention, representing Astell as an English female intellectual, served mainly to support Britain‘s national superiority; nonetheless, such memorializing further proves the apparent social value of the private sphere. Surprisingly, however, though the educationalists were still widely read after the turn of the century, polemics introducing or defending educational theory and practice for women seem to have declined. Instead, the conduct manual or courtesy book became the most prolific genre purportedly addressing educational concerns for women. Such manuals increased in popularity throughout the century, gaining ascendency by the 1740s and (as argued by Nancy Armstrong and others) powerfully influencing domestic ideology, the new domestic woman, and domestic fiction. Ironically, however, conduct and courtesy literature—though grappling ostensibly with similar concerns over education and the private sphere—do not employ educationalists‘ rhetorical innovations. Conforming generally to the didactic and advisory materials of the seventeenth century (such as mock defenses, querelle des femmes, pious

99 harangues and repositories of habit-based platitudes), conduct books for women replicate the constraining rhetoric of writers like François Fénelon. In fact, Fénelon‘s work—like that of Locke—continued to be popular well into the middle of the century. But though thematically consistent with Fénelon‘s conception of female frailty (and the corresponding need for external control), conduct materials of the same period differed in structure and were in many instances much less exhaustive.

Conduct manuals generally address the educational subject directly, prescribing model behaviors ―construed as a largely formulaic inventory of exhortations and prohibitions.‖204 Nancy Armstrong suggests that conduct books of the eighteenth century codify the behavior of a class that has yet to establish its significance, inscribing fixed

―rules for sexual exchange‖ and providing, in fact establishing, what Kathryn Sutherland calls ―the desired domestic relations and practices of an apparently non-political, private sphere.‖205 Conduct books construct female identity in ―imagined contention‖ with deviance and difference; their instruction serves as the corrective for the abnormal—―the irresponsible, the overrefined, the ungoverned, the under- or over-educated.‖206 By late- century, women had, as a result, become the denizens of household affairs, overseers of the domestic that did no ‗work‘ but who purified male economic exchanges and gave them ideological meaning. Armstrong maintains that conduct literature posited a feminine ideal, a wife, a woman of superior and asexual morality, who was essential to domestic happiness.207 Drawing on conduct literature‘s particularly powerful ideological

204 Barney, Plots, 17. 205 Kathryn Sutherland, "Writings on education and conduct: arguments for female improvement." In Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, edited by Vivian Jones. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26. 206 Ibid., 26. 207 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 63. 100 framework, the ―new domestic woman . . . encroach[ed] upon aristocratic culture and seiz[ed] authority from it.‖208 However, by emphasizing behavioral restraint, conduct manuals also provide ―a special kind of educational programme‖ for the essentially uneducatable.209 What emerges, therefore, is a somewhat contradictory body of literature, and one that sought to disentangle itself from the political and public sphere. In attempting through exhaustive regulation and restraint to preserve or attain an ideal female identity, conduct literature reduced the scope of female agency to rules of decorum and sexual polity. More disturbingly from the standpoint of female autonomy, the conduct manual‘s emphasis on habitus and techniques of the body reproduced the mechanical behavior that educationalists intended their readers to abandon. Perhaps for this reason, Armstrong considers courtesy literature itself ―empty‖ of substance; it merely provides a frame of female subjectivity upon which the emerging novel (the genre

Armstrong views as the inheritor of the conduct manual‘s grammar, its ideological narrative of the ―new‖ domestic woman) would build.210 Nevertheless, at the turn of the eighteenth century, when the domestic ideal was only just being conceptualized and the

―novel‖ not yet a pervasive or consistent fictional form, works promoting performative female conduct posed a familiar threat to female autonomy, substituting ―Shadow‖ for

―Substance‖ and ―Appearance‖ for ―Reality‖ (SP [1697] I:24).

Unlike the educationalists‘ polemical assertions about mental autonomy, the rhetoric of conduct mainly concerned the creation (and preservation) of a class and of its

208 Ibid, 59. 209 Ibid. 210 In terms of chronology, Armstrong‘s work on middle- and latter-century conduct material and the domestic ideal concerns an alternative rise for the ‗novel‘—a category that (like the ‗middle class‘) did not exist as a consistent or well-understood term until the late in the period. Arguably, the ‗novel‘ remains fairly amorphous even today. 101 mythic figures: ―domestic, middle class female‖ and ―rational economic male.‖211

Without an emphasis on female reason and rationality, conduct manuals thus based their education for women on a program of control and restraint that reinforced habituated behavior in place of self-government. As with the disparity between male pedagogues like Fénelon and female educationalists like Astell, serious contrasts of intent, scope and structure separate educational polemics from conduct manuals—despite what might be viewed as similar objectives. Both the polemicist and the conduct writer attempted to elevate the private, domestic sphere, and both use (to varying degrees) a language of empire to authorize that sphere‘s value. However, educationalist polemics and conduct literature inscribed the domestic sphere in very different ways. In recommending

―correct‖ behavior rather than engaging with the rational mind, most conduct books represented class ideology at the expense of the individual domestic woman. The educationalists, by contrast, began with the rationality of women, reasoning that self- governance began ―at home‖ in the private reflective mind. By exploring and supporting the human capacity to reason, these women also engaged in the ambiguous educational discourse that ―claimed to sponsor both individual freedom and social restraint at the same time.‖212 Conduct manuals were less interested in such debates, and while they may have been essential to establishing the ―new‖ woman, they were also responsible for maintaining the status quo, a social hegemony that posited the "female" and the "male" in different loci, but one that situated piety in the former and rationality in the latter. Thus the educationalists‘ concern that, under traditional tutelage, women would be pious solely because they were ―accustomed to it‖ continues at least several decades into the

211 K. Sutherland, ―Writings,‖ 27, 26. 212 Barney. Plots, 17. 102 eighteenth century. The persistence of traditional conduct rhetoric—as ideology and strategy—thus makes categorizing materials by their century a difficult and perhaps artificial process.

An illustration of the overlapping rhetoric between early and late manuals,

Brathwaite‘s 1640 English Gentlewoman provided a model which later writers imitated

(and which may have been ‗borrowed‘ even by Brathwaite himself). The text provides lessons on female decency of behavior and the maintenance of female virtue, but makes a special necessity of silence as a woman‘s most ―moving Rhetoricke.‖213Robert

Codrington, Brathwaite‘s contemporary, actually copies the entire section in his own advice book. Such works might be considered progenitors of eighteenth-century conduct books in which young women were ―taught ‗natural‘ femininity in terms of negation and repression—silence, submission‖214—certainly the language is often quite similar.

Moreover, many popular seventeenth-century works were reprinted well into the next century; George Saville, marquis of Halifax‘s 1688 Lady‟s New Year‟s Gift, for instance, was running a 12th edition in 1741, and Fénelon‘s treatise on women‘s education was republished as The Accomplished Governess at mid-century. Similarly, Richard

Allestree‘s The Ladies Calling (1673) went through twelve editions by 1727 and many more under its new title The Whole Duty of a Woman.215 In Ladies Calling, Allestree reverts to certain humanist claims about the genderless quality of souls, concluding

―whatever vicious impotence Women are under, it is acquired, not natural‖216—but

213 Brathwaite, English Gentlewoman, 320. 214 Jones, Vivan. Women in the Eighteenth Century. (London: Routledge, 1990), 15 215 Allestree is also generally recognized as the author of The Whole Duty of Man, which went through nearly 100 editions by 1800. 216 Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling, in Two Parts, by the Author of the Whole Duty of Man. 2nd Edition. (Oxford, 1673), Preface. 103 though this conduct book begins by suggesting a moral equality between the sexes, it does not ultimately support female intellectual autonomy. Allestree follows Brathwaite and Fénelon in recommending female silence and piety, suggesting that a ―woman‘s tongue should indeed be like the imaginary Music of the Spheres, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance.‖217 Works like the Ladies Calling intend women to serve as spiritual (and not intellectual) guides for mankind—a perspective in keeping with the conduct literature appearing later in the eighteenth century. Consequently, not only do the sentiments and educational strictures remain similar in the period between 1640 and

1740, but many of the texts are literally the same.

It is true that a host of new conduct books for women joined reprinted works in the early eighteenth century, but the term ―new‖ must here be applied with caution. These manuals borrow heavily from Fénelon and Locke, and sometimes quote at great length from early works. John Essex, for instance, begins his 1722 The Young Ladies Conduct by referencing women‘s ―unstable and irresolute‖ natures and suggesting early training to take advantage of their ―softness.‖218 He also quotes from Fénelon (as the Archbishop of

Cambray), offering similar injunctions about female ―craft‖ and ―artifice‖ and universally declaiming curiosity as ―a dangerous Enemy that lurks within [women‘s] own Breasts, to assault them…when most unguarded, and in private.‖219 Privacy and internal reflection are discouraged by implication, and when women do ―Reflect on their own Innocency,‖ they are sure to be mislead into ―thinking they cannot be tempted.‖220 Another guide from

217 Ibid., 7. 218 Essex, John. The young ladies conduct: or, rules for education, under several heads; with instructions upon dress, both before and after marriage. And advice to young wives. (London, 1722), vii. 219 Ibid., ix. 220 Essex, John. The young ladies, ix. 104 the 1720s, the anonymous Thoughts on Friendship […] for the use and improvement of the ladies (1725), likewise reprints portions of Fénelon—stating in fact that his Education of a Daughter is so ―excellent‖ a guide as to make further discourse of female education unnecessary.221 Fénelon‘s treatise is discussed as though the audience for Thoughts on

Friendship was generally familiar with the older work and its promotion of restrained behavior (over reflection) as the most appropriate form of female education. Other early century works use concepts developed by Locke to elide education and ―breeding,‖ the term Locke uses to describe a gentleman‘s carriage—or behavior towards self and others.222 The Accomplish‟d Female Instructor seeks to instruct women in the ―most pressing Affairs that concern them,‖ namely ―Generous Breeding and Behaviour‖ as well as ―Modesty, Chastity, Religion, Charity, Compassion‖ and ―Contentment of Mind‖ with one‘s station.223 The author interchanges the terms ―Generous Education‖ and ―good

Breeding,‖ describing a woman‘s uncultivated, natural state as ―rude and unpolished,‖ requiring ―Art‖ and ―Industry‖ to ―reform Defects.‖ 224 James Bland‘s An essay in praise of women: or, a looking-glass for ladies makes similar comments about Nature as ―blind and dull, or at best but dim-sighted, and therefore must needs be polished by Art,‖225 utilizing Locke‘s concept of the uncultivated and weedy garden plot. The resulting focus prizes cultivation and art over natural capacity; training for young ladies need not include

221 Well-wisher to her sex. Thoughts on friendship. By way of essay; for the use and improvement of the ladies. By a well-wisher to her sex. (London, 1725), 24. 222 Section 141-145 in Locke‘s Some Thoughts on Education details the difference between good and ill breeding. 223 R. G. The Accomplish'd Female Instructor: or, a very useful companion for ladies, gentlewomen, and others. In two parts. ... (London, 1704). Preface, [no pagination]. 224 Ibid., 2. 225 Bland, James, Professor of Physic. An essay in praise of women: or, a looking-glass for ladies to see their perfections in. ... (London, 1733), 187. 105 serious reflection or study, but must be polished with accomplishments like limning

(painting), dancing and music—that is, cultivated habits of behavior.

Reason is similarly replaced in such texts, where vigilance over chastity serves as a woman‘s ―Judgment, [and…] Reason‖ against ―Rhetorical Protestations.‖226 Thus a practiced restraint and a conscious shortening of a woman‘s ―line of liberty‖ stands in for female prudence.227 ―Ladies‖ needed little reason of their own in these figurations, especially as religion (their central concern) had already been ―sifted and refined‖ for them by men: ―the voluminous Enquiries into the Truth by reading multitudes of Books, are not expected from [women].‖228 Far from employing or developing educationalists‘ polemics, early-century conduct materials continue the tradition of patriarchal Custom and educational habituation evident in earlier courtesy literature and pedagogy, from

Brathwaite and Codrington to Fénelon and Locke. The period after 1740, which recreates women as pious though not necessarily rational counterparts to the middle-class, economic man (and which remains the focus of much modern criticism) thus derives much of its substance from the seventeenth century. The ―shortening‖ of women‘s liberty to a private and domestic sphere begins well before the mid-eighteenth century, with manuals that simultaneously restrain women and promote them as the arbiter of piety and morals. The ―new‖ domestic woman was thus refashioned from a great deal of ―old‖ material; conduct manuals of the eighteenth century might purport to develop a female program of education, but they largely promoted habitual training developed by earlier male pedagogues. Neither the educationalists‘ strategies supporting female autonomy nor

226 Bland, An Essay in Praise of Women, 17. 227 George Savile Halifax, Marquis. The lady's new-year's gift: or, advice to a daughter. ... By the Right Honourable George Lord Saville, late Marquis and Earl of Halifax. The twelfth edition, exactly corrected. London, [1688] 1741. Hereafter cited in the text as LNYG. 228Ibid., 46. 106 their negotiations of the public, political force of domesticity appear in conduct rhetoric.

The two approaches to female education remain distinct.

Understanding this separation between conduct rhetoric and proto-feminist rhetoric allows us to re-evaluate the apparent discontinuity in educationalist polemics.

When perceived as the natural progression of educational discourse for women, the conduct manual suggests as interruption in the rhetoric of intellectual emancipation developed by Astell and her contemporaries—a return to the authority of Custom and to the utility of habits. Such works were, however, written contemporaneously and in contention with female educationalist discourse. Reprints of seventeenth-century conduct books continued to compete with successive editions of educationalist works into the early eighteenth century, and given the number of published responses to Astell, Drake and Chudleigh,229 the aims, innovations and practices of female educationalists did not disappear from the discursive context. Nonetheless, while new conduct manuals were being written based on earlier models, far fewer educational polemics appeared after

1700. Accounting for this apparent lapse has resulted in the perceived gap between early and late polemicists, and has also tended to support the unequivocal rise of conduct materials as the sole means of educational discourse in the period. Proto-feminist rhetoric did not, however, disappear with the female polemic. Rather, the strategies developed by

Astell and others were re-employed by a different genre, one that was (perhaps surprisingly) neither polemical nor strictly instructional. Educationalist rhetoric continued to develop through fiction—didactic fiction, in particular. The restraint evident in conduct

229 The works of Astell, Chudleigh and Drake occasioned a number of responses, from veneration to attack. Some publications appeared as anonymous publications in print magazines (such as Damaris Masham‘s critique of Astell‘s Letters Concerning the Love of God or a number of rebukes to Chudleigh‘s Ladies Defence), others as letters of appreciation from friends and interlocutors. 107 manuals‘ developing conception of the domestic ideal serve as context for authors like

Penelope Aubin and Jane Barker (and to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Singer Rowe),230 engendering response and continuing the dialectic between freedom and restraint.231 By incorporating the educational strategies into their didactic projects, these writers respond to the constraining habits of conduct and serve as a crucial link between the educationalists and later authors of domestic fiction.

Didactic Fiction Before 1740

I have claimed throughout this project that proto-feminist innovations may be traced from the early female educationalists, through fiction, to late-century polemicists like Mary Wollstonecraft. This continuing arc intersects with a number of works, but I will focus here primarily on fictions that cannot and should not be considered novels. My avoidance of this category is not meant to remove such works from the novel‘s history, but rather to question the viability of a term that, even now, is not well understood or specifically applied. Didactic fiction is the term most appropriate for many early works, though even the term ―didactic‖ becomes unfortunately plural, applying usefully to most publications and ―an astonishing amount of private discourse‖232 in the eighteenth century. J. Paul Hunter‘s extensive list of didactic works in Before Novels includes everything from polemics and conduct manuals to devotionals, histories and fiction. His broad categorization widens the scope of materials serving as precursors to or influences on the burgeoning ―novel,‖ but potentially makes such works subservient to that later

230 Primarily a poet and less connected to Barker and Aubin than some have conjectured, Rowe will figure less significantly in this examination of didactic fiction. 231 Dialectic in that these terms are dynamically engaged rather than diametrical opposed, in a relationship that is processual rather than productive (as per Hegelian dialectic). 232 J. Paul Hunter. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 225. 108 tradition. Hunter remarks that one reason ―popular reading materials antecedent to the novel have not been studied more fully is that more of them seem to modern sensibility inherently wrongheaded, narrow, ineffectively focused, and boring.‖233 It is also true, however, that antecedent didactic materials have been ignored precisely because they are not novels, or because they are an uncomfortable fit for narratives of the novel‘s ―rise.‖

Even Hunter (whose history is comparatively inclusive) describes the novel as providing

―by definition‖ a ―richer sense of context for human choices than do treatises and tracts.‖234 While perhaps accurate in that the fictional construct contextualizes and characterizes moral platitudes, providing more ―complex motives and values,‖235 Hunter primarily considers Defoe, Haywood, Smollet, Lennox, Richardson, Fielding and

Burney—most of whom wrote concurrently with or after the publications of Richardson‘s

Pamela and Clarissa (defining moments in the novel‘s conceptualization as a form).

Samuel Richardson, himself a producer of conduct literature such as the 1741 Letters

Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions and anecdotal reprints of Pamela‘s or Clarissa‘s letters, repeatedly figures as a (and perhaps the) foundational ―didactic‖ figure in literary and ―novel‖ histories. John Richetti gives

Richardson pride of place in his treatment of the English novel, describing him as one of the ―high-minded and serious moral writers‖ who appropriated amatory fiction for didactic purposes.236 Richardson ―and his mostly female imitators‖ both moralize and localize the romantic tale, ―purg[ing]‖ it of ―erotic effects,‖ 237 and Clarissa, according to

Richetti, is nothing less than ―a transformation of the clichés of the amatory pattern into a

233 Hunter, Before Novels, 226. 234 Ibid., 232. 235 Ibid. 236 John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700-1780. (London: Routledge, 1999), 15. 237 Ibid. 109 monumental novel without parallel in English or in European fiction.‖238 Though impossible to deny the impact of Clarissa on fictional forms—certainly works from

Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless to Frances Burney‘s Evelina respond to its formal and contextual cues—the twining of amatory and didactic stories began much earlier. At the turn of the century, women like Jane Barker and Penelope Aubin were already publishing didactic fiction, and exploring these early figures amounts, at times, to a secondary

―rediscovery‖ of female writers and women‘s rhetoric.

Writing two decades prior to the publication of Clarissa, Penelope Aubin—while self-consciously differentiating herself from her ―warm‖ amatory contemporaries239— claims a didactic agenda that combines the adventure/romance with instructional goals:

―to reclaim our giddy Youth; and since Reprehensions fail, try to win them to Vertue, by

Methods where Delight and Instruction may go together.‖240 Jane Barker, too, with her

1713 Love Intrigues; or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia, straddles the gap between amatory and didactic purpose. The text promises but never consummates

Galesia‘s amours, and the author concludes by privileging the ―espousal of a book‖ over the heady, misleading and painful intrigues of love. These two early authors, often placed in the ―pious school‖ of female writers, have fallen into near obscurity (a strange fate, especially in the case of Aubin, who was the most successful fiction writer after Defoe and Haywood in the early eighteenth century).241 Though generally considered ‗daughters

238 Richetti, The English Novel, 99. 239 In the preface to Charlotta du Pont. 240 Penelope Aubin, The strange adventures of the Count de Vinevil and his family. ... By Mrs. Aubin.(London, 1721), Preface [no pagination]. Hereafter cited in the text as SACV. 241 Gollapudi, Aparna. "Virtuous Voyages in Penelope Aubin's Fiction." SEL 45, no. 3 (2005): 669-690, 685. 110 of Orinda‘ and opposed to the amatory ‗daughters of Behn‘,242 these writers remain in

Hunter‘s antecedent period with Behn and Manley243—by implication less complex and potentially less valued. I am not concerned in this project with providing a narrative arc for the novel (which has already been done by others), but rather with demonstrating the continuity of a proto-feminist tradition honoring female mental autonomy. As a result, the works of Barker and Aubin—with their application of educational rhetoric and their emphasis on reflection as the means of effecting moral change—provide a context for characterizing the female self, as well as a language for promoting it as appropriate to the domestic sphere. The assumption and validation of women‘s intellectual autonomy and their status as moral equals becomes sublimated, appearing not as polemical injunctions but as narrative constructions and character traits in these earlier didactic fictions. The proceeding sections will address the rhetorical strategies of each author, exploring the ways in which they address, refigure and employ educationalist strategies for use in the fictional context.

Jane Barker: the Politics of Apology

Attempting a chronological history of Barker and Aubin is a somewhat complicated task—though Barker began her writing career many decades earlier, the two published their fictions only a few years apart. Nonetheless, as Jane Barker was born during the Interregnum her life and works—her ―mental universe‖—were most formatively shaped by the various ―political and religious crises‖ of the seventeenth

242 King, Kathryn R, and Jeslyn Medoff. "Jane Barker and Her Life (1652-1732): The Documentary Record." Eighteenth-Century Life 21, no. 3 (1997): 16-38, 28-29. 243 These latter two authors of amatory fiction are, however, beyond the scope of this project. Though no less concerned with aspects of conduct and, in an experiential sense, education, amatory writers generally engage with masculine rhetoric—the contentio of the stage and public sphere—rather than with the educationalists rhetorical innovations. 111 century.244 As with the conduct literature of the period, Barker‘s works responded to (and against) the context of the preceding century. Thus, though Barker is often associated

―with ‗the rise‘ of a genre that laid claim to and in part invented domesticity, interiority, female subjectivity, and the private sphere,‖ her texts are still very much a part of the seventeenth century‘s ―refusal to separate private and national, personal and public history.‖245 The telling of that combined ―history‖ remains problematic for many critics, who tend to fuse Barker‘s life and works in ―historical‖ accounts of her career. It was not until Kathryn King and Jeslyn Medoff‘s retelling of that history in the late 1990s that the self depicted in Barker‘s pseudo-autobiographical fiction was treated as ―an invention,‖ an ―idealized recasting of a life.‖246 This recasting process is primary to Barker‘s narrative purpose, however. Essentially revisionary and reflective in nature, these works provide innovative means of establishing and excusing an autonomous female selfhood— while complicating the boundary between public and private.

In 1713, Barker wrote Love Intrigues; or, the History of the Amours of Bosvil and

Galesia. This narrative details the unsuccessful love affair between Galesia (the character most often aligned with Barker) and Bosvil (also referred to as Strephan). The story may possibly be infused with scenes from Barker‘s life, but Galesia‘s growing awareness of her choices—to marry an inconstant, enigmatic and unreadable suitor or to ―espouse a book‖247—offer a reflective re-working of a woman‘s self-experience. Barker‘s 1723 A

Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies revisits this early love affair, not only by direct reference, but also through the (equally unsuccessful) love intrigues of Galesia‘s later

244 King and Medoff. "Jane Barker,‖ 29. 245 Ibid., 28. 246 Ibid., 27. 247 Barker, Jane. Love intrigues: or, the history of the amours of Bosvil and Galesia as related to Lucasia, in St. Germains garden. A novel. Written by a young lady. (London, 1713), 15. 112 life. In Patch-Work Screen, however, the ―failure‖ is more particularly due to Galesia‘s desire to avoid ―worldly‖ attachments. It is only when she is ―free from Passion‖ and the trials of courtship that Galesia is capable of ―serious Reflection.‖248 In these retellings, traditional romance plot structures are reformed, not primarily as sanitized version of amatory fiction (as is often claimed),249 but rather as a means of creating and improvising female identity and reserving a space for intellectual freedom and growth. Moreover, by moving Galesia‘s private affairs in and out of the public sphere, Barker helps to politicize the rhetoric of apology, further promoting the social utility of the domestic space.

Barker was well aware of the fictional tradition surrounding her in 1723; she mentions the various ―Histories‖ being printed and their ―Fashionable‖ quality, specifically Robinson Crusoe, Colonel Jack, and Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, but she also differentiates her narrative from these favorites. As her frontise-piece advertises,

Barker renders instruction—with its didactic moral force—piece-meal, after the fashion of a patch-work screen.250 The screen was a familiar feminine accomplishment in the early century and one that, at least in Barker‘s account, had replaced complex needlework. Barker takes pains, however, to compare the patch-work craft to the sentiments of women, generally, stating that

whenever one sees a Set of Ladies together, their Sentiments are as differently mix‟d as the Patches in their Work: To wit, Whigs and Tories, High-Church and Low-Church, Jacobites and Williamites, and many more Distinctions, which they divide and subdivide, ‗till at last they make this Dis-union meet in a harmonious Tea-Table Entertainment.(PWS v).

248 Barker, Amours, 70. 249 King and Medoff remark on the traditional dichotomy between the ―daughters of Orinda‖ and the ―daughters of Behn,‖ 28-29. 250 The text includes several narrative voices, in-set stories, poetry and recipes—it is meant literally to mimic the patch-work craft, wherein different kinds of material formed a single work. 113

In this manner, she both establishes the political character of women, and yet distances women from the public contest of politics. Rather than causing a disruptive split or establishing an opposition against which they must define themselves, the distinct sentiments are joined through the working of a female craft: like the ―Clashing of Atoms, which at last united to compose the glorious Fabrick of the Universe‖ (PWS v-vi). As

King remarks, the Tea-Table (symbol of the domestic and separate sphere) does not represent a female alternative to the public world, but rather ―the political sphere in microcosm.‖251 Barker re-appropriates the Tea-Table as a political and potentially public space, even as she privileges the private, familial unity of the domestic sphere.

Like Astell‘s retreat where women might reclaim ―Paradise‖ from a world of disappointments (SP [1697] I:40), Barker‘s metaphorical union (and her text, which represents it) serves as a respite from the world of ―Male Patch-Workers‖ whose own

―New Creation […] was blown up about their Ears…to the utter Ruin of many

Thousands‖ (PWS vi, vii). Called ironically by Barker the scheme of ―unfallen‖ Adam, this political reference concerns Walpole and the financial scandal of the South Sea

Bubble.252 The political sentiment is buttressed, however, with a religious reference that complicates the manufactured ―paradise‖ of scheming men and differentiates this sphere from the creative interiority of a reclaimed female empire. A woman‘s tea-table society and a woman‘s private retreat (in which to reflect and cultivate her ―empire‖) serve as the alternative means of political action, public influence and freedom. Though spaces of retreat—the convent, the country house or the garret closet—often represent a kind of

251Kathryn R. King, Jane Barker, Exile, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 202. 252 King, Exile, 209-210. Notably, two of the South Sea Directors are figured as specious characters in Galesia‘s narrative… They come to take 10,000 pounds from Galesia‘s newfound friends, and Galesia warns them with, appropriately, a poem. 114 restraint on the physical body, they are nonetheless linked symbolically to greater intellectual freedoms, greater means of accessing interior mental space. The World and its attendant love intrigues, by contrast, are presented as nothing more than an interruption, a disturbance to ―Tranquility‖ (PWS 2). Thus, though evident in Galesia‘s struggle between the affairs of love and the (private) practice of reading and writing in

Bosvil and Galesia, the contest between worldly and domestic spaces become increasingly complicated in Patchwork Screen. A number of subtle shifts in the text serve to change the amorous dichotomy between love and authorship to a more complicated dialectic between public and private: Bosvil and others of his type are early associated with worldly cares and with the noise of London society, while solitude represents an active space for self-reflection and an intellectual cultivation sanctioned in part by the domestic sphere in which it takes place. Galesia—now ―disingag‘d‖ from love—passes the time by reading poetry and studying anatomy and other physical sciences with her brother (PWS 2). These studies, though an ―Amusement different from [those of her] Sex and Years,‖ take place within the domestic privacy of Galesia‘s family, excused by the

―humor‖ of her brother and the ―Satisfaction of [their] endearing tender Parents‖ (PWS

11). Though contrasted with the typical recreations of young women, such as ―telling our

Dreams‖ and ―counting Specks on our Nails,‖ Galesia‘s unusual reading habits are nonetheless placed into the category of ―Diversion‖ and ―fancy‖ (PWS 10-11). This categorization relocates study in the private sphere, while situating ―amours‖—though central to the domestic, marriage plot—in the ―World‖ with its noise and hurry.

As the bastion of knowledge, private retreat provides a power unavailable to those living a more public life in worldly society. Galesia pities ―the busy Town,/To whome

115 these Rural Pleasures are not known./ But more I pity those whome Fate inthralls,/ Who can‘t retire when Inclination calls‖ (PWS 5). She likewise warns her readers about ―the

World‘s‖ chief danger, the ―Beau Rake,‖ but ultimately elides the two figures as the

―Beau World,‖ impertinent, vain and vapid (PWS 37, 55). Thus, though finding herself

―in the midst of Throngs,‖ Galesia feels ―alone in Morals‖ (PWS 55). Through her mental retreat, privacy becomes portable property. Galesia therefore lives ―alone […] in the midst of Multitudes,‖ while her various suitors seem destined to end their lives in public shame: arrested, hung or ruined by pernicious affairs (PWS 50). Love intrigues become strangely public in the text, while an education in medicine and anatomy—and even

Galesia‘s occupation as a healer during her time in London—appear as private and appropriately domesticated. Galesia‘s poem On the Apothecaries Filing my Recipes amongst the Doctors continues to turn the public use of medical knowledge into an appropriate site for female ―work‖: ―The Sturdy Gout, which all Male Power withstands,/

Is overcome by my soft Female Hands‖ (PWS 57). Galesia ―despise[s] the World with all its gaudy Trappings,‖ and the ruin and folly of more worldly characters serve to validate her choice of private study, where her ―Inclinations corresponded with [her]

Circumstances‖ (PWS 89, 56).

Galesia‘s activity ―Amongst the Doctors‖ seems at first to justify one complaint made by male pedagogues and conduct writers, namely that women will use their education to impinge on the masculine sphere—that they will not ―know their place.‖

Such freedoms amounted to an abuse of education similar to that proposed by Makin‘s interlocutor, and certainly writing prescriptions in Latin contravened ―Custom.‖

However, Galesia equates her work to a Christian duty that ultimately serves mankind.

116

Similar to Astell‘s claim that God ―gives no Power or Faculty which he has not allotted to some proportionate use,‖ Barker authorizes Galesia‘s education in traditionally masculine arts by emphasizing both her natural (or God-given) abilities and the social value of her skills (SP [1697] II:123). Galesia‘s ―pride‖ in her work is thereby excused on the grounds of ―dutiful‖ gratitude:

I Hope I sha‘n‘t be blam‘d, if I am proud To be admitted in this learned Croud. For to be proud of Fortune so sublime, Methinks, is rather Duty than a Crime. Were not my Thoughts exalted in this State, I should not make thereof due Estimate: And, sure, one Cause of Adam‘s Fall, was this, He knew not the just Worth of Paradise (PWS 57).

The conception of the fall and the forfeiture of paradise once again appears as a trope in these lines—though, unlike Astell‘s invocation of Eve‘s error (SP [1697] I:40), it is

Adam who does not accurately assess the worth of his Eden. An inability to appreciate and exalt God-given gifts becomes the greater sin. References to paradise therefore serve two related purposes in the text; first, as a retreat and haven, it provides the ―unseen

Empire‖ in which women have the right to cultivate wisdom and freely exercise their reason; second, it appears as a spiritually valid introspective space that women are duty- bound to exonerate. For Astell, reclaiming this paradise requires at least a temporary severance from worldly distractions so that a woman might ―attend to the Dictates of

[her] Reason‖ (SP [1697] I:47). For Galesia, this separation is permanent, sanctioned by the wordly and unworthy character of fallen men.

The subtle way in which Barker turns male foibles into an excuse for female aberration recalls Chudleigh‘s rhetoric in The Ladies Defence. The heroine of

Chudleigh‘s poem, Melissa, complains that women who marry are ―Made Slaves to

117 serve [men‘s] Luxury and Pride‖ and taught ―but how to Work, to Dance, and Dress […] as if we were for nothing else design‘d‖ (LD 15.1, 26-28). Barker‘s Galesia, in her ironic blessing of the ―Son‘s of Art‖—those beau rakes who figure repeatedly in the text— likewise recasts a woman‘s domestic role as degraded, idle, indolent: ―False Strephan

[i.e. Bosvil] too, I almost now coul‘d bless,/ Whose Crimes conduc‘d to this my

Happiness./ Had he been true, I‘d liv‘d in sotish Ease,/ Ne‘er study‘d ought, but how to love and please‖ (PWS 57). The inverse of enslavement to luxury or life of ―sotish Ease‖ might be intellectual freedom—but this freedom must be accompanied by a sense of duty.

Barker‘s Galesia suggests that her work in physic will do ―such Wonders‖ that ―to our

Art, Mankind their Ease will owe;/Then praise and please our-selves in doing so‖ (PWS

58). Though Galesia does not specifically invoke national identity to authorize her advancements in learning, she does submit her ―honour‘d Place‖ to the service of mankind and the removal of maladies such as asthma, gout and rickets (PWS 58).

Chudleigh‘s claims for enlightened education results in a similarly utopic vision: ―The

Poor we‘ll feed, to the Distress‘d be kind, […] Visit the sick, and try their Pains to ease‖

(LD 22.18, 20). Both authors suggest that by allowing women to ―Rule‖ their ―Minds,‖ men—or Mankind, rather—will reap the benefit (LD 22.20). They likewise suggest that women will be strict supervisors of their own freedoms, that they will trade intellectual restraint for dutiful self-control and self-possession. The empire over which Galesia rules

(viewed, for part of the text, from her Garret ―closet‖ on the housetop) remains private and internal, and yet, as with Chudleigh‘s invocation of public works, her private study results in public good. The ―revolutionary‖ occupation Galesia is allowed to pursue reverses customary assumptions about male and female roles. More importantly, this

118 complication of divisions between public and private life allows Barker to excuse and even to praise Galesia‘s abilities. It is important to note, however, that such praises are carefully scripted; it is Galesia‘s younger self (through poetry) who valorizes her abilities and scorns the world‘s censure. The elder Galesia, through whom Barker narrates much of the life history, tends to shrink from these bold statements and even to apologize for them—another kind of advisory restraint.

Galesia accompanies the reflections on her past life with a number of retractions, apologies and excuses, particularly concerning her ―fancy‖ for Anatomy and Harvey‟s

Circulation of the Blood. While she excuses her studies as a means of ―securing‖ her heart from the ―weakness‖ of love intrigues, the elder Galesia nonetheless appears to agree with conduct authors of the 1720s who disparage female learning or, like John

Essex, attack female curiosity. The weak understanding of women purportedly made them ―unequal‖ to masculine intellectual attainment; their efforts resulted in merely foolish pedantry.253 Galesia‘s claim that ―A Learned Woman, being at best but like a

Forc‘d-Plant, […] never has its proper relish‖ or that ―Books and Learning‖ are ―useless‖ and ―pernicious‖ to the female sex reflect the popular sentiment of these conduct materials—but with an important difference (PWS 11, 79). The education of Barker‘s protagonist may make her a ―useless Member‖ of assemblies or render her dissatisfied with the ―World,‖ but that Galesia is capable of attaining this knowledge is never in question (PWS 11, 79). She reads and understands anatomy; she even employs this understanding practically in the writing of her prescriptions. The only genuine complaint

Galesia makes for her ―Stoical Dulness‖ is that it teaches her to ―relish not the Diversions and Imbellishments of out Sex and Station; which render us agreeable to the World, and

253 Brathwaite, English Gentlewoman, 320. 119 the World to us‖ (PWS 79). Yet, Barker previously recasts ―the World‖ as dangerous, foolish and vain; intellectual advancement therefore opposes the world‘s vanity and supports the image of female piety often recommended by conduct materials. Galesia‘s

―moral‖ solitude make her unfit for the world‘s company because she is above it, not below it. Like Makin—who overturns the argument against women‘s learning on the basis of its abuse—Barker reminds the reader that there is always a difference between the ―Use and Abuse‖ of things (PWS 116). As Galesia remarks: ―God is pleas‘d to place different Persons in different Stations‖— ―over-doing our Condition‖ might possibly lead to pride, but ―under-doing‖ leads to sloth and sin, the sin of Adam who did not rightly estimate the worth of paradise (PWS 116). Galesia‘s pious self-restraint opposes and replaces external controls while allowing for greater intellectual—and even occupational—freedom. The semi-historical fiction surrounding Galesia provides that

―richer sense of context‖ Hunter expects from novels, but the ―complex motives and values‖ help to excuse her unusual freedoms, supporting and authorizing a surprising female autonomy.

Like Drake, Astell and Chudleigh, Barker employs apology not to draw attention to Galesia‘s subversive act but to deflect attention from it, ultimately emphasizing both the public and private benefits of Galesia‘s acquired knowledge. Barker thus presents the private sphere as one that bisects domesticity and social value; the private and the public exist in a dialectical rather than diametrically opposed relationship. Borrowing and re- employing the social value arguments of empire rhetoric, reversing the spheres of female influence, and dispersing blame or diffusing tension serve as the primary means of accommodating Galesia‘s unusual character to the expected domestic role she courts, but

120 ultimately refuses. Galesia remains a revolutionary figure in many ways, but Barker‘s strategies effectively clothe her in a pious frame of reference as a moral woman above the lowly trifles and temptations of the World. This ―screen‖ is so effective that Barker remains ―famously moral, decorous, and above all respectable‖254 even in modern critical conceptions, and is often touted as ―the new, moral woman writer, acceptable to later generations‖255—a label she shares with Penelope Aubin, another of the ‗daughters of

Orinda‘ recognized more for her piety than her productions.

Penelope Aubin: Role Reversal and Refashioning the „Self‟

Though Penelope Aubin‘s reputation has fared, critically, no better than Barker‘s, her popularity during her lifetime is comparable to that of Daniel Defoe. She was prolific and well received, accepted both as a moral didacticist and as a writer of breathless adventure stories having much in common with Robinson Crusoe. Her works were reprinted often and she was arguably as popular as Elizabeth Singer Rowe—the third of the ―daughters‖ to whom she is often compared. This comparison becomes, interestingly, central to the surprisingly scant256 critical inquiry into her works or the often confusing details of her life. Though John Richetti, Jane Spencer and Janet Todd do make (sometimes passing) mention of Aubin, she is generally mentioned as the didactic contemporary of Rowe. It was not until the 1994 publication of Sarah Prescott‘s ―Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: A Reassessment of the Pious Woman Novelist,‖ that the connection between

Aubin and Rowe was seriously questioned, and more recent works by Chris Mounsey,

Aparna Gollapudi and Debbie Welham have succeeded in severing the supposed

254 King and Medoff, ―Jane Barker and her Life,‖ 28. 255 Qtd. in Ibid., 28. 256 H. McBurney‘s 1956 ―Mrs Penelope Aubin and the Early-Eighteenth Century English Novel‖ served as the lone representative for nearly half a century. 121 connection entirely. Aubin‘s preface remarking on her friendship to Rowe has turned out to be largely a marketing device257—an intentional refashioning of the author and her literary circle. Aubin, no less than Barker, constructed her identity in conscious awareness of the limits and expectations for women, and used her fiction as a means of testing and reversing the ―plots‖ available to her heroines. This active recasting—both of her literary persona and of her fiction‘s marriage/domestic plots—complicates the image of Aubin as retiring, modest moral commentator and arbiter of what Richetti calls ―the ideological satisfaction of innocence preserved and atheism confuted‖ (figurations which have also led to her critical dismissal).258 A more useful rendering of Aubin‘s persona must take into account both her marketability and the rhetorical means by which she entertains a Defoe-like following while yet retaining the ―pious‖ reputation so necessary to her success.

Aubin‘s fiction does deliver moral platitudes, and Aubin carefully cultivates a religious framework for heroism (and anti-religious frameworks for the malevolent deeds visited upon unsuspecting heroines). However, unlike the conduct book‘s presentation of passive females exhibiting largely passive virtues and contained, restrained and defined by males, Aubin‘s heroines jump out of windows,259 escape from robbers,260 defend themselves with the sword261 and even commit terrible acts of self-mutilation262 in active

257 Chris Mounsey, ' '...bring her naked from her bed, that I may ravish her before the Dotard's face, and then send his Soul to Hell': Penelope Aubin, Impious Pietist, Humourist or Purveyor of Juvenile Fantasy?', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 26 (2003), 61.The dedicatee may actually have been to ―Mrs. Rowe‖ the daughter of Dr. Barker, Dean of Exeter; in any event, the ambiguous play on Rowe‘s name fooled her contemporaries as much as her modern critics. 258 Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: narrative patterns 1700-1739. Clarendon Press, 1969, 216. 259 Charlotta du Pont 260 Madame de Beaumount 261 The Amorous Adventures of Lucinda 262 The Noble Slaves 122 attempts at preserving their virtue and doing their Christian duty. The ―odour of sanctity

[that] quickly began to adhere‖263 to Aubin after her death in 1731 has, therefore, become something of a ―posthumous disadvantage‖264 to her critical reception, more or less obscuring the complex and revolutionary ways in which Aubin‘s plots unfold. It has also masked the apparent similarities the works bear to the early works of Haywood. Though

Aubin intentionally distances herself from her bawdy contemporaries through her prefaces, her plots are replete with erotically charged scenes of seduction and rape, not all of which are conveniently interrupted by sudden attacks of conscience or Divine

Providence. Chris Mounsey rightly takes issue with phrases like ―bring her naked from her Bed, that I may ravish her before [her father‘s] face, and then send his Soul to Hell‖ from The Strange Adventures of Count de Vinevil and his Family, but his reconstruction of Aubin as a writer of juvenile erotica seems equally unjustified. The admittedly small number of critical accounts thus tend to polarize over Aubin‘s intentions, listing her as either the foremother of the eighteenth-century moral novelist or as ironic eroticist, using prefatory material to ―fool the gullible into believing [her] plots were moral.‖265 I intend to resist these categorizations for Aubin as I did for Barker. More important to this project is the careful assessment of what these competing forces of didactic moralizing and unrestrained (and sometimes eroticized) adventure accomplish for the heroines in the texts—those women who, in fictional accounts, stand in for the conduct manuals‘

―pupil.‖ These heroines are consciously rendered as models in Aubin‘s prefaces, whose examples the reader is meant to follow: ―I present this Book…where Men behave

263 Mounsey, ―‘bring her naked,‖ 55. 264 Sarah Prescott. ―Penelope Aubin and The Doctrine of Morality: a reassessment of the pious woman novelist.‖ Women Writing 1.1., 1994: 99-111. 265 Mounsey, ―‘bring her naked,‖ 60. 123 themselves like Christians, and Women are really virtuous, and such as we ought to imitate‖ (SACV 6). Prescott notes that critical opinions of Aubin‘s works are gathered largely from Aubin‘s prefatory materials (not unlike the creation of Barker‘s life history through her reconstructed ―fictions‖). Thus Aubin‘s image is based not on knowledge so much as ―textual construction.‖266

Prescott points to Gomberville‘s The Doctrine of Morality, or Moral Virtue

Delineated, which Aubin edited, as an influence on her constructions of morality in the various prefaces, using the textual contrivance as a means of stressing the ―moral and social utility‖ of her work and ―safeguarding herself against criticism‖267—essentially deflecting attack. That this deflection works effectively may be inferred from another preface, the introductory material to a posthumous edition of her novels published in

1739:

We shall only therefore observe, that Mrs. AUBIN has a far happier Manner of thinking, and Acting [than her contemporaries]. She disdained to paint the guilty Scenes of Folly and Vanity in such Colours as might conceal their natural Deformity, and make the most unlovely and pernicious Vices amiable. […] She was Mistress of a polite and unaffected Style, and aimed not at the unnatural Flights, and hyperbolic Flourishes, that catch the weaker and more glittering Fancies of some of her Sex, and give their Performances too romantick an Air for Probability.268

Aubin helped to create her image as a moral didact, separate from her contemporaries both because of her virtue and her veracity (though to suggest that Aubin‘s tales of multiple kidnappings, escapes, shipwrecks, etc. are more probable than those of

Haywood is to stretch veracity to the breaking point). Regardless of how the texts might be retroactively deciphered, it remains clear that Aubin courted the role of moral censure

266 Prescott, ―Penelope Aubin,‖ 100. 267 Ibid., 101. 268 Qtd. in Mounsey, 55-56. 124 and moral guide, and that she wished to have her works considered as educational, didactic and morally uplifting. To that end, Aubin‘s fictions—particularly early publications like Count de Vinevil and Madame de Beaumount—―instruct‖ the reader and provide models that (often surreptitiously) carve a niche for active self-formation out of a revised domestic plot.

Aubin‘s presentation of self as moral instructor allowed her to participate in a context with the already successful Rowe, and provided her with the ethical credibility necessary to a writer whose fictions might, in fact, be more ―delightful‖ than instructive.

The conduct manual‘s presentation of the female extends also to the female writer, and the reception amatory authors received at the hands of critics would have served as a constant reminder of how tenuous propriety could be for public female figures. Conduct authors like Essex remind readers that young ladies ought not be witty as they may turn

―Critick, in things that are above [their] capacity‖269—a capacity that ―is here limited properly to the Province assign‘d her within Doors.‖270 John Duncombe‘s The Feminiad, or Female Genius (1754), represented female poets like Elizabeth Singer Rowe as properly domestic, ―modest, retiring, undesiring of fame and not neglectful of domestic duties in her service of the Muses‖271—as opposed to Pope‘s acerbic remarks about more public (and thus less pious) female authors in The Dunciad. Qualities such as modesty and a retiring nature are equally lauded in Gomberville‘s moral dicta, especially in his observance that no matter a man‘s occupation or state of life, he may (and should) be

269 Essex, The young ladies conduct , xv 270 Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct , xxxiii 271 Prescott, ―Penelope Aubin and the Doctrine of Morality: a reassessment of the pious woman novelist,‖ Women's Writing, Volume 1, No.1 (1994), 99-112, 101. 125 virtuous.272 Aubin borrows from Gomberville in constructing her prefaces and presents not only her characters but herself as pious and virtuous. As one who observes and criticizes ―fallen‖ mankind, Aubin does not wish merely to ―reclaim our Giddy Youth,‖ but also to ―wish well our Nation‖ and to influence ―the English‖ to regain a lost virtue and nobility (SACV 6-7). Though utilizing a similar construction of female piety, the difference between this aim and the more localized preoccupation of conduct material is striking. Fénelon warns against the dangers of women to the nation—the apparent cause of wars, revolutions and ―innovations‖ of religion—whereas Aubin presents herself and her work as a means of reclaiming those ―shining Qualities, for which their Ancestors became so honour‘d‖ (SACV 7). Like Makin, whose revival of ―Antient‖ education suggests a return to a golden age of virtue through the intellectual cultivation of women,

Aubin expects the histories of Ardelisa, Belinda and other characters to stir up a ―just emulation.‖

The heroine‘s adventure is, however, also a kind of ―education,‖ an active means of gaining valuable experience for female characters as autonomous selves. Though these women are first presented as passively virtuous, the strange nature of their misfortunes abroad recreates them as active figures in their own self-formation. Thus, though Aubin begins with the rhetoric of evasion and deflection, even calling her work— apologetically—a mere ―Trifle,‖ she ultimately uses the rhetoric of empire to authorize female development (SACV 8). By acting as an exemplary Christian on foreign and sometimes ―heathen‖ soil, these characters enact a kind of empire-building (an activity most notable in The Noble Slaves, where conversion is a major theme).273 Moreover, by

272 Qtd. in Ibid., 103. 273Gollapudi, ―Virtuous Voyages,‖684. 126 removing the traditional guides and guardians, these tales provide space for activity. Thus domestic is paired strangely with foreign in all of Aubin‘s fiction, often with important consequences for the heroine. Women must rely upon themselves and exercise the

―Reason and common Justice‖ that Aubin‘s preface calls for in order to defend the very characteristics that render them virtuous, innocent and ―domestic.‖

In Aubin‘s first work, the 1721 Count de Vinevil, the heroine is taken from her native home in France and lands in ―Mahometan‖ Constantinople. Beginning the novel as an essentially passive potential victim, Ardelisa succumbs to sea-sickness on the voyage and shrinks from the potential dangers of a ―lovely Face‖ among the ―lustful Turk[s]‖

(SACV 18). Gollapudi comments on the seeming passivity of female characters whisked along on travels they themselves do not plan or desire, reminding us that though the eighteenth-century male traveler might ―enact the fantasy of the capable commercial imperial self conquering his environment,‖ that frame of reference was largely unavailable to women.274 In the ―dangerous and exotic world of travel literature‖ few

―legitimate and sanctioned ideological spaces‖ existed for women.275 The female body, as

―the locus of the affective relationships that defined the domestic and social space could only endlessly reenact the battle for sovereignty over its own self.‖276 These are weighty matters, however, and elicit an active rather than passive response. As I have described in

Chapter Two, ideas about sovereignty were changing—particularly as concerned individual rights and the right to rule. Aubin does employ the language of struggle, battle, and revolution, most often in the service of preserving female chastity. But the preservation of the heroine‘s sexual integrity is also a battle over her will—her desire to

274 Gollapudi, ―Virtuous Voyages,‖ 674. 275 Ibid. 276 Ibid. 127 remain whole and distinct. Because the perpetrators in these stories are nearly always of foreign origin, such acts of violence are symbolic intrusions of the other, even a kind of invasion of ―domestic‖ soil. Revolutionary rhetoric is thus sanctioned in part by the very foreign otherness of the heroine‘s surroundings; in preserving the female self, these women are—at least in name—also working to preserve the Christian, white European empire on which they rely.

Gollapudi infers that, as female travelers, Aubin‘s heroines have already transgressed the private domestic sphere and must therefore be rendered ―ideologically safe‖ through their unshakable virtue,277 but a close reading of the text reveals an ideology that shifts with its borders. Aubin‘s female characters are repeatedly described as paragons of virtue in the text, but that virtue is almost entirely of a sexual kind. The heroines are chaste, but once on foreign soil, their behavior is rarely ―retiring‖ or

―modest,‖ and they do not refrain from using words, wit and even dissimulation (craft) to define and protect themselves. George Halifax‘s conduct book described the step from the father‘s house into the ―World‖ as a dangerous one where the ―Enemy is abroad.‖

Aubin‘s ―World‖ is just as dangerous—but rather than promoting behavior that is

―reserv‘d,‖ cautious and free of ―Extravagancies,‖278 Aubin allows her heroines to plot and sometimes to achieve their own deliverance. Ardelisa, trapped for the second time by a ―lustful Turk,‖ calls upon God not only to support her under her affliction, but also to direct her ―bold Hand‖ that she might ―destroy the Villain when he enters‖ (SACV 66).

This scene is repeated in Charlotta du Pont, who actually succeeds in striking down her intended rapist by stabbing him in the stomach. It is true that certain manuals of conduct,

277 Ibid., 675. 278 Saville of Halifax, Ladies New-Year‟s Gift, 68. 128 such as James Bland‘s Looking-glass for Ladies, held that a truly virtuous woman would rather ―submit to Death‖ than give in to temptation (a suggestion nearly followed through by Richardson‘s Clarissa and her pen-knife). However, no conduct manual recommends female violence be enacted on others; the didactic tenor of Aubin‘s work therefore necessitates social or divine sanction for such acts. As a result, it is God who inspires and strengthens the woman‘s hand—always in the service of chastity, chief among the conduct book virtues. In this manner, religion and empire (as protection from the foreign heathen) and the power of chastity (as protection from the villain/rake) authorize female activity. Bathsua Makin and Judith Drake‘s call for women to ―take up arms‖ to defend themselves is, in Aubin‘s fiction, enacted literally.

Accompanying this remarkably active role for women is a corresponding passive role for men in Aubin‘s fiction. This reversal takes the form of fainting male lovers (such as Mr. Hide in Madame de Beaumount), weeping and feverish men (such as Count de

Beaumount) and weakened, easily over-powered rapists (such as the Bashaw in Charlotta du Pont). When Mr. Hide learns that the lovely Belinda is married and cannot be his, ―a death-like Paleness overspread his Face, a cold Sweat trickled down his Cheeks‖ and he

―fainted, and was by the Servants carry‘d to his Chamber‖279 (while Belinda strives ―with

Reason to assuage his Grief, and cure his Passion‖) (LMB 68-69). Count de Beaumount, after causing the suicide of a young woman whose favors he refused, retreated to his

Chamber, ―threw [him]self upon [his] Bed, refused to eat, and by next morning was seized with a violent Fever, which robb‘d [him] of [his] Reason‖ (LMB 82). The Bashaw overpowered by a female character (named Janetone) in one of the inset narratives—who

279 Penelope Aubin, The life of Madam de Beaumount, a French lady; who lived in a cave in Wales ... Also her lord's adventures in Muscovy, ... By Mrs. Aubin. (London, 1721), 68. Hereafter cited in the text as LMB. 129

―grew strong‖ as he grew weak—ends up literally swooning at her feet.280 The heroines, by contrast, are remarkably strong and resourceful. Janetone jumps out of a window after fighting off the Bashaw, and Ardelisa helps engineer the escape of her servants and herself by setting fire to Osmin‘s palace, while Belinda, in addition to ―reasoning‖ with her several captors, ultimately arranges her own and several others‘ escape from robbers by donning male disguise. This ―reinvigoration of the genteel heroine‖ may require a delicate balance between the heroine‘s valor and ―the blessings of a benign

Providence,‖281 but it does not entirely explain away the unlikely and unusual behavior of men in the text. The reversal works both ways. Judith Drake‘s strategies of reversal consist largely of comic exaggeration, demonstrating that men have as many faults and foibles as women and offering a universalized perception of virtue and vice. In Aubin‘s fiction, the reversal concerns passive and active roles, and by allowing her heroines to fight and her heroes and anti-heroes to ―swoon,‖ Aubin suggests a universality both of emotive and defensive responses.

Also similar to Drake‘s reversal of vices is Aubin‘s treatment of craft; many of the deliverances noted above are precipitated by the heroines‘ ability to disguise, to dissimulate, and to lie. John Essex—following Fénelon—complains: ―HOW

Contemptible is Craft in a Woman; it always proceeds from a mean and a little Spirit.‖282

There is an inferred comparison here to the (apparently more salubrious) craft of men.

Women are considered, first to be ―most Crafty and Tricking‖ when they have something to conceal, and second, to be inefficient practitioners, bringing ―Shame upon themselves

280 Penelope Aubin, The life of Charlotta Du Pont, an English lady; taken from her own memoirs. Giving an account how she was trepan'd by her stepmother to Virginia… (London, 1723), 182-183. 281 Gollapudi, ―Virtuous Voyages,‖ 679 282 Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct, ix. 130 by the very Artifices which they practice to hide it.‖283 Drake‘s work, by contrast, suggests that a world ―full of Craft, Malice and Violence‖ requires women to use craft, assuming not only their ability to use it well but also their pardon for doing so (EDFS

100). Ardelisa certainly ―dissembles‖ when she pretends to be a boy to fool her Turkish captor (who doesn‘t seem to care if she is a boy or not, as it happens); Belinda, Lucinda and a number of other female characters are equally apt at disguising their gender. As

Drake‘s observes, the art of dissimulation is not natural to women (as Fénelon insists), but rather a technique necessarily learned through experience. Belinda, for instance, begins the story ―without art,‖ but quickly learns the value of concealing her identity to thwart potentially villainous men. After her first experience of male deceit in the character of Glandore, a wiser Belinda ―prudently conceal‘d her Name, Family, and all the Transactions of her Life‖ from Mr. Hide [my italics] (LMB 65). Aubin‘s emphasis on art as prudence agrees with Drake‘s assessment that ―according to the present

Constitution of the World,‖ dissimulation ―is a main Ingredient in the Composition of

Human Prudence‖ (EDFS 99). Further acts of dissimulation, or lying, or disguise, are likewise embedded in a narrative that faults the male perpetrators for making such actions necessary. In the world, Aubin claims that ―Vice takes place of Virtue,‖ men are ―rife‖ with ―Villany and Fraud,‖ ―Oaths and Promises are only Jests, and all Religion but

Pretence,‖ (LMB 102). Women must therefore learn, even as Drake suggests, ―an Art so necessary to preserve ‗em from becoming a Prey to every designing Man‖ (EDFS 101).

Thus the strategy of deflection returns within the framework of the text, scapegoating the heathen and immoral villains and vindicating the heroine.

283 Ibid. 131

So powerful is this combination of deflection, blame and scapegoating—joined as it is to the foreign context of immeasurably dangerous and pagan landscapes—that those

―fallen‖ women typically denigrated in conduct materials are here given the chance for redemption. Even in Barker‘s work, though readers are encouraged to pity the seduced woman (such as the one who seeks solace in Galesia‘s garret), such women do not ultimately achieve happiness, security or support. By contrast, Aubin provides an unusual picture of a fallen woman in the character of Violetta (a secondary heroine in Count de

Vinevil and the Venetian mistress of a Turk). Violetta is conflicted by Ardelisa‘s determination to die (or kill) before suffering dishonor, especially as Violetta feels some affection for her captor. Having escaped from Constantinople, ―she thought only of retiring to a religious House, to weep for a Sin, of which she was in reality altogether innocent‖ (SACV 90). The word ―innocent‖ has interesting connotations as it is used here—Violetta is certainly not virginal, as she had a still-born child by the Turk. Neither is she considered to have wholly resisted his attention, having looked upon him ―with a

Wife‘s Eyes‖—that is, with a sanctioned level of marital obligation if not desire (SACV

92). And yet, the Christian priest who travels with Violetta and Ardelisa pronounces her more than absolved—she was acting out of Christian duty: ―it was no Sin in you to yield to him, and it would have been willful Murder to have kill‘d him, or but conspir‘d his

Death […] you might have been a means of his Conversion‖ (SACV 90). This remarkable statement of ―innocence‖ seems at first to cast guilt upon Ardelisa, who did conspire to kill the Turk and who did not yield. The difference between the two women‘s circumstances has to do first with their marital status—Ardelisa (like most of Aubin‘s heroines) is married at the beginning of the plot, while Violetta is single. Second, Violetta

132 lost her virtue on foreign soil to a Turk who only ―acted according to his Knowledge and

Education‖ (SACV 90). The passage implies that chastity is a term defined differently according to its geography—the ―domestic‖ plot does not, here, unfold in domestic surroundings. An unmarried woman who ―yields‖ is, in conduct literature and even in

Barker‘s fiction, unchaste. In the context of Violetta‘s story, only the married woman who yields has transgressed. The ―knowledge and education‖ of these foreign spaces is such that traditional understandings of virtue are not possible; Violetta is exonerated and changed ideologically to a ―wife,‖ and then, upon hearing of the Turk‘s death, to a

―widow‖ with permission to marry again (which she does).

The shifting view of virtue in Aubin‘s texts contrasts with the more static representations of passive and habituated behavior exhibited in conduct materials, but it is effected through a combination of scapegoating and nation building. In some ways, the foreign nation is the scapegoat, responsible for the separation of the heroine from her father and husband and for the gruesome circumstances requiring her ―manly‖ strength of mind. The scapegoat does, in fact, make a literal appearance in Madame de Beaumount.

When nearly starved to death while running from robbers, Belinda finds and catches a goat kid, ―licked up the warm Blood, and eat the raw Flesh‖ (LMB 120). As with the stabbing of rapists in other Aubin stories, this act is attributed to Divine Providence rather than to the inherent strength (or bad taste?) of the heroine—and it is by this means that

Belinda retains strength of mind to compose herself and ―prepare for Eternity‖ (LMB

122). Belinda‘s active mind—reasoning with her various captors, disguising herself for escape, preparing herself for death—is her most notable feature. She displays a level of independent thinking that even the men do not, and so she is justified in being indignant

133 with her husband Lleulling at the novel‘s close when he asks if she has retained her virtue. She ―look‘d on him with Disdain,‖ asking ―Do you know me?‖ (LMB 128). The question is singular, for it seems clear that Belinda knows herself, though this ―self‖ is different from the artless and unpracticed girl who begins the story. Ardelisa, too, has changed, and determines to ―make a Tryal of her Lord‘s Affection‖ rather than openly declare her arrival after so long an absence from him (SACV 127). Nearly all of Aubin‘s heroines might be said to have ―learned‖ through their experiences, though the lessons are often problematic, and (in Ardelisa‘s case) even almost ―Criminal‖ (SACV 131).

Though these women are frequently considered static characters, exhibiting the same unswerving virtue from beginning to end, it is clear that Aubin provides a subtle means of self-formation or even (as with Violetta) of transformation, of learning to dissimulate and to test, to fight and fly from danger, and above all to reason on their own.

To quote once more from George Saville Halifax‘s section on female Behaviour and Conversation:

It is time now to lead you out of your House into the World. A dangerous Step! Where your Virtue alone will not secure you, except it is attended with a great deal of Prudence. You must have both for your Guard, and not stir without them. […] Your Behaviour is therefore to incline strongly towards the reserv‟d Part; your Character is to be immoveably fixed upon that Bottom […]A close Behaviour is the fittest to receive Virtue for its constant Guest, because there, and there only, can it be secure.284

For Halifax, the ―unjustifiable Freedoms of some of [the female] Sex have involved the rest in the Penalty of being reduced‖;285 thus, even for this conduct author, the restrictions on female freedoms are presented as necessary and intentional limitations—even as punishment, as though for erring Eve. In the didactic works of Barker and Aubin,

284 Saville of Halifax, Ladies New-Year‟s Gift, 68-69. 285 Ibid., 69. 134 however, ―unjustifiable Freedoms‖ have been taken by men rather than by women. Fallen

Adam, the ―Beau Rake,‖ the ―giddy‖ World, the deceitful villain and the lustful and

Godless heathen conspire to reduce women, to bind, restrain and ruin them. Because men cannot be trusted with female virtue, women must therefore become the overseers of their own behavior. Rather than depending upon external controls, women are here encouraged to have self-control, to be active participants in their own self-construction through re- telling, re-casting, and re-creating their roles. Didactic works continue this refashioning project into the middle of the eighteenth century, and the reissue of texts like Madame de

Beaumont (in 1741)286 or the final edition of Lady Lucy in 1746 makes such works contemporary even with Richardson‘s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748). The rhetorical strategies of the educationalists thus remain part of the discursive context, appearing alongside—though distinct from—the rhetoric of conduct and informing the ―new‖ domestic novel. As I will demonstrate in the next chapter, however, the dialectic between freedom and restraint continues in the rising genre, with writers like Eliza Haywood incorporating similar apologetics and re-fashioning techniques while writers like

Richardson turn toward the conduct model for their didactic purposes.

286 The title name loses a letter in this edition; Beaumount becomes Beaumont. 135

Chapter Five The Inadvertent Scholar: Eliza Haywood’s Revision of the Richardsonian Heroine

Unlike Barker or Aubin, Eliza Haywood maintained her popularity into the eighteenth century and, considering her current critical reception, well beyond. The significance of

Haywood‘s reputation is, however, still debated by her critics. Kathryn King claims that

―to this day much criticism tends to read amatory novels by women, Haywood‘s in particular, through the imagined reading experiences of heuristic readers generally supposed to be females of diminished cognitive ability.‖287 By being so clearly distinguished as the author of Fantomina and Love in Excess—amatory fictions considered bawdy or ―warm‖ depictions of illicit female desire—Haywood has come to represent both Alexander Pope‘s unfortunate caricature of her in the Dunciad and a kind of feminist pioneer. The dual role is explored in part by King, who describes Haywood‘s critical reception from early twentieth-century critic Edmund Gosse (who first portrayed the fictionalized Haywood reader Ann Lang) to that of John Richetti (Popular Fiction

Before Richardson 1969) and Ros Ballaster (Seductive Forms 1992). For Gosse and

Richetti, Haywood‘s popularity among readers ―possessed of severely limited capacities‖ suggests that her amatory works should not to be taken seriously—that they can only be described through the limited and reactive emotional experiences of others.288 At the same time, Ballaster‘s account serves to render Haywood as a subversive feminist idol, and her audience as complex and deeply psychological.289 In either representation,

287 Kathryn King. "New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians." In A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, edited by Paula R Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, 261-275. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 261. 288 Ibid. These readers are supposedly women (often of lesser education and status) seeking erotic titillation, whose reading experiences were largely emotional and/or erotic and, in that sense, ―somatic.‖ 289 Despite Ballaster‘s attempts at solidifying Haywood‘s reputation as overt feminist, Eve Tavor Bannet complains that modern feminist scholars dismiss her polite writing as ―not feminist enough.‖ She cites Ann Messenger, Mary Anne Schofield, Shawn Lisa Maurer and others as complaining of Haywood‘s 136

Haywood‘s actual contribution to fiction remains insufficiently engaged by modern critics. King reminds us that while Haywood is still ―to be sure, a figure for the scandal of the early novel,‖ she is also part of ―the developing discourse of politeness and bourgeois refinement.‖290 In both her early and late material—and perhaps most noticeably in The

Female Spectator and Betsy Thoughtless—mental acuity and the ability to reflect mark the ―true worth‖ of Haywood‘s characters. Women‘s education (or re-education) serves as an organizing principle in Haywood‘s conduct works as well as her fictions, and in this way she is closer to Aubin, Barker and the educationalists than might first appear. The rhetorical innovations apparent in those earlier works may be traced in many of

Haywood‘s texts, thus establishing the presence of proto-feminist rhetorical strategies at mid-century.

I begin with this discussion of Haywood‘s reception and her dual roles as amatory and conduct fiction writer because it serves to illustrate the apparent divide between novels of the early and late eighteenth century—the same divide that seems evident in the divergent fictional output of Behn and Manley compared to that of Barker and Aubin.

The rhetoric of sensibility, particularly its new emphasis on refined taste and manners, and a changing literary market are generally cited as reasons for this shift, responsible for the sudden popularity of didactic authors and the denigration of writers like Behn (whose once popular works were a cause of embarrassment by mid-century).291 Haywood, however, managed her literary output over the entire period and working in several

capitulation, her failure to question ―the validity and rightness of women‘s place in the home.‖ Eve Tavor Bannet. "Haywood's Spectator and the Female World." In Fair Philosopher, edited by Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J. Newman, 82-103. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 82. 290 King, ―New Contexts,‖ 263. 291 Catherine Gallagher mentions Sir Walter Scott‘s anecdote about improvements of ―delicacy,‖ recording the astonishment of Scott‘s great aunt‘s when, sixty years after Behn‘s public success, she finds herself embarrassed to re- read the once popular playwright. 137 genres (from drama to periodicals, amatory to didactic fictions). The History of Miss

Betsy Thoughtless tracks this arc in a sense; it begins with a heroine not unlike the adventurous Fantomina (from Haywood‘s 1724 Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze), but ends with that heroine‘s re-education to the sobriety of mind and propriety of manners appropriate to the domestic woman—or more specifically, the wife.292 For critics like

Ballaster, the change in Haywood‘s ideology suggests that amatory fiction was ―written out‖ of the novel, purged ―of its disreputable associations with female sexuality and the subversive power of female ‗wit,‘ or artifice.‖293 Haywood may have changed genres to meet the expectations of an increasingly education-minded bourgeois middle class; she may, like Charlotte Lennox or Sarah Fielding, be capitalizing on the success of moral fictions like Richardson‘s Clarissa. And yet Haywood was—even in her earliest works— already addressing the need for women‘s self-control (as opposed to external control), and lamenting the paucity of educational opportunities for women.

Haywood‘s oeuvre has two telling bookends: Love in Excess (1719-1720) and conduct manuals The Wife and The Husband (1756). These texts are, admittedly, very different in their respective aims and scopes. However, the Female Spectator and The

History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (which appear between them, 1744-1746 and 1751 respectively) reveal a consistent development of female interiority that speaks both to the complex self-government of Melliora, the ―innocent‖ heroine of Love in Excess, and to the subtle but unmistakable critique of patriarchy in The Wife. Self-government, self- reflection, and the ability to learn from past errors appear as repeated tropes in these texts. However, due to a variety of constraints, when it comes to the development of

292 Also the title of one of Haywood‘s conduct books, The Wife, 1756. 293 Ros Ballaster. Woman's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 3. 138

Haywood‘s heroines and their experience in and of the world, the only kind of education possible is an ―inadvertent‖ one. Though Betsy Thoughtless is sometimes presented as

Haywood‘s signal shift from amatory works to moral fiction, Betsy as a character is hardly a paragon. Her coquettish failings are examined, even laid bare, by the narrator— and yet Betsy‘s blunders are presented as accidental, her slights of decorum unintentional. It is true that ―inadvertency‖ is something which the female educationalists disparage as being linked to unthinking habits, but the unintentional and the involuntary provide a useful screen for heroines wishing to gain knowledge. It is through this covert process of learning and gaining experience, often disguised as accidental occurrence or reproved as a fault in need of correction, that Haywood—like Aubin and Barker before her—provides alternative methods of education without seeming to advocate for them.

Thus to see Haywood‘s output as either overly conflicted or the result of capitulation to narrow domestic ideals fails to account for the continued elements of wit, vivacity of mind and self-determination in all her writing. The ―cultural contradiction‖294 of

Haywood‘s dual roles seems apparent in part because of attempts to categorize her as either a paragon or polemicist, amatory feminist or promoter of domestic hegemony.

Deconstructing the polarized view of Haywood‘s works begins with a recognition that no clear division exists between her conduct and amatory material. Mary Stuart

(1725), The Tea Table (1725) or even Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726) might be categorized as conduct material; as Christopher Flint points out, the period of

Haywood‘s conduct writing roughly coincides with her fictional output.295 Flint describes ―the relation between narrative discourse and conduct literature‖ as both

294 King,―New Contexts,‖ 263. 295 Christopher Flint. Family Fictions: Narrative and Domestic Relations in Britain, 1688-1798. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 208. 139

―necessary and vexing‖296 to authors like Haywood. For many critics, however, this vexation is assumed to result from Haywood‘s uncomfortable need to ―purge‖ her work in order to survive in a marketplace suddenly primed for an infusion of didactic and domestic fictions. Her works about women‘s conduct and education are generally considered addenda, awkward additions to her successful amatory career—even though we might just as fairly assume that Haywood wrote amatory fictions for similarly market- driven reasons, and that she may have been no more committed to the amatory than the didactic mode. As we approach Haywood‘s oeuvre, it may be more useful to recognize, not those elements that signal market change, but those that are more or less continually developed in her works. This inclusive view allows us to compare her strategic accommodations to masculine rhetoric of the period (rather than to her own early works), once more revealing the ongoing dialectic between behavior-centered rhetoric and the rhetoric of autonomous self-hood developed by female educationalists.

In the previous chapter, I outlined the competing rhetorical tracks in the period before 1740: conduct literature‘s rhetoric of external control and didactic fiction‘s proto- feminist rhetoric of self-control. These two rhetorical methods, present even in the seventeenth-century contest between the female educationalists and pedagogues like

Fénelon and Locke, continue to develop through the eighteenth century, complicating the

―rise‖ of a more or less unified domestic ideology. Proto-feminist rhetoric (as ideological argument) is present in the sermocinal rhetoric of conversation, but also in the various reversals and revisions of masculine tropes, and builds upon itself through each subsequent employment of its rhetorical strategies. Barker‘s politics of apology engaged with, employed, but also developed the rhetoric of deflection and evasion; Aubin‘s

296 Ibid. 140 refashioning of the female self utilized but also augmented the rhetoric of reversal. This development might be represented as a kind of rhetorical progression [see fig 4,

Appendix B], where masculine and feminine strategies engage (and compete) with one another. Beyond the 1740s, then, we should expect the same dialectic of persuasive, oppositional dialogue between freedom and restraint, external control and self-control.

Fiction inherits the interplay of these rhetorical strategies on a continuum from those writers who, like Richardson, participate in the promotion of a fiercely conscribed domestic hegemony and those who, like Haywood, promote women‘s intellectual freedom and self-development. To further illustrate this progression, I will examine the works of Eliza Haywood in context (and in contention) with writers like Addison and

Steele (The Spectator) and Samuel Richardson. By revealing the often ―invisible‖297 rhetorical progression from proto-feminist polemics through didactic fiction and into those works appearing after Clarissa, we begin to see an on-going female tradition of writers and ―rhetors‖ extending well into the latter part of the eighteenth century.

As described in Chapter Four, the rhetoric of conduct was one primarily concerned with external control, habits and the preservation of the emerging middle class domestic ideology. The ―shortening‖ of women‘s liberty recommended by writers like

Halifax—―You are therefore to make your best of what is settled by law and custome, and not vainly imagine, that it will be changed for your sake‖298—is continued in later works, sometimes by direct reference. However, this language, so essential to establishing and maintaining the ―pious‖ domestic woman, was also taken up in

297 I would like to refer once more to a point made in chapter one, that female rhetoricians and their contributions are ghost-like, unrecognized because of a tautological categorization that disallows their existence. 298 Saville of Halifax, Ladies New-Year‟s Gift, 24. 141 publications like The Spectator and in the moralizing fictions of Samuel Richardson. Eve

Tavor Bannet describes The Spectator as endeavoring to ―persuade women that it was becoming in them to be fearful, tender, soothing, soft, and virtuously submissive to their fathers and husbands‖—and ―Mr. Spectator‖ himself quotes Raleigh‘s assertion that ―‗the

Woman‘ was ‗given to Man for a Comforter and Companion, but not for a

Counsellor.‘‖299 Similarly, Richardson writes ―I wrote not from Women; but for them—

In other Words, to give them, not to take from them, an Example.‖300 Contributors to The

Spectator (and, I argue, Richardson) conceived of men as ―governing both in the public and in the familiar spheres,‖ supporting a femininity that served the ―new form of gender dominance.‖301 The Spectator‘s claim that it offered women those ―Matters which relate to Females as they are concern‘d to approach or fly the other Sex, or as they are tyed to them by Blood, Interest, or Affection‖302 reinforces the male control exerted in this domestic economy. Not unlike Bland‘s conduct book, the Looking Glass,303 Mr.

Spectator intends to ―point out‖ women‘s ―imperfections‖ and ―blemishes,‖ so as to

―increase the number […who] join all the beauties of mind to the ornaments of dress‖— ornaments which, despite protestations to the contrary, remain central to The Spectator‘s concept of female beauty (TS I, 10:57). Just as early-century conduct materials failed to promote educationalists‘ prerogative of autonomous female development, The Spectator re-deployed concepts of habituation and ornamentation over serious intellectual

299 Bannet, ―Haywood‘s Spectator,‖ 85. 300 Qtd. In Martha J. Koehler, Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney and Loclos. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 30. 301 Shawn Lisa Maurer Qtd. In Bannet, ―Haywood‘s Spectator,‖ 85. 302 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator. Vol. I. (London, 1712). Volume 1, Number 4, 26. Monday, March 5th, 1712. Subsequent references will be to this volume and will hereafter be cited in the text parenthetically by TS, volume number, paper number and page. For space considerations, date has been omitted in future in-text citations. 303 I describe this conduct book in chapter four. 142 advancement. Richardson, though often considered more liberated in his presentation of female characters, likewise continues this rhetoric of control through his revisions, addenda and explanatory remarks in which ―he tracks what he sees as inappropriate responses‖ to his heroines, Clarissa in particular.304 In a letter to Lady Bradshaigh,

Richardson‘s recounts his disappointment with female readers, who missed those

―Lessons or Instructions […] for the Sake of which the whole was written,‖305 demonstrating a similar frustration with female ―incapacities‖ and a corresponding desire to control female reading and response. The problem, for these male authors, is that women are already too ―free,‖ both with their choice of subject matter and their recasting of its particular meanings and morals. Eliza Haywood, castigated for taking too many freedoms in her own bid for publication, was therefore particularly well-situated to respond to these attacks.

In 1751, Samuel Richardson (in the third edition of Clarissa) and Eliza Haywood

(with the first edition of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless) presented what Shea

Stuart calls two ―renderings of the same patriarchal situations.‖306 Both texts participate in a political devaluation of divine-right patriarchy in favor of domestic (re)education,307 but Betsy could not be less like Clarissa in terms of her proclivities and the

―thoughtlessness‖ of her behavior. And yet, this thoughtlessness does not result in permanent damage to the heroine. Clarissa‘s experiences with men serve to disrupt and ultimately to destroy her marriageability; Betsy‘s accumulated experiences with love and

304 Koehler, ―Models of Reading,‖ 31. 305 Richardson‘s letter to Lady Bradshaigh, 15 December 1748. Qtd. In Sylvia Kasey Marks. "'Clarissa' as Conduct Book." South Atlantic Review 51, no. 4 (November 1986): 3-16. 11. 306 Shea Stuart, "Subversive Didacticism in Eliza Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless." SEL 42, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 559-575, 560. 307 Ibid. 143 men, however, do not critically or permanently injure her social value, and she makes not one but two marriages in the course of the text. Her first marriage is an unqualified disaster in terms of domestic harmony, but even this becomes a valuable experience for

Betsy, teaching her to curb ―attempts to assert complete control over her romantic relationships.‖308 Betsy‘s social relations, particularly with her suitors, do not serve merely to create a particular kind of femininity in the face of patriarchal oppression.

Rather, the repeating scenes of courtship (and sexual importunity) serve to provoke self- awareness and correct Betsy‘s fluctuating disposition. These ―narrative cycles‖ result in what Richard Barney calls ―a piecemeal enlargement of her native intelligence and a gradual dwindling of her will to power.‖309 Certainly Haywood uses the figure of the thoughtless coquette to argue for the development of female reflection—but as Juliette

Merritt reminds us, Haywood never participates in the wholesale vilification of the coquette, being, as the Female Spectator, a reformed coquette herself.310 Betsy‘s problems with control are less that she wants to control others than that she is incapable of controlling herself; the will to power is something she must relinquish, but the will to control and correct her own behavior must be correspondingly acquired and developed.

If Betsy—along with any number of other characters prominent in the Female

Spectator—is to engage successfully with her surroundings, she must be subjected to a form of re-education and correction. In Betsy Thoughtless, it is only the ―virtues of our heroine (those failings that had defaced them being fully corrected)‖ which are ―at length rewarded with a happiness, retarded only till she had rendered herself wholly worthy of

308 Barney, Plots, 286 309 Ibid., 287. 310 Juliette Merritt. "Reforming the Coquet? Eliza Haywood's Vision of a Female Epistemology." In Fair Philosopher, edited by Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J Newman, 176-192. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 177. 144 receiving it.‖311 There is no mention here of achieving social freedom or even room to perform the kinds of ―free‖ actions available to Betsy earlier in the novel (which is perhaps why Ballaster considers Betsy Thoughtless a retrenching of Haywood‘s earlier

―feminism‖). Rather, the heroine must learn to give up certain ―masculine‖ freedoms, such as ―Raillery‖ (an ―art in which Miss Betsy… learned to excel‖) or her ―free behavior‖ towards men (which makes her a target for sexual importunities) (BT 18, 23).

At the same time, however, Betsy is not actually too free. Rather, ―tho‘ she was as far removed, as innocence itself, from all intent or wish of committing a real ill, yet she paid too little regard to the appearances of it‖ (BT 36). We have here an instance of the inadvertency of Betsy‘s education—she is able to spar with men, to keep lovers in suspense, to have her virtue presumed upon, and even to invite the censure of her guardians, but her apparent indiscretions are always accidental. They may even be beneficial, in a way, to her growth; it is, after all, ―valuable breadth of experience, coupled with […] capacity for reflection‖312 that make the Female Spectator useful to her readers—and the only means by which Haywood can ―correct those Errors in the Mind which are most imperceptible, and for that Reason the most dangerous‖ to men and women alike.313 Before exploring the means by which an ―inadvertent scholar‖ such as

Betsy revises paragons like Pamela and Clarissa, I will examine more specifically the groundwork for her character‘s inception. While the Richardsonian heroine undeniably influenced Haywood‘s latter works (Anti-Pamela particularly), Haywood had already begun developing a response to the pious and controlled domestic woman recurrent in

311 Haywood, Eliza. The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 568. Hereafter cited in the text as BT. 312 Merritt, ―Reforming,‖ 178. 313 Qtd. In Ibid. 145 conduct literature. The mini-narratives embedded in The Female Spectator, along with the polemical introductions and responses of her ―contributors,‖ establish a self- sustaining form of female advocacy similar to that of Aubin and Barker and in dialogue with female educationalist strategies.

The Female Spectator: Female Advocacy and Female Failings

It is occasionally argued that The Female Spectator, despite being presented as a collection of essays from several contributors, was ―almost certainly‖ written by

Haywood herself.314 Yet in her first essay, Haywood claims to have courted three other women to help in the project: a wife (Mira), a ―Widow of Quality‖ and a virginal daughter (Euphrosine). These three figures ―approved my Design, assur‘d me of all the

Help they could afford, and soon gave a Proof of it in bringing their several Essays.‖315

For Haywood, these ladies function as ―the Members of one Body, of which I am the

Mouth‖ (FS I, 1:6)—a community of embodied female advocates that provides the, albeit imaginary, support system in which it might thrive.316 I have defined the ―female advocate‖ as both a supporter of women and a permutation of the patron system, as in the relationship between Astell, Lady Elizabeth Hastings and Lady Catherine Jones. Such women, Astell suggests, were supposed to ―watch over each other for Good, to advise, encourage, and direct‖ (SP [1694] I:86). The Female Spectator, who actively references

The Spectator as her ―brother,‖ sets herself up as a female advocate in his place. The

314 Bannet, ―Haywood‘s Spectator,‖ 83 315 Eliza Fowler Haywood. The female Spectator. ... Vol. through 4. (London, 1745 [1746]) Volume I, Book 1, page 5. Subsequent references are to this edition, and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by FS, volume number, book number, and page. 316 Haywood‘s rhetoric here is suggestive, particularly considering the claim by Gosse and Richetti that Haywood‘s female readers sought out her works primarily for the bodily responses they provided (through erotic titillation). Yet Haywood is also potentially referencing the more holy or moral body of Christian affiliation, wherein the ―preacher‖ is the mouth of his flock. In any case, this ―body‖ of women is equipped with an empowered and very public voice. 146

Female Spectator‘s ―chief View in Publishing these Monthly Essays is to rectify some

Errors, which, small as they may seem at first, may, if indulged, grow up into greater, till they at last become Vices, and make all the Misfortunes of our Lives‖ (FS Dedication, 1).

As subsequent publications of The Female Spectator make clear, these errors are largely errors of the mind that must be corrected by women themselves. Thus Haywood‘s aim diverges from that of The Spectator, which intends to ―point out‖ and correct women‘s

―blemishes‖ for them (TS I, 10:57). Her introductory comments might be more usefully compared with those of Astell, who remarks that ―mistakes of […] Education, […] like an Error in the first Concoction, spreads its ill influence through all our Lives‖ (SP [1694]

I:25). However, this female advocate needs advocates of her own to accomplish this goal, especially since she is not—as with Astell—a virginal and conservatively religious figure, nor—as with Lady Mary Chudleigh—a respectably married lady of quality. She is, in fact, a ―reformed‖ coquette, guilty of ―Vanity and Folly‖ and ―a continued Round of what I then called Pleasure‖ (FS I, 1:2). Potentially more damaging, the company kept by this coquette was not ―so well chosen as it ought to have been, for the sake of my own

Interest or Reputation‖ (FS I, 1:3). This is a telling criticism; the Female Spectator at once lays herself open to the charge of improper sexual conduct (the ―pleasures‖ of the amatory genre) and to having a private ―interest‖ that is plainly differentiated from concerns about ―reputation.‖ The Spectator serves as one of the great critics of coquettes in general, and on similar lines. Many of the papers concern the unhappiness of men who have been snared by her scheming, as well as the miseries attendant upon her vanity and the ―unaccountable humour in womankind, of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial‖ (TS I, 15:84). Given these considerable handicaps, the Female

147

Spectator cannot be considered a paragon and has, as a result, lost the authority that many educationalists borrowed from virtue, religious devotion, or even of empire (for the coquette is often described as very nearly an enemy of state—―an unsettling, even threatening figure‖317 to the domestic economy being established at that time). For the

Female Spectator to retain an audience and any hope of ethos, she must therefore align herself with those who can represent the propriety of the paragon: the good wife, widow and virgin.

Haywood does not invent this appropriation of fictional female advocates; the strategy was already being employed by Jane Barker, who not only provides supportive female listeners for Galesia, but also reinvents several versions of herself (at various ages) to serve as interlocutors. Barker‘s use of the female advocate serves in part to excuse the ―unlucky genius‖ of the heroine, but Galesia‘s moral character is never in question. Haywood puts the female advocate to a different use in her construction of real and imagined contributors to The Female Spectator; they serve to support and at times even to excuse a female figure who is in many ways seriously flawed. Merritt describes

Haywood‘s ―vision‖ as ―pragmatic rather than utopian or even idealistic,‖318 that in creating not paragons but coquettes in need of reform, she produces a more realistic model for moral improvement and female development. However, in perceiving the coquette and other flawed female characters as not only in need of reform, but capable of it, Haywood assumes their rational capacity (and therefore culpability). Like Astell,

Haywood alternately blames men and custom for the errors of female education, but ultimately she holds women responsible for the ―Inconveniences such a manner of

317 Merrit, ―Reforming,‖ 180. 318 Ibid., 187. 148

Conduct has brought upon [them]‖ (FS I, 1:2). Not unlike the educationalists, who call women to actively ―Disengage‖ themselves from ―Opinion,‖ (SP [1697] II:41) Haywood intends to use the Female Spectator‘s own ―experience‖ to guide her readers away from the thoughtless pleasure and toward introspection and an active mind. Idleness and misconduct result from the combined importunities of ―Men‖ and ―Custom‖—and that women are given specific roles as silly women and then upbraided for playing the part so well is a complaint Haywood shares equally with Lady Mary Chudleigh. But for

Haywood, as for Astell, women also have the ―Power to regain [their] Freedom‖ (SP

[1697] II:9). There are, Haywood insists through a contributing letter, ―no Sexes in Souls, and we are as able to receive and practice the Impressions, not only of Virtue and

Religion, but also of those Sciences which the Men engross to themselves‖ (FS II,

10:231). Both the capacity and willingness to correct the ―small Errors‖ of behavior are assumed—but with an additional difference: this education must be gained through experience (FS Dedication 1).

The educationalists imply the necessity of experiential learning, but because the focus is primarily upon the internal empire of the mind, the claim is almost always latent.

The didactic authors are in this sense more bold; Barker‘s Galesia arrives at experience vicariously through contact with fallen women and worldly rakes, while Aubin‘s characters are forced into experience because of their placement in foreign contexts without adequate protection. In both of these examples, experiential learning is excused more than lauded, however: the exception that proves the rule. In The Female Spectator, by contrast, the (sometimes suspect) experiences of the narrator/heroine are rendered salubrious—they serve, in fact, as her ―Consolation‖ for a risky youth, furnishing her:

149

not only with the Knowledge of many Occurences, which otherwise I have been ignorant of, but also enables me, when the too great Vivacity of my Nature became temper‘d with Reflection, to see into the secret Springs which gave rise to the Actions I had either heard, or been Witness of—to judge of the various Passions of the human Mind, and distinguish those imperceptible Degrees by which they become Masters of the Heart, and attain the Dominion over Reason (FS I, 1:3).

The rhetorical presentation in this selection is important; her description of the

―imperceptible Degrees‖ by which passions master reason recalls the quote by Dryden on the frontise-piece: ―Ill Customs, by Degrees, to Habits rise,/ Ill Habits soon become exalted Vice.‖ It also, however, resonates both with Locke‘s warning about the dangers of habits (ill customs, rather than problematic Custom) and with Fénelon‘s advice that habits may, by degrees, be ―insinuated‖ into the female pupil. Haywood—like Astell— considers these subtle habits as the thieves of reason, the means by which reason is replaced not just with ignorance, but with ―Passions.‖

The passions were already the purview of Haywood‘s earlier amatory fiction, and very often the means by which the plot (through passionate declarations or unthinking revelations) moved forward. But passions, specifically female passions, were considered

―irrational and dangerously uncontrollable,‖ and as such they represented thoughtlessness and a lack of self-control or reflection.319 These unthinking ―outbursts‖ of female behavior serve, for Addison, Steele and others, to reinforce the need for external control.

As The Spectator attests, a woman cannot ―mitigate the fury of her principles with temper and discretion‖ because she lacks the ―temper and reservedness‖ of the masculine sex (TS

I, 57:322). Passion is particularly dangerous in the coquette, who is always conceiving a new passion, and who will have ―ten more before she is fixed‖ (TS I, 79:453). Haywood

319 Emily Hodgson Anderson. "Performing the Passions in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina and Betsy Thoughtless." The Eighteenth Century 46, no. 1 (2005): 1-16, 1. 150 also recognizes the power (and danger) of passions—and represents their consequences in amatory works like Love in Excess, where the passions (and machinations) of characters like Alovisa, D‘Elmont and the Baron result in death and exile. Even in this early text, men are equally (or more) capable of dangerous passions, and Haywood continues to universalize this ―fault‖ in The Female Spectator with characters like

Pompilius, who ―[gave] way to the Dictates of a Passion […] injurious to his own

Character‖ (FS I, 2:75-76). Haywood‘s suggested method of correction for these passionate individuals is not, however, additional external control or limits; rather, it is the ―Knowledge of many Occurences…temper‘d with Reflection‖ (FS I, 1:3). Thus, the

Female Spectator‘s ―Experience, added to a Genius tolerably extensive, and an Education more liberal than is ordinarily allowed to Persons of [her] Sex‖ make her fit to ―judge‖ the erroneous behavior of others (FS I, 1:3). By these means, the Female Spectator becomes part of an ―Education more liberal‖ by imparting her knowledge to others, and so being ―useful and entertaining to the Publick‖ (FS I, 1:3). Haywood therefore performs two functions with her presentation of passions; first, these behaviors—at their inception—lead their practitioners into thoughtless (rather than specifically criminal) behavior. Second, these behaviors are not exclusive to the female sex. She explains that

―A thousand odd Adventures‖ made but a slight impression on her life. She was rushed, through thoughtless pursuit of town pleasures, from one occurrence to the next but without lasting consequences. To continue in such behavior would, of course, lead to vice by ―slow Degrees,‖ but the experience itself may also serve to promote later reflection.

Her early foibles and adventures ―rise fresh to [her] Remembrance, with this Advantage, that the Mystery [she] then, for want of Attention, imagin‘d they contain‘d, is entirely

151 vanish‘d‖ (FS I, 1:3). Thoughtless passion, even in females, is not uncontrollable—it is rather an object lesson, giving her material for reflection and self-correction. Conversely, male passions are not unequivocally more retrained. As revealed in several narratives about virtue in distress, such passions provoke considerable contempt as the reason behind much female suffering.

Like Drake‘s Theophrastian gallery of mismanaged men, but also like Aubin‘s enervated and over-powered heroes and villains, Haywood‘s male characters seem passionate and foolish by comparison to obedient and cool-headed women. In the third book of The Female Spectator‘s first volume, we are given the story of Euphrosine, one of the supposed contributors to the paper. This obedient daughter is importuned by a wealthy but unsuitable lover who has the consent of her father. The daughter, ―all

Obedience,‖ keeps her contempt silent and bears with his odious address with as much propriety as she can without giving him encouragement (FS I, 3:137). She puts herself under ―Constraint‖ until she injures her own ―Chearfulness and Vivacity,‖ while her lover is described as impatient, urgent and dissatisfied, desperate to ―prove his Passion‖ with a repulsive ―Rhetoric‖ (FS I, 3:137). The body in need of control is not that of the obedient daughter—she has admirable self control—but rather her implacable and vain lover. Reversals of this sort continue in Book IV concerning dress, for instance; the narrator complains that ―No difference [is] made between the young Nobleman and the

City-Prentice, except that the latter is sometimes the greater Beau‖ (FS I, 4:151). False

Delicacy also comes under attack for making men ridiculous to one another, but also, interestingly, for having ―undone half the Nation‖ and made Britain a laughing-stock

―among Foreigners‖ (FS I, 4:203). As the public half of human-kind and the denizens of

152 the national and economic sphere, men do damage to their nation. Men are thus guilty of the same faults for which women stand accused—but with, potentially, greater consequences.

Part of what allows Haywood to transfer the Female Spectator‘s critique of thoughtlessness coquetry to the foibles of men is the very disallowance of female influence on the public sphere; however, Haywood—like Drake before her—also relies extensively on generalized human nature. Retreating from specific statements about the particular failings of men or women, Haywood lapses instead into a discussion of common vice: ―the various Kinds of Errors into which Human Nature is liable to fall‖ and the hindrance of ―long Custom [that] is become habitual‖ (FS IV, 21:128). Haywood describes the case of ―both Sexes, who lead Lives perfectly inoffensive,‖ who may yet be compared ―to Clock-work, which has Power to do nothing of itself till wound up by another‖ (FS I, 4:200). She calls this a ―Vacuum in the Mind‖: such persons ―have no

Ideas of their own‖ and no powers of reflection; they suffer from a mechanization of thought (FS I, 4:200). What such persons have instead of autonomy is the appearance of rationality in company, enabled by practiced behavior to ―talk agreeably‖ after the fashion of ―Custom and a genteel Education‖ (FS I, 4:200). Returning once more to

Fénelon‘s ―insinuation‖ of female duty, this ornamentation replicates a kind of mechanical obedience, privileging behavior over rationality (IED [1708] 3, 20). It is this ignorance that Astell declaims as causing women to ―quit the Substance for the Shadow,

Reality for Appearance‖ (SP [1697] I:24); for Haywood, it creates ―heavy, lumpish

Creatures‖ of both sexes, ―stupid,‖ ―inanimate‖ and half-asleep in their waking life (FS I,

4:200). A character like Betsy Thoughtless, all vivacity, wit and spirit, is comparatively

153 less offensive—and some of her less honorable predecessors in The Female Spectator escape worse punishment by virtue of a spirited disposition.320 By honoring self- reflection as chief among human virtues, Haywood, like the educationalists and didactic authors before her, assumes rational capacity for women and the responsibility to cultivate it by whatever means possible.

By attending to the rhetorical presentation of education and mental acuity in The

Female Spectator, Haywood‘s proto-feminist resistance may be reconstructed outside of the dual roles of amatory feminist or capitulating moralist to which she is not infrequently assigned. The framework of female advocacy-through-fiction builds upon the power of self-reflection, the means by which a ―lumpish creature‖ learns to speak with her own ideas rather than parroting those of others (a mimicry that recalls habitus and techniques of the body).321 It also assumes an autonomous female self who, through education, learns control and regulation. The development of this mental empire is of primary importance precisely because it is not reliant upon external stimulus or control, for ―A real fine Genius‖ needs no ―exterior Means of Employment,‖ because it ―will always find that within which will keep it from being idle (FS I, 4:200-201). To a degree, Mr.

Spectator seems to agree that there have not been ―sufficient pains taken in finding out proper employments and diversions for the fair ones‖ (TS I, 10:57). However, Mr.

Spectator intends to provide this entertainment with his paper, furnishing women with

―Tea-Table-Talk‖ in a manner ―suitable to their understanding‖ (TS I, 4:25). For the

320 Juliette Merrit describes Haywood‘s respect for the coquette‘s energy, independent spirit, and commanding social presence‖ in her work "Reforming the Coquet? Eliza Haywood's Vision of a Female Epistemology." In Fair Philosopher, edited by Lynn Marie Wright and Donald J Newman, 176-192. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 177. 321 Discussed in chapter two, ―techniques of the body‖ are described by Marcel Mauss in Sociology and Psychology Essays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 154

Female Spectator, it is rather the very activity of the outer world (and not the cloistered confines of either a strict domestic economy or a religious retirement) that fosters internal

―employment.‖ Haywood describes this process as the actions of ―Memory and

Recollection,‖ which ―will bring the Transactions of past Times to View;‖ ―Observation and Discernment‖ which will ―point out the present with their Causes;‖ and finally of

―Fancy, temper‘d with Judgment,‖ that ―anticipates the future‖ (FS I, 4:201). A similar process occurs (and recurs) throughout the plot of Betsy Thoughtless until the heroine completes her ―reformation.‖ Haywood‘s interplay between external experience and internal reflection—like that of blame and defense, which ―marks Haywood‘s usual practice in her dealings with the coquette‖322—strikes a more delicate and nuanced balance than either her female predecessors or male contemporaries. The Female

Spectator opposes and seeks to correct the errors and failings of its subscribers, but it nonetheless advocates for the very experiential learning which introduced the possibility of error. Haywood‘s ―pupils‖ are not meant to avoid temptation so much as to face and thwart it. The development of the heroine, through The Female Spectator and into Betsy

Thoughtless, begins necessarily with imperfect contexts and flawed characteristics. The interaction between developmental (if potentially injurious) experience and internal reflection is paradigmatic in Haywood‘s works, becoming a ―model for female knowledge.‖323 Thus, while Haywood‘s early amatory characters (like Fantomina) actively manipulate ―the male tendency to read a woman by her context, shaping her context to create her own roles,‖ a later character like Miss Betsy is acted upon by her

322 Merritt, ―Reforming,‖ 177. 323 Ibid., 178. 155 context, learning through experience to struggle ―against the roles into which she is forced.‖324

Interestingly (and perhaps ironically) the unfolding of a female self, struggling against an inhibiting context in which others attempt to define and regulate her, recurs as a theme in the works of Samuel Richardson as well. Characters like Pamela and Clarissa seem to resist the status quo as readily as the educationalists or the fictional characters of

Aubin and Barker. As Janet Aikins claims, in Pamela‘s re-writing of Locke in Part II,

―she takes control of the powers and sight‖ and ―created a discursive space within which she claims authority for the female body and mind.‖325 Similarly, Clarissa resists the commands of her parents and the various roles that her family or Lovelace intend her to occupy. However, both Pamela and Clarissa tend toward to the stability of patriarchal and domestic hegemony by the end of their novels. Pamela reinforces the conduct-book view about women‘s duties, and the once ―isolated Pamela‖ ultimately becomes ―the center of a coherent social group, her singular personality providing a center for reaffirmation of the landed gentry‘s way of life.‖326 Though her arc is both longer and more tragic,

Clarissa also returns, arguably, to ―an icon-like stability‖327 and is even described by

Richetti as ―nothing less than the organizing center of the characters‘ lives.‖328 Both of these female figures are, we must remember, the creations of a male printer and conduct- book author. As Armstong suggests, Richardson actually deploys the strategies—and, I argue, the rhetoric—of the conduct book within fiction.329 By creating paragons

324 Anderson, ―Performing,‖ 6. 325 Janet E. Aikins. ―Pamela's Use of Locke's Words‖ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 25 (1996): 75-97, 78. 326 Richetti. The English Novel, 96. 327 Ibid, 115. 328 Ibid., 116. 329 Armstrong. Desire and Domestic Fiction, 110. 156 seemingly untouched by either the sudden promotion or destruction of their hopes,

Richardson creates ―a categorical boundary between his heroine[s] and other women.‖330

They are inimitable precisely because, as Richardson himself insists, he is writing for and not from actual women. These novels may expose or develop a female self (of sorts), but they also recreate more or less static constructions of gendered identity. Pamela, despite its title, is in many ways a text about the reformation of B;331 Clarissa, against

Richardson‘s wishes perhaps, may also be a text about the degeneration of Lovelace. As with The Spectator, which selects ―proper subjects for women readers‖ based upon

―women‘s relations to men, [which] were to be prescribed and monitored by men,‖332 the

Richardsonian heroine is made a proper subject largely by being a proper object.

Christopher Flint describes the contrast between Richardson‘s heroines and Betsy

Thoughtless by contrasting the ways in which a character like Pamela ―is herself the repository of domestic values that she must impose on an unruly masculine domain,‖ while Betsy is rendered ―unruly and must adapt to a patriarchal society that insists on propriety but finds it difficult to enforce.‖333 The success of Richardson‘s paragons is imputed to an audience in need of ―dogmatic celebration of domestic virtue,‖ while the almost equal success of Betsy Thoughtless334demonstrates that ―successful application of

Richardsonian propriety was being modified for less-peerless figures.‖335 It is undeniable that Haywood recasts and revises the Richardsonian heroine, but as with the didactic authors before her, she does not rely solely upon existing masculine models. Rather, her

330 Koehler. Models of Reading, 74. 331 As is suggested by Lois A. Chaber, ―From Moral Man to Godly Man: 'Mr. Locke' and Mr. B in Part 2 of Pamela‖ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 18 (1988): 213-261, 214. 332 Bannet, ―Haywood‘s Spectator,‖ 85. 333 Flint. Family Fictions, 162. 334 Bannet, ―Haywood‘s Spectator,‖ 83.The text actually surpassed Pamela in certain circulating libraries, though these were mostly in America. 335 Flint, ―Family Fictions,‖ 162. 157 works continue to develop rhetorical response introduced by educationalists half-a century earlier. Richardson‘s paragons tend to adapt a pre-existing conduct model of female behavior, while Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless augments the rhetorical strategies of female educationalists—from reversal to deflection—evident in earlier works.

Paragons and Paramours: Stasis vs. Development of the Domestic Heroine

A comparison between Richardson‘s and Haywood‘s heroines necessarily involves a comparison between passive and active constructions of female identity.

Samuel Richardson was a publisher and writer of conduct books with their fixed ―rules for sexual exchange.‖336 Such static constructions are likewise a hallmark of

Richardson‘s fictions; his sympathies inclined toward didacticism, and the principle aim of his fiction (and many of his contemporaries) was to provide a standard or model of

Christian behavior rather than a representation of developmental female character.

Richardson writes in 1748 that "Religion never was at so low an ebb as at present. And if my work must be supposed of the novel kind, I was willing to try if a religious novel would do good."337 Thus, in writing his novels, Richardson intended to create works that might be placed ―on the same shelf‖ with conduct books like Lewis Bayly‘s Practice of

Piety and Jeremy Taylor‘s Holy Living and Holy Dying.338 Pamela, like most other eighteenth-century fictions, was written ―to promote the cause of religion and virtue‖ rather than to ―merely‖ entertain.339 The novel even bears a secondary title, Virtue

Rewarded, reminiscent of conduct books and moral literature—and Richardson‘s claim to

Aaron Hill that Clarissa was The Lady‟s Legacy recalls Thomas Brown‘s 1705 conduct

336 K. Sutherland. "Writings on education,‖ 26. 337 From a letter to Lady Bradshaigh, qtd. In Sylvia Kasey Marks. "'Clarissa' as Conduct Book." South Atlantic Review 51, no. 4 (November 1986): 3-16, 5. 338 Form a letter to Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, qtd. In Ibid., 3. 339 From a letter to Aaron Hill, qtd. In Ibid., 5. 158 manual, A legacy for the ladies. Or, characters of the women of the age. To further underscore his purpose, Richardson completed Pamela II, which dispenses with the fictional construct, less than half-way through in favor of a dissertation on practical applications for Locke‘s Some Thoughts on Education. In the second half of part II,

Pamela critiques Locke‘s apparent gender bias, asking (not unlike the educationalists)

―who, I pray, as our Sex is generally educated, shall teach the Mothers? How, in a Word, shall they come by their Knowledge?‖340 The answer, however, is Richardson himself;

Richardson‘s own voice ―informs‖ Pamela‘s—and in the writing of her ―little book‖ for the education of children and women, we have Richardson‘s own recasting of Locke.341

As Lois Chaber argues, ―where Locke leaves off, Richardson takes up the task, moving from reason and socialization into the more obscure realm of grace and providential interposition.‖342 It is no surprise, then, that Richardson advertised Pamela in a list of educational texts. In fact, near the end of his career, Richardson collects the moral precepts from the three novels (Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison) into a single volume, ―compressing the fiction into a final conduct book,‖343 that familiar

―formulaic inventory of exhortations and prohibitions‖ described by Armstrong.344

Clarissa, no less than the original ―ladies‘ legacy‖ creates more fixed roles for its female characters, constructing ―a more specialized and less material form of subjectivity

[…]designated as female.‖345 Pamela also begins the text as a paragon; she resists temptation successfully, achieves a raised status, and then ―waxes suddenly stuffy, static,

340 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, virtue rewarded. In a series of familiar letters from a beautiful young damsel, to her parents. ... In four volumes. Vol. 4, sixth ed. (Dublin, 1741), 340. 341 Aikins, ―Pamela‘s Use,‖ 91. 342 Chaber, ―From Moral Man to Godly Man,‖ 235 343 Flint, Family Fictions, 165. 344 Barney, Plots, 17. 345 Armstong, Desire and Domestic, 14 159 and both patronizing and obsequious, displaying all those qualities, in short, that made conduct books themselves seem so empty and tedious.‖346 Armstrong calls this

Richardson‘s ―static paradigm,‖347 and Richetti considers it his commitment to

―meaningful superficiality‖—that is, the heroine‘s ability to be ―exactly what she appears to be.‖348 Appearances, like habitus and techniques of the body, promote the valuation of surface over depth, behavioral response over female interiority and introspection. For

Richardson (as for many conduct writers) ―depths‖ are potentially ―unstable and destructive.‖349 Both Pamela and Clarissa therefore seek to occupy the relatively fixed, stable (and comparatively surface) role of the ―new domestic woman.‖ Richardson‘s particular brand of domestic fiction does carry on the ―struggle to define the female‖ described in Armstrong‘s reconstruction of domestic fiction‘s ―rise‖—and yet, to see his novels as ―nothing short of a victory for the modern self over the political system that was authorized by a household which a male governed and sustained by his patronage‖350 mistakes the object (the constructed paragon) for a subject. Armstrong considers

Pamela‘s ability to ―define herself‖ as a singular moment in the ―history of writing,‖351 but as I have demonstrated, the struggle to achieve an autonomous female selfhood was begun much earlier, by women, for women, and is continued in the dynamic developmental process of Haywood‘s protagonists. Pamela, the saucy but (almost improbably) innocent symbol of domestic economy, and Clarissa, the icon-like ―object of wonder,‖352 belong instead to a ―long line of heroines who patiently await their secular

346 Ibid., 124. 347 Ibid., 125. 348 Richetti,The English Novel, 105. 349 Ibid. 350 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic, 118 351 Ibid., 113. 352 Richetti, The English Novel, 116. 160 assumption by steadfastly maintaining their domestic role‖ [my italics]353—not by learning how to acquire a role for themselves. Pamela may claim ―I am Pamela, her own self,‖ but Pamela is not her own; her ―enormous verbal effort of self-definition‖354 is not a construction of autonomous female selfhood, but of a habitus, a collection of platitudes that—more successfully perhaps than the conduct books before it—helped to establish the domestic ideal. By contrast, Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless tracks the development of a heroine whose chief flaw is a ―habitual inadvertency‖ a characteristic responsible, says

Haywood, for many ―mistakes the sex are sometimes guilty of‖ (BT 9) and which, Astell remarks, renders women ―incapable of any serious and improving thought‖ (SP [1694]

I:48). In this novel, Haywood continues to develop a concept of interiority and mental acuity that, unlike the ―irrepressible intelligence,‖ ―moral will‖ and ―serene eloquence‖355 of the paragon, must be developed by the gradual awakening of the woman‘s ―power of reflection‖ (BT 37). It is only by reflecting on her ―inadvertent‖ experiences that a woman gains intellectual autonomy, and the rhetorical presentation of that achieved

―selfhood‖ necessarily utilizes, first and perhaps foremost, the strategy of deflection.

Apology (diffusion of tension) and scapegoating (dispersal of blame) are thus essential to the construction of Betsy Thoughtless as a heroine. She, like the Female Spectator before her, needs supportive advocates and the excuse of a less than perfect context to ennoble her fumblings toward experiential learning.

Excusing the Inadvertent Scholar

Judith Drake‘s claim that ―the World is too full of Craft, Malice and Violence, for absolute Simplicity to live in it‖ echoes the principle that furnishes much of the plot

353 Flint, Family Fictions, 194. 354 Ibid., 177. 355 Richetti, The English Novel, 105. 161 content of Betsy Thoughtless (EDFS 100). Haywood, too, calls the world ―malicious‖ and portrays Betsy as an ―innocent‖ whose greatest flaw is her ―too little regard‖ for

―appearances‖ (BT 36). At the same time, however, Betsy pays too much regard to the

―showy and superficial‖—or surface representation—of those she meets (TS I, 15:84). It is for this reason that she does not recognize Miss Forward, her childhood friend, as a prostitute; it is also for this reason that she fails to recognize her pretentious and scheming suitor Frederick Fineer as a member of the servant class. Betsy does not heed the repeated warnings of Lady Trusty (her most consistent female advocate), who cautions that ―an innate principle of virtue is not always a sufficient guard against the many snares laid for it, under the shew of innocent pleasures, by wicked and designing persons‖ (BT 37). Such remonstrance recalls the language of blame used by Drake, who excuses and even encourages female dissimulation as a means of protecting women

―from becoming a Prey to every designing Man‖ (EDFS 100). In many respects, Betsy

Thoughtless repudiates Clarissa‟s desire for stable surfaces; Betsy must learn to see beneath the surface—to recognize the rake, the faker and the prostitute. ―Superficiality‖ may, as for Richardson, be ―meaningful,‖ but it is also terribly misleading. Betsy is already mistaken for being ―exactly what she appears to be‖356—an unchaste and loose woman. Dissimulation, or the ability to ―act‖ an appropriate ―part‖ is not, in this text, a validation of surface over depth, but rather the necessary means of appearing to be what one in fact already is (BT 436). The world (as vicious and rakish here as in Barker‘s

Patch-work Screen) is unsafe to the open-hearted and empty-headed. Haywood begins

Betsy Thoughtless by claiming that ―those mistakes the sex are sometimes guilty of, proceed for the most part, rather from inadvertency, than a vicious inclination‖ (BT 9).

356 Richetti, The English Novel, 105. 162

Inadvertency is still a failing, yet, inadvertency might also be understood as the inability to dissemble in a world that requires it. Betsy, we are told, is but ―an ill dissembler‖ even late into the novel (BT 445). Having no malicious designs herself, she is incapable of recognizing the maliciousness of the world. Thus, though Haywood castigates her inadvertency and inability to reflect on past behavior as real faults in need of correction, she also continually contrasts Betsy‘s good will and transparency to the black designs of those around her—and of a society that values ―reputation‖ more than virtue (BT 335).

The aspect of performance required by this ‗positive‘ dissimulation might be compared to the stage-like qualities of Haywood‘s earlier works. Emily Hodgson

Anderson, for instance, considers Betsy Thoughtless and Fantomina to be related in this regard, calling the practice ―self-conscious performance‖ wherein women act ―roles that they have independently conceived for themselves.‖357 Anderson claims that, for

―emotional expression to register with an audience‖ the ―Haywoodian heroine must plan the moment and mode‖—contrasting Diderot‘s claim that a woman ―who grieves and artfully arranges her arms…is false‖ with her own conception of a presentation that allows real grief to be ―displayed.‖358 And yet, for Anderson, such performance makes the search for a woman‘s ―true sentiments‖ misleading, while for Haywood, as for the educationalists, dissimulation‘s performative quality both displays and ―screens‖ an actual interior selfhood. Chudleigh urges women to explore and expand the ―close

Recesses‖ of internal mental space, but in order to ―Rule alone/Those unseen Empires‖ they must first flee from the world‘s ―Censures‖ and ―Tricks‖ (LD 18:20-21, 21:32-35). It is not enough, therefore, for Betsy to be innocent—she must also appear so. As her

357 Anderson, ―Performing,‖ 1. 358 Ibid., 2. 163 brothers remind her: ―What avails your being virtuous? […] your reputation is of more consequence to your family:—the loss of one might be concealed, but a blemish on the other brings certain infamy‖ (BT 335). Betsy must ―wear‖ her virtue even as Miss

Forward ―wears‖ her infamy by the behavior, dress and even location of her person: habit once more approximates habitude. Being and seeing are complicated by men who wish to grasp only at the surface—who encourage women to be static paragons, ―appearing‖ rational and displaying a habitus of behavior that promotes domestic ideology. Betsy must learn to make appearances and actualities correspond—a practice which involves restraining her more volatile (though often correct) emotions in favor of self-controlled presentation. Thus, though Betsy is censured for her failings, being ―too volatile‖ and

―tost about …just as each predominant passion directed,‖ the scheming world around her bears much of the blame (BT 13). Haywood‘s ―apology‖ for Betsy‘s behavior ultimately involves censuring a world that fosters thoughtlessness, and which requires vice (in the form of dissimulation) both to avoid the snares of the wicked and the censures of the just.

The use of scapegoats to disperse blame therefore nearly subsumes the actual critique of

Betsy‘s shortcomings.

The two opening chapters of Betsy Thoughtless introduce us to several characters who ought to serve as models and advocates for Betsy, but who ultimately fail to provide her with the means of acquiring either reflection or self-control. We are told at once that

Betsy has lost her mother—the expected female model and advocate—and that she has been sent to school for refinement and ―never suffered… to come home‖ (BT 9). This banishment is supposedly for her improvement and does not reflect any lack of affection on the part of her father, though forgoing circumstances (one of her fellow pupils is

164 involved in a clandestine romance and later becomes a prostitute) calls into question the efficacy of schools for ―female accomplishments.‖ Betsy has not acquired ballast at this female institution, which, for the educationalist, means a solid foundation in knowledge:

―a good measure of true knowledge, like Ballast in a Ship, settles down, and makes a person move more even in his station‖ (ERAEG 32). Unfortunately, the loss of Betsy‘s remaining parent leaves her education in the care of Lady Mellasin, the ―spectacularly unchaste‖359 wife of Mr. Goodman. We are not privy to the motives behind this act, though we are cautioned by the narrator that the ―good-nature‖ of the proposal was more seeming than actual. Mellasin‘s manner of ―improving [Betsy‘s] mind‖ is, at least, highly suspect; the effect turns Betsy‘s head with ―promiscuous enjoyment‖ so that Betsy‘s

―very power of reflection [is] lost amidst the giddy whirl‖ (BT 16, 18). Betsy has been trained only to dance and dress—she has native intelligence and quick wit, but her training in the customs of idle and silly women essentially stifle her reason. In part, this series of events recalls Fénelon‘s assessment of women‘s bodily vanity and with conduct rhetoric‘s connection between over-consciousness of dress and moral failings. However, as with the educationalists re-employment of habitus as the ability ―to put on a Whisk, to wear gay Clothes,‖ Betsy‘s vanity is ―cultivated‖ by guardians who privilege surface ornamentation and behavior over depth of character (ERAEG 22). Cultural learning is once more portrayed as engrafted, the result of mismanaged cultivation rather than nature. Unlike the educationalists, however, who largely malign men as responsible for this state of affairs, many of the scapegoats in Betsy Thoughtless are female.

359 David Oakleaf. "Circulating the Name of a Whore: Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless, Betty Careless and the Duplicities of the Double Standard." Women‟s Writing 15, no. 1 (May 2008): 107-134, 108. 165

Lady Mellasin, Miss Flora, Miss Forward and Mme. Roquelair each represent a host of female faults that make Betsy‘s ―innocent‖ thoughtlessness seem excusable by comparison. Moreover, Lady Mellasin, as an adult and guardian, is responsible for many of Betsy‘s errors. It is Mellasin‘s gay household that turns Betsy‘s head, and it is

Mellasin‘s own coquetry and lack of circumspection with gallants that serves as the model for Betsy‘s behavior. At fourteen, Betsy has entered that ―delicate time‖ when she

―is most apt to take the bent of impression, which, according as it is well or ill directed, makes or mars, the future prospect of their lives‖ (BT 17). Similar to the Female

Spectator‘s warning, this caution directs women to correct their small faults before they grow to be large ones with greater consequences—but Betsy, living under Mellasin‘s roof, is as handicapped by improper impressions as by inappropriate cultivation. The only potential lesson Betsy might learn from Mellasin or her daughter is that of dissimulation—mother and daughter (due perhaps to practiced guilt) know much better than Betsy how to present themselves artfully. These women can avoid the appearance of having ―the least tincture of so foul and mean a passion‖ as they both plainly possess— but the narrator makes clear that this form of craft befits only the wicked adventuress (BT

44). These ―inappropriate‖ women, incapable of real friendship and having ―no real regard for any one beside themselves‖ are unfit for female advocacy and ultimately pay for their crimes (BT 44). Miss Forward ends up in debtor‘s prison, and Flora and Lady

Mellasin are exiled to Jamaica, that ―notorious […] refuge for fallen women‖ (which also serves as the asylum of Sally Godfrey in Pamela).360 Betsy‘s scapegoats (with the exception perhaps of Mme. Roquelair, who is simply returned to France) pay for crimes

Betsy herself is always nearly (though never actually) guilty of. We might say that each

360 Oakleaf, ―Circulating,‖ 108. 166 of these women serves as a replacement for the protagonist—Betsy is importuned by

Gaylord, but it is Flora who submits; Betsy is mistaken for a prostitute at the play, but it is Forward who makes (and loses) her fortune that way. Even Mme. Roquelair‘s affair with Munden (Betsy‘s husband) might be a representation of the potential liaison between Betsy and Lord— (her husband‘s patron). Thus, Betsy‘s actual innocence and her hatred for ―any thing that had the least tincture of indecency‖ does not protect her virtue nearly so much as ―the interposition of her guardian angel‖ and the apparent abundance of women willing to take her place (BT 44, 97). The scapegoat, for Haywood, here figures as both rhetorical strategy and plot device (a narrative execution that will be repeated by Francis Burney in her novel Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's

Entrance into the World). Blame is displaced first upon context, and second upon characters who cannot transcend that context through self-conscious reflection.

It is important to note, however, that while Haywood makes no attempt to malign men only or instead of women, the faulty male guardians surrounding Betsy share in the diffusion of blame for her mistakes. Mr. Goodman is a cuckold, Betsy‘s younger brother is volatile and leaves off his studies, and her elder brother has the bad sense to keep a capricious French mistress (Mme. Roquelair) who later causes the final rupture in Betsy‘s marriage to Munden. In effect, though Betsy is continually learning ―propriety‖ from men—Gayland makes her see the improper nature of her free behavior, the man who attempts her virtue in the carriage warns her to mind the company she keeps, and even the brutish Mr. Munden teaches her to esteem those qualities he doesn‘t possess—these male figures make equally unfit models or guides for the young heroine. The use of the scapegoat to excuse folly (often presented as unavoidable or unintentional) may be a

167 useful means of retaining sympathy and gaining ethos in the face of moral failing, but the failed male characters in this text serve more generally to reverse masculine censure by universalizing faults. Even Trueworth, who is one of the most ―worthy‖ male figures in the text, spies on Betsy (craft), readily believes slander about her (susceptibility to the

―superficial‖) and commits his own acts of sexual indiscretion (inconstancy, promiscuity)—with Miss Flora Mellasin, no less. Miss Betsy, as a female, is held to a standard men cannot, and do not attempt, to achieve. As Mr. Francis explains, ―virtue is a different thing in our sex, to what it is in yours;—the forfeiture of what is called virtue in a woman is more folly than a baseness; but the virtue of a man is his courage, his constancy, his probity, which if he loses, he becomes contemptible to himself, as well as to the world‖ (BT 335). This éclaircissment denigrates the virtue of women to mere foolery, whereas a man‘s virtues (which do not, it seems, include chastity) are of considerably greater value. Moreover, it is assumed by Betsy‘s brother that women do not, or cannot, become contemptible in their own eyes: they have no honorable interiority to defend. In order to foster an internal and virtuous ―self‖ within Betsy—to give her a credible sense of honor and virtue as Mr. Francis understands it—Haywood must once more turn men‘s ―own Artillery upon them‖ by exposing the character of dishonorable and shameless men (EDFS 52).

In the period generally and in Betsy Thoughtless specifically, honor and virtue bear a complex relationship to the ―rights‖ of mankind—and an even more critical correlation to the ―will to power.‖ 361 The power of individual will, as Locke refigures it towards the end of the seventeenth century, applied exclusively to men; ―Man‖ had

361 Barney, Plots, 287. 168 power over self, and man ―authorized‖ those who held power.362 ―Natural‖ individual rights like those describes in the Two Treatises of Government thus never applied to women, whose ―selves‖ were valued only by their relation to men (a view shared by The

Spectator). To provide women the foundation for similar rights—while avoiding the threat of subversion—educationalists had to reconstruct revolutionary rhetoric and to demonstrate rational equality in those situations deemed defensible by men. Such circumstances principally involved attacks on female chastity and virtue; Aubin‘s foreign contexts and Barker‘s ―Beau World‖ serve as fictional examples and provide similar recourse for female assertions of rights. In contrast, Betsy‘s virtue provides her with but an unequal defense; she claims women can reflect upon and feel shame for their choices as any man, but her brother‘s reply denigrates female virtue. For Mr. Francis, ―a woman brings less dishonor upon a family, by twenty private sins, than by one public indiscretion‖ (BT 336). Female virtue is the property of the family—principally the men of the family—and does not proceed from an interior, autonomous self. Betsy‘s brother is concerned mainly with surfaces and wants Betsy to ―appear‖ chaste more than he wishes her to ―be‖ virtuous. Male virtue, by contrast, is a man‘s central being without which he is contemptuous, less than a subject, potentially less than human. This contradiction is borne out by conduct rhetoric as well, as Robert Codrington‘s discourse on marriage attests. According to Codrington, man‘s reputation is the central concern to be promoted and protected by his wife. While the wife must never bring aspersions on her mate, she herself is ―bound to hold the Condition, follow the Quality, Countrey, Family, and

Habitation of her Husband […and] to accompany him in all things, in his Journeys, his

362 McCrystal, "Revolting Women,‖ 190. 169

Banishment, his Imprisonment, yea although he be […] a Vagabond and a Fugitive.‖363

The double standard is clearly not lost on Haywood or the educationalists before her, who remind their readers that men, despite their advantages, are often guilty of greater faults:

―They tax us with a long List of Faults and Imperfections […taken from] their own

Follies and Vices‖ (EDFS 52). That catalogue, in Drake‘s reversal of the querelle des femmes, includes vanity, impertinence, envy and inconstancy; Haywood demonstrates these and adds to them enervation of mind, lack of forbearance, folly and a ―fluctuating‖ disposition. A brief survey of the central male characters (most of whom are implicated in Betsy‘s less sanguine adventures) demonstrates a continuation of the Female

Spectator‟s reversal of masculine and feminine traits and replaces revolutionary rhetoric as the principle means of arguing for ―female‖ rights.

Apart from Betsy‘s father, the primary male guardian in the text is Mr. Goodman; this ―good man‖ has an unfortunate blindness towards the conduct of his wife, however, and allows her to mismanage his household and his affairs. He likewise provides Betsy with little actual guidance, and, were she a man, he would have applauded her behavior as that which makes a ―rare minister of state‖ (BT 110). After the exposure of his wife‘s vices, Mr. Goodman also exhibits an enervation of mind similar to the mental collapses of Aubin‘s heroes (Count de Beaumont, in particular). He ―sunk beneath the apprehensions‖ and was ―seized at once with a violent fit of an apoplexy‖ which causes him for a time to lose his good senses (BT 261). This might be contrasted to the energetic activity of Lady Mellasin (who contrives a false will to preserve her fortune) and Flora

(who begins an affair with Trueworth)—or even of Betsy herself who, after considerable misfortune in her own marriage to Mr. Munden, has the stamina to request a legal

363 Codrington. Youths Behavior, 66. 170 separation. Betsy‘s other guardians, her brothers, likewise exhibit damaging flaws, and those men who have less innocent designs upon her person demonstrate the worst consequences of vanity, impertinence, inconstancy and generally virulent and unchaste living. Gayland receives a ―shock‖ to his ―vanity‖ when Betsy treats his importunities with contempt, while she, relying on the ―share of understanding [she] is mistress of‖ rightly considers his overtures ―the rude impertinencies of an idle coxcomb‖ (BT 24). Sir

Frederick Fineer (while clearly less suave that his predecessors) likewise attempts to rouse Betsy with ridiculous flattery, foolery and uneducated impertinencies, and Mr.

Munden, the worst though most successful suitor, is exposed as an inconstant bully, tyrant and miser—as ambitious and thoughtless of virtue as Lady Mellasin and just as unfaithful. In her dealings with these faulty male figures, Betsy (like Euphrosine in The

Female Spectator) actually demonstrates remarkable fortitude. These qualities are amplified by her marriage to Munden, whose serious character flaws render him, as Mr.

Francis suggests, ―contemptible […] to the world‖ (BT 335).

Betsy begins the married state already determined ―religiously to perform‖ the duties required of the wife (BT 438). It is not marriage that teaches her how to be domestic; she was ―ignorant to no part of‖ what is required of women (indeed, it is her knowledge of the married state that keeps her so long from it) (BT 438). Mr. Munden also intends to observe his part as a husband, but this part is one of absolute mastery of a type

John Sprint‘s Bride-woman‟s Counsellor would approve. In his general comportment

(including his destruction of Betsy‘s pet squirrel on the grounds that it disrupted the family economy) Munden ―could not have more effectually‖ rendered himself ―hateful in the eyes of his wife‖ (BT 449). He is ―ignorant of the regard he ought to have for his

171 wife,‖ but in addition to disregarding Betsy‘s feelings, he also disregards her virtue, which is endangered by Lord— (BT 450-1). Not unlike Betsy‘s brothers, Munden sees no intrinsic value to a woman‘s virtue; he suggests, in fact, that she might have traded upon it more effectively. Betsy‘s response is first to blame her husband, but also to blame herself for feeling pride at Lord—‗s flattery; she saw ―her faults‖ and they appeared

―contemptible.‖ She has trespassed against her own sense of duty and honor, not just what she owed to Munden as her husband, but what she owed to herself: ―Good Heaven

[…] defend me, and all virtuous women from such gallantries;—but know, sir […] that but for that idle resentment, as you are pleased to call it, my ruin and your dishonour would have been completed by this best of friends‖ (BT 493). Munden seems both unaware of his wife‘s honor and unable to feel his own dishonor. His consternation at losing his patron causes him to call Betsy‘s virtue ―cursed pride,‖ while his own pride (as a husband) is overmastered by his desire for advancement and ―great share of ambition‖

(BT 493). The effect of this scene upon Betsy, however, fosters a sudden and lasting self- reflection and reproach. Though her past adventures (like those of the Female Spectator) never made ―any lasting impression,‖ the importunities of Lord— and the behavior of

Munden in relation to it confirm her in a new resolution that does not ―prove to be […] transient‖ (BT 494, 496).

That Betsy makes this sudden conversion after so much mental fluctuation appears, to many readers and critics, as suspect. Haywood herself finds it necessary to concede that the change is ―great and sudden‖ (BT 496). The shift seems, perhaps, too much like capitulation to the patriarchal view of Betsy‘s new role as a wife—so much so that Merritt claims Betsy‘s lesson in self government ―during her dreadful and mortifying

172 marriage to Munden […is] not a good news story.‖364 She contrasts it to the development of subjectivity in The Female Spectator, arguing that, rather than helping her become a subject, the ―knowledge Betsy acquired confirms her position as an object in the service of either male sexual desire or male ambition‖ [my italics].365 However, such a reading mistakes Betsy‘s motivation. She is not seeking to become ―the center of a coherent social group‖ as is Pamela, or ―an object of wonder‖ like Clarissa. If anything, she is attempting to move away from the public center and into the introspective empire of the mind: her ―external charms‖ deemed dangerous, Betsy ―ceased even to wish they should be taken notice of, and set herself seriously about improving those perfections of the mind, which she was sensible could alone entitle her to the esteem of the virtuous and wise‖ (BT 499). Like Astell and the educationalists, Haywood here argues for female interiority and an empire of mind to replace the empire Betsy had built through her coquetry and merely external accomplishments. It is unlikely that Haywood, any more than her educationalist predecessors, intended to promote the dissolution of gender boundaries or the repudiation of the domestic sphere (she does not, in fact, do so even in her amatory works). The education of Betsy enriches her domestic experience and provides her with that internal ―genius‖ that will keep her mind ―from being idle‖ (FS I,

4:201). Thus the accommodating nature of Betsy‘s conversion to a ―wife‖ reflects a desire not to imitate or supplant men, but to establish mental equity and her position as an autonomous self. However, Haywood does go further than her predecessors in Betsy‘s demand for—and achievement of—her ―rights.‖

364 Merritt, ―Reforming,‖ 187. 365 Ibid. 173

As Flint remarks, there ―are few, if any, examples before Wollstonecraft‘s heroines of a female character who actively separates from her husband and is both exonerated and wedded successfully to another man.‖366 The ―rights‖ of the ―wife‖ in this text are supported by characters as diverse as Mr. Markland, the Trustys, and Betsy‘s brothers and friends. However, this support is garnered not primarily because of Mr.

Munden‘s infidelity (that, as Halifax would urge, ought in itself to be excused and reclaimed through female softness), but rather because of its flagrant and public nature.

Munden‘s affair with Mme. Roquelair demonstrates not only his inconstancy, but also a lack of honor and respect for either his own or his wife‘s reputation. He fails to be virtuous or to appear virtuous; he has rendered himself an object (rather than a subject) of contempt. Betsy therefore resolves ―not to live with him again,‖ arguing that any other course of action would ―have been an injustice not only to herself, but to all wives in general, by setting them an example of submitting to things required of them by neither law nor nature‖ (BT 532, 531). Mr. Francis equates the honor of men to their selfhood;

Betsy, in her response to Munden‘s indiscretion, proves herself to be a woman of honor— and by this universalized argument, a self. This renewed sense of female autonomy and worth (and the necessity and means of defending it to others) is tested only pages later.

Apparently regarding Betsy‘s marital and moral status as questionable, Trueworth

―clasp‘d her to his breast with a vehemence, which in all his days of coutrtship to her he never durst attempt‖ (BT 545). Though Betsy retains affection for this early (and best) suitor, she insists that she will think of Trueworth with only ―the tenderness that honour and the duties of my station will admit‖ [my italics] (BT 545). In her ―menacing‖ rebuff,

Betsy reminds Trueworth not only of whose she is, but also of who she is—it is her

366 Flint, Family Fictions, 241. 174

―reputation and peace of mind‖ that she ultimately seeks to preserve (BT 546). Despite what this scene imputes to the character of Trueworth, the narrator confesses that ―all in general must applaud the conduct of Mrs. Munden; till this dangerous instance she had never had an opportunity of shewing the command she had over herself‖ (BT 546). It is in learning self-command and in employing it to defend her honor (rather than specifically her chastity), that Betsy proves she is self at all. At last, with a ―true worth‖ based upon her self-government, Betsy becomes the model of behavior for the men around her, including Trueworth (whose name, finally, seems more than a little ironic).

Though Betsy‘s apparent conversion to the domestic ideal—her sense of duty, circumspection and humility—ultimately ―justified‖ her ―to all her friends, and to the world in general,‖ this accommodation nonetheless allows Betsy to be accepted on her own terms (BT 562). She has affirmed her internal condition by adopting the practices that society associates with that condition—a positive dissimulation that is also a

―revolutionary‖ defense. As repeatedly argued by Chudleigh, Drake and others, women must adopt such means to preserve themselves, for men are equally or more seriously flawed and cannot be trusted with the task. Unlike the behavioral constraint recommended by conduct writers or the static domestic ideal suggested by ―Mr.

Spectator‖ or Samuel Richardson, Haywood offers an ―education‖ to her heroines that is both experiential and introspective. External experiences shape and mold, but it is self- control that ultimately allows a woman to be ―her own self.‖ Haywood‘s fiction, unlike that of Richardson, is thus of and from women, as well as for them—a continuation of educationalist discourse on intellectual equality and the autonomous female self.

Haywood‘s works, popular and often reprinted, thus serve to continue the arc of

175 revisionist rhetorical strategies into the latter part of the eighteenth century—particularly through the work of writers like Francis Burney. Evelina, yet another recasting of the inadvertent scholar, at last brings the educationalists across the ―gap‖ and into the proto- feminism of the 1780s and 90s, but it was enabled in part by Haywood (a writer Burney herself may have found questionable).

176

Conclusion

Neither God nor Nature have excluded [women] from being Ornaments to their Families and useful in the Generation; there is therefore no reason they should be content to be Cyphers in the World, useless at the best …insensible to their own worth. —Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part 1, 15-16

I began this dissertation by describing the purported ―gap‖ between educationalists like

Mary Astell and later acknowledged feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. Though scholars occasionally describe Astell‘s work as radical, Astell and her contemporaries continue to be neglected by most modern critics, who instead consider more acknowledged challengers to women‘s marginalization: late-century writers like Catherine Macaulay,

Hannah More, Mary Ann Radcliffe, Priscilla Wakefield, and Mary Wollstonecraft.367

This project has endeavored, through a combined focus on polemics and fiction, to

(re)discover arguments for intellectual liberty and a female empire of mind well before this period—and to reveal the proto-feminist rhetorical innovations subsequently developed by various women writers. Educationalists borrowed from male pedagogues and from each other to argue for a liberated female mind; didactic authors like Aubin and

Barker employed but also advanced these early strategies for use in a changing rhetorical

(and ideological) landscape; and by the 1740s, Eliza Haywood adapted these same strategies to establish a new purchase on the educationalist concept of individual rights.

Thus, while it ―would naturally be of great interest to know whether or not Mary

Wollstonecraft read Astell,‖368 such knowledge is unnecessary for demonstrating the persistence of Astell‘s rhetoric, or its potential influence, on late-century ―feminism.‖

367 One of the few critics that acknowledges Astell‘s radicalism, Kathryn Sutherland credits her for refusing a ―socially constructed place in a world of objects‖ and trading ―pre-possession‖ for ―self-possession.‖ See "Writings on education and conduct: arguments for female improvement." In Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, edited by Vivian Jones. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. 368 Catherine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 161. 177

My study ends with work produced in the 1760s, when the domestic ―novel‖ was only beginning to be acknowledged or formalized as a genre, and before it became the expected purview of writing women. Eliza Haywood here makes a useful and perhaps natural terminus; a flexible and capable rhetorician, she explored and employed educationalist strategies in several genres, and her work serves as a useful bridge between the adventurous fictional forms of early century to the more recognizable domestic fictions of mid and late century. However, the proto-feminist rhetorical project of the writers I examine continued to develop past this determinate and somewhat artificial end- point, ultimately informing the late-century polemics of Wollstonecraft (and others). A recent study by Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos, Early Feminists and the Education Debates, for example, examines pedagogical rhetoric in the 1760s and beyond. Sotiropoulos highlights the ―rhetorical skill and creativity‖ necessary to writers of this period who sought to refute claims about women‘s lack of rational capacity and challenge the bourgeois notion that education itself was ―unsuited, or even injurious, to [women‘s] particularly female virtues.‖369 However, as in earlier assessments of women‘s education,

Sotiropoulos‘s account primarily considers the non-fiction polemics of late-century

―feminists‖ (a term she uses to refer to nearly all the pro-education women writers of the century). While usefully concerned with the literary devices employed rhetorically by women—such as the inset narratives, ―character portrayal‖ and ―plot‖ of educational materials—Sotiropoulos‘s work, like many other rhetorical reclamation projects, does not specifically examine the fictions produced in this latter period.370 This narrowness allows for greater breadth (her work covers the education debates in three nations), but this focus

369 Ibid. 370 Ibid., 15. 178 also precludes intensive study of either the early educationalists or latter fiction writers who, I argue, set the stage for these debates. Sotiropoulos‘s exploration of those women who sought to repudiate the ―regressive construct of woman‖ (re)introduced by Rousseau in Émile, ou de l‟education captures the ongoing dialectic of masculine and feminine rhetorical strategies.371 Nonetheless, her claims about ―the pervasive influence of

Rousseauean thought‖ overlooks the equally powerful and pervasive influence of earlier eighteenth-century fiction writers on the ―feminist educationist[‘s]‖ ability to ―carv[e] out space for women‘s learning.‖372 Sotiropoulos portrays Wollstonecraft and Macaulay as responding directly to male pedagogues and masculine conduct rhetoric, and treats their rhetorical contributions—even their ―castiga[tion of] women for their complicity in their own subjugation‖—as mere response rather than participation in a female tradition of rhetoric. 373 Thus, while Sotiropoulos‘s exploration of ―early feminist‖ influence in the period after 1760 usefully continues the arc of female rhetorical strategies proposed by this project [see Chapter Five, fig. 4], it privileges the 1760s as its genesis (even as

Armstrong and others privilege the 1740s). Admittedly, Sotiropoulos‘s work ―does not pretend to tell ‗the whole story‘‖ of women‘s education in the eighteenth century,374 even as this study does not fully reconstitute the arc of educationalist rhetoric into the nineteenth century. Neither work can be fully or ultimately comprehensive, though both participate in the ongoing project to recognize a female tradition of educational rhetoric

371 Ibid., 18, 24. Rousseau‘s conclusion to Émile remarks ―Dés qu‟une fois il est démontré que l‟homme et la femme ne sont ni ne doivent être contstitués de meme, de caractère ni de temperament, il s‟ensuit qu‟ils ne doivent pas avoir la meme education.‖ Roughly: Once demonstrated that the man and woman are not (and should not be) constituted the same in terms of character or temperament, it follows that they should not have the same education. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, ou de l'éducation. Par J. J. Rousseau, ... Vol. 4. (Francfort [i.e. London] 1762), 12. 372 Ibid., 25. 373 Ibid., 36, 135. 374 Sotiropoulos, Early Feminists, 14. 179 and the female advocacy that made it possible. Nevertheless, even considering these limits, analysis of representative fiction between that of Eliza Haywood and late century writers can offer a broader perspective on the progression of women‘s intellectual liberty.

A brief comparison of Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless and these works, particularly

Frances Burney‘s Evelina, demonstrates how one might re-inscribe the ―alphabet of sense‖ through the employment—and emplotment—of rhetorical strategies in the 1760s and beyond.

An Uninterrupted Arc

Eliza Haywood‘s Betsy Thoughtless was popular enough in the decade following its first printing to warrant three editions between 1767 and 1768, with a final printing in

1783. The posthumous circulation of her works ensured that her literary career overlapped with that of other woman writers of fiction, among them Charlotte Lennox,

Sarah Scott (sister of the notable ―bluestocking‖ Elizabeth Montague) and Frances

Burney. It also places her works in the context of the bluestocking circle, that society of proto-feminists and advocates such as Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, and Hester

Chapone, and in company with the latter educationalists, Macaulay and Wollstonecraft.

Haywood‘s fiction serves as a continuation of the discourse on women‘s intellectual liberty, even though Haywood herself may not have been very acceptable company to either Burney or Scott. In some ways, it is the legacy of Betsy Thoughtless that most tenaciously endures, and we might usefully compare this text to a number of works published in the mid and latter eighteenth century. Works like Lennox‘s Female Quixote,

Scott‘s Millenium Hall and Burney‘s Evelina contain narratives surprisingly consistent

180 with Betsy‘s, address problems of female education and, to varying degrees, balance

―inadvertency‖ with the need for reflection.

Lennox and Haywood, publishing within a year of one another, are often paired in critical analyses. In The Sign of Angelica (1989) Janet Todd describes Lennox and

Haywood as conscious reformers of the novel, and Catherine Craft compares Haywood‘s use of male models in Fantomina with Lennox‘s in The Female Quixote.375 The final chapter of Richard Barney‘s Plots of Enlightenment evaluates the connection between

The Female Quixote and Betsy Thoughtless, primarily through their respective ―Dreams of Feminine Empire.‖ For Barney, the signal difference of the two texts lies with

Arabella‘s (the quixotic heroine of the title) reliance on masculine educators to correct and inform her behavior, while Betsy ―benefits from the sustained efforts of a female mentor, Lady Trusty, who, while absent for occasionally long periods of time, is still able to administer a less presumptuous and more amicable form of supervision.‖376 Of course, much of Lady Trusty‘s advice, particularly about marriage, comes more or less directly from conduct manuals like that of George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, and does not prove very useful. Both Arabella and Betsy thus struggle not only to learn from others, but also to learn from their own errors of judgment, and this inability to reflect on past behavior thwarts their attempts to govern others (male suitors) or themselves. In the precarious balance of introspection and inadvertency, self-government and externalized control, these texts revise standards of conduct and the limits of ―proper‖ female behavior. Janet

Todd suggests that Lennox in fact echoes constraining conduct books and promotes ―self-

375Catherine A. Craft, ―Reworking Male Models: Aphra Behn's Fair Vow-Breaker, Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, and Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote,‖ The Modern Language Review, 1991 Oct; 86 (4): 821-38. 376Richard Barney, Plots of Enlightenment. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 287. 181 sacrifice‖ and ―constraint,‖377 while Sharon Smith Palo argues that Lennox‘s representation of romance-reading critiques the conduct-book ideal ―to explore the potential of female education‖ and ―to completely reshape women's role within society, particularly within the public sphere.‖378 Betsy Thoughtless, as I have shown, uses the educationalist strategies to develop a different kind of education for women than conduct books generally allow, one based on the value of female self-hood. In this respect, perhaps, Haywood‘s work may seem, as it does to Barney, ―more a victory than a capitulation,‖379 but it is clear that both Lennox and Haywood responded to the same social and educational contexts and, potentially, to one another.

Scott‘s Millenium Hall, published in 1762 (the same year as Émile), also addresses the problems of frivolous education and methods of meritorious self- possession. The utopian fantasy of a female-centered society closely resembles Astell‘s religious retirement, where a woman would not ―be inveigled and impos‘d on.‖380 The female directorship of Millenium Hall and its emphasis on the power of choice for its inmates reintroduces the concept of female advocacy. Gary Kelly claims that Scott

―synthesizes‖ the arguments of Makin and Astell, using them to outline ―a program to reform economic, social, and cultural relations.‖381 He calls Millenium Hall ―the fullest literary expression of the first wave of ‗bluestocking‘ feminism,‖ exploring how

―representatives of one set of the oppressed—women—have reformed this system to

377 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800 (London: Virago, 1989), 160. 378 Sharon Smith Palo. ―The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study: Romance and Women's Learning in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote.‖ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18: 2 (Winter 2005-6), 203-228, 204. 379 Barney, 299. 380 Mary Astell. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. Part I and Part II. 4th ed. (London: J.R. for R. Wilkin at the King's Head in St. Paul's Churchyard, 1697. 1697 [1701]), 90. 381 Gary Kelly ―Sarah Scott, Bluestocking Feminism, and Millenium Hall,‖ A Description of Millenium Hall. (Petersborough, Ont.:Broadview Press, 2001), 15, 26. 182 provide properly for the dispossessed and powerless.‖382 Such a claim may be warranted, both by the text and by Scott‘s life. She was the sister of Elizabeth Montague, who

―presided over‖ an elite and literary Bluestocking assembly in London, and was herself a member of a female community at Bath composed of less prominent figures (though

Sarah Fielding, sister of Henry Fielding, occasionally made one of their number).383

Given the moral tenor of Scott‘s life and her endeavors towards social reform, it is perhaps not surprising that, unlike Lennox, Scott is compared more often to Astell than to

Haywood—though Paula A. Backsheider claims Haywood laid ―the foundation‖ for

Millenium Hall.384 An examination of Millenium Hall‘s inset narratives does reveal a thematic and rhetorical similarity both to the stories in The Female Spectator and the various scenes of Betsy Thoughtless. The story of Lady Sheerness, for instance, demonstrates the folly of an education in ―external accomplishments‖ which leave the

―understanding and principles […] to the imperfections of nature corrupted by custom.‖385 Lady Sheerness, like Betsy Thoughtless‟s Lady Mellasin, is a ―victim of dissipation,‖ and through a lack of introspection is ―carried full sail down the stream of folly‖ (MH 173). Also, as in Betsy Thoughtless, Lady Sheerness‘s lack of moral guidance nearly ruins her young charge, Lady Mary. Mary must, therefore, learn self-government in part by defining herself against a negative example who pays the full price for female folly. A second theme developed in Millenium Hall concerns the plight of unhappily married women and the illusion of power bestowed by courtship rituals. Like Betsy, Miss

382 Ibid, 11, 28. 383 Ibid., 194-195. 384 Paula A. Backsheider ―The Story of Eliza Haywood‘s Novels: Caveats and Questions.‖ IN The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Works. Eds. Kristen T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio. (University Press of Kentucky, 2000) 40.. 385 Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall. Ed. Gary Kelly. (Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), 173. Hereafter cited in the text as (MH p). 183

Melvyn (another inmate of the Hall) is coerced by her family into an ―unhappy union‖

(MH 130). All the ―softness‖ recommended by conduct literature as the means of securing an errant husband proves useless. Miss Melvyn‘s husband Mr. Morgan—with a spitefulness not unlike that of Betsy‘s Mr. Munden—explains ―were I inclined to grant your request, you could not have found a better means of preventing it‖ than by passionate tears (MH 130). Mr. Morgan shares a number of other similarities with Mr.

Munden, from his ―parcimony [sic]‖ (MH 155) to the ―littleness‖ of his mind (MH 130).

Though claiming to admire Miss Melvyn‘s ―eloquence prodigiously‖ during their courtship, Mr. Morgan becomes a tyrant in marriage and despises her knowledge—even as Mr. Munden ―kneels to conquer‖ by submitting to Betsy only to later ―impose laws‖

(BT 256). The relief gained by both women through the passing of their spouses reveals not only the infelicity of tyrant husbands, but also the shame of yoking a witty and intelligent woman to a low and narrow-minded man. Betsy—as the widowed Mrs.

Munden—learns to honor herself through self-government and reflection; the widowed

Mrs. Morgan turns her experience into the seedbed for the Millenium Hall community, a place of ―religious retirement‖ and education for young women.

While the moral injunctions delivered by Scott differ in tone from the discourse of human rights enjoined by Haywood, the two texts remain thematically consistent.

However, neither Scott‘s nor Lennox‘s texts are as easily compared with Betsy

Thoughtless as is Frances Burney‘s Evelina. Appearing more than a decade after

Millenium Hall, Burney‘s novel details a young woman‘s entrance into the world of flatterers, rakes and inappropriate guardians. Though Evelina is more socially elevated than the bourgeois Betsy, her story similarly takes place in the highly ―public‖ world of

184

London, and the narrative content so effectively parallels the plot of Betsy Thoughtless that for many years it was considered the primary model.386 These notable similarities,

Burney‘s ties to the second generation of bluestockings, and Mary Wollstonecraft‘s familiarity with Burney‘s fiction, make her work the most evident bridge between rhetorical strategies at mid-century and the polemics of the 1790s.

The Inadvertent “Paragon”: Evelina and the Rhetoric of Deflection

John Dunlop‘s 1814 The History of Fiction seems the first text to critically elaborate upon the relationship between Betsy Thoughtless and Evelina, an assessment that held considerable sway for over a hundred years. As late as 1977, Sharon

Footerman‘s brief note on additional sources for Evelina had to contend against the

―tradition‖ of coupling the texts—though current scholarship has, if not entirely denied, at least down-played the association.387 More recent scholars such as Margaret Doody

(1994), Tamara Weets (2002) and Martha Koehler (2005) compare Burney to Samuel

Richardson. Koehler, for example, considers Evelina a recasting of Richardson‘s

Clarissa, a ―reaction against [Richardson‘s] textual imposition of a negative, gendered self-image on the female reader.‖ 388 Evelina does seem to be a Richardsonian paragon at times, innocent and uncorrupted by her new surroundings. Moreover, the text as a whole is a first-person account of her private reflections and letters, and so she cannot be considered ―thoughtless‖ in the same sense as the un-reflecting Betsy. Yet, like Betsy

Thoughtless, Evelina possesses an extraordinary capacity for ―inadvertency.‖ Her many

386 James P. Erickson, ―Evelina and Betsy Thoughtless.‖ Texas Studies in Literature and Language VI, 1964, 96-97. 387 Sharon B. Footerman ―A Neglected Source for Fanny Burney‘s Evelina,‖ Notes and Queries. 24:1, February 1977. 388 Koehler, Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney and Loclos. (Martha J. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005) 9. 185 social faux pas, her ―accidental‖ verbal assaults on the foppish and vain, and her adventures among dark walks with prostitutes and rakes are rendered excusable not only because they are unintentional, but because of the very virtue of her naivety and innocence. Evelina claims to be ―too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct [herself] with propriety in this town,‖ a statement that resonates not only with the warnings of Lady

Trusty to Betsy about the world‘s ―many snares‖ and ―designing persons‖ (BT 37), but also with Galesia‘s complicated defense of her intellect against the malicious ―Beau

World‖ in Jane Barker‘s Patch-Work Screen (PWS 55). All three texts essentially re- employ Judith Drake‘s strategy of deflection: the world, ―too full of Craft, Malice and

Violence,‖ requires a circumspection achieved in part through the fumblings of experiential education (EDFS 100). By being the (innocent and moral) narrator of her own text, Evelina establishes an ethos not unlike Pamela‘s, while synthesizing the complex covert strategies of inadvertent education and indirect critique present in Betsy

Thoughtless. The effect of this ―inadvertent paragon‘s‖ deflective rhetoric is to excuse the heroine of even the most egregious errors of behavior and judgment, turning what in

Betsy Thoughtless are dangerous and potentially ruinous situations into opportunities to critique society, while yet remaining part of it. An inside, rather than an outside perspective, Evelina reintroduces the social commentary of the polemic from the perspective of the domestic paragon.

Evelina is not a true orphan like Betsy Thoughtless, but rather the unacknowledged daughter of Sir John Belmont. Her similar parentless situation ensures, however, that she is looked after by a succession of guardians, from the ―good man‖ Mr.

Villars to the Melasin-like Madame Duval. Also similar to Betsy‘s story, Evelina‘s

186 adventures begin when she leaves the country for the city. London offers a continuous round of entertainment, but though she is ―quite a little rustic, and knows nothing of the world,‖ Evelina is equipped with nearly as much wit as Betsy, and makes free with it in her judgment of those around her.389 Though delivered generally in her private reflections rather than in public, her ―sharp eye‖ for ―absurdity‖ is revealed through comic scenes comparing her own rustic sense to the thoughtlessness exhibited by often ridiculous and usually blameworthy members of high society.390 As Evelina‘s mistakes become more dangerous to her virtue and reputation, however, Burney‘s use of deflection as the dispersal of blame intensifies. As in Betsy Thoughtless or the inset narratives of

Millenium Hall, the catalogue of scapegoats includes a (potentially) fallen and

(unquestionably) improper female figure: Madame Duval, Evelina‘s natural grandmother.

As with Lady Mellasin or Lady Sheerness, Madame Duval is represented as an appalling guardian and inappropriate female model. Evelina‘s greatest errors of judgment occur while in her care, so that some of the blame naturally devolves onto Duval‘s poor stewardship. Moreover, by comparison to the ignorant vulgarity of Madame Duval and her relatives, Evelina appears not only a paragon of virtue but also of intelligence and social etiquette. As with Betsy‘s malicious husband or thoughtless brothers, the ―little minded‖ characters surrounding Evelina vindicate her comparative sense. Thus, though

Evelina‘s inadvertency nearly delivers her into the hands of ―designing‖ men on repeated occasions (E 99-100), reproach is rendered innocuous first by Evelina‘s innocence and

389 Frances Burney, Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady‟s Entrance into the World. Ed. Edward Bloom. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21. Hereafter cited in the text as (E p). 390 Vivan Jones, ―Introduction.‖ Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady‟s Entrance into the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.., xviii 187 second by the behavior of those who ought, by right, to protect and provide for her.391

Madame Duval‘s own inglorious adventures, in which she (rather than Evelina) suffers humiliation and shame, further disperses the blame from the heroine.392 The ―artlessness of [Evelina‘s] nature, and the simplicity of [her] education‖ thus excuse the heroine as unfit for—but also innocent of—―the thorny paths of the great and busy world‖ (E 117).

The greatest divergence of Evelina from Betsy Thoughtless might be the heroine‘s willingness to withdraw from the ―busy world,‖ and to excuse herself from making her own defense while in it. However, this difference in plot masks rhetorical similarity.

Evelina‟s social critic may be compared once more to Drake‘s definition of practiced prudence and positive dissimulation: ―the hiding, or disguising, our secret Thoughts or

Inclinations under another Appearance,‖ a kind of performance that may have been as familiar to Burney, also a playwright, as it was to Haywood (EDFS 100).393 Because

Evelina has been unacknowledged by her father and raised as the ward of a country vicar, she is considered ―a kind of toad-eater‖—an impoverished companion to the wealthy and well-bred (E 294). She is therefore advised ―to pay [her] court‖ to those who she clearly disrespects, and though her private reflections might be disdainful, her social performance must be tactful, if not directly artful (E 294). As a paragon, Evelina is excused for her behavior only when she is defending her virtue—she is not permitted to

391 Madame Duval, Captain Mirvan, the Branghtons—or even Sir Clement Willoughby, who offers protection as one known to the family (though under false pretenses). 392 Deceived by Captain Mirvan, Madame Duval is attacked by (fictitious) robbers and cast into a ditch. A ―forlorn‖ and miserable figure, her ―head-dress had fallen off; her linen was torn; her negligee had not a pin left in it; her petticoats she was obliged to hold on; and her shoes were perpetually slipping off‖ (E 150). She bears every appearance of a woman ruined, her torn clothing and discomposure fitting symbols of sexual violence. Despite the narrative proximity of Evelina‘s own narrow escape, however, even she finds the situation laughable, and the incident is passed off as an ill-mannered jest (E 152). 393 I refer here once more to Emily Hodgson Anderson and the practice ―self-conscious performance‖ wherein women act ―roles that they have independently conceived for themselves.‖ See Anderson, ―Performing,‖ 1. 188 defend her rights except to bemoan their loss in private, reflective writing. The plot necessitates the introduction of a final guardian figure, Mrs. Selwyn, who may ―speak‖ those things which Evelina cannot (E 313). In this way, Burney effects the ―emplotment‖ of rhetorical strategies, turning an educated woman, ―masculine‖ in her understanding, into a female advocate who doubles as a scapegoat, taking the blame for actions too bold to be proper (E 296). Mrs. Selwyn both awes and intimidates the men; ―she has wit […] and more understanding than half her sex put together; but she keeps alive a perpetual expectation of satire, that spreads a general uneasiness‖ (E 343). Throughout the latter portion of the narrative, Selwyn artfully pits one gentleman against another, and like

Betsy Thoughtless, excels at ―raillery.‖ She seems, in fact, almost a representative of that earlier period, and of Haywood‘s emphasis on wit and vivacity. Selwyn‘s voice replaces

Evelina‘s in the scenes requiring witty evisceration of the higher (rather than the lower) classes, and it is she who instigates and brings to fruition the final confrontation with

Evelina‘s father, Belmont. Meanwhile, this bold advocate‘s transgression of social and gender boundaries is continually lamented by Evelina, even though Selwyn‘s daring assertions are indispensable to Evelina‘s future happiness. Though benefitting from Mrs.

Selwyn‘s ironic ministrations and agreeing with her sentiments, Evelina is rendered comparatively silent, proper and humble, her ―perfections‖ made more manifest by the

―faults‖ of her emboldened ally (E 343). The creation of a substitute mouthpiece for

Evelina returns us to the polemical outcry of women such as Astell or Drake, while nonetheless condemning the ―unfeminine‖ practice of rhetoric and argument in the person of Mrs. Selwyn. Like Haywood, Burney advocates for women‘s rights and an education in experience, using the strategies of deflection and an innovative employment

189 of the scapegoat/advocate to criticize custom—even while her heroine is absorbed into it.

Evelina moves from a position outside high society to a position inside it, without losing her witty appreciation for its vanity, its absurdity and the gendered implications of its customs. Burney‘s novel thus retells Betsy‘s story from the paragon‘s perspective, incorporating the revision of the Richardsonian heroine and of arguments for the liberated female intellect.

As this brief assessment of Burney‘s novel suggests, the continual development and revision of rhetorical strategies occupied women novelists to the end of the eighteenth century. Whether or not Burney (or Lennox, or Scott) directly or consciously reworked Astell and the educationalists tells only part of the story—educationalist strategies were not static formulas; they continued to evolve as they were re-employed by fiction writers. The claim by Sylvia Harkstack Myers and others that the bluestockings were disconnected from earlier ―feminists‖ like Astell largely results, therefore, from the genre-focus of rhetorical reclamation. Burney, as a second-generation bluestocking, is firmly anchored in the literary and social context of the latter eighteenth century.

Moreover, Evelina continues to be the only eighteenth-century fiction ―written by a woman‖ to remain ―consistently in print.‖394 A new edition appeared in 1794, and it is likely, considering Dunlop‘s 1818 account, that readers of these latter editions recognized

Evelina as a re-working of Betsy Thoughtless. It was also, however, a continued progression of the proto-feminist rhetorical strategies of the earlier-century educationalists. Though Burney may have been familiar with Haywood—even as

394 Thompson, Helen. Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 17. 190

Wollstonecraft may have been familiar with Burney—395 it is not necessary to conjecture a relationship between authors to suggest a connection between educationalist strategies and latter-century polemics. The proto-feminist rhetoric developed between 1690 and

1790 for the use of upper-middle class female advocates became part of that class‘s cultural capital, an indirect but potentially pervasive influence on later writers. Thus, by widening the lens of rhetorical reclamation to include fiction writers (of the early and latter eighteenth century), we rediscover the female legacy of rhetorical innovation while embracing the significant role that narrative fiction played in the development of later educationalist theory. Furthermore, by doing so, the purported historical ―gap‖ between

Astell and Wollstonecraft becomes an intersection. The ―middle space‖ from 1690 to

1790, rather than offering nothing new, witnessed the complex (re)construction of pedagogical rhetoric and concurrent proto-feminist arguments for female mental autonomy.

A Final Note:

In the first chapter of this study, I briefly mention Jamie Barlowe‘s critique of the critical ambivalence with which critics approach Wollstonecraft‘s Mary, A Fiction (1788).

Before concluding, I would like to return once more to her analysis of Wollstonecraft‘s contribution to ―Feminist Dialogics.‖396 ―Too often,‖ Barlowe claims, ―critics have argued that Wollstonecraft‘s personal life betrayed her feminist positions.‖397 She cites

Mary Poovey, who considers Wollstonecraft a ―hostage…to the very categories she was

395 Claudia Johnson remarks that Wollstonecraft and Burney ―demonstrably read and pondered‖ each other‘s texts. Wollstonecraft also served as Analytical Reviewer for Burney‘s 1796 Camilla: or, a Picture of Youth. Claudia Johnson. Equivocal Beings. Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s-- Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14. 396 Jamie Barlowe, "Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics." In Reclaiming Rhetorica. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). 397 Ibid., 109. 191 trying to escape,‖ and Jennifer Lorch, whose desire to ―disentangle‖ Wollstonecraft‘s political writing, career and life resonates with many feminist projects to assess her relevance.398 These genre-specific studies and narrow conceptual categories for feminism represent Mary as ―merely sentimental‖ rather than as ―the initial working out of

Wollstonecraft‘s feminist project.‖399 Considered less ―radical‖ than the unfinished

Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798), Mary seems to necessitate a carving up of

Wollstonecraft‘s career between her early and late materials. I would compare this categorical exclusion to the critical separation of Haywood‘s amatory and didactic works; despite apparent ―shifts‖ in genre and ideological perspective, both Haywood and

Wollstonecraft display consistent resistance to the limits placed on women‘s abilities and possibilities. This rhetoric of female interiority and intellectual freedom may be glimpsed in the last lines of Mary in which, like the purposeful ladies of Astell‘s proposed community, but also like the unhappily married Mrs. Munden of Betsy Thoughtless, the heroine ―visited the sick, supported the old, and educated the young.‖400 Such occupations ―engrossed her mind,‖ and yet, even Mary has time for introspection and veiled social critique: ―in moments of solitary sadness, a gleam of joy would dart across her mind—She thought she was hastening to that world where there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage.‖401 This project has sought to deconstruct some of the rigid binaries (feminist/non-feminist, public/private) that persist in portraying women writers as isolated feminists instead of participants in a long tradition of female advocacy. Rather than finding the late eighteenth century ―a puzzling moment full of anomalies and

398 Qtd. In Ibid., 119. 399 Ibid., 125. 400 Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary, a fiction. (London, 1788), 186. 401 Ibid., 187. 192 paradoxes,‖ or seeing in this latter period the first ―cross-fertilization of fiction with nonfictional genres,‖402 we can trace through it an uninterrupted arc of female innovation.

This organic process continued throughout the eighteenth century and ultimately into the nineteenth, as later writers not only defined themselves against limiting concepts of femininity and female interiority, but also revisited and revised the polemical strategies of their foremothers for use in new fictional contexts.

402 Sotiropoulos, Early Feminists, 220, 221. Sotiropoulos rightly considers the influence of fiction on nonfiction polemics and vice-versa, but the focus of her work limits the claim to late-century writers. She uses her claims to point towards a revaluation of the female Bildungsroman of the early nineteenth century. 193

APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGY

The following chronology, while not exhaustive, provides a sense of rhetorical and pedagogical context for the period between the last seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Earlier works—those whose popularity or primacy suggests a lasting influence on the later period—are also included.

1511 Desiderius Erasmus, De ratione studii ac legend interpretandique actors liber (on the basics of educational processes) 1513 William Lily Grammar 1516 Desiderius Erasmus, Education of a Christian Prince orig. Institutio Principis Christiani 1523 Juan Luis Vives Instruction of a Christian Maid (Orig. De Institutione Christianae Femina) and Satellitium 1524 Desiderius Erasmus, The Abbot and the Learned Lady in Coloquia familiaria, Juan Lois Vives Introduction to wisdom (Orig. Introductio ad sapientiam) 1529 Desiderius Erasmus, De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamation (on the basics of educational processes) 1532 Plutarch [trans. Thomas Eliot Knyght], The education or bringinge vp of children 1537 Urbanus Rhegius, A co[m]parison betwene the olde learnynge [and] the newe [translated out of latin in Englysh by Wylliam Turner] 1575 Michel de Montaigne Essays 1570 Roger Ascham The Schoolmaster 1579 Thomas Salter, A mirrhor mete for all mothers, matrones, and maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie no lesse profitable and pleasant, then necessarie to bee read and practiced 1581 Richard Mulcaster Positions 1588 William Kempe, The education of children in learning declared by the dignitie, vtilitie, and method thereof. Meete to be knowne, and practised aswell of parents as schoolmaisters 1589 George Puttenham The Arte of English Poesie 1597 Francis Bacon, ―Of Custom and Education.‖ The Essayes of Covnsels Civill and Morall –rewritten several times with new additions 1603 James I, King of England, Basilikon doron. Or His Maiesties instructions to his dearest sonne, Henrie the prince 1605 Francis Bacon Advancement of Learning 1607 James Cleland, Hereo Paideia, or the Institution of a Young Noble Man 1612 William Martyn, Youths Instruction [to his son] 1622 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman, Marie le Jars de Gournay Égalité des homes et des femmes 1626 Marie le Jars de Gournay, Grief des Dames 1630 Richard Brathwaite The English Gentleman 1631 ------The English Gentlewoman 1637 Thomas Hobbes, A briefe of the art of rhetorique

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1642 John Amos Comenius A Reformation of Schools 1644 John Milton Of Education, René Descartes, Les Principes de la philosophie

Late 17th and 18th Century Pedagogical Works (primarily for women) 1651 John Dury, The Reformed School: and the Reformed Librarie-keeper, Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathon 1655 Margaret Cavendish The Philosophical and Physical Opinions 1657 Gent, I. B. Heroick Education, or Choice Maxims and Instruction 1659 Anne Marie van Schurman, English Trans. of The Learned Maid, John Amos Comenius, English Trans. of Great Didactic (by Charles Hoole—originally composed in Bohemian between 1628 and 1632) 1664 Robert Codrington, Youths Behavior: or Decency in Conversation Amongst Women, second edition., Descartes, René. Treatise of Man 1670 John Eachard The Grounds and Occasions of the Comtempt of the Clergy 1671 Edward Chamderlayne, An Academy or College: wherein Young Ladies and Gentlewomen… [a proposal] 1672 Owen Stockton, A Treatise of Family Education 1673 Bathsua Makin An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, Obadiah Walker Of Education, Hannah Woolley The Gentlewoman‟s Companion, Francois Poullain de la Barre, De l'Egalite des deux Sexes, Richard Allestree The Ladies Calling 1678 Jean Gailhard The Compleat Gentleman 1685 Claude Fleury Traité dur le choix et la method des études 1687 Francois Fénelon Instructions for the Education of a Daughter (English version 1707) 1688 Stephen Penton The Guardian‟s Instructor, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax Lady‟s New Years Gift, or Advice to a Daughter 1690 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1692 John Aubrey An Idea of Education 1693 John Locke Some Thoughts on Education 1694 Mary Astell A Serious Proposal to the Ladies 1696 Judith Drake An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex, Damaris Masham Discourse Concerning the Love of God 1697 Mary Astell A Serious Proposal to the Ladies part 2, Daniel Defoe ―An Academy for Women‖ in An Essay upon Projects 1700 Mary Astell Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion‟s by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine‟s Case; Which Is Also Consider‟d 1701 Lady Mary Chudleigh The Ladies Defense 1705 Damaris Masham Occasional Thoughts, Mary Astell The Christian Religion. As Profess‟d by a Daughter of the Church of England 1707 Francois Fénelon Instructions for the Education of a Daughter (pub. In France, 1687) 1710 Lady Mary Chudleigh Essays on Several Subjects

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1714 Delariverier Manely History of Rivella, Bernard Mandeville Fable of the Bees 1715 Daniel Defoe The Family Instructor 1719 Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe, Eliza Haywood Love in Excess (fin. 1720) 1720 John Clarke An Essay upon the Education of Youth 1721 Penelope Aubin The Life of Madam de Beaumount,a French Lady 1722 Eliza Haywood British Recluse, Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders 1723 Jane Barker A Patchwork Screen for the Ladies 1724 Mary Davys Reformed Coquet, Daniel Defoe Roxana 1726 Jonathon Swift Gulliver‟s Travels 1732 The Chevalier Ramsay A Plan of Education for a Young Prince 1727 Mary Davys Accomplished Rake 1735 Sarah Chapone Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives, Alexander Pope ‗Epistle to a Lady. Of the Characters of Women.‘, Climene ―The Female Sex not the Weakest‖ 1736 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Nonesense of Common Sense 1739 Mary Collier Woman‟s Labour, Elizabeth Carter Sir Isaac Newton's Philosphy Explain'd for the Use of the Ladies [Translated from the Italian], ―Sophia‘s‖ Woman not Inferior to Man 1740 Samuel Richardson Pamela p1, Wetenhall Wilkes Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady 1741 Samuel Richardson Pamela p2, Isaac Watts The Improvement of the Mind; or, A Supplement to the Art of Logick, Eliza Haywood Anti- Pamela; or Feign‟d Innocence Detected 1742 Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews 1743 Abbé d‘Ancourt The Female Preceptor, Mary Cooper The Child‟s New Plaything (spellingbook) 1744 Edward Moore Fables for the Female Sex, Sarah Fielding Adventures of David Simple 1747 Samuel Richardson Clarissa (fin. 48) 1748 David Hume An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Thomas Seward ―The Female Right to Literature, in a Letter to a Young Lady, from Florence‖, William Cadogan An Essay upon Nursing, and the Management of Children, from Birth to Three Years of Age 1749 Henry Fielding Tom Jones, Sarah Fielding The Governess 1750 Samuel Johnson The Rambler (runs to 52) 1751 Eliza Haywood Miss Betsy Thoughtless, Henry Fielding Amelia 1752 Charlotte Lennox The Female Quixote, George Ballard Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain, who have been celebrated… 1753 Jane Collier Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting James Nelson An Essay on the Government of Children, Richardson Sir Charles Grandison 1754 John Duncombe Feminiad 1755 Samuel Johnson Dictionary, Thomas Armory Memoirs of Several

196

Ladies Francis Hutcheson ―Concerning the Moral Sense‖ (in A System of Moral Philosophy) 1756 Eliza Haywood The Wife and The Husband (conduct material) 1759 Samuel Johnson Rassalas, Laurence Sterne Tristram Shandy (continued through 1767), Voltair Candide Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiments 1761 Sarah Pennington, An Unfortunate Mother‟s Advice to Her Absent Daughters, Jean-Jacque Rousseau La Nouvelle Héloïos 1762 Sarah Robinson Millennium Hall, Jean-Jacque Rousseau Contrat Social, Emile Frances Sheridan Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph 1764 Anon, Progress of the Female Mind 1765 The Cries of London; or Child‟s Moral Instructor, John Gottlob Kruger An Essay on the Education of Children 1766 Oliver Goldsmith Vicar of Wakefield 1768 Laurence Sterne Sentimental Journey 1772 J. Hamilton Moore (ed) The Young Gentleman and Ladies Monitor 1773 Hester Chapone Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, William Russell‘s translation of M. Thomas‘s Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages 1774 Earl of Chesterfield Letters to his Son, John Gregory Father‟s Legacy to His Daughters, Sarah Scott Female Advocate 1775 James Fordyce Sermons to Young Women, Thomas Percival A Father‟s Instructions to his Children 1777 Anna Laetitia Barbauld Hyms in Prose for Children 1778 Francis Burney Evelina, Ann Penny (?) An Invocation to the Genius of Great Britain, Anna Laetitia Barbauld Lessons for Children Joseph Priestly Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education 1779 Hannah More Fatal Falsehood, William Alexander History of Women Mme. De Miremont Traité de l‟éducation des femmes (seven volumes, through 1789) 1782 Frances Burney Cecelia 1785 Dialogues Concerning Ladies (see Small Change for more), Lady Elenor Fenn The Art of Teaching in Sport 1786 Sarah Trimmer Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children 1787 Mary Wollstonecraft Thoughts on the Education of Daughters 1788 Mary Wiseman A Letter from a Ladt to her Daughter, on the Manner of Passing Sunday Rationally and Agreeably 1790 Catherine Macaulay Letters on Education 1791 Elizabeth Inchbald A Simple Story, Arnold The Arithmetical Preceptor 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Women, Clara Reeve Plans of Education 1793 Laetitia Matilda Hawkins Letters on the Female Mind, Jane West Advantages of Education John Burton Lectures on Female Education and Manners

197

1794 William Godwin Caleb Williams, Ann Radcliffe Mysteries of Udolpho, Thomas Beddoes, A Guide for Self-Preservation, and Parental Affection 1795 Maria Edgeworth Letters for Literary Ladies, Hannah More Cheap Repository Tracts (complete in 98), Priscilla Wakefield Mental Improvements 1796 Elizabeth Inchbald Nature and Art, Frances Burney Camilla, Mary Hays Memoir of Emma Courtney 1797 Andrew Bell An Experiment in Education, Made at the Asylum of Madras, Thomas Gibson An Inquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, William Godwin The Enquirer; Reflections on Education, Maners, and Literature 1798 Maria Edgeworth Practical Education, Mary Hays Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on behalf of Women, Richard Polwhele The Unsex‟d Females, Priscilla Wakefield Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex, Mary Wollstonecraft Wrongs of Woman, Anonymous The Female Ægis; or, the Duties of Women from Childhood to Old Age 1799 Hannah More Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, Mary Ann Radcliffe Female Advocate, Mary Robinson Letter to the Women of England, Anne Frances Randall Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination

198

APPENDIX B: Figures 1-4

FIGURE 1

*Extraction of child from uterus with forceps, Tab. XVI. Smellie, William. A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery, with a view to illustrate a treatise on that subject, and collection of cases. London: [s.n], 1754. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

199

FIGURE 2

*Tab IV: ―Foetus in utero‖ Hunter, William. The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures, by William Hunter, physician extraordinary to the Queen, professor of anatomy in the Royal Academy, and Fellow of the Royal and Antiquarian Societies. Birmingham: By John Baskerville, Sold in London by S. Baker and G. Leigh, in York-Street; T. Cadell in the Strand; D. Wilson and G. Nicol, opposite York-Buildings; and J. Murray, in Fleet-Street, 1774. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

200

FIGURE 3

*Tab. XVI. Smellie, William. A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery, : with a view to illustrate a treatise on that subject, and collection of cases. London: [s.n], 1754. Courtesy of Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections.

FIGURE 4 1690s 1740s

Rhetoric (male pedagogy, Conduct Literature Rhetoric perspicuity, Locke) (masculine, external control)

Rhetoric (masculine, classical)

Rhetoric (female Conduct/Didactic Rhetoric educationalist, polemics) (female, self-control)

*Limited, of course, by false boundaries (I have already demonstrated that both male and female authors borrowed from and were influenced by one another), the model nevertheless allows us to see the continuation of educationalists‘ revisionist strategies into the eighteenth century.

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REFERENCES

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