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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/50247 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. The Fuzzy Theory and Women Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century By Francesca Maria Scott A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies September 2011 Contents Page List of illustrations……………………………………………………………………..i Dedication……………………………………………………………………………..ii Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………...iii Declaration……………………………………………………………………………iv Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1: ‘The Unsex’d Females’: the Law of the Excluded Middle, Fuzzy Set Theory and the Heterosexual Matrix…………………………………………………17 Chapter 2: ‘From myself another self I turned’: The Representation of Queen Elizabeth by Unmarried Women Writers…………………………………………….56 Chapter 3: A Fuzzy Debate: Man-Midwives, Old Women, Women Writers and the Case of Nature verses Medicine…………………………………………………….126 Chapter 4: ‘To Bruise the Serpent’s Head’: Hannah More, Joanna Southcott and New Eve…………………………………………………………………………………..193 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..258 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...270 i List of Illustrations Figure 1: Venn Diagram……………………………………………………………..25 Figure 2: Venn Diagram signifying gender………………………………………….25 Figure 3: Engraving taken from Philip Thicknesse’s Man-Midwifery Analyzed; or the Tendency of that Indecent and Unnecessary Practice Detected and Exposed (1764). Artist unknown. Courtesy of Chawton House Library)……………………………142 Figure 4: ‘The Imposter, or, the Obstetric Dispute’, by George Cruikshank (London: T. Tegg, 1814) NLM <http://ihm.hlm.nih>………………………………………...239 ii Dedication To my mother Angela and my father Philip, To whom I owe everything. And to Richard, My friend, my love, my home. iii Acknowledgements I have been overwhelmed by the support I have received throughout my PhD, and while it is impossible to thank everyone, I would like to single out a few of those who have been particularly helpful. I am in awe of my supervisor, Jackie Labbe, an inspirational academic. She has guided me by her example, with exceptional intuition, and with unending patience and kindness. I am very grateful for everything she has given me, and her advice and esteem will remain with me for the rest of my life. My loving thanks must also go to my wonderful family. My parents, Angela and Philip, have supported me throughout with their wisdom and generosity. My mother, especially, has followed my every step with unparalleled enthusiasm and with such loving care, while my father has given everything he has to help me succeed. My brothers Nicholas and Timothy have also helped in their unique ways, bringing laughter and love when times were hard. I feel blessed to have such a creative and dynamic family around me. Thanks are also due to Richard, my fiancé, whom I met at the start of this journey and who has seen me through to the end with love, compassion and lots of laughter. His commitment and ambition continues to be an inspiration, and will, I believe, lead to great success. I am also grateful to Richard for bringing his family into my life. Sharon, Daryl, Lucy and Katie have welcomed me into their family with such kindness, and their company has been a welcome relief and a continual source of pleasure over the last three years. My PhD has been funded by a Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship, and I am indebted to those who continue to sponsor the scheme. I was also fortunate enough to be awarded a two-month fellowship at Chawton House Library, where I wrote my third chapter. The calm and studious atmosphere of Chawton initiated a turning point in my thesis, and I am very grateful for the hospitality and support of the staff. It was here, too, that I was lucky enough to meet several brilliant academics, Suzan van Dijk, Melissa Sodeman, and Susan Allen Ford, who provided me with wisdom and support, and continue to offer assistance. A number of academics from Warwick have also helped during the last three years, either with their encouragement or with advice. Emma Mason has provided some much needed insight into the religious atmosphere of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while Adam Slavny has guided and tested the logic. Gill Frith, my mentor, Hilary Marland, and Emma Francis have often offered friendly advice both in this and in other areas of my academic development, and the administration staff in the English department— including Cheryl Cave, Heather Pilbin, Caroline Griffin, Julia Gretton, Sally Wallace and Tracie Williams— have also often gone above and beyond the call of duty with their kind assistance. Special thanks must go to a number of friends who have stuck by me throughout the last few years. Beth McCarthy, Emma Clarke, Nivene Raafat have been with me since my degree at the University of Leeds, and have reminded me why good friends are irreplaceable. The friends I have made at Warwick— amongst them, Kate Scarth, Ji Won Chung, Charlotte Mathieson and Pete Kirwan— have made these last three years truly memorable. iv Declaration This thesis is my own work; no part of it has been published elsewhere or submitted for a degree at another university. v Thesis Abstract ‘Fuzzy Theory and Women Writers in the Late Eighteenth Century’ contends that women writers require more careful critical treatment, and suggests that critics are still bound by the outdated logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle. This law, first formulated by Aristotle, and developed by Gottfried Leibniz in the early eighteenth century, indicates that where there are two contradictory prepositions, one must be true and the other false; a female writer must, therefore, either be feminine or masculine, conservative or radical. The twentieth century concept of Fuzzy logic, however, helped mathematicians and engineers to manage reasoning that was only approximate, rather than exact. Borrowing from this, the thesis will employ the Fuzzy Set Theory, which permits the gradual assessment of elements in a set, rather than relying on elements that are assessed in binaric terms (the principle of bivalence, or, contradiction). Put simply, the Fuzzy Set Theory does away with binaries, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and the Law of Contradiction, allowing subjects to be imprecise, and changeable. Thus, each chapter will construct a Fuzzy Set by which a variety of eighteenth century debates, with which women writers engaged, can be examined. The thesis will show that all such concepts are subjective and unstable— changeable and open to personal interpretation, and will discuss such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay, Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Hays, Lucy Aikin, Hannah More and Joanna Southcott. 1 Introduction Our old acquaintance Mrs. Barbauld turned satirist! The last thing we should have expected, and, now that we have seen her satire, the last thing that we could have desired. May we (without derogating too much from that reputation of age and gravity of which critics should be so chary) confess that we are yet young enough to have had early obligations to Mrs. Barbauld; and that it really is with no disposition to retaliate on the fair pedagogue of our former life, that on the present occasion, we have called her up to correct her exercise? But she must excuse us if we think that she has wandered from the course in which she was respectable and useful, and miserably mistaken both her powers and her duty, in exchanging the birchen for the satiric rod, and abandoning the superintendence of the ‘ovilia’ of the nursery, to wage war on the ‘reluctantes dracones’, statesmen, and warriors, whose misdoings have aroused her indignant muse. We had hoped, indeed, that the empire might have been saved without the intervention of a lady-author: we even flattered ourselves that the interests of Europe and of humanity would in some degree have swayed our public councils, without the descent of (dea ex machina) Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld in a quarto, upon the theatre where the great European tragedy is now performing. Not such, however, is her opinion; an irresistible impulse of public duty—a confident sense of commanding talents— have induced her to dash down her shagreen spectacles and her knitting needles, and to sally forth, hand in hand with her renowned compatriot, in the magnanimous resolution of saving a sinking state, by the instrumentality of a pamphlet in prose and a pamphlet in verse.1 This scathing attack delivered by the Quarterly Review in June 1812, in response to Anna Letitia Barbauld’s poem ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, outlines the angry sentiments employed by most reviewers of the last poem Barbauld published in her lifetime. As William McCarthy has noticed, the reviewer, John Wilson Crocker, was first secretary at the Admiralty, the office that ran the British Navy, which, along with the Quarterly Review itself, acted as a ‘voice of the government’.2 As McCarthy suggests, Crocker’s review must, therefore, be taken as evidence that ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, coming