Ingenuous Subjection : Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel [1 ed.] 9780812203776, 9780812238914

Citation preview

Ingenuous Subjection

Ingenuous Subjection Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel

HELEN THOMPSON

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2005 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10

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Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Helen, 1967– Ingenuous subjection : compliance and power in the eighteenth-century domestic novel / Helen Thompson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8122-3891-5 (cloth : acid-free paper) 1. English Wction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature— Great Britain—History—18th century. 3. Women and literature—Great Britain— History—18th century. 4. Domestic Wction, English—History and criticism. 5. Power (Social sciences) in literature. 6. Family in literature. 7. Women in literature. I. Title. PR858.F45T47 2005 823'.5093552—dc22 2005042299

Contents

Introduction

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Part I. Ingenuous Subjection and Feminine Political Difference 1. Boys, Girls, and Wives: Post-Patriarchal Power and the Problem of Feminine Subjection 24 2. Mushrooms, Subjects, and Women: The Hobbesian Individual and the Domestic Novel 57 3. “The Words Command and Obey”: Pamela and Domestic Modernity 87 Part II. Ingenuous Subjection and the Novel 4. Eliza Haywood’s Philosophical Career: Ingenuous Subjection and Moral Physiology 124 5. Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance: Ingenuous Subjection and Genre 152 6. Frances Sheridan’s “disingenuous girl”: Ingenuous Subjection and Epistolary Form 172 Conclusion: “Marriage has bastilled me for life”: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Domestic Novel 200 Notes

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Contents

Bibliography Index

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Perhaps it is my own childhood education, alienating and yet hard to shake, in the practice of politeness that draws me to the claustrophobic aspect of Frances Burney’s novels. My students, on the other hand, do not identify. The impalpable but stiXing force of the manners that Burney’s protagonist Evelina imposes on herself drives them crazy. Impressed by their frustration with the torment that Evelina politely endures, I asked my students to augment Burney’s epistolary novel Evelina, or, A Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) with one letter in which Evelina responds to an insult as they would wish. The following excerpts clearly show what kind of relief these readers wanted. One Evelina Wnally rebuffs her insinuating, falsely gentlemanly predator Sir Clement Willoughby: I raised my hand . . . and struck him hard across the face. He bent over double, clutching his cheek and looking up at me with confusion. “I am sorry, sir, to have resorted to such measures, but I have long endeavored to make my dislike of your advances abundantly clear, and yet you have ever continued in them,” said I. “I can only hope that this, at last, will convince you to trouble me no more.”

A soldier accosts another Evelina while she walks in a garden with her conWdante Maria: I squirmed and blushed and called out to Maria in a complete state of panic. And then the strangest thing happened . . . I can’t completely explain it, but somewhere in my being, a nerve snapped and I struck out at the soldier with my left foot. He doubled over in pain and, recovering, lurched at me again, for which he was rewarded with a swift uppercut to his jaw. “You’re nothing but a brutish, pea-brained, sniveling excuse for a man!” I cried.

I cannot resist citing one more revision. Evelina’s nameless protagonist recovers her patronymic when she Wnally confronts her father, who has

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Introduction

mistakenly raised as his daughter a nurse’s child substituted for Evelina at infancy. Her father, Sir John Belmont, is staggered with guilt by Evelina’s resemblance to the wife whom he abandoned before she died in childbirth. As she faces Sir John, this Evelina’s anger is not entirely silenced by the event of her faint: I let out an involuntary scream and fainted . . . However, a strange thing happened when my head hit the Xoor. I found that my tongue had come unhinged, and I was unable to stop the impertinent words that Xowed from my mouth. As my father backed from the room, crying “I can see her no more!,”1 I leapt up from my knees and forcibly restrained him. “Listen, John,” I proclaimed in a frightfully unfamiliar voice, “You refuse to own me as your daughter . . . And now, you inform me that you can ‘see me no more?!’ Well, sir, I implore you to take a good look, because if you do not own me as your daughter now you shall be seeing quite a bit of me in court!” I gasped and clasped my hand over my mouth. What insolence, what villainy sprung from the demonic possession that loosed my tongue! Sir John shook his head in amazement, crying, “Alas! I am not worthy to bless thee! I am not worthy to call thee daughter!”2 To which I replied: “Indeed, you most certainly are not. Do you know how difWcult this whole ‘Anville’ sham has been to maintain? Do you know how irritating it is to be unable to go to the Opera or a Wreworks exhibition without being shamelessly groped by drunken rakes or accosted by burly prostitutes? . . . So, father, in light of all this you must forgive me if I am not entirely sympathetic to your sorrow and distress at the sight of me.” I suspect my bold words may have occasioned a good deal of surprise on the part of Sir John, but happily, he has acknowledged me as his heiress.3

I Wnd these supplemental letters not only funny, gratifying, and ingenious but also moving. In rectifying the historical irritant that is Evelina’s tolerance of patriarchy, their authors presume the remedial efWcacy of the law, the capacity of Evelina’s speech acts to repel the rakes who hound her, and, Wnally, the incomprehensibility of a world in which women obey men who are indeed, Burney’s novel makes clear, pea-brained brutes. Yet these letters also acknowledge a discrepancy between their corrective imaginary and the retributive powers of the woman Burney actually represents. All of them activate her lapse into anti-patriarchal lucidity as a species of demonic possession, as a snapped nerve, banged head, unloosed tongue, or, more broadly, as the retaliatory reXex able to augment a canon of novels sadly deWcient in “bold” women. I do not cite these letters to suggest that their writers are wrong, that Evelina cannot be expected to lead the “REVOLUTION in female manners”4 whose necessity to women’s achievement of civil liberty is later urged by Mary Wollstonecraft. Quite the contrary: I cite them to suggest that our position as readers who do want Evelina to violate the norms that constrain her marks one of the most compelling historical and methodological challenges facing our ongoing feminist assessment of the

Introduction

3

eighteenth-century novel. In this capacity, what I Wnd most indicative about the “frightfully unfamiliar voice” ventriloquized by these revised Evelinas is, again, the sophistication with which each letter concedes that it implicates a historically different kind of woman: an Evelina who would, to repeat the word used by more than one of her authors, succeed in making her resistance to masculine tyranny “clear.” She behaves very differently than a late eighteenth-century Evelina whose energies seem devoted to another, equally demanding, practice: not resistance, but compliance. Of course the apparent passivity of the latter Evelina drives students crazy. They are not alone.5 In listing the generic types of “girls” afforded by a series of eighteenth-century women’s novels reprinted in the late 1980s by Pandora Press, Betty Rizzo evinces deftly ironized frustration at the limited range of action permitted them: “In the end we have four different kinds of heroines here: the masochistically long-suffering blameless girl . . . the erring girl who is destroyed . . . the girl-as-object or prize, statically desirable and ultimately won . . . and, most attractive (or solely attractive) to us, the spirited, thoughtless, ignorant, or erring girl who through adversity learns her lesson, takes her medicine, and grows up.”6 Rizzo does not explain why “we could, and should, love no other than the fourth kind of girl,”7 but my students’ letters indicate that this might be the case because the fourth girl is, at least for a time, spirited. Unlike the long-suffering blameless girl whose tolerance of the misogyny so maddeningly evoked by Burney seems explicable only as masochism, Rizzo’s last girl might brieXy animate a deWnition of freedom like that provided by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690): “Liberty is a power to act or not according as the Mind directs.”8 As a seminal representation of the agency of contractual citizens, Locke’s Essay does more than, it would seem, obviously disqualify Rizzo’s girls from the practice of liberty. For freedom is not a power that Locke’s contractarian men choose to exercise; rather, it is the capacity to act freely that deWnes these men in the Wrst place. In proposing that “it is the Man that does the Action, it is the Agent that has power, or is able to do,” Locke aims to redress the semantic impropriety entailed by the designation of powers like freedom “distinct Agents” separable from the persons who wield them: “Digestion is performed by something that is able to digest; Motion by something able to move; and Understanding by something able to understand. And in truth it would be very strange, if it should be otherwise; as strange as it would be for a Man to be free without being able to be free.”9 Lockean men who cannot be free “without being able to be free” open another vantage upon Evelina’s failure effectively to rebut her novel’s ambient insult. Just as motion presupposes something already able to move, so freedom presupposes a man

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Introduction

already able to be free. Yet Lockean daughters and wives are not necessarily able to be free, because they are implicated in the defense of masculine freedom signally framed by Locke in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689): “In private domestic affairs, in the management of estates, in the conservation of bodily health, every man may consider what suits his own conveniency . . . No man is angry with another for an error committed in sowing his land, or in marrying his daughter.”10 Under the heading of men’s “private domestic affairs,” Locke includes not only the marriage of daughters but also the government of wives; his Second Treatise of Government (1690) justiWes the provenance of the latter species of conjugal authority by arguing that since “the last Determination, i.e. the Rule, should be placed somewhere, it naturally falls to the Man’s share, as the abler and the stronger.”11 To what end might Locke’s hypothetical daughter acquire the capacity to act freely, if—unlike a “Man [who] is naturally free from subjection to any Government”12—she must, after contracting to marry, become “naturally” subject to her husband? Further below, I turn to the impasse in feminist literary methodology propelled by the effort to Wnd inside Burney’s protagonist the “distinct agent” that is a will to resist. Here, I mean to suggest that by complying, Evelina does not simply refuse to muster the freedom that my students so vigorously restore to her. In Evelina, Burney works with a construction of femininity—or, to make a critical distinction, a construction of daughters and wives—that would ratify the natural power of fathers and husbands. Yet Evelina might fail to support Locke’s derivation of conjugal “Rule” through the infelicities, precisely, of her effort to do so. Such a possibility raises two questions. The Wrst asks what qualiWes, for presentday readers, as agency at all: is the resistance lent Evelina by my students’ interpolated letters the only thing that we can appreciate as an act? The second revisits a literary-historical narrative of Enlightenment modernity that would permit us to gauge a novel’s political content only as its representation of persons who behave freely: is resistance the only thing that eighteenth-century novelists and readers could appreciate as a political act? To anticipate the answers which my book will attempt to offer, I return to Locke, who crucially restricts the domestic rule that, he claims, naturally devolves upon husbands: “But this reaching but to the things of their common Interest and Property, leaves the Wife in the full and free possession of what by Contract is her peculiar Right, and gives the Husband no more power over her Life, than she has over his. The Power of the Husband being so far from that of an absolute Monarch . . .”13 Locke divests husbands of the power that vindicates Robert Filmer’s royalist patriarchalist analogy of absolute monarchs and Adamic heads of families. Instead, post-patriarchal wives are grouped, with land and daughters,

Introduction

5

under the heading of men’s private domestic affairs. Lockean husbands govern their wives with “a Conjugal Power, not Political, the Power that every Husband hath to order the things of private Concernment in his Family, as Proprietor . . . but not a Political Power of Life and Death over her.”14 By designating wives both contractual partners and “things” subject to an exercise of private proprietorship that “suits his own coveniency,” Locke advances a formulation of masculine conjugal power that is overdetermined. Even though the marriage contract admits a wife’s “peculiar” property, she is—with the exception of her claim upon her “Life”—herself among the property which her husband claims the natural power “to order.”15 A wife’s legitimately peculiar possessions do not, therefore, effectively preclude the likeness of husbands and absolute monarchs, as Locke’s contemporary, the Tory feminist philosopher Mary Astell, argues in Some ReXections upon Marriage (1700): “What tho’ a Husband can’t deprive a Wife of Life without being responsible to the Law, he may however do what is much more grievous to a generous Mind, render Life miserable, for which she has no Redress.”16 Astell’s nominally contractual but otherwise wholly “miserable” woman lays bare the paradox characterizing an institution of political modernity in which, as Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract importantly argues, naturally free citizens exercise conjugal power over naturally subject wives. It is this contradiction, my book suggests, that the eighteenth-century domestic novel represents as a contradiction. Yet, as I hint of Evelina, the novel animates this contradiction not with angry or resistant but with “grievous” women—women miserable because they are unable “freely,”17 as Locke states of contractarian citizens, to ratify the legitimacy of the power that governs them. To anticipate how the novel applies Locke’s modernizing opposition of forced and free assent to the domestic sphere, I turn to the conduct book A Companion for the ladies-Closets; or, the Life and Death of the Most Excellent Lady ——— (1712), whose authorship is attributed to Aphra Behn.18 Companion represents the domestic sphere’s difference from contractual modernity, I will suggest, as the effect of how a more or less miserable wife is able to comply: (1) Behn represents the agency of her conduct-book wife’s compliance. With the term “agency,” I do not mean a personal or psychological aptitude, but rather the text’s activation, in the domestic sphere, of the Lockean algorithm that legitimizes the modernity of public power only as the effect of how freely its subjects obey. Borrowing from Richard Allestree’s conduct book The Ladies Calling (1673), my own book’s title refers to the modernizing agency of freely acted duty as “ingenuous subjection.” The word “ingenuous” qualiWes a practice of subjection whose unforced spontaneity

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Introduction dissolves the arbitrariness of the power that commands it; as Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) will argue, ingenuously or freely acting men demonstrate a newly autonomous aptitude for assent secured not by force but by childhood pedagogy’s ideal endpoint, a boy “in love with all the ways of virtue.”19 A wife’s effort to practice ingenuous subjection, Allestree and Behn advise, might also modernize her husband, deferring the show of arbitrary force that otherwise turns her into his grievous or servile object. (2) Yet Companion also represents its model wife’s failure to obey freely. Despite her best efforts, this woman cannot make herself into the kind of wife who would ratify the Lockean derivation of her husband’s power: a wife whose ingenuous subjection would defuse the fact that she might not, in fact, be governed by a naturally abler and stronger man. By representing this failure, Behn’s Companion illuminates the critical force of a schematics of contractarian political assent whose key criterion is not its agent’s sex but rather the unforced “love” that inspires its agent’s virtue. Beginning with Thomas Hobbes, contract theorists base the permanence of the post-absolutist commonwealth on its subjects’ virtuous redirection of passion—passion, as Hobbes’s inclusion of equally selfinterested women in his state of nature suggests, that does not necessarily dictate the masculinity of its animating body. Behn’s text intimates that women as well as men might harbor the capacity not only to align desire and duty but also to expose the arbitrariness of power that cannot elicit its object’s unforced virtue.

Remarkably, the ingenuous subjection of Companion’s “Excellent Lady” is most graphically impeded by her husband’s dogs: Whereinsoever her Humour was not the same with my Master’s, she comply’d with so much Freedom and Readiness, that it was not easie to discover her Dislike ; and one thing there was wherein they differ’d as much as ’twas possible. My Master being a general Sport’s-Man, was a Lover of all sorts of Dogs, insomuch that they seem’d to swarm in the House; and seldom we sat down to Dinner without half a Score of ’em. Now tho’ these were my Lady’s Aversion as much as any thing could be . . . yet she so ordered the matter, and such was her Willingness to please, that she seem’d in the main as well satisfy’d with ’em as my Master himself. ’Tis true, she has been heartily vext to see the Furniture spoil’d, and the House, which she delighted to be neat in, under a Necessity of being more or less perpetually nasty. And upon this Account I have indeed seen her thus expressing herself—“O the Vexation and continual Trouble of living with Dogs; that ever any humane Creature should be so much delighted with so beastly a Conversation . . . ’Tis strange . . . to see how complaisant and nice we are towards one another in every thing, not daring to touch what we offer another, and yet suffer these mangy Curs to blow upon the Victuals, daub both

Introduction

7

the Room and our Cloaths, get upon the Table, stink enough to poyson one at every Turn, and must be saluted into the Bargain as the dearest of Creatures.” But after all, my Lady made her self easie under this Toil, purely out of Love to my Master; and what, as a Woman, she could very ill away with, as a Wife, she submitted to with all imaginable Cheerfulness. By this her wonderful Patience and Goodness, she at last in a very few Years surmounted this Mischief, giving by degrees a total Rout to every Dog in the House; and that without making any Manner of Petition for it, but rather the contrary. It happen’d one Day, my Lady being at Dinner, and dress’d something better than ordinary, that one of the Favourite-Hounds clapt up his dirty Feet on her Ladyship’s Arm, and not only, sliding from thence with his Claw, tore her RufXe to peices but so scratch’d her Arm that it bled. Notwithstanding what Reason she had to be concern’d at it, she said never a Word, but looking on my Master (who already began to be angry with the Dog) with her Eyes as brimful of Love as of Tears, it put him into such a Passion as I had seldom seen him guilty of before. He thunder’d out Death and Destruction against all of ’em; hang ’em up was the Word, and some of ’em had certainly suffer’d accordingly, had not my Lady interpos’d, begging hard for their Lives, and out of Love to my Master, for their Liberties too. My Master, who was the best natur’d Man in the World, and exceedingly fond of my Lady, said no more for the present, but (to return her great Kindness) resolv’d so to rid the House of ’em by degrees, as that she should not perceive it, and intercede any more in behalf of ’em; insomuch that most of ’em in Three Months Time were either shut up or dispos’d of: And he himself growing less fond of his Sports, in Two or Three Years more, there was not a Dog admitted into the Dining-Room.20

I excerpt from Behn’s conduct book at some length because this passage shares not only the importance but also the political and discursive genealogy of social compact theory. And there is much to say about a complementary domestic plot which has received far from equal attention. First, this wife’s “Freedom” serves—in a strictly adverbial capacity— to distinguish how readily she “comply’d.” She thereby mimics the assent of men whose desire coincides with good that they have been taught to love, because, as Some Thoughts Concerning Education repeats of contractarian pedagogy’s projected alignment of passion and duty, “the objects of their desires are made assisting to virtue.”21 Yet Behn’s wife’s “willingness” to obey is not assisted by her own desire; although it is manifest on the outside as the “readiness” with which she “seem’d” as satisWed as he, her exercise of wifely virtue is exhaustively qualiWed as the repression of disgust at her husband’s “nasty” dogs. Her ready semblance of satisfaction, perceived as such only by the near-omniscient servant who tells this tale, hides the “continual Trouble” of her effort of dutiful will. In the context of this wife’s will to look as if her semblance of satisfaction requires no will, the likeness of a revolting dog that “must be saluted into the Bargain as the dearest of Creatures” to a “Sport’sMan” husband is unmistakable. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Behn’s plot is its triangulation through the dogs. They Wgure the loathsome

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Introduction

husband who requires an exertion of compliant will evident only to the narrator who exists to intimate its magnitude; but they also, far more urgently, substitute for a wife who obeys power mitigated by nothing, apparently, but her own “Love.” This wife’s equivocation of “Cheerfulness” and “Toil” works the political magic of Companion’s plot, the magic of a change of domestic government for which she will never have to “Petition.” For the person who becomes “angry” when her laboriously dissimulated disgust Wnally erupts as a physical symptom (a “scratch’d” arm) is not this long-suffering wife but her far less stoic husband, who regresses to a display of arbitrary power threatened by his summary execution of all of the dogs. By pleading for them, his injured wife defuses his rage, compelling him to exercise upon the dogs a force so unobtrusive “that she should not perceive it.” The crux of this happy ending resides in the fact that her husband wields a less brutal and capricious form of power only “to return her great Kindness”; only as the effect of a wife who “submitted . . . with all imaginable Cheerfulness” can her husband’s violent “Passion” be transformed into a more gentle and inoffensive—for Locke, a more modern— medium of conjugal authority. By doing the “contrary” of petitioning, this wife shows the “wonderful Patience” that dissolves not only the offensive materiality of her husband’s dogs but also the offensive materiality of her husband himself. It is the capacity of a wife’s cheer to reconstitute her husband’s power to which I refer below as her transitively modernizing agency. Moved by her “brimful” eyes, the tyrant who threatened to “hang ’em up” metamorphoses into a rational governor receptive to her defense of the dogs’ “Liberties too.” Now “growing less fond of his Sports,” this husband promises to make less painful his wife’s ready semblance of pleasure. With this passage, Companion attributes a wife’s difference from a citizen not to the inert fact of her sex but to the discrepancy between cheerful and miserably willed compliance made insoluble by a house full of “perpetually nasty” dogs. The most vividly embodied beings in Behn’s text, these “dirty,” “beastly,” “stink[y]” and “mangy Curs” trigger the reXex that impairs a wife’s readiness to obey: “Dislike.” It is this obstacle to her “Willingness to please”—or, this failure to reconcile “Aversion” and “delight”—which, I argue, anticipates the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s representation of the difference between wives and public subjects. Clearly, the reconciliation of duty and appetite that animates the virtue of Locke’s ideally educated men cannot be achieved by a woman who, “delighted to be neat,” marries a man alternatively “delighted with so beastly a Conversation.” This wife’s attempt at ready compliance instead divides her in two: into a “Woman” whose physiology dictates disgust and a “Wife” whose desire should effect her conjugal

Introduction

9

obligation. While Companion’s plot does, in the end, minimize the difference between revulsion and cheer, its vanishing dogs are, perhaps, only surrogate objects of this wife’s intractable dislike. The following sections of this introduction lay out my engagements in eighteenth-century literary history and contemporary methodology. Most importantly, my book claims the free or ingenuous practice of compliance, rather than the entity we presently call the abstract individual, as the standard against which the eighteenth-century domestic novel represents women’s political difference. The novel reWnes the stakes of that difference, I argue, not in terms of anatomical particularity but, on the contrary, in terms of an unsexed physiology—composed of nerves, muscles, animal spirits, passions, impressions, and, indeed, ideas—which, as Locke states of public men, cannot freely or ingenuously obey power that does not solicit its desire. The novel thus activates the analogy of family and state to extend the critical intelligibility of the discourse of compliance to the practice of wives. By representing women unable to animate Locke’s articulation of contractarian virtue, the novel explores the liabilities of a political modernity which does not consistently extend to the domestic sphere. In the sections that follow, “Locke” sometimes signiWes as shorthand for the eighteenth-century political and moral philosophical attempt to theorize the unforced autonomy of post-absolutist men’s virtue. Other contributors to whom I will refer over the course of this book include René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Willis, Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, as well as theorists of the particularized virtue required of wives, such as Richard Allestree and John Gregory. In Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke, Carol Kay aligns political philosophy and novels to different ends from mine;22 but, like Kay, I argue for the critical repercussions of the novel’s interest in the alignment of appetite and duty that enables the freely acted virtue of public men.

Feminist Historiography and the Abstract Individual At the start of her novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), Aphra Behn offers testimony which Xeshes out her dedicatory reference to her protagonist Silvia as a “true Tory in every part.”23 Silvia writes to her brother-in-law Philander of her body’s response to the presence of her “Godlike King”: I never approach His Sacred Person, but my Heart beats, my Blood runs cold about me, and my Eyes o’reXow with Tears of joy, while an awful confusion

10

Introduction

seizes me all over, and I am certain shou’d the most harden’d of your Bloody Rebels look him in the face, the devilish instrument of Death wou’d drop from his sacrilegious hand, and leave him confounded at the feet of the Royal forgiving Sufferer, his eyes have in ’em somthing so Werce, so Majestick commanding, and yet so good and merciful as wou’d soften Rebellion it self into repenting Loyalty.24

Behn’s “Philander” represents Ford Lord Grey, a participant in the Duke of Monmouth’s 1685 rebellion against the Catholic king James II; “Silvia” represents Lady Henrietta Berkeley, Ford Grey’s wife’s sister, with whom he eloped prior to assisting in Monmouth’s failed attempt to seize the throne. At this early point in the novel, Silvia is not only a true Tory in every part but a better Tory in every part than her imminently Whiggish brother: she models the mechanics of “awful confusion” that deWne regicidal ambition as, literally, a physiological impossibility. Because her “Heart,” “Blood,” and “Eyes” incarnate the reXexive awe that would overcome any man’s will to rebel, Silvia demonstrates the political aptitude of bodily mechanism whose power to induce “Loyalty” is, clearly, not limited by its sex. In this passage, Behn draws out the logic of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651), which defends the longevity of a contractual commonwealth whose Wguration as an “ArtiWciall man” brilliantly transmits the instrumentality of Hobbes’s claim for the “similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts and Passions of another.” The “similitude of Passions, which are the same in all men, desire, feare, hope,”25 Wxes the durability of an artiWcial commonwealth in the agreement of the natural passions that drive all of its subjects to authorize it. As Behn’s passage suggests, Hobbes’s “all men” include women like Silvia, whose passions’ “similitude” to those of every other subject body renders the mechanical promise of loyalty impervious to anatomical difference. Behn’s novel, written up to the moment of the Exclusion Crisis, represents the partial breakdown of that promise as the specter of Philander’s preternaturally “harden’d” sensorium. Locke will reject the political efWcacy of the unadulterated passion—namely, fear—that forces Hobbes’s materialist persons into the perfectly uniWed consensus represented by the compressed bodies on Leviathan’s title page. But as they are most insistently claimed not by Behn but by Astell, the critical implications of Hobbes’s egalitarian physiology persist into and beyond that Lockean moment. Appropriated by Astell to insist upon the indifference to sexed anatomy of Locke’s deliberative, but still passionate, practice of assent, this physiology refuses to embody Lockean wives’ natural subjection. Silvia’s heart, blood, and eyes seal her likeness to a person whose public and private obligations transpire as the result of desire rather than of

Introduction

11

sex. Therefore, this person demands a contemporary critical category which presumes in advance neither the sex nor the density of contractarian theory’s representative subject. While the word “individual” serves powerfully to underscore the paradoxically inclusive and exclusive pretenses of contractarian modernity, this word, as it is deployed in contemporary critical and feminist theory, does not qualify the features of the person upon whom Hobbes and Locke predicate the success of a post-absolutist commonwealth. Because neither Hobbes nor Locke represents his model citizen as the disembodied, universalizing, necessarily masculine Wgure who serves as the individual’s contemporary referent, the literary-political modernity to which I refer diverges from contemporary critical visions of a public sphere populated, sometimes with surprising literalness, by abstractions. The modernity represented by eighteenth-century social contract theory, moral and natural philosophy, conduct books, and novels instead resides in the schematics of ingenuous practice deWned, I argue, by a person’s reconciliation of mechanical passion and virtuous will. In this capacity, J. G. A. Pocock’s claim for contractarian men’s susceptibility to feeling, as opposed to the representative abstraction of the individual theorized by C. B. Macpherson and Jürgen Habermas, constitutes a more auspicious blueprint of political aptitudes not necessarily determined, Pocock uneasily concedes, by sexed anatomy.26 Likewise, Victoria Kahn cogently evokes desire’s imminence to contractarian political obligation by remarking “the paradoxical experience of the subject of contract, at once voluntary and involuntary, rational and passionate.”27 To locate the standard of political modernity in a virtuous but still passionate reWnement of assent is to reconsider the analytic utility of the mind-body split, because our present-day speciWcation of women’s difference from contractual citizens remains anchored by the Wgure, as Joan Scott states, of “the abstract individual.”28 This Wgure anticipates its own failure to contain, Scott states, social contract theory’s “contradictory assertions about the universal human rights of individuals, on the one hand, and exclusions attributed to ‘sexual difference,’ on the other.”29 Yet even though the ascription of “universal human rights” to a minority of men does not dictate the literal abstraction of those men’s bodies—the “abstract individual” signiWes, precisely, an impossibility—their privilege has nonetheless come to settle in the aggravated materiality of the “sexual difference” to which Scott attributes women’s exclusion. Pateman likewise attributes women’s disenfranchisement to the fact that “a being of the other sex can only be a modiWcation of the individual”:30 The body of the “individual” is very different from women’s bodies. His body is tightly enclosed within boundaries, but women’s bodies are permeable, their

12

Introduction

contours change shape and they are subject to cyclical processes. All of these differences are summed up in the natural process of birth.31

Scott’s and Pateman’s “individual” cannot accommodate the eighteenthcentury elaboration—from Silvia’s awful confusion through, at least, Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments—of a mechanistic physiology whose capacity to motivate virtue does not essentially sex men and women. This physiology requires an alternative feminist hermeneutic, one that does not presume the power of anatomy to Wx in advance women’s political and metaphysical difference. Susan Bordo’s alignment of women and “the body” tout court illuminates the analytic inXexibility that preemptive claims for feminine alterity portend: But what remains the constant element throughout historical variation is the construction of body as something apart from the true self . . . For if, whatever the speciWc historical content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and woman is the body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be.32

Because it is impervious to “speciWc historical content,” Bordo’s “duality” occludes not only an articulation of difference not structured along the body-mind axis, but also the historical possibility of a feminism grounded in men and women’s physiological likeness. Indeed, Scott’s own genealogy of “modern Western feminism”33 begins a century after Astell with late eighteenth-century women’s effort to accommodate their bodies to what Scott claims as an inherently masculine—although, paradoxically, universal—model of the rights-bearing individual. As a critique of “discursive practices of democratic politics that have equated individuality with masculinity,” modern feminism, for Scott, originates as “the nagging reminder of republicanism’s insufWcient universalism.”34 This is not the “modern” feminism advanced by Astell’s appropriation of a Hobbesian physiology which, as Leviathan states, refuses to establish men as “the more excellent Sex.”35 By claiming for women the generically unsexed mechanism whose aptitude for desire modernizes public virtue, Astell argues that wives are as embodied as contractarian citizens. In so doing, she enlists a body whose failure ingenuously to obey extends the logic of Locke’s indictment of arbitrary power into the conjugal sphere. The historical speciWcity of Astell’s feminism thereby resides not in its adjudication of static metaphysical coordinates but in its insistence upon the physiological indifference of persons who register the misery of irrational and forced obedience in both the public and private spheres. In arguing for the speciWcity—and the persistence—of this modality of modern feminism, my book engages Scott’s crucial invitation: “feminist agency has a history.”36

Introduction

13

Returning to contemporary methodology, I wish to underscore the discrepancy between, on the one hand, a feminist indictment of the abstract individual which presumes the historical stability of the mindbody split and, on the other hand, the feminist argument that the category of matter is historically contingent. By suggesting that the body is a historically constructed metaphysical constant, Bordo tries to have it both ways. But in so doing, she magniWes the incompatibility of an abstract individual whose repugnance to women is secured by the mindbody divide and a feminist genealogy of matter which asserts the volatility of that same divide. In one attempt to untangle feminism’s paradoxical claims on the category of matter, Toril Moi comments trenchantly on Judith Butler’s effort, Moi recapitulates, to show “that the body is material and yet constructed”: “A far better starting point,” Moi states, “would be to ask when (under what circumstances) the problem of the ‘materiality of the body’ might arise.”37 My book claims the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s representation of contractarian men’s domestic power as one moment “when” the problem of the materiality of the body is posed. The novel broaches this problem as the failure of women’s unsexed physiology to incarnate the naturally sexed subjection of Lockean wives. Butler deploys the word “materialize”38 to stress the inadequacy of the notion that “power is often cast as unequivocally external to the subject, something imposed against the subject’s will.”39 Such an account of the relation between power and the “subject” illuminates the eighteenthcentury domestic novel’s reWnement of a person—as Companion’s wife’s will to be cheerful anticipates—whose effort ingenuously to comply drives the novel to innovate interiority itself. But the domestic novel does far more than imagine how the power of Companion’s sportsman husband is not “unequivocally external” to the Wgure of his seemingly satisWed wife. The novel represents the long moment “when” social contract theory’s still passionate body might fail to realize the legitimacy of Lockean husbands’ power.

Contractarian Physiology and the Category of Gender Eliza Haywood’s conduct book The Wife (1756) imagines the following resolution of “the fate of a very deserving young lady . . . married to a man who, tho’ of high and distinguished birth, had such a miserable want of understanding as to render him incapable of transacting any business whatsoever”: [T]he match had been made by friends, —little courtship had pass’d between the young couple, and she knew not that she was going to be tack’d to a fool for life till after the indissoluble knot was tied . . . It happen’d luckily, that tho’ he was a fool, he was not of that obstinate sort

14

Introduction

some are; —he had been always under the tutelage of his lady mother, so could more easily submit to that of a wife; —she soon discover’d this pliant disposition in him, and took the hint: —she wrote all his letters for him . . . which he copied after her, and made pass for his own. —When any person came to him upon affairs of importance she always pretended he was either abroad or indispos’d, but said she would communicate to him the purport of their coming . . . which she never fail’d to do, either by making him write an answer or sending by a servant the message which she put into his mouth. Thus did she do every thing without seeming to do any thing, and so inviolable a secrecy did she preserve in this method of proceeding, that when any of her own nearest relations . . . suspecting the weakness of her husband’s intellects, would say to her that they suppos’d he put the sole direction of his affairs entirely into her hands, she always replied in the negative, and told them she was supriz’d they should imagine it . . . But . . . his insufWciency would sometimes peep out in spite of all her care to conceal it; nor could she avoid receiving those praises which she would never confess she had any pretence to merit.40

Invented at a stage in Haywood’s career often taken to be consonant with midcentury tenets of sentimental morality, her “deserving young lady” would seem to have little in common with Companion’s disgusted wife and Love-Letters’s reXexively awed royalist. Yet the “letters” which she ghostwrites sustain some continuity with these women, as Barbara Taylor indicates when she argues that Lockean “epistemology did not recognize gender distinctions: as all minds received sensory impressions, so all were capable of reasoned reXection on experiential data.”41 By manifesting understanding superior to that of a “fool,” Haywood’s wife shows one clear likeness to Companion’s exemplar of domestic virtue: the necessity of this lady’s subjection is not securely Wxed by her sex. Indeed, in an irony which Haywood takes pains to explicate, it is this wife’s duty herself to simulate the necessity of her sexed subjection. Rather than having to endure Companion’s brutal sportsman, this mid-eighteenth-century wife must ratify the injunction that she obey a fool whose pretense to masculine superiority she thereby tirelessly engineers. By “do[ing] every thing without seeming to do any thing,” she approximates a Lockean wife’s natural inferiority at the same time that she impersonates her stronger and more able husband. But by effectively becoming her own husband, this wife exacerbates the open secret that “peep[s] out” of Haywood’s conduct book: in the absence of a rationale for her subjection, The Wife seems to take for granted the supplemental imperative that requires her to fake that rationale’s persistence. Is this wife obliged to feign inferiority to a fool simply because she is already “tack’d” to him—or, perhaps, because he is “pliant” enough to accept the masculinizing assistance of his wife’s “intellects”? Haywood provides no further reason for the secondary, extraLockean mandate that a wife fabricate the necessity of her subjection to

Introduction

15

a less able man. The point I wish to pursue, along these lines, concerns the applicability of the term “gender” to her effort. Certainly, Haywood’s exemplary wife consolidates an illusion of sexed necessity—more precisely, the Lockean necessity that her husband be naturally more able than she. But on closer scrutiny, she makes a somewhat perverse contribution to that project: if, to put it in contemporary theoretical terms, this woman performs essential femininity, then she does so only by demonstrating her equally impressive ability to perform essential masculinity. It is, therefore, difWcult to claim that Haywood’s passage reinforces a binarized model of essentially sexed difference. Instead, this woman’s ability to act like both a wife and her more able husband draws its resources from the model of the person to which I refer above under the heading of Hobbes’s and Astell’s egalitarian or unsexed physiology. Given the extra-Lockean conundrum which Haywood’s vignette poses and resolves with remarkable economy, this dutiful wife might be better qualiWed by Thomas Laqueur’s genealogy of a “one-sex” model from which masculine and feminine difference is leveraged by the “interconvertibility implicit in the physiology of one sex.”42 I am less concerned with Haywood’s wife’s literal embodiment of Laqueur’s model than with his accompanying point that, because this model is displaced by an anatomical construction of sexual difference only over the course of the eighteenth century, “the body must be understood as the epiphenomenon, while gender, what we would take to be a cultural category, was primary.”43 But Laqueur’s projected reversal of the historical priority of “gender” and binarized anatomy divests the former category, strictly speaking, of sense, because that category’s current meaning accrues only as the refutation of essential sex. The practice of domestic virtue realized by a wife who acts like a husband does not coincide with a deWnition of “gender” according to which contingent acts denaturalize a prior illusion, because, rather than refuting her essential femininity, this woman’s assumption of both wifely subjection and husbandly superiority is laid over a person whose capacities are not preemptively determined. Rather than modeling an essence, she achieves wifeliness, Haywood makes clear, as the result of her capacity to be her husband. If, according to Butler, Aretha Franklin’s claim that “you make me feel like a natural woman”44 conveys the poststructuralist critique of sex provoked by the category of gender, then another Franklin refrain captures the eighteenth-century feminism advanced by Astell: “she’s Xesh and blood, just like a man.” “Performativity,” the term with which Butler evokes gender’s potentially subversive effects—the term proceeds from Friedrich Nietszche’s and Jacques Derrida’s refusals to locate an origin anterior to the events of personal identity and linguistic signiWcation,

16

Introduction

respectively—operates only against the presumed stability of sex. Because eighteenth-century literary-political modernity, I argue, lacks an articulation of essential femininity that would effectively shield Locke’s exemption of “Conjugal, not Political” power from the modernizing standard of ingenuous practice, the word is misleading. Because antipathy to a prior essence is, so to speak, built into them, I avoid the terms “performativity” and “gender” below. By instead using the word “sex,” however, I do not refer to a holistic, innate, or essential masculinity or femininity.45 On the contrary, I use the word “sex” and the word “woman,” as does the eighteenth-century domestic novel, to entertain the failure of anatomical difference to secure the natural subjection of the physiology—and the intellect—of wives. Here I do not mean to deny the relevance of the category of gender to a domestic novel in which more than one wife Wnds herself naturally obligated to obey a fool. But a history of gender constituted, not as the opposite of sex, but as the revision of a materialist physiology which resists such speciWcation, requires more room than I can directly give it; I avoid the word to prevent confusion with its contemporary meaning. Butler argues for the capacity of rule-bound practice to undermine norms in the process of observing them. She thereby suggests that political agency need not be deWned as deliberate resistance; however, she endorses compliance as a species of political practice only after claiming its potentially subversive effects. She advances two algorithms to explain how potentially subversive things happen: Wrst, the assignment, as she states of Sophocles’ Antigone, to the potentially subversive actor of “the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the one she resists, an appropriation that has within it traces of a simultaneous refusal and assimilation of that very authority”; and, second, a vision of change effected by neither intentioned actors nor even preconstituted subjects, but by what Butler calls “the aberrant temporality of the norm,” an aberrant temporality most tellingly represented by Oedipus, who himself subverts kinship norms, Butler states, “unknowingly.”46 This gloss is meant to underscore the fact that I do not argue for the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s critical intervention in contractarian modernity by ascribing this aptitude to its characters.47 It is not the goal of the following pages to read women’s compliance as equivocally resistant repetition.48 Rather than the performative deconstruction of norms, what deWnes the eighteenth-century novel’s representation of women’s compliance as political is a standard of contractarian virtue which, registered by the persons of women as well as the persons of men, exposes the arbitrariness of Lockean husbands’ power. The readings that follow do not reclaim women’s compliance as resistance, as subversion, or as novelists’ indirect attribution of those effects

Introduction

17

to the characters they depict. To make this disclaimer is not to endorse the necessity of eighteenth-century women’s subjection but rather to sever the manifest political resonance of women’s compliance in the novel from supplemental claims for characters’ extratextual intention to subvert. I think, following the lead of Margaret J. M. Ezell’s important assessment of the feminist valuation of “anger,”49 that searching for openly or indirectly resistant women might preclude our recovery of the critical intelligibility of feminine compliance in the novel—its engagement in a discourse of contractarian modernity whose legitimating standard of ingenuous assent does not always extend to wives.

Feminine Compliance and the Novel As she introduces an issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction dedicated to Frances Burney, Julia Epstein asks: “Did she succumb to patriarchal constraints and write what she thought her father would approve, or did she deploy a subversive strategy of indirection? How ambitious was she, and how rebellious?”50 Because it is the only eighteenth-century novel written by a woman to have stayed consistently in print, Burney’s Evelina demonstrates with particular vividness how the interpretive mandate conveyed by Epstein’s questions has played out. Epstein defends Evelina’s “subversive strategy of indirection,” arguing that “there is a second novel here, over which Evelina rests like a palimpsest”; taking the letters of which Burney’s novel is composed as “a potential arena for subversion,” Epstein locates the second novel’s “quiet insurrection” in such stylistic traces as “rhetorical overkill” and “oblique address.”51 Kristina Straub, on the other hand, asks why Burney’s Wrst novel so clearly fails to transmit resistance: “Burney’s historically determined inability to do more than expose the contradictions that shaped her sense of female maturity . . . left her vulnerable to debilitating self-doubts from which a more fully conscious critique of received ideology might have protected her.”52 These responses to Epstein’s question—does Burney succumb, or does she indirectly subvert?—mark the limits of a feminist hermeneutic that does not admit the political intelligibility of the novel’s representation of women’s compliance: both readers seek in Evelina, according to Straub, a “critique of received ideology” or, according to Epstein, “a feminist ideological critique.”53 Straub attributes the absence of that critique to Burney’s “historically determined” inability to communicate it; Epstein excavates the same critique from the “clear evidence” of Evelina’s “real thoughts and feelings”54 only partially hidden beneath the surface of Burney’s novel. Yet insofar as it might be Evelina’s miserable practice of virtue—rather than her capacity to ventriloquize recognizably “feminist” commentary—which troubles the claim to conjugal power sustained by

18

Introduction

brutes, fops, and long-distance guardians, Evelina’s critical resonance cannot be gauged by the question, as Vivien Jones asks, “of how, and to what extent, women were enabled to transgress the constraints of acceptable femininity.”55 By deWning eighteenth-century women’s novels as themselves a form of conciliation to a unilaterally repressive patriarchal discourse, Mary Poovey’s “proper lady” has provided an inXuential answer to Jones’s question: “Forbidden by convention to declare their desires, the heroines must struggle, often ineffectually, to communicate by indirection or even deceit, and the interest of the plot lies in the nuances of frustration and achievement that mark their efforts.”56 To assert the difference between proper ladies and women whose politeness masks transgression, Poovey identiWes as their novels’ sole “interest” the “nuances” of an invisible, necessarily subversive desire. As the closest approximation of resistance to be found in novels which represent women who try to obey, Poovey invokes “indirection or even deceit” sustained as such only because it fails to appear upon the novel’s printed page. In this case, Epstein’s “how rebellious?” conjures desire whose transgressive speciWcity exempts it from determination by language itself. Turning to the novel’s manifest content, I can only brieXy indicate how badly compliance has fared. Of what she calls “the sentimental novel”—a genre qualiWed as such because it lacks sufWcient resistant nuance—Poovey states that because its authors have “generally internalized” repressive norms, they write novels that “often echo conduct books almost verbatim.”57 Janet Todd likewise asserts that after the publication of Charlotte Lennox’s anti-romantic novel The Female Quixote (1752), “[The ‘female novel’] will serve as conduct book, colluding with the new ideology of femininity and teaching the sentimental image of womanhood.”58 Margaret Doody assigns the same date to “the new Realism’s usurpation of the major realms of prose Wction”; this realism, itself a “kind of ideology,” dictates as the fate of Lennox’s model protagonist that she “meekly tak[e] up the tameness of the imprisoning ‘real life’ she is offered.”59 With as much conWdence as Poovey, Patricia Meyer Spacks isolates the motive of women writers who represent what Spacks calls a “negative condition of blamelessness”: “terror of doing wrong.”60 In the most polarized application of this hermeneutic to date, Eve Tavor Bannet divides the canon of mid- to late eighteenth-century women’s novels into mutually exclusive groups based on her ascription to those texts of resistant or collusive authorial intention.61 The equation of the domestic novel and marvelously coherent sentimental “ideology” does, alternatively, permit a methodological approach that embraces the author’s death. Nancy Armstrong makes the inXuential suggestion that novels be considered under the heading of the

Introduction

19

“Foucauldian hypothesis that various kinds of writing worked together in an unwitting conspiracy that would eventually authorize modern institutional procedures”;62 rather than existing outside of Poovey’s novel, desire is constructed by Armstrong’s novel to produce the medium of Foucaultian modernity—a “power that appeared to have no political force at all.”63 Yet Armstrong claims the domestic novel as the vehicle of Foucault’s transparent, indeWnitely pervasive power only because she, too, reads feminine compliance as “passive virtue.”64 Therefore, despite what seems the profundity of their difference—for Poovey, desire hovers outside of discourse; for Armstrong, desire is discourse—both assert the political unintelligibility of the domestic novel’s representation of women’s compliance. Indeed, both offer a single, remarkably similar sentence to afWrm this premise. Poovey proposes that proper ladies might nonetheless “satisfy their desires”: “As long as it was strictly conWned to certain arenas and ultimately obedient to men’s will, women were also allowed to exercise considerable personal—if indirect—power.”65 Armstrong assesses the conduct of what she calls “the efWcient housewife”: “Except for unqualiWed obedience to her husband, the virtues of the ideal wife appeared to be active.”66 Here both readers grant wives “power” by relegating the novel’s manifest content to the status of an exception; while Poovey extends the invisibility of feminine desire to qualify satisfaction whose textual evidence also remains latent, Armstrong’s wives wield the medium of Foucaultian modernity she entitles “domestic surveillence”67 because this aptitude is equally indirect and invisible. To recuperate manifestly compliant domestic women’s invisible power, it would seem, Poovey and Armstrong must bracket from critical scrutiny the novel’s sustained representation of these women’s practice of “unqualiWed” obedience. In this sense, Armstrong replicates the constitutive bias of Lockean modernity; her “political” history of the novel dismisses masculine conjugal authority as, in Locke’s words, “not Political.” Does reading the domestic novel for something other than women’s invisible power dictate as one’s object a genre occupied by female characters, Doody states, who “meekly take up the tameness of . . . imprisoning ‘real life?’” Does denying wives’ ambivalently enabling likeness to agents of Foucaultian surveillance inversely afWrm, in Anthony Fletcher’s extreme formulation, “woman’s imprisonment in an ideological straightjacket?”68 By representing wives who cannot realize the contractarian aptitude of freely acted or ingenuous virtue, the domestic novel does not elaborate that practice as a “negative condition” or as meekly “passive virtue.” Rather than resembling either Fletcher’s uniformly oppressive “patriarchy”69 or Armstrong’s transparently Foucaultian modernity, the power retained by the novel’s husbands is susceptible to determination by the kind of obedience that it solicits. I therefore read the novel,

20

Introduction

along the lines advanced by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, for its effort to frame and to resolve the contradictions propelled by a political modernity still inhabited by naturally subject wives. Because I suggest that the domestic novel represents, and indeed philosophizes, the exception to modern political virtue Wgured by women who cannot ingenuously obey, I differ from Armstrong, Habermas, and Michael McKeon, who argue that the domestic novel facilitates the ideological Wction of a private sphere divested of any trace of power.70 Rather than the sentimental prop of bourgeois ideology or Foucaultian discipline, the domestic novel reWnes the vitally critical Wgure of a person whose practice of compliance exposes the persistent arbitrariness of contractarian men’s conjugal authority. By calling wives an “exception,” I mean also to signal the (perhaps inevitable, given my formation in the 1990s) inXuence of deconstruction. This is not to suggest that I “deconstruct” novels—indeed, my prose is more ponderous than playful—but rather that, in aligning the novel and political philosophy, I follow the lead provided by Gayatri Spivak, whose preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology invokes his project as “locating the text’s ‘navel’ . . . the moment in the text that seems to transgress its own system of values.” (It is worth noting that this formulation, borrowed from Sigmund Freud on the interpretation of dreams, seems to Wgure deconstruction as an inevitably feminist project.) To suggest that novelistic wives disturb a “text” which tries, as Spivak states, “to make the deWnition coincide with the deWned, the ‘father’ with the ‘son,’”71 is not so great a stretch, given that the text in question can be identiWed, in the words of Pateman’s foundational assessment of social contract theory, as a “story of masculine political birth.”72 However, the eighteenth-century domestic novel compels us to read in a different direction from Luce Irigaray, inarguably the greatest feminist appropriator of Derrida’s method. Irigaray locates in Western philosophy—or, as she puts it, Western metaphysics—a mind-body split that relegates women to the latter pole; as these texts’ navel, she Wnds traces of a supplemental or tertiary “feminine” whose own repressed philosophical necessity she insistently represents as maternal. Whereas Irigaray defends the radical alterity of the “feminine,” I Wnd in the eighteenth-century novel a persistently materialist person whose capacity to animate unsexed virtue compels an indictment of conjugal power based on men’s and women’s physiological likeness.73 This likeness surfaces in both the novel and political philosophy proper, where the failure of sex to constitute a rationale for wifely subjection sometimes, as Haywood says, peeps out. My book has two parts. Part I explores Astell’s feminist appropriation of materialism’s imminently virtuous but not necessarily sexed passions; the interest, for women’s literary history, of Astell’s feminist physiology;

Introduction

21

and Samuel Richardson’s magisterial attempt to represent the transitively modernizing agency of an ingenuously subject wife. Part II offers three case studies, which aim to illustrate how the domestic novel reWnes wives’ difference from citizens. The book’s Chapter 1 reads Astell’s rebuttal of Locke’s particularized genealogy of modern political virtue. By claiming for women the free practice of virtue that Locke prescribes to postabsolutist sons, Astell repudiates the passive obedience exacted, she argues, by contractarian husbands. Her feminist physiology serves critically to illuminate, the chapter suggests, a domestic plot like that of Mary Davys’s The Reformed Coquette, which stages a coquette’s happy conversion into a subject wife only as a violation of the novel’s truth. Chapter 2 further argues for the literary-critical importance of Astell’s feminist physiology by exploring the hermeneutic utility of a Hobbesian “individual” who is naturally subject to neither political nor domestic power. By refusing to naturalize familial and maternal obligation, this individual fails to embody a rationale for the subjection required of wives in civil society, a dilemma which Hobbes himself cannot resolve. The Wgure of a wife who might resemble a Hobbesian individual persists into Daniel Defoe’s Roxana and even Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Chapter 2 suggests, to disturb a Lockean rationale for masculine conjugal dominance secured only by weaker and less able women. It is here that we might begin to locate the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s “feminism”: not in the necessity of feminine resistance, but in wives who might, sometimes despite their best efforts, extend Hobbes’s egalitarian person into domestic modernity. No study of the critical intelligibility of feminine compliance in the eighteenth-century domestic novel would be complete without attending to Richardson’s enviably strenuous effort, sustained throughout Pamela’s revisions and its sequel, to locate a husband’s domestic virtue in his wife’s unforced reciprocation of his power. Chapter 3 pays more attention than do recent commentators, however, to the protracted ambivalence of Richardson’s effort imaginatively to modernize an arbitrary master. Rather than the humanized, ideally paciWed domestic sentiment claimed by readers like Armstrong and Habermas, Chapter 3 locates Pamela’s contribution to literary-political modernity in its oscillation between carefully calibrated reciprocity and absolute force—an instability resolved, in the end, by the sequel’s defense of one husband’s Lockean superiority. As the domestic novel’s most important representation of a superlatively virtuous wife’s failure transitively to modernize her husband, Pamela marks a generic, philosophical, and formal milestone to which the novels in Part II respond. Chapter 4 takes the key turn in Eliza Haywood’s long literary career as the shift of her analysis of masculine power into the medium of the

22

Introduction

domestic novel. After tracing her amorous Wction’s elaboration of feminist physiology—a physiology whose sex does not mitigate the mechanical urgency of its desire—the chapter turns to Anti-Pamela, Haywood’s rejection of Richardson’s unevenly modernizing Wction. Haywood’s domestic novels and conduct books, the chapter suggests, implicate feminine mechanism and conjugal power by representing physiological revisions that would, impossibly, engineer women who desire to obey cruel or faithless husbands. Chapter 4 is a case study of what I call “moral physiology” and the domestic novel; Chapters 5 and 6 consider, respectively, the novel’s generic difference from romance and the formal effect of loveless duty upon epistolary thought. Chapter 5 reads Charlotte Lennox’s anti-romantic novel The Female Quixote to remark the reliance of its marriage plot upon the passionate mechanism that Lennox otherwise repudiates; romance enables the novel’s protagonist freely to choose the man whom she has been ordered to marry. Lennox’s vivid framing of this contradiction might, the chapter suggests, point toward a contemporary dialectical and feminist history of the novel, a history that recognizes the political instrumentality of romance to a domestic plot which tries to reconstitute masculine conjugal power as its subject’s ingenuous assent. Chapter 6 also explores the instrumentality of feminine passion—in this case, the utility of pleasure to moral sense philosophy, according to which public men’s sympathetic feeling must be reXected at home, a writer like Smith suggests, by an equally pleased wife. This chapter reads the epistolary novel’s most thoroughgoing representation of a woman’s deviation from the writing to the moment that, in Pamela’s case, conveys the unmediated truth of a wife’s reciprocal sentiment. Because the letters composing Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph transmit neither the pleasure nor the spontaneity that realize the virtue of Pamela’s form, they impair the transparency of a medium of consciousness unable inwardly to incarnate Lockean freedom. Ingenuous Subjection concludes by stressing the persistence of Astell’s feminist physiology into the moment of Mary Wollstonecraft’s call for women’s civil liberty. Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women and her two domestic novels base this appeal not on women’s title to a set of abstractly human rights but rather on the nerves, animal spirits, passions, impressions, and ideas that make women as well as citizens able to incarnate the practice that Wollstonecraft calls active virtue. By reading Wollstonecraft from the vantage of her feminism’s past rather than that of its future, we Wnd women who are as incapable of forced virtue as Locke’s contractarian sons. We also Wnd the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s own feminism, which propels Wollstonecraft to locate political modernity’s failure in the specter of passively obedient wives.

Introduction

23

Perhaps, accustomed to seeking Rizzo’s resistant fourth girl, we might Wnd it hard to feel the critical force of Wollstonecraft’s claim upon the practice of active virtue. Yet Wollstonecraft, as I hope this book will show, signals her greatest debt to the eighteenth-century domestic novel when she Wxes her call for women’s civil liberty in the nerves of a wife whose lack of desire vindicates the virtue of her refusal to comply.

Chapter 1

Boys, Girls, and Wives Post-Patriarchal Power and the Problem of Feminine Subjection

Rethinking Women’s Political Difference; or, Hortense Mancini’s Great Escape Aphra Behn dedicates The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker (1689) to “the Most Illustrious Princess, The Duchess of Mazarine.”1 The infamous Duchess, Hortense Mancini, was disastrously married at age thirteen to become, her Memoires (1676) report, “the Richest Heiress, but the unhappiest Woman, in all Christendom.”2 She is the fascinating dedicatee of a story whose heroine rivals her claim to superlative misery. Become a nun, Behn’s virtuous protagonist Isabella is racked by “Wts, pains, and convulsions”3 when she falls in love with a man glimpsed through the grate of her convent door. After Isabella Xees the convent and marries the object of her insuperable passion, he dies while battling “Turks” at Candia.4 Years later, Isabella reluctantly weds another suitor. Despite eyewitness testimony to his death, her Wrst husband then returns. Desperate to defer “the happiness ’twas [his right] that night to receive,”5 Isabella smothers him. She proceeds surreptitiously to stitch the dead husband to the cloak of the living; the latter, weighed down by the burden, is dragged to his own death as he tries to save his now-bigamous wife by heaving the corpse into a river. The townspeople recover both husbands’ bodies; Isabella, convicted of double murder, is beheaded. The French Duchess of Mazarine Xed her abusive husband and found refuge at the court of Charles II to become a cause célèbre in England.6 She inspired dedications, panegyrics, broadsides, and, one year after her death in 1699, the Tory feminist philosopher Mary Astell’s publication of Some ReXections upon Marriage, Occasion’d by the Duke & Dutchess of Mazarine’s CASE.7 As vividly as any of these texts, Behn’s History of the Nun responds to the experience of arbitrary power evoked by Mancini’s Memoires as follows: If I did not apprehend to tyre your Patience, I could tell you a thousand such little malitious tricks which [the Duke] playd me, without any manner of necessity,

Boys, Girls, and Wives

25

out of the meer pleasure he took to torment me. Fancy then to your self, continual oppositions to my most innocent desires; and an Implacable hatred against all those I loved, or loved me; an undefatigable care to bring into my presence all those I hated mortally, and to corrupt those of my Servants whom I most trusted, to betray my Secrets if I had any; a studious Application to cry me down every where, and make my Actions odious to all people. In Wne, all that the Malignity of the by-got Cabal could invent of practice, in a house where it had absolute Tyranny.8

Although the “continual oppositions” facing the Duchess do not precisely resemble the trials endured by Isabella, their texts claim an overarching thematic likeness: they each represent power so oppressive that it drives its objects to do the impossible. First among the Duchess’s feats is the fact of her Xight from her “malitious” husband. More impressively, the Duke’s wife discovers as a result of his “implacable” torment reserves of “more than ordinary strength”; in her climactic confrontation with the man who meant “to make me a Prisoner in my own house,” Memoires relates, the Duchess “thrust by him in spight of all he could do.”9 Finally, the arrival of the Duke at the convent where she has taken refuge inspires an evasion of domestic “Tyranny” that decisively strains the credibility of his wife’s narrative. After the Abbess of the convent foils the Duke’s attempt to “carry me away by force,” the Duchess and her companion are informed “that Monsieur Mazarine went off, onely with the designe to returne againe in the Night.” The two women prepare against abduction: [W]e thought upon an expedient to hide our selves; there was a hole in the Grate of our Parleour bigg enough for a great Dish to pass; and we never till then thought one could Creep through it: Yet we both got in at that Hole, but it was with so much difWculty, that if Monsieur Mazarin himself had been in that Parlour he would never suspect that place . . . I was above a quarter of an hour betwixt two barrs of Iron, and almost squeesed to Death without being able to get in or out.10

This scene does more than amplify the suffering of the Duke’s “horribly pinched”11 wife. Because the Duchess anticipates a threat which she can elude only, fantastically, by changing shape, the arrival of the unyielding Duke exacts a reciprocal yieldingness from the body of his frantic wife. By claiming to pass through a hole only “bigg enough for a great Dish,” the Duchess underscores both the improbability of this “expedient” and, inversely, the equally incredible stubbornness of the power that compels her to it. Like Behn’s innocently bigamous Isabella, who fuses two husbands together to redress the insolubility of their coexistence, the Duchess squeezes between bars too narrow for her passage to escape the Duke’s even more implacable tyranny.

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What critical vocabulary might elucidate these women’s relation to power that forces the fantastic transformation of the persons it would govern? By imagining husbands who drive their wives to impossible strategies of evasion, both Memoires and The History of the Nun represent how women fail to satisfy the criterion according to which the political theorist Giorgio Agamben deWnes “the birth of modern democracy”: “man as a living being presents himself no longer as an object but as the subject of political power.”12 Judith Butler uses the term “subjectivation” to convey the historical novelty of the latter category: “Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being.”13 In this light, the polemical force of Mancini’s Memoires and Behn’s History resides in these texts’ suffocating, suspenseful, and seemingly excessive visions of how masculine conjugal power “only acts on” Isabella and the implausibly plastic Duchess. Indeed, Memoires stakes its indictment of the Duke on his wife’s incapacity transitively to be enacted by “Demands” so irrational and so noxious that, its narrator assures her readers, they “deserved rather to be refused than granted.”14 Written to vindicate the Duchess’s inability to accommodate herself to her husband’s “unreasonable Caprice,” Memoires represents a woman whose escape from a state of “unparalleled slavery” requires that she bend the rules of her own narrative reality.15 Their exposure to a power that remains capricious, alien, and resolutely arbitrary compels Isabella and the Duchess to metamorphose from wives into unlawful bodies. The historical failure of women like the Duchess to materialize as modern political subjects has been assessed by Joan Scott, who attributes that failure to the deviation from universality entailed by their sex: [M]aleness was equated with individuality, and femaleness with otherness in a Wxed, hierarchical, and immobile opposition (masculinity was not seen as femininity’s other). The political individual was then taken to be both universal and male; the female was not an individual, both because she was nonidentical with the human prototype and because she was the other who conWrmed the (male) individual’s identity.16

To be sure, the Duchess Wnally arrives at “that strange and so much blamed Resolution, which I took, of retiring into Italy” because, as a wife, she lacks legal autonomy: she faces the prospect of being “forced by Act of Parliament to return to” her husband.17 But as we have seen, Memoires dramatizes her disenfranchisement not by asserting the opposition of her sex to the abstract category of the “political individual,” but by recounting the effects of her desperately evasive practice. The Wgures of the impossibly “squeesed” Duchess and the impossibly murderous Isabella— who murders, again, to prevent her resurrected husband’s claim upon

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his conjugal right—constitute representations not of rigidly sexed political difference but of escape artistry whose improbability aggravates the arbitrariness of the power with which these wives contend. The epistemological strain that their feats place upon these wives’ narratives exacerbates the capriciousness of an authority that they cannot rationally obey. The Duchess’s Memoires does not locate the impediment to her political modernity in the fact that the Duke is a “universal” and “male” individual. Instead, her plight is galvanized by a husband who remains as stubbornly embodied as the “indivisible beam of majesty” claimed by the patriarchalist theorist Sir Robert Filmer in Observations upon Aristotles Politiques (1652) as the source of an authority that “cannot be divided among, or settled upon a multitude. God would have it Wxed in one person, not sometimes in one part of the people, and sometimes in another, and sometimes—and that for the most part—nowhere, as when the Assembly is dissolved it must rest in the air, or in the walls of the Chamber where they were assembled.”18 By advocating a form of government that can be represented by only “one person” at a time, Filmer disqualiWes the pretense of “assembled” men to any authority more substantial than “air.” He echoes the complaint, made in Eikon Basilike (1648) by the imprisoned Charles I, that “the Majestie of the Kings of England might hereafter, hang . . . between the Power and Priviledges of the two Houses, in an aiery imagination of Regalitie.”19 For Agamben or Butler, Filmer’s royalist refusal to credit a government not “Wxed” in one body would deWne his mutually political and metaphysical anachronism. And yet Filmer invokes a medium of authority that persists well into the eighteenth-century domestic sphere.20 In case of the Duchess, it is not her husband’s “aiery” or abstract individuality but his imposition of unreasonable caprice that Memoires invokes as the source of her political difference. Memoires elaborates that difference not as rigidly sexed particularity but as the practical fallout of demands whose arbitrariness renders it impossible for the Duchess to comply. Memoires indicts the Duke by representing the irrationality to which he drives his wife. In so doing, this text contributes to a post-Civil War reconception of both public and private authority that deWnes the modern citizen as an effect of how he practices assent. To refute Filmer’s endorsement of absolute patriarchal power, John Locke and his contractarian contemporaries posit a person still swayed by passion and still prone to irrational appetites, a person who incarnates modernity not as Scott’s abstract “individual”—a word not used in this sense by Locke at all—but as the product of a period of gentle childhood pedagogy during which he learns to reconcile his desires and his father’s commands. By leavening the assent of contractual citizens with their own desire,

28

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Locke imaginatively reconstitutes the power which these men no longer experience as capricious or unpleasing. And yet, as Astell asks in her ReXections upon Marriage, what kind of assent can be solicited by husbands, the persistence of whose difference from Locke’s post-patriarchal governors is richly intimated by the Duchess’s plight? How can wives desire to obey a domestic government that forces them either to Xee or, ReXections states, to “truckle?”21 Astell chooses as a cognate for the practice of wifely obedience the very verb expurgated from Locke’s post-absolutist political genealogy. Locke’s pedagogical treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) proposes to revise how boys comply “from their very cradles”22 in order to reject the equivalence which, according to Filmer, locates the origins of patriarchal government in the domestic sphere: “A son, a subject, and a servant, or a slave, were one and the same thing at Wrst.” For Filmer, the identity of sons and slaves inversely supports the primordial biblical identity of “father, king and lord over his family.”23 Locke’s fathers disable this identity by refusing to impose upon their sons the “slavish and corporal punishments” that, Locke argues, irreversibly turn sons into Filmerian slaves by “breaking” (ST 34) them. Post-patriarchal fathers instead exploit as the motive for boys’ compliance the agency of desire claimed by René Descartes in The Passions of the Soul (1649) to deWne “the principle utility of Moral Philosophy”: “because [the] Passions can incline us to any action only through the mediation of the Desire they excite, it is that Desire in particular which we should be concerned to regulate.”24 Regulated neither by corporal punishment nor by “the pleasure of a luscious morsel” (ST 35) but by a pedagogical program through which “the objects of their desires are made assisting to virtue” (ST 37), Locke’s sons will never truckle. As such, they disprove in the register of practice Filmer’s equation of “king and lord over his family”: boys who from their very cradles do not obey like slaves deWne as the end of Locke’s educational regime citizens whose desire animates their “easy and unconstrained” (ST 42) assent. These still-passionate persons are not abstract individuals but rather, Locke states, “ingenuous men” (ST 34).25 Locke uses the word “ingenuous” to assert the novelty of an education that appropriates the power of Filmerian fathers to anti-Filmerian ends: an “ingenuous education” (ST 32) dissolves the “absolute power” (ST 30) of patriarchal governors by engendering sons spontaneously “in love with all the ways of virtue” (ST 37). Such sons occupy an only residually arbitrary domestic sphere, which prepares them to enter the contractual commonwealth as virtuous men who, having been “made so within” (ST 31), solicit from their rulers no further application of force. In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson excerpts from Locke’s Thoughts to deWne the word “ingenuous”:

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1. Open; fair; candid; generous; noble. ... If an ingenuous detestation of this shameful vice be but carefully and early instilled, that is the true and genuine method to obviate dishonesty. Locke.26

Johnson culls his second deWnition from Eikon Basilike: 2. Freeborn; not of servile extraction. Subjection, as it preserves property, peace, and safety, so it will never diminish rights nor ingenuous liberties. K. Charles.27

In Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke presents his inaugural Wction of contractual union between men “amongst whom there was no natural Superiority or Subjection” as follows: “So that their Politick Societies all began from a voluntary Union, and the mutual agreement of Men freely acting in the choice of their Governours, and forms of Government.”28 The present chapter elaborates the importance, for a feminist history of the domestic novel, of Locke’s stipulation that the citizens who occupy his post-Filmerian commonwealth are not merely “not of servile extraction”; men qualiWed voluntarily to ratify power which they continue to obey are both freeborn and “freely acting.” Having been “carefully and early” trained to disprove the likeness of sons and slaves, these ingenuous men refute patriarchal political causality by reconciling desire and “agreement,” passionate mechanism and contractual union. In response to Locke, Astell enlists freely acting women in only one event of voluntary union. Her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694; Part 2, 1697) states of the constituents of the “happy Society” of her proposed female “Monastery, or if you will . . . Religious Retirement”:29 [W]hat faults they bring with them shall be corrected by sweetness not severity . . . And since Inclination can’t be forc’d . . . there shall be no Vows or irrevocable Obligations, not so much as the fear of Reproach to keep our Ladies here any longer than they desire. No: Ev’ry act of our Religious Votary shall be voluntary and free, and no other tye but the Pleasure, the Glory and Advantage of this blessed Retirement to conWne her to it. (SP 89)

By occupying a compact motivated not by “fear” but by “desire,” Astell’s prospective votaries realize the promise of Locke’s own modernizing pedagogy: the “Pleasure” that substantiates their most binding “tye” to Astell’s “Amicable Society” (SP 75) renders these women both “voluntary and free.” Why does Astell place free women only in a monastery, for Behn and the Duchess the ultimate site of “forc’d” obligation? To advance an

30

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answer, the next part of this chapter explores how Astell frames women’s divergence from Locke’s pedagogical plot. Astell’s Serious Proposal, her Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695), her ReXections, her Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), and her political treatises deWne women’s difference from Locke’s freely acting citizens not as the result of feminine deviation from an abstract universal, but as the result of wives’ inability to become subjects of a species of conjugal government which frustrates the modernizing accommodation of desire and virtuous volition. By deWning the ensuing destiny of wives as their hopelessly slavish exercise of “mere obedience” (R 50), Astell locates the conXuence of feminine duty and “Inclination” only in a state of religious retirement. Women cannot, Astell insists, ingenuously obey a domestic government that turns them into servile and broken objects of power. The third section of this chapter takes up the alternative to Astell’s marriage plot proposed by contemporary conduct books and represented by the domestic novel: the susceptibility of husbands to the softening inXuence of wives who, unlike Locke’s sons, cannot always spontaneously ratify the modernity of the power to which they submit. After examining the corrective agency of the practice advanced by Allestree’s conduct book under the heading of “ingenuous subjection,” the chapter concludes by exploring how Mary Davys’s novella The Reformed Coquet (1724) marvelously engineers a Xirt’s Lockean desire to obey her future husband. The Reformed Coquet illuminates how feminist literary history might recover the critical force of the domestic novel’s representation of women’s compliance; indeed, the impossibilities Wgured by Behn and the Duchess anticipate the urgency of the novel’s engagement with a conjugal sphere where, well into contractual modernity, wives might continue to truckle.

“MortiW’d Passions” and Mary Astell’s Feminist Physiology Locke is not the Wrst theorist of political modernity to make the correction of Aristotle, advanced by Thomas Hobbes in On the Citizen (1642), that deWnes man as no longer a naturally social animal: “man is made Wt for Society not by nature, but by training.”30 Nor is Locke Wrst to garnish men’s contractual departure from a state of nature with the imperative, advanced by Samuel Pufendorf in On the Duty of Man and Citizen (1673), of “sociality [socialitas] among men,” a “more general discipline” that supplements civil law by teaching every citizen to “so conduct himself towards [others] that they are not given even a plausible excuse for harming him.”31 Furthermore, Locke’s rationale for immediate pedagogical intervention is exhaustively anticipated by Desiderius Erasmus’s

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A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children (1529), which synthesizes classical claims for the “raw and ill-deWned . . . mass of material [that is] the human mind at the time of birth”: “press wax,” Erasmus enjoins parents, “while it is softest; model clay while it is still moist.”32 Indeed, one cannot overstate the indebtedness of Locke’s Thoughts to every element of Erasmus’s Declamation, from the indelibility of juvenile association to the necessary implication of pedagogy and childish pleasure (while also recommending dice games to confuse play and the acquisition of literacy, Locke discards the alphabetic cookies which would make Erasmian pupils “hungrily eat their letters”33). What most inXuentially deWnes Erasmus’s educational program as “liberal,” however, is its vision of a practice of Wlial compliance that bears no testimony to paternal force: If someone reforms his ways only out of fear of evil consequences, he has a slavish disposition. In the common usage of our language, however, we call our sons liberi, realizing that they should have a liberal education, which bears no resemblance to anything servile . . . [I]f masters of the wiser sort are careful to train slaves who will serve them in a spirit of freedom, and indeed prefer to have freedmen over slaves, then how ridiculous it is to turn free-born children into slaves . . . [T]here is an immense difference between a father and a master. A master can exert his authority only through compulsion, but a father who appeals to his son’s sense of decency and liberality can gradually build up in him a spontaneous capacity for moral conduct which is untainted by any motive of fear . . . Between a father and a master there should be a much greater difference than between a prince and a tyrant; yet we overthrow tyrants from their positions in the state but place them in charge of our children or even assume the role of tyrant ourselves.34

Erasmus repudiates a “resemblance to anything servile” that would seem already proscribed by a free son’s status. This resemblance is threatened not by the “immense difference” between fathers and masters but, more urgently, by their imminent likeness. Slavishness qualiWes, for Erasmus, as a “disposition” to which free-born sons are prone just as much as servants not simply because they both must capitulate to absolute fathers and masters but also because virtue promises, in either case, to become “a spontaneous capacity.” Slaves and sons whose conduct testiWes to no extrinsic compulsion prove, by means of their reciprocally adverbial “spirit of freedom,” the liberality of the power to which they submit. Hence Erasmus asserts the likeness of his domestic sphere to a political state also able to demonstrate the superior wisdom of the governor who, Erasmus writes in The Education of a Christian Prince (1516), “holds [his citizens] bound over to him through love”;35 the immense difference between fathers and masters can be proven by sons who testify in the very act of acquiescence that they have been, Erasmus states, “better persuaded.”36 Locke introduces his pedagogical treatise with the Erasmian warning

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that a “slavish discipline makes a slavish temper” (ST 34). As with Erasmian sons still liable to behave like slaves, the political genealogy animated by Locke’s freely acting freeman deWnes as the crucially modernizing variable of his Thoughts not whether a son obeys but how he obeys. The endpoint of an education directed by Locke at “our English gentry” (ST 8), a “temper truly ingenuous” (ST 55), converts the imperative of Wlial submission into a gestural mandate that deWnes how a son motivates his assent. Because he learns to obey parental commands “freely of his own accord” and “without reluctancy” (ST 52–53), Locke’s text projects as its outcome not simply the unforced docility of sons but also the leavened authority of post-patriarchal fathers. Gillian Brown states that in his Thoughts “Locke entitles the child with the faculty and right of ratifying parental authority”;37 yet a son “in love with ingenuousness” (ST 102) does not so much ratify his father’s power as reconstitute it—to the extent, indeed, that it no longer looks like power at all. By converting absolute paternal authority into the medium of civil friendship between men, Locke’s son promises the persistence of Wlial obligation beyond the boundaries of boyhood: Would you have your son obedient to you when past a child? Be sure then to establish the authority of a father as soon as he is capable of submission and can understand in whose power he is. If you would have him stand in awe of you, imprint it in his infancy, and as he approaches more to a man admit him nearer to your familiarity; so shall you have him your obedient subject (as is Wt) whilst he is a child, and your affectionate friend when he is a man. (ST 30)

This assurance to fathers seems to beg the question urged by the reudiation of Filmerian patriarchalism made by Locke’s First Treatise, a rejection of “this strange kind of domineering Phantom, called the Fatherhood”38 that hinges upon a son’s release from the authority to which he must submit while an infant: “The Bonds of this Subjection are like the Swadling Cloths they are wrapt up in, and supported by, in the weakness of their Infancy. Age and Reason as they grow up, loosen them till at length they drop quite off, and leave a Man at his own free Disposal.”39 Because he insists that parental “Bonds” are “temporary,”40 Locke dissociates modes of domestic and political power whose identity permits Filmer to claim that the “subjection of children is the only fountain of all regal authority.”41 The reconception of childhood as, according to James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha; or, The Patriarch Unmonarched (1681), “an age of Nonage . . . in which though the Child be indeed free, yet (by reason of his own want of strength and discretion) is obliged to submit himself to his Parents judgment,”42 reciprocally converts the authority of Locke’s fathers into “not so much as the shadow” of “the proper power of the Magistrate.” As “but a help to the weakness and imperfection of

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Nonage,” parental power serves contractarian political genealogy solely, Locke stipulates, as “Discipline necessary to their Education.”43 Why, then, does the son of Locke’s Thoughts obey his father when past a child? By dedicating parental authority to the ends of an ingenuous education, Locke’s Thoughts neutralizes this very query: the father who regulates his familiarity to coincide with his son’s apparition as a freely acting citizen facilitates the equivocation of discipline and friendship as, in Locke’s statement of Two Treatises’s post-Filmerian outcome, “the Father and son [who] are equally free . . . equally Subjects of the same Law together, without any Dominion left in the Father.”44 With the conversion of both authority and subjection into friendship, Locke reconciles a father emptied of force to a son who has learned spontaneously to obey “the same Law.”45 Both equally free and equally subject, Locke’s grown men defuse the historically vital threat, Filmer argues, of a state “miserably wasted with civil war.” Filmer’s warning against the “miserable liberty”—or “constant anarchy”—fomented by contractarian men would be realized only by equally free sons who have not learned to obey when past a child.46 Locke devotes much of his Thoughts to an early, obvious impediment to the transformation of domestic authority into friendship, a “stubbornness and an obstinate disobedience [that] must be mastered with force and blows.” The following beating represents a primal Filmerian scene in which parental authority manifests itself as brute force: A prudent and kind mother of my acquaintance was . . . forced to whip her little daughter at her Wrst coming home from nurse eight times successively the same morning before she could master her stubbornness and obtain a compliance in a very easy and indifferent matter. If she had left off sooner and stopped at the seventh whipping, she had spoiled the child forever and by her unprevailing blows only conWrmed her refractoriness . . . but wisely persisting till she had bent her mind and suppled her will, the only end of correction and chastisement, she established her authority thoroughly in the very Wrst occasion and had ever after a very ready compliance and obedience in all things from her daughter. For as this was the Wrst time, so, I think, it was the last too she ever struck her. (ST 55)

Whipping number seven produces as Thoughts’s “spoiled” political outcome a girl who remains the intransigent object of parental power. As her penultimate experience of “chastisement,” however, it prepares the way for the change that will conclude her nonage; by making the application of force for “ever after” redundant, the girl’s eighth whipping penetrates more deeply than those that came before. It is striking, then, that Locke’s text enlists a daughter to stage the irreversible transformation of stubbornness into “ready compliance,” for her exemplarity would seem to suggest that girls, too, might demonstrate how the impetus to

34

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comply can be redirected from the body of power’s object to the “mind” of its subject. But this is only more or less so. For in the girl’s case, an initial gap or break interrupts the seamless operation of “awe” that should, Locke instructs, be induced “in his infancy”; the girl who has been sent out to nurse returns to her mother with a hypertrophied will which Xouts Locke’s stipulation that infants “should be used to submit their desires and go without their longings even from their very cradles” (ST 29). Locke’s baby boy occupies a plot in which this break in an otherwise omnipresent authority no longer obtains: If any vicious inclination in him be in the Wrst appearance of it and instances of it . . . discountenanced with the severe brow of the father . . . If vicious inclinations were watched from the beginning and the Wrst irregularities which they caused corrected by those gentler ways, we should seldom have to do with more than one disorder at once, which would be easily set right without any stir or noise and not require so harsh a discipline as beating. Thus one by one, as they appeared, they might all be weeded out without any signs or memory that ever they had been there. (ST 60)

By bracketing the logistics of nursing in this even more exemplary case, Locke cites “the severe brow of the father” as the only indicator of parental force that a son will ever need to perceive. Unlike the daughter whose ready compliance requires eight whippings, this infant boy’s continuous susceptibility to his father’s inXuence instills in him the capacity to “be made sensible and ashamed of his fault” (ST 60) without any mnemonic at all. For a son who has always been easily set right, the dissolution of infantile memory ensures the dissolution of the residually harsh origins of parental law, showing the reliance of Locke’s ingenuous education upon the effacement of the “signs” that would remind a boy of his (sister’s) infantile stubbornness. To extend the anti-Filmerian implications of this point, Locke superimposes the lost memories of citizens and commonwealths to afWrm the political irrelevance of their possibly arbitrary or, indeed, possibly regicidal origins: “For ’tis with Common-wealths as with particular Persons, they are commonly ignorant of their own Births and Infancies.”47 A freely acting man without “memories to retain the beginnings” (ST 32) has thus forgotten the events preceding what Agamben designates his birth—his emergence as an equal of the father with no authority left in him. Will Locke’s little daughter be equally forgetful? Returning to Thoughts’s previously refractory girl, we might wonder whether grown women occupy the medium of Lockean sociability. As we have seen, the hand that supples a child’s will can belong to either a father or a mother; despite one glitch in the girl’s achievement of ready compliance, might she also be able to sublimate these domestic beginnings and participate in the sphere of civil friendship? Locke’s treatment

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of the violation of public decency as the failure politely to articulate “dissent” (ST 111) seems to suggest the contrary: The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done and then answering them calmly and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civilized part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reformed this ancient piece of barbarity amongst us. Was it not, think you, an entertaining spectacle to see two ladies of quality accidentally seated on the opposite sides of a room, set round with company, fall into a dispute and grow so eager in it, that in the heat of their controversy, edging by degrees their chairs forwards, they were in a little time got up close to one another in the middle of the room, where they for a good while managed the dispute as Wercely as two gamecocks in the pit, without minding or taking any notice of the circle, which could not all the while forbear smiling? (ST 112)

If Locke’s Indians typify at least one Enlightenment ideal, then his ladies of quality are more barbarous than they. Indeed, these passionate ladies Wgure the declension of the sphere of civil debate into embodied violence, returning the medium of ideally disinterested political exchange— evoked by Jürgen Habermas as “people’s public use of their reason” or the “authority . . . of the better argument”48—to the obsolete posturing of gamecocks in the pit. Far more than Locke’s impassive Indians, Locke’s eager women Wgure the infantile antecedent to civil politics. As they unthinkingly edge their chairs into the center of the room, they realize a form of persuasion so quaintly anachronistic that their Enlightenment spectators cannot “forbear smiling.” Although one doubts that Mary Astell smiled as she read this passage, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Some ReXections upon Marriage register the depth of her agreement with Locke on the inevitability of “spoil’d” women: for Astell, ladies of quality are barbarously overembodied precisely because men “den[y] them the beneWts of an ingenuous and liberal Education” (SP 61–62). To specify women’s resulting difference from freely acting men, Astell returns to the Cartesian articulation of the moral philosophical promise that “those in whom the will can naturally conquer the passions most easily and stop the accompanying movements of the body have the strongest souls.”49 As Descartes’s Passions of the Soul postulates, the unregulated passion of Locke’s Werce ladies becomes susceptible to the volitional control modeled by Locke’s stoic Indians only as the result of prior habituation, because “these movements, excited in the blood by the objects of the Passions, immediately follow so swiftly from mere impressions formed in the brain and from the disposition of the organs, even though the soul may in no way contribute to them, that there is no human wisdom capable of withstanding

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them when one is insufWciently prepared for them.”50 For a person whose receptivity to sensory or passionate impression supersedes any less decisively materialized impulse, mechanistic reXex determines the blood’s movements well in advance of the mediation of an “insufWciently prepared” will. The latter intervenes only after the passions have wrought their primary effect upon Cartesian physiology: “they excite Desire.”51 To compel the remedial mandate of her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Astell recapitulates the mechanics of this argument, for which she credits Descartes’s Passions de l’Ame and Henry More’s Abridgment of Morals (1690):52 [N]ot to enter too far into the Philosophy of the Passions, sufWce it brieXy to observe: That by the Oeconomy of Nature such and such Motions in the Body are annext in such a manner to certain Thoughts in the Soul . . . all this being perform’d by means of the Animal Spirits. The Active Powers of the Soul, her Will and Inclinations are at her own dispose, her Passive are not, she can’t avoid feeling Pain or other sensible Impressions so long as she’s united to a Body . . . And when outward Objects occasion such Commotions in the Bloud and Animal Spirits, as are attended with those Perceptions in the Soul which we call the Passions, she can’t be insensible of or avoid ’em, being no more able to prevent these Wrst Impressions than she is to stop the Circulation of the Bloud, or to hinder Digestion. All she can do is to Continue the Passion as it was begun, or to Divert it some way or other to ModiWe and Direct it. The due performance of which is what we call Vertue, which consists in governing Animal Impressions, in directing our Passions to such Objects, and keeping ’em in such a pitch, as right Reason requires. (SP 213–14)

A “Philosophy of the Passions” that annexes “Thoughts in the Soul” to “Motions in the Body” owes its infrastructure, as Descartes states in Passions of the Soul, to “[William] Harvey’s opinion concerning the circulation of the blood.”53 It is, more precisely, the animal spirits—according to Descartes, “the most agitated and Wnest of [the blood’s] parts”54— that mediate between the soul’s “Active” and its “Passive” powers, between a will able to produce muscular or mental motion and passions whose equivalence to “sensible impressions” place them outside volitional control. Astell’s recapitulation of the materialist derivation of moral philosophy demonstrates her fundamental agreement with Locke’s own approximation of Cartesian virtue, which deWnes contractarian liberty not as unrestricted bodily mobility but, rather, as one’s capacity to arrest one’s body in the name of a less sensationally urgent good. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke states: “A Man’s Heart beats, and the Blood circulates, which ’tis not in his Power by any Thought or Volition to stop . . . Voluntary then is not opposed to Necessary; but to Involuntary.”55 What deWnes the liberty of Locke’s citizen is his conversion of the pursuit of his desire from an involuntary into a

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voluntary exercise, for “the mind having in most cases . . . a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so . . . is at liberty to consider the objects of them; examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty Man has.”56 This equivocation of action and passion Wxes the success of an ingenuous education.57 The liberty exercised by the building block of political modernity Locke designates only in this capacity a “free Agent” consists not in that man’s capacity to do what he pleases, but in his capacity “to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will.” Because, Locke states, “I Wnd the will often confounded with . . . Desire,” he aims the power wielded by fathers during their sons’ nonage at the passion that, left unregulated, drives men into “a necessary compliance” with their bodies.58 A boy who has learned to subordinate his desire for “present satisfaction” to his anterior will realizes “the essential foundation of our liberty,”59 because a “child who must have grapes . . . when he is grown up, must . . . not be satisWed too if his desires carry him to wine or women” (ST 27)—or, recalling Filmer’s warning, to anarchy. The boy who, on the brink of entering the public sphere, has achieved “mastery of our natural propensity to indulge corporal and present pleasure” (ST 33) is thereby free; but, because he no longer harbors “ungovernable passion,” he is governable. Men able to “make things or actions more or less pleasing to themselves” achieve the regulation of passion that makes their political assent voluntary and, as a result, less palpably necessary.60 The liberty of Locke’s citizen resides in his “power to govern” (ST 27) the mechanical urgency of desires which, in threatening the reduction of what is good merely to what feels good, would preclude the reconciliation of the necessary and the voluntary upon which an ingenuous adulthood turns. Astell’s Serious Proposal reiterates Locke’s speciWcation of virtue as this progressively de-mechanized reWnement of desire, because, just like a Lockean man, a woman “united to a Body” through the medium of animal spirits “can’t avoid feeling.” Because passions impress themselves upon her, in Cartesian fashion, as “Perceptions in the Soul,” she cannot, Astell repeats, “be insensible of or avoid ’em.” With this claim, Astell does not argue for a feminine susceptibility to “commotions in the blood” that would distinguish embodied women from abstract men. Rather, by arguing for men’s and women’s physiological likeness, Astell insists that women are as embodied as Lockean citizens. The historical speciWcity of her feminism thus resides in a claim for the physiological sameness of bodies that grants women’s passion the same aptitude for moral and political “vertue” as men’s. To underscore the fact that “the essential foundation” of moralized liberty occupies a person who is not preemptively sexed, I refer below to Astell’s elaboration of that aptitude as her “feminist physiology.”

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By basing Serious Proposal’s indictment of “light and frothy” (SP 68) women upon the unrelieved inXuence of desires that would spoil either sex, Astell’s rationale for feminine education deviates from the contrasting presumption, taken by Scott as the starting point of modern feminism as such, of women’s anatomically entrenched difference from abstract or rights-bearing individuals. But Locke’s ingenuous citizen does not occupy only one half of the mind-body division upon which such a derivation of feminism depends, because he exercises his liberty by desiring to obey. As Susan James remarks of the moral philosophical relation of volition and passion, Descartes himself does not unilaterally afWrm “the emergence of a clear division between mind and body [which] served to attach women more Wrmly to the physical world.”61 This insight is crucial to the historical determination of both Astell’s feminism and its literary-political resonance. What occasions Astell’s call to make women more than “curious piece[s] of Mechanism” (SP 148) is not the discrepancy between feminine embodiment and the standard of essentially masculine virtue called by Hilda Smith a “false universal”; it is, instead, the lapse in childhood training that prevents women from “directing” their passionate “Motions” as well as partially de-mechanized Lockean men.62 Indeed, Henry More’s Abridgment of Morals vindicates the moral utility of passion because it infuses duty with desire: Des Cartes also says very happily, that the Passions seem to be a most certain and solid Treasure of the Soul . . . . . . [T]here is another use of them deserving notice; as namely, the rating of things that are laudable and just according as we Wnd our Passions excited by them, or as they are felt and relished by a sort of Connexion with our Souls. For passionate affecting is the most intimate and immediate Fruit of Life; and tho we may adorn the best of things with superWcial and imaginary approbation, yet our Souls are not able, without such Passions, to wed the Object, and, as it were, to intermix it with our Sense and Life . . . For this is the nature of true Virtue, to love the best things, and hate the worst.63

Rather than a universal automatically hostile to feminine appropriation, the person which realizes passion’s Cartesian “use,” Astell insists, belongs indifferently to Serious Proposal ’s spoiled women or to Locke’s grapeloving boys. The endpoint of properly excited passion is, in neither case, an individual whose wholesale abstraction opposes the speciWcity of women’s sex, but a person in whom reXexive desire and willed duty mutually constitute his or her “passionate affecting.”64 Astell’s critique of Lockean modernity is grounded in his persistently materialist evocation of a practice of post-patriarchal virtue that, as we will see, cannot be reconciled to the plight of wives. If women, Xesh and blood just like Cartesian men, incarnate “half Mankind” (R 31), then Locke’s ladies of quality are insolubly spoiled

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but not insolubly sexed: “Were the Men as much neglected, and as little care taken to cultivate and improve them . . . they themselves wou’d sink into the greatest stupidity and barbarity” (SP 57). Women, Astell conWrms, “are sunk into an Animal life” (SP 126) not as the effect of sexed essence but because they lack the training (they retain, as she puts it, the Lockean “Weeds” [SP 54]) that would enable them, like Locke’s boy, “to keep our inclinations and Passions under Government” (SP 164). Because Locke and Astell both cite the equation of virtue and volitional self-mastery, Astell can claim women’s “Incapacity” as “acquired not natural”: feminine barbarity is instead due to “the mistakes of our Education; which like an Error in the Wrst Concoction, spreads its ill InXuence through all our Lives” (SP 59–60). Yet it is worth repeating that a boy “in love with all the ways of virtue” (ST 37) has not had to achieve Locke’s draconian restatement of the Cartesian mandate that he become “used to submit [his] desires and go without [his] longings” (ST 29); rather than going without what he wants, the Enlightenment man who loves virtue has learned to want the right thing. He has been trained, as Astell states, successfully to “ModiWe and Direct”—but not to relinquish—his longings, whereas girls remain in thrall to “un-mortiW’d Passions” (SP 186) grown so “ungovernable, [that] instead of doing Service to the Mind, [they] get Dominion over it” (SP 211). If a boy learns to suspend his desire, we can inversely say that he learns to lend his virtue desire’s density; but what of the grown woman who, long after her nonage, Wnds herself unable to Wt her desire to an abruptly unpleasing form of domestic government? How, in other words, will Astell’s “un-mortiW’d” and “ungovernable” girl learn to obey a husband? By broaching this question, Astell’s ReXections reiterates the problem resolved for Lockean boys by the conversion of childish awe into masculine friendship. Locke’s Thoughts once more plots the stakes of the shift from “[f]ear and awe” to “love and friendship” induced in sons “from the beginning” and enabled by a “father’s brow” that becomes incrementally “more smoothed to them.” The father who makes his sons “slaves to your estate,” on the other hand, solicits compliance restricted to a “dissembled outside put on by fear only to avoid . . . present anger.” Unable to learn to love or, more graphically, to “put into him” (ST 31– 32) the capricious inXuence that traps him in an arbitrary “present,” Locke’s boy portends more than a few fearful sons: he anticipates the passive obedience of an entire population of Astellian wives. Astell is not alone in predicting little girls’ departure from Locke’s modernizing trajectory. Two years before the publication of ReXections, the phrase “mere obedience” appeared in George Savile, the First Marquis of Halifax’s popular conduct book The Lady’s New-years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (1688). Uniformly decried by recent commentators as,

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according to Ruth Perry, “[t]he seventeenth-century locus classicus of patriarchy . . . the most controlling set of injunctions that a . . . father could think up,”65 Halifax’s Advice can alternatively be read in light of the Erasmian and Lockean implication of arbitrary power in the slavishness that it solicits. Halifax claims as the inspiration for his advice the difWculty with which his daughter will, recalling Butler’s phrase, be transitively enacted by her future husband’s government; speaking from the vantage of “a Father [who] layeth aside his Authority, and persuadeth only by his Kindness,” Halifax aims to ease this daughter’s discovery that “[t]here may be some bitterness in meer Obedience.” Of her upcoming transition to a state that “looks a little uncouthly at Wrst appearance,”66 Halifax can only, rather ominously, advocate her own assumption of amnesia: I will conclude this Article with my Advice, that you would as much, as Nature will give you leave, endeavor to forget the great Indulgence you have found at home, after such a gentle Discipline as you have been under; every thing you dislike will seem the harsher to you, the tenderness we had for you, My Dear, is of another nature, peculiar to kind Parents, and differing from that which you will meet with at Wrst in any Family into which you shall be transplanted.67

A daughter’s transition from indulgence to “harsher” discipline compels Halifax to formulate as the best analogy for his advice “something strew’d on tender Flowers to preserve them from being blasted.”68 Halifax’s less than reassuring evocation of the prophylactic function of his rules encapsulates the dilemma posed by the wife who, Astell’s ReXections repeats, performs “meer Obedience, such as is paid only to Authority” (R 50). In her most famous indictment of the harshness of that authority, Astell ascribes it to the Puritan radicals who have somehow failed to remark this divergence of private practice and public principle: “how much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny” (R 46–47). By extending the Erasmian likeness of fathers and tyrants to qualify the power wielded by republican husbands, Astell reWnes a Tory polemic against the hypocrisy of contractarian men repeated by the nonjuring clergyman and “unabashed Filmerian”69 Charles Leslie in The New Association of Those Called Moderate-Church-Men, with the Modern-Whigs and Fanaticks (1703): These Men whose chief Topick is the Liberty of the People, and against Arbitrary Power, are the most Absolute of any other in their Families . . . If they Believ’d Themselves, or their own Pretences, they wou’d go Home, and call a Council of their Wives, Children, and Servants, and tell them that the Master of a Family was

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ordain’d for the Good of those that were put under his Government . . . And therefore, that they shou’d . . . set him Rules . . . Which if he Broke, or that they thought so, for they are the Judges of that; then they shou’d Abdicate him . . . The Reason is the same in a Kingdom, which is but a Great Family . . . And can any Believe, that a Tyrant in a Family would not prove the same upon a Throne? It has ever prov’d so.70

As Tory insight, according to Astell’s A Fair Way with the Dissenters (1704), into the “Practice of Lewd and Self-interested Mens pretending to be Patriots,”71 the revelation of contractarian men’s private exercise of “Arbitrary Power” need not necessarily be read as an appeal for husbands’ gentler domestic governance. In a forceful effort to qualify Astell’s indictment of marriage, Patricia Springborg and Rachel Weil argue for the weight of Astell’s Tory and Anglican conviction, stated in her Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom (1704), that the “Christian Religion does no where allow Rebellion.”72 Deployed to expose as hypocritical “Gibberish” the progressive pretenses of men for whom “all . . . except their own Discipline is Tyranny,”73 the likeness of a kingdom to a “Great Family” furthers, according to Springborg and Weil, Astell’s Filmerian commitment to a “divinely ordained social order” that should obtain in both spheres.74 For Springborg, Astell’s ReXections “reinstated the traditional interpretation of marriage in order to undo” contractarian theories that challenge both public and private hierarchy;75 likewise, for Weil, Astell “allowed the obedient wife to represent the ideal model for political behaviour in a subject.”76 Read as a Whiggish expedient to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the throne upon the death of his brother Charles II, the contractarian “harangue . . . against Popery and Arbitrary Power” is nothing more, Astell writes in An Impartial Enquiry, than “the Baits that cover the Hook of home-bred Cabals and Rebellious Projects.”77 For Springborg and Weil, Astell’s refutation of a “Cant of Self-Preservation”78 that establishes the likeness of the Civil War and the Exclusion Crisis resides in her recovery of marriage as a model of political allegiance impervious to contractarian critique. Weil states: Astell made a powerful case that those who obey a power simply because it is there (passive obedient tories) are steadier in their allegiance than those who obey a power on grounds that it is deserving of allegiance (whigs). Such an argument was far easier to make with reference to conjugal authority than to governmental authority precisely because the claim that husbands should rule over their wives whether they deserved to or not was entirely uncontroversial.79

Astell’s defense of hereditary sovereignty indeed places her on the side of even arbitrarily wielded princely power: “But are Sedition and Rebellion no Grievances? they are not less, [but] perhaps more

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Grievous than Tyranny.”80 But Astell’s indictment of marriage resides in an assessment of masculine competence that renders absolute conjugal power harder, and not easier, to vindicate to its objects than political tyranny. By claiming women as well as men able to animate a “true vital Principle of Obedience,”81 Astell disqualiWes virtue compelled “not so much [by] Reason as Necessity” (R 62) as a salutary model of either domestic or political subjection. Women can be sure of practicing “reasonable Service,” she argues in The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), only to God.82 Astell’s Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris (1695) rejects “the Love of dirty Clay” for the “Heights of Piety” to which, Astell states, “this Divine Principle [will] elevate the amorous Soul.”83 This preference can be read as testimony, in the word of her biographer Perry, to Astell’s “asceticism”;84 yet rather than a symptom of metaphysical prudishness, Astell’s sustained treatment of “the Irregularity of our Desire” enlists amorous souls in the promise of properly reoriented passion to “render our Obedience regular constant and vigorous.”85 The feminist congruity of Astell’s Letters and her Christian Religion with her critique of marriage lies not in their repudiation of pleasure but rather in the fact that they again radicalize men’s and women’s physiological indifference: “if Love which is the leading and Master Passion were but once wisely regulated,” Astell states, “our Passions would be so far from rebelling against and disquieting us, that on the contrary they would mightily facilitate the great Work we have to do.”86 She imagines how amorous-souled persons will “do” this work: [Love] is the Parent of the most intire Resignation, and exact Conformity. A true Lover neither questions GOD’s Revelations nor disputes his Commands . . . I cannot discern wherein the Virtue of a bare Submission consists, such a passive Obedience to GOD is like the new Notion some have got of passive Obedience to their Governors, a being content to suffer when we know not how to help it; but our Divine Amorist has an intire Complacency in whatever GOD allots, he in a manner goes forth to meet it, chuses, justiWes, and rejoyces in it.87

The “Divine Amorist” who “does not pursue his Service with a languid and frozen Application, but with the Diligence and Zeal of Love”88 drains passive obedience of its “Virtue” precisely because, unlike the activities of choosing, justifying, and rejoicing, it is passive. For Astell as for Locke, “constant and vigorous” obedience, as opposed to “bare Submission,” reciprocally constitutes an authority no longer reducible to “necessity”: service to God, Christian Religion argues, permits for women as well as men a practice of assent that “is not an Arbitrary thing.”89

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Perry evokes Astell’s feminism as both “Stoic and Christian.”90 But Astell’s Letters carefully qualiWes the aspiration to “free our Minds of that early Prejudice that sensible Objects do act upon our Spirits,” for later in this text she stipulates that “I am not for a Stoical Apathy.”91 Astell’s amorous-souled person repudiates “the sottishness of those dull Epicureans,” because the fact, as we have seen, that animal spirits circulate from body to mind and back again permits her to redeem bodily pleasure not as “early prejudice” but, inversely, as the aftereffect of divine “Joy”: “Whilst our Souls are inebriated with its Pleasures, our very Bodies partake of its Sweetness: for it excites a grateful and easie Motion in the animal Spirits, and causes such an agreeable Movement of the Passions as comprehends all that Delight.”92 Here Astell echoes the Cartesian theologian Nicolas Malebranche’s claim that “the love of truth, justice, virtue, or of God Himself is always accompanied by motion in the spirits that makes this love sensible.”93 Malebranche’s “God” likewise inspires the impassioned rationality which dictates the physiological consistency of a divine amorist’s “Zeal,” for “God . . . does not wish to give us a . . . forced love, as it were, but a love by choice, an enlightened love, a love that subjects our mind and heart to Him.”94 In this capacity, critical stress upon Astell’s unilaterally ascetic tendencies threatens to overlook the still palpably materialized medium of “enlightened love”—and mechanical “Delight”—through which she represents herself as a “Free Agent.” Astell assumes this title neither by squelching her passion nor by advocating “a bare power to do what we Will” but by practicing a form of reasonable service that incorporates desire itself.95 Rather than “Rebellion,” it is the impassioned practice of “intire resignation” that projects for Astell’s votaries a state of “Christian Equality.”96 Love produces subjects of power, Astell’s Letters afWrms, by “melting down their obstinate, ingrateful, disingenuous Wills.”97 (Serious Proposal chides: “shall we be so disingenuous and ungrateful as to think . . . a little Meditation and Watchfulness too much to return his Love?” [SP 133].) Yet if, for Christian women, “Love stirs us up to Obedience and endears it to us,”98 ReXections’s pithy demystiWcation of the vocabulary of romantic courtship—“he may call himself her Slave a few days, but it is only in order to make her his all the rest of his Life” (R 44)—resolutely excludes husbands from participation in this process. Astell caustically observes: Did the bare name of Husband confer Sense on a Man, and the mere being in Authority infallibly qualiWe him for Government, much might be done. But since a wise Man and a Husband are not Terms convertible, and loath soever one is to own it, Matter of Fact won’t allow us to deny, that the Head many times stands in need of the Inferior’s Brains to manage it . . . if she submits to his Power, it is not so much Reason as Necessity that compels her. (R 62)

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Again, in the name of “GOD’s Word and Ordinance,” Astell is willing to tolerate sovereign departures from sense: “I will not pretend to justiWe all the Actions of our Princes.”99 Those who aspire to the ofWce of husband, however, engender a far less recuperable divide between God’s mandate and the person who represents it, because “scarce a Man can keep himself clean and make a Bow, but thinks he is good enough to pretend to any Woman . . . a Husband is such a Wonder-working Name as to make an Equality, or something more, whenever it is pronounced” (R 65–66). If the wonder to which Astell refers is entailed in Locke’s ascription of domestic dominion to “naturally . . . abler and . . . stronger”100 men, then ReXections refuses to credit the magic that marriage would work on barely clean suitors’ brains. A measure of women’s difference grounded not in sexed superiority but rather in the susceptibility to moral habituation “of the volume and agitation of the animal spirits”—a standard here invoked by Malebranche’s The Search After Truth—anticipates a generically unsexed physiology which engenders some women, Malebranche concedes, with “stronger minds than some men.”101 In violation of Lockean nature, Astell insists, Malebranche’s “stronger” women might also be wives. Astell introduces Christian Religion to its female readers by posing a counterplot to ReXections, one that imagines adult women’s conversion to a state of reasonable service. For the “Man” whom Astell’s Letters names as its divine amorist is, in fact, a woman: [M]ost, if not all, the Follies and Vices that Woman are subject to, (for I meddle not with the Men) are owing to our paying too great a deference to other Peoples judgments, and too little to our own . . . when GOD has not only allow’d, but requir’d us to judge for our selves. How those who have made themselves our Governors, may like our withdrawing from their yoke I know not; but I am certain that this principle of judging for our selves in all cases wherein GOD has left us this liberty, will introduce no . . . disobedience to our Lawful Governors . . . The insinuations of those who have no right to be our Directors, but who have only usurp’d an empire over our Understandings, being one of the principal causes of our disobedience to Lawful Authority.102

By proposing that wives’ understandings are “usurp’d,” Astell advances the same analogy for objects of political and of romantic eloquence. Whiggish dupes are “trap’d . . . without perceiving the Snare, till they are entangled in the greatest Crimes”;103 the suitor’s “Prey,” Astell states, “is entangled in the Snare . . . Love, or rather a Blind unreasonable Fondness, which usurps the Name of that noble Passion, has gain’d on her” (R 68–69). Astell’s conXation of romantic Xattery and the “Ill Arts of Factious Men”104 derives from the Tory equivalence of sedition and seduction

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that would, Eikon Basilike optimistically states, redeem the complicity of duped and “vulgar” subjects as “loyall injuries.”105 By placing Astell’s indictment of both forms of eloquence in service of her Tory agenda, Weil locates ReXections’s political intervention in the insight “that rather than diminishing patriarchal authority contract theory licensed its worst abuses.”106 But the split of divine love from a love that “usurps” its name might compel an inversion of Weil’s gloss. Rather than likening Whigs to (bad) husbands, Astell likens husbands to (insolubly bad) Whigs: by inspiring not love but “Blind unreasonable Fondness,” not obedience but “disobedience,” husbands resemble men whose claim to just authority is divested of legitimacy by the very fact of their pretense to it. The terminal Whiggishness of those who “have made themselves our Governors” would thus prevent even the cleanest of suitors from ever coinciding with “Lawful Authority.” Astell’s point is not simply that the marriage contract legitimizes abuse; more gravely, the wonder-working name of husband, like a “Leap-frog Government” installed by rebellious Whigs, can only in a romantic universe simulate legitimacy at all.107 It would be difWcult to overstress the force, in a text devoted to women’s rational and spiritual improvement, of Christian Religion’s equation of marriage with “the setting ours[elves] to sale, and the dressing forth our selves to purchase a Master.”108 Here Astell rejects the accommodation that permits Filmer, in his Interregnum Directions for Obedience to Governours in dangerous and doubtfull Times (1652), uneasily to endorse the practice of “obedience that is due onely by tolerating what they inXict; not by performing what they require.” Filmer’s citizens are bound to the former practice because “it is not improper to say, that in obeying an usurper, we may obey primarily the true superiour.”109 But by refusing even grudgingly to permit husbands to represent true superiors, Astell draws upon the example of Charles I, whose rationale for not conceding to his own usurpers anticipates her judgment of marrying women: “He deserves to be a slave without pitty, or redemption, that is content to have the rational soveraignty of his Soul, and liberty of his will, and words so captivated.”110 Women in pursuit of husbands might indeed conWrm Locke’s most misogynist estimate of their brains, for of the “Masters” who “deny us Judgment,” Astell’s Christian Religion concedes, “I own it is too true, That too many of us have given them just reason . . . For it is no great sign of Prudence to chuse a Service when we are Free.”111 Because the “Plot” (R 66) that transforms a woman’s suitor into her master happens far too late in her life to be forgotten, the power endured by Astell’s wives manifestly fails to resemble what Locke evokes, in the case of the gentle paternal law imposed on contractarian sons, as a “natural principle, whereof he never perceived the beginning” (ST 75). Instead, the Whiggish suitor who, while “nourish[ing] the Hope of being

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Lord and Master, appears with all the Modesty and Submission of an humble and unpretending Admirer” (R 66) precisely reverses the direction of Locke’s insensibly modernizing pedagogy. The suitor’s plot obviously precludes Lockean resolution; as her surrogate for the son whose obedience has become a natural principle, Astell offers a wife “heartily reconcile[d]” to her suddenly arbitrary husband’s “nauseous Ostentation of Power” (R 54). An adulthood passed in thrall to power that remains more or less nauseatingly enforced compels virtue bearing little resemblance to enlightened love: This is her time of Tryal, the Season of exercising and improving her Vertues. A Woman that is not Mistress of her Passions, . . . who does not practice Passive Obedience to the utmost, will never be acceptable to such an absolute Sovereign as a Husband. (R 61)

Astell’s “Mistress of her Passions” marks ReXections’s satirical appropriation of the mandate of Cartesian moral philosophy to Wt the slavish destiny of a wife. For, unlike Locke’s son, this woman does not Wnd that her “Obedience” is motivated by her love. Instead, her love has already been motivated by her obedience: “Modesty requiring that a Woman should not love before Marriage, but only make choice of one whom she can love hereafter: She who has none but innocent affections, being easily able to Wx them where Duty requires” (SP 102). The extra-Cartesian impossibility of wholly dispassionate “modesty” precludes the accommodation of desire and virtue proposed by Locke as the substance of political liberty. Astell’s wife instead reduces love itself to a wholly willed— although, perhaps, still nauseous—“Duty.” Descartes anticipates the virtuous redirection of passion because, even if passions “[seem] to have been joined by nature to each of our thoughts from the beginning of our life, one can nevertheless join them to others by habituation.”112 Like Locke, Astell repeats this assurance to justify the urgency of early childhood education, for “if a Passion that is young and tender gives us work enough, as the difWculty of Education plainly shews that it does, they had need be very Kind, very Good, and very Wise, who set about the Cure of an Old and inveterate one” (SP 229). Yet if the inveteracy of “Old” passion constitutes a mandate for the education of both girls and boys, Astell does not reiterate the Cartesian assurance that “tho we may Wnd it difWcult absolutely to quash a Passion that is once begun, yet it is no hard matter to transfer it” (SP 223) to vindicate a modest woman’s effort to Wx her affections. She writes of this woman’s fate: “[She] who can be truly mortify’d as to lay aside her own Will and Desires, to pay such an intire Submission for Life, to one whom she cannot be sure will always deserve it, does certainly perform a more Heroic Action than all the famous Masculine Heroes can boast

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of” (R 78). In this conclusive departure from Locke, Astell projects a wife so “truly mortify’d” that she would retain no residual “Desires” at all. ReXections thus Wxes wives’ divergence from free agents in the outcome of the “slavish discipline” that produces Locke’s irreversibly “broken” boys: made passive by domestic government that “break[s] the mind,” these indelibly “low spirited, moped creature[s]” are drained of the “vigor” (ST 33–34) which animates the virtue of ingenuous men. On Locke’s terms, then, wives’ terminal political difference might most forcibly reside in the insolubly “moped” practice of mere obedience. By implicating contractarian husbands in the fatality of an adult woman’s passively obedient “Life,” Astell refuses to counter the prognosis that ReXections advances with disarming brevity, for “if a Wife’s case be as it is here represented, it is not good for a Woman to Marry, and so there’s an end of [the] Human Race” (R 77–78). For Astell, slavish wives pose an insoluble obstacle to the Lockean reform of power achieved, as we have seen, as the subjectivation of that power’s former objects. By brieXy reviewing contemporary disagreement over whether Astell’s ReXections inaugurates a feminist critique of the abstract individual, I conclude the present section with the suggestion that this evaluative standoff fails to capture Astell’s response to Locke, which anchors the aptitude of ingenuous assent in a person whose desire’s convertibility into virtue is not necessarily determined by its sex. Carole Pateman suggests that Astell’s indictment of private tyranny exposes as politically retrograde a husband’s right, as Locke’s First Treatise states, “to have his Will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common Concernment.”113 The difference between paternal authority (the progressive friendliness of a father who must “be a Will to [his son], till he hath attained to a state of Freedom”114) and husbandly tyranny (a “Wonderworking” marriage contract that converts barely clean suitors into masters) provokes Pateman to rename Lockean contractarianism “fraternal patriarchy”; Locke’s revision of patriarchal power leaves untouched, Pateman asserts, the masculine “sex-right or conjugal right” that husbands continue to exert over wives.115 Fraternal patriarchy is thus characterized by the exemption of the power of men over women, and not the power of fathers over children, from any mitigating contractual inXuence, because “women are subordinated to men as men, or to men as a fraternity.”116 Astell’s refutation of tyrannical husbands’ republican pretenses is less obvious than it might seem, Pateman asserts, because of the universalizing tendencies of a discourse in which contractual “‘individuals’ are all of the same sex.”117 For Pateman, Astell’s equation of wives and slaves heralds a feminist challenge of “masculine right” contemporaneous with “the beginning of the modern era.”118 But as we have seen, Springborg and Weil, who

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subordinate Astell’s charge of domestic tyranny to her indictment of the seditious political projects of “deprav’d”119 Whigs, do not necessarily read ReXections as a critique of marriage at all.120 According to Pateman, Astell’s tyrannical husbands expose women’s “exclu[sion] from the status of ‘individual,’”121 thus inaugurating liberal feminism’s deWning insight; Springborg and Weil, however, place Astell’s charge of private tyranny in service of what Springborg calls Astell’s “truly political” indictment of hypocritically republican Whigs.122 Certainly, to mark my difference with Pateman, I have suggested that Astell’s reXections on marriage do not identify men with the universalizing category of the abstract individual (as ReXections’s barely clean suitors indicate, far from it). Nor does Astell advance women’s claim to civil liberty, for, as she repeatedly states, “’tis better that I endure the Unreasonableness, Injustice, or Oppression of a Parent, a Master, &c. than that the Establish’d Rules of Order and good Government shou’d be superseded on my account.”123 But Astell does question the lawfulness of husbands’ “absolute” power, a challenge compelled by the Cartesian person which cannot, regardless of its sex, animate vital obedience to conjugal authority modernized by Locke only in the case of fathers. The gold standard of this feminist— or, to repeat Springborg’s word, this “political”—appraisal of contractarian modernity resides in the amenability to impassioned and rational virtue of a still materialist person’s desire. Because ReXections’s husbands exact bare submission rather than ingenuous virtue, Astell’s representative object of power enjoys “a few days” of romance followed by a “life” of miserably passive obedience. How might the novel imaginatively defer mortiWcation dictated, for Astell, by the metamorphosis of Xattering suitors into masters? By aggravating the improbability through which it conjures a happily compliant wife from a spoiled coquette, Mary Davys’s The Reformed Coquet anticipates, I will suggest, the role of Astell’s feminist physiology in the critical future of the domestic novel.

Domestic Power and the Novel: The Reformed Coquet’s “one little Improbability” Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act offers a “speciWcation of the relationship between ideology and cultural texts” which ampliWes the signiWcance of the implication of masculine power and feminine compliance variously represented by Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673) and Davys’s The Reformed Coquet; or, The Memoirs of Amoranda (1724). Jameson borrows from Claude LéviStrauss’s structural study of myth to suggest that “ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic

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act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.”124 Davys’s The Reformed Coquet and Allestree’s The Ladies Calling both invent solutions to the contradiction whose insolubility materializes, for Astell, in the Wgure of the Wnally mortiWed wife. To make this claim for the latter text, therefore, is to read Allestree’s conduct book as a dynamic ideological “act” rather than to presume the transparency or coherence of the patriarchal norms which it would alternatively simply transcribe. Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, a genealogy of what Elias designates “[i]nternally more paciWed societies,” importantly activates conduct books as “a literary genre in their own right.”125 Here I explore the feminist methodological interest of reading this “genre” as something more than a set of directives, to repeat Jameson’s terms, informed or invested by a static ideological mandate. The anterior stability of that mandate tends to be taken for granted by readers like Weil, who dismisses as “lip service to male superiority” the expanse of “wise and dextrous” conduct Halifax’s Advice recommends to make his soon-to-be married daughter “the better prepared for the Compliance that is necessary.”126 Yet, as we have seen, Halifax’s Advice projects the failure of masculine “superiority” to defuse the arbitrariness of the power that his daughter, become a bride, will obey. Unlike Astell, of course, Halifax takes a husband’s sex as a sufWcient rationale for his power. But to label Advice, with Anthony Fletcher, the product of “eighteenth-century ideologists intent upon Wxing men and women in a framework of polarity”127 is to risk missing its effort to transpose Locke’s accommodation of parental power and ingenuous assent into a domestic sphere which Locke does not imaginatively modernize, the sphere for which a soon to be naturally subject wife must somehow be “prepared.” It is no wonder, then, that Fletcher reads Advice’s stress upon “kindness rather than authority” as no more than a “cloying” stylistic device further dedicated to the genre’s uninXected “defence of patriarchy.”128 Like Halifax’s Advice, Allestree’s Ladies Calling cogently anticipates the harshness of masculine conjugal power in the same gesture with which it advises wives how themselves to mitigate that power. Allestree explains why a wife’s “Wrst debt” to her husband is love: [T]hat is the most Essential requisite: without this, ’tis only a Bargain and Compact, A Tyranny perhaps on the Mans part, and a Slavery on the Womans . . . Therefore as it is very necessary to bring some degree of that to this State; so ’tis no less to maintain and improve it in it. This is it which facilitates all other duties of Marriage; makes the Yoke sit so lightly, that it rather pleases than galls. It should therefore be the study of Wives to preserve this Flame . . . [and] carefully

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to guard it from all those things which are naturally apt to extinguish it: of which kind are all frowardness and little perversness of humor, all sullen and morose behavior; which by taking off from the delight and complacency of Conversation, will by degrees wear off the kindness.129

To cite this passage for its agreement with Astell on the topic of conjugal “Tyranny” and “Slavery” would be to miss the point of advice aimed to stave off that very prospect.130 By invoking the agency of a love that remains supplemental to “all” of a wife’s “other duties,” Allestree prescribes an antidote to wifely mortiWcation that hinges upon the physiological integrity of her passion. Unlike the mortiWed wife who retains no desire extrinsic to her dutiful will, the wife who can “maintain and improve” her love preserves intact its slender but “Essential” difference from wholly willed virtue. In the name of this difference, Allestree does not command wives to love but rather to “guard” their love; rather than having to Wx her affections, Allestree’s wife must “preserve” the passion which promises to mitigate the necessity of her practice of subjection. It is the duty of Allestree’s wife to preserve intact her extradutiful love. This task engages the entire remaining swathe of her “behavior,” for she must ceaselessly extirpate from her practice of obedience any testimony to the fact that her husband might not always gently inspire it. Her failure threatens a lapse in “kindness” whose repercussions Allestree spells out in the case of the sullen and morose wife: How pleasantly might many Woman have lived, if they had not affected Dominion? Nay, how much of their Will might they have had, if they had not strugled for it? For let a Man be of never so gentle a Temper (unless his Head be softer then his Heart) such a Usurpation will awake him to assert his Right . . . And at last ’tis commonly the Wives lot, after an uncreditable unjust War, to make as disadvantageous a Peace; this (like all other ineffective Rebellions) serving to straiten her Yoke, to turn an ingenuous Subjection into a slavish Servitude: so that certainly it is not only the Virtu, but the Wisdom of Wives to do that upon Duty, which at last they must (with more unsupportable Circumstances) do upon Necessity.131

According to Allestree, it is the Whiggishness of wives, and not husbands, that insinuates slavishness into the state of domestic dominion. Wives who wage “uncreditable unjust War,” and not suitors who turn into masters, pose the sole impediment to women’s “pleasantly” dutiful subjection, for a wife’s unjust claim upon his “better Title” compels the severity of her otherwise gentle husband.132 What precludes this wife’s exercise of “ingenuous Subjection,” then, is not the tyranny of Astell’s masters but her own Whiggish failure to “make the Yoke sit so lightly.” By sullenly performing duties that she must, Allestree afWrms, “do” in either case, this wife aggravates the arbitrariness of the power to which she must

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submit. Allestree’s conduct book coaches wives how ingenuously to obey a power prevented from materializing as necessity, he promises, through the softening agency of that practice. Because Allestree grants his imminently Whiggish wife the power to convert gentle-tempered men into masters—and, presumably, back again—she does not occupy the inevitably tyrannical marriage projected by Astell. Locke predicates the reconstitution of post-patriarchal paternal authority upon the unforced assent of ingenuous sons; the capacity of Allestree’s hypothetical wife to defer her husband’s ungentle and redundant assertion of his right can likewise be speciWed as her ability transitively to modernize her husband. Yet Allestree invents this solution only by begging the question which John Essex, whose The Young Ladies Conduct (1722) reiterates the same directive, more forcefully broaches: Many of you are apt to submit more out of Necessity, than any Principle of Duty or Choice; and this makes a State that is in it self so Happy, Miserable to you; all you do is against the Grain, and with Reluctance, till you lose the very Liberty you are seeking, unless you have sincerely learn’d how to Obey.133

Astell’s ReXections has already raised the objection: when have girls “sincerely learn’d how to Obey” a domestic “Necessity” whose political anachronism remains unrevised by Locke’s projected reform of Filmerian fathers? How does a grown woman accommodate her desire to power that she has not gradually learned to love? Davys’s The Reformed Coquet imagines a resolution of this conundrum. Like Locke’s Thoughts, Davys’s novella exploits the passion of love to accommodate its heroine’s desire and her exercise of virtue; but Davys’s coquettish protagonist Amoranda has passed the age at which she might, like a Lockean boy, insensibly reconstitute external force as freely acted duty. To avoid a practice of necessity exacted “against the Grain,” Davys’s spoiled and vain Amoranda occupies a plot tailored to the grown woman who must learn to love a manifestly arbitrary domestic law: Amoranda’s venerable, sympathetic, and fatherly guardian, Formator, sent by her uncle after Amoranda’s father’s death to wean her from her coquettish love of Xattery, metamorphoses at the story’s end into the youthful Alanthus, the man chosen by her uncle to marry her. In her dedication, Davys justiWes the applicability of this plot: “If I have here touched a young Lady’s Vanity and Levity, it was to show her how amiable she is without those Blots, which certainly stain the Mind, and stamp Deformity where the greatest Beauties would shine, were they banished.”134 Unlike Locke’s barbarous ladies or Astell’s pieces of mechanism, Amoranda is not yet a wholly spoiled woman. Her strictly local blots grew, weedlike, from “the Seeds of [her sex’s] Pride and Vanity”; Xattery of the beautiful girl “made an early impression upon the Mind

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of young Amoranda” (256) unfortunately “encouraged” (257) by her indulgent parents. With no training in the restraint of a passion that should have been governed from its “Dawnings” (256), Amoranda, left an orphan in her ninth year, declares at age Wfteen that “I am not proof against Flattery, there is something so inexpressibly pleasing in it” (260). Because of her susceptibility to pleasure that must be supplied by “a Crowd of Admirers” (260), the heiress Amoranda fails to achieve the particularization of desire requisite to her will to marry: “her particular Inclinations were so very weak, that she would have been at the greatest loss where to Wx” (261). Yet if Amoranda, unlike Astell’s modest woman, proves not easily able to Wx her affections, she remains an otherwise sincerely dutiful daughter. Confronted with her distant uncle’s command that she let her new guardian Formator “interest himself in all your Affairs,” she reconciles herself to the situation because “she considered she had a Father and Mother to please in the Person of her Uncle . . . and said to [Formator], with a Smile, I Wnd, Sir, I am no longer my own Mistress” (267). Despite her blots, Amoranda “own[s] I have the greatest Inclination in the world to please” Formator and, when chastised by him for indulging her “greedy Desire of Flattery,” she “told herself in her own Breast that every Word he said was true” (271–72). In specifying the congruity of Amoranda’s inner inclinations and Formator’s belatedly imposed government, Davys isolates the solely chronological impediment to Amoranda’s reform. In her willing redirection of will, Amoranda would be a Lockean boy, were it not for the lapse in preparation that has left her unable to regulate her greedy desire. Lacking the habituation that insensibly redirects the appetite of ingenuous sons, Amoranda tries her hardest to turn her sensations into what Formator tells her they should already be: “I am resolved I will never think [Xattery] a pleasure again, because you dislike it in me” (292). However, her kindly instructor Formator effects his purpose so well that Amoranda can Wnally claim it as her own: “I own, Formator, the groundwork of this Reformation in me, came from those wholesome Lectures you have so often read to me; but the Wnishing touch is given by my own inclination” (303). In an echo of the Lockean mutation of desire that facilitates a boy’s love of virtue, Amoranda declares to Formator that “you have taught me to relish” (306) anti-coquettish discipline. Davys then engineers the transformation of the father Wgure who facilitates Amoranda’s virtuous relish. First, Amoranda falls in love with the dashing stranger Alanthus, who saves her from near rape. After she confesses her prepossession to Formator and swears that she will marry no man without his consent, Davys inserts a forbiddingly Astellian obstacle.

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At this juncture, Formator poses the specter of genuinely arbitrary parental power: Your Uncle, before I left him, had provided a Husband for you, a Man of Worth, of Wealth, of Quality, and my Business was to take care you married nobody else: Now, Madam, if your Uncle’s Choice be every way as good as your own, will you scruple to oblige him, when you cannot Wnd one Objection against the Man? Why, Formator, said she, trembling, have you used me so cruelly, as not to tell me this sooner? (310)

If Amoranda threatens to deviate from the model of virtue acerbically cited by Astell as a woman’s capacity to love the man whom an absolute uncle commands, then Davys solves this problem with the obvious expedient: “now Madam,” Formator tells Amoranda, “prepare for Joy, Alanthus is your Uncle’s Choice.” Amoranda then recapitulates her plot’s approximation of a happy Lockean ending: “I now Wnd myself in a Condition to please a most indulgent, tender, kind, generous Uncle, and at the same time indulge my own inclinations” (311). By reconciling Amoranda’s and her uncle’s “Choice,” this resolution crucially facilitates not her modernity but his: the daughter who trembles in the face of “cruelly” Filmerian parental power (“why must I be forced into the arms of a Man I never saw?” she asks despairingly) now herself reconstitutes that power as “indulgent, tender, kind, generous.” By anticipating her uncle’s command with her own inclination, Amoranda accommodates herself to a form of conjugal authority that remains otherwise unrevised by contractarian politics. Her ingenuous embrace of her uncle’s command defuses the fact that it remains arbitrary. By avoiding being forced into the arms of a man whom she has never seen, Amoranda escapes the state of truly mortiWed passion resulting from the experience of an arbitrary uncle’s choice. The salutary coincidence of her desire and her uncle’s command thus appears a predictable resolution along the lines prescribed by Allestree: Amoranda’s love facilitates what would otherwise be her mortifying duty to love. But Amoranda’s plot takes one step further, precipitated by her cousin Maria’s revelation that the elderly Formator’s “Beard . . . is a very queer one . . . it has never been a pin’s point longer or shorter” (313). Shortly thereafter, Formator appears without any beard at all, compelling Maria’s discovery that “This Alanthus . . . is Formator in everything but the Wlthy Beard” (314). The ensuing identity crisis—how can Amoranda know which is the original man?—is settled by written testimony of her uncle, whose “hand” she recognizes: The Man . . . who some Months ago appeared to you as the grave, the wise, the old Formator; is now turned into the gay, the young, the accomplished Lord of W—— . . . He

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. . . promised to make you the Partner of his Bed, if he liked you when he saw you, and could Wnd a means to win your Affections; if not, you will never know him for what he is. (315; emphasis Davys’s)

Returning to Jameson, we can elucidate two “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” invented by this turn in Amoranda’s plot. First, of course, is the equivocation of parental indulgence and husbandly tyranny that Astell refuses to entertain. Indeed, Davys’s own solution transpires with remarkable economy. If, according to Astell’s ReXections, a wife becomes “one whom [her husband] can intirely Govern, and consequently may form her to his will and liking” (R 51), then Amoranda’s guardian Formator, who “by a daily application endeavored to form Amoranda’s mind to his own liking” (291), has obviously rendered superXuous his own imposition of postmarital force. By gently forming Amoranda’s mind to his liking in advance of marrying her, Formator indeWnitely defers his own conversion into a tyrant. To use the Lévi-Straussian terminology from which Jameson draws, Formator is a “trickster” Wgure or “mediator”:135 he embodies both the gentle paternal power required by post-patriarchal political genealogy and the natural masculine power, Locke stipulates, still immune to contractarian inXuence. By deferring the potential arbitrariness of the latter with the “daily,” preventive, “application” of the former, Formator’s retention of domestic prerogative will never be implicated in the slavishness of his wife. Davys’s second solution entails Amoranda’s uncle’s confusion of this chronology. By retroactively inserting into her story the gay young Lord who would aspire to “win” her, Amoranda’s uncle obfuscates the fact that Formator forms his future wife in advance. For a young man does not simply arrive on the scene after Amoranda, as Essex puts it, has “sincerely learn’d to Obey.” Her uncle’s synopsis would thus induce its own species of amnesia, representing the product of Formator’s daily application as an object of spontaneous desire whom W—— “liked when he saw you.” Here Formator can exert his kindly paternal inXuence and, in doubling back upon himself, have passion too. Jameson includes both “imaginary and formal solutions” to political contradiction in the act of narrative, and the move with which Davys defers Amoranda’s slavishness does, quite graphically, implicate the generic medium in which she makes it. Of a recombination of paternal and marital forms of power which makes superXuous the tyranny of Astell’s Whiggish suitor, Davys begs the reader of her preface to grant her one instance of extranovelistic license: “if they will be as kind to me, as they have been to many before, they will over-look one little Improbability, because such are to be met with in most Novels, many Plays, and even Travels themselves” (254; emphasis Davys’s). Here Davys locates The Reformed Coquet among

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a generic expanse of claims upon the new narrative standard of verisimilitude, or probability; as Michael McKeon suggests, the strongest of these claims was made not by “Travels,” which in purporting to be literally true history disavowed any recourse to the verisimilar, but by the novel itself.136 By pleading her “little” exception, then, Davys does more than foreground the improbability of a disguise enabled only by a beard; in fact, such disguises routinely facilitate the plots of her novelistic contemporaries Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood. Instead, Davys punctures the epistemological pretenses of a narrative whose solution to political contradiction hinges upon the very expedient that disqualiWes its claim to resemble truth. The impetus propelling the novel’s new claim upon the versimilar— a claim retrospectively phrased by Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, No. 4 (1750) as the demise of the “machines and expedients” of the now epistemologically bankrupt genre of “the heroic romance”137—also galvanizes the promise of epistemological redress aimed at coquettish, Xatteryloving, romance-reading girls. Astell voices this promise as follows: [I]f a Woman were duly Principled and Taught to know the World, especially the true Sentiments that Men have of her, and the Traps they lay for her under so many gilded Compliments, and such a seemingly great Respect . . . Women would Marry more discreetly, and demean themselves better in a Married State than some People say they do. (R 74)

Amoranda not only avoids having to “Marry more discreetly” (for Astell, as we have seen, a cognate activity can only be not marrying at all); the improbable conversion of the kind Formator into the dashing Alanthus also saves her from having to learn how to “demean” herself “better.” Astell’s anti-romantic insistence upon the “true Sentiments” of fulsome suitors thus illuminates the trade-off that The Reformed Coquette makes. Astell endorses a pedagogy of epistemological disillusion whereby girls learn properly to read a Whiggish world; to preserve her heroine from this mortifying task, Davys betrays the epistemological integrity of that same world. In other words, Amoranda’s release from her mortiWed future reasserts her difference from a freely acting man as, now, as the lapse in probability incurred by her text’s delayed approximation of Locke’s pedagogical plot. (The fact that only a surrogate father can accommodate Amoranda to that plot afWrms the Whiggishness of suitors whom Davys otherwise represents as the would-be abductors and rapists Froth and Callid.) Here we can appreciate the gravity of the contradiction transposed by Davys into the register of novelistic form, because if Astell, in advising women not to marry, forebodes the “end” of the human race, then Davys, to turn her spoiled protagonist into a happily dutiful wife, effectively “ends” the truth of the genre which

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represents that solution. In the same gesture with which she resolves Amoranda’s difference from a Lockean son, Davys underscores the persistent arbitrariness of a form of domestic authority rendered desirable only by magic. Amoranda’s reform requires the improbable adjustment of the world around her and not simply the particularizing declaration that “I have no longer a taste for Flattery” (306). And yet in a Wnal, still improbable turn of Davys’s plot, Amoranda develops another taste. After her marriage to Alanthus, she begs him to put Formator’s beard back on: But pray, my Lord, said she, (taking the Beard) let me once more see my good old Formator, let me once more behold you in that Dress, which so artfully deceived me: methinks I grieve when I tell myself I have lost the good old Man.

She continues: I can’t but love that Form . . . when I consider the Advantages that accrued to me under its Government, the just Rebukes, the friendly Persuasions, the kind Admonitions, the assiduous Care. (316)

Not only does Formator’s beard exempt Davys’s plot from probability; it also, in resurfacing well after its utility to that plot, afWrms the difference between Formator’s “Government” and a Lockean boy’s forgotten spanking. In expressing her desire again to see the disguise “which so artfully deceived me,” Amoranda reveals that her “Old” passion has not been wholly redirected toward the husband whom her paternal guardian has become. With this last appeal to the improbability of her conversion into an ingenuously subject wife, Amoranda anticipates the novelistic persistence of a materiality of masculine power that refuses, in the end, entirely to dissolve into love.

Chapter 2

Mushrooms, Subjects, and Women The Hobbesian Individual and the Domestic Novel

“Every Sinew, every Vein and Nerve”: Feminist Physiology and the Category of Sex To convert its protagonist from a Xirt into a dutiful wife, Mary Davys’s The Reformed Coquet admits the assistance of not just one but two “improbable”1 events. Before she is rescued by the “graceful, Wne, well-shaped Man” whom her elderly guardian implausibly becomes, the residually coquettish Amoranda takes a boat trip with the “strange Lady” Berintha. Alone in the wilderness, she must resist the “Proposals” that Berintha, suddenly metamorphosed into the male villain Biranthus, tries to force upon her to gain her “Estate”:2 Before I would consent to be a Wife to such a Monster, I would tear out the Tongue by the roots that was willing to pronounce my Doom. I would suffer these Arms to be extended on a Rack, till every Sinew, every Vein and Nerve should crack, rather than embrace, or so much as touch a Viper like thyself.3

In this remarkable elaboration of Mary Astell’s feminist physiology, Davys equates the spectacularly graphic terror of the “Rack” with the misery endured by a wife forced to “embrace, or so much as touch” her viperous husband. Because Amoranda’s “every Sinew, every Vein and Nerve” are as capable of pain as a man’s, her unsexed mechanism levels the agonies of absolutist torture and those of forced marriage. But by ascribing the latter fate to her “Tongue,” Amoranda manages a peculiarly emphatic inversion of blame: rather than the villainy of the womanturned-man who, if Amoranda refuses to marry him, threatens “This minute” to “enjoy thee,” 4 Amoranda’s “willing” tongue would effect her own “Doom.” Here she assumes the premarital powers of Lockean women with a vengeance: conWned to the solitary organ that Berinthus cannot make speak, the contractarian agency of Amoranda’s tongue would, of itself, entail the sensational torment of the rest of her body. Later in this plot, when Amoranda’s uncle writes to conWrm that her dashing rescuer is her intended husband, the “Pleasure [that] diffused itself in every

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Muscle of her Face” 5 happily extends Amoranda’s embodiment of the power of contractual assent from her tongue to all of her facial muscles. With the help of her plot’s improbabilities, every muscle of the oncecoquettish Amoranda’s face animates her practice of ingenuous subjection. Her sinews, veins, and nerves thus modernize the power to which she, like a Lockean citizen, willingly submits. This outcome afWrms the success of a corollary operation, graphically exposed by the intervention of the future husband who saves her from rape: because Amoranda’s ingenuous subjection entails her willingness to be governed by a man who proves the redundancy of Locke’s stipulation that he is naturally abler and stronger than she, the muscles that animate Amoranda’s Wnally pleased submission require this supplemental anatomical determination. In marshaling Amoranda’s unsexed physiology only in concert with the obviously expedient, rote iteration of the threat of rape, Davys justiWes a distribution of domestic power that cannot, as her own text vividly intimates, be Wxed solely by sinews, veins, and nerves. This chapter claims as a deWning problem for the eighteenth-century domestic novel the fact that a woman’s unsexed sinews, veins, and nerves must ratify Locke’s defense of naturally stronger and abler men’s claim to conjugal dominance. In The Reformed Coquet, Amoranda’s vulnerability to rape sexes the physiology that grants her projected refusal of “consent” the same mechanical force as a man’s. Yet, this chapter argues, Astell’s feminist physiology is elaborated by the eighteenth-century domestic novel as the specter of wives whose natural obligation might not be secured by the act of consenting to marry. Prior to Astell’s insistence that Cartesian mechanism qualiWes women as well as men, Thomas Hobbes imagines radically egalitarian persons who, anterior to the civil institution of marriage, do not support men’s claim to conjugal dominance. Both Astell’s feminist physiology and Hobbes’s extrafamilial persons illuminate the history of a domestic novel that cannot locate the rationale for masculine conjugal rule simply in anatomy, a novel that both mitigates and ampliWes the instability of a mandate for masculine power not always assisted by naturally inferior wives. In her 1706 preface to Some ReXections upon Marriage, Astell proclaims the inadequacy of the expedient that enables Formator’s superiority: But the Scripture commands Wives to submit themselves to their own Husbands. True; for which St. Paul gives a Mystical Reason (Eph 5.22, etc) and St Peter a Prudential and Charitable one (I St. Pet. 3) but neither of them derive that Subjection from the Law of Nature. Nay St Paul, as if he foresaw and meant to prevent this Plea, giving directions for their Conduct to Women in general, I Tim. 2, when he comes to speak of Subjection, he changes his Phrase from Women which denotes the whole Sex, to Woman which in the New Testament is appropriated to a Wife.6

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In The Reformed Coquet, the imperative that Amoranda be saved from rape by her future husband would “derive that Subjection from the Law of Nature.” But if this imperative naturalizes Amoranda’s weakness, then it is, to say the least, itself contingent: it dictates that Berintha, after traveling deep into the woods with her intended victim and a host of corrupt servants, turn into a man. Although Formator’s sexed “Nature” renders inevitable his claim to conjugal dominance, Davys foregrounds as yet another lapse in the epistemological coherence of her plot the event which would establish the inevitability of that claim. A threat of rape otherwise prosecuted by a woman distils the occasion of Formator’s superiority into the improbable, last-minute revelation of the difference that turns Berintha into Berinthus. The expedient that naturalizes Formator’s claim to conjugal rule— the aggressively isolated fact of masculine anatomy—resolves the discrepancy between, Astell states, “Women which denotes the whole Sex” and “Woman which in the New Testament is appropriated to a Wife.” Because, however closely Davys cuts the criterion, Formator incarnates masculine dominance, Amoranda reciprocally incarnates weakness now secured by the anatomical vulnerability of her “whole Sex.” This marks another Lockean resolution of Amoranda’s plot—a resolution which, Astell insists, lacks the sanction of a “GOD Himself who is no Respecter of Persons.”7 As if to afWrm the literary-historical persistence of Astell’s feminist “GOD,” the protagonist of a novel published in the same year as The Reformed Coquet stresses the intractability of the difference between not naturally subject “Women” and postmarital or Lockean “Woman.” A wife whose anatomy, whose physiology, and whose brain fail to make her weaker than the husband whom she “chose for being a handsome jolly Fellow,”8 the protagonist of Daniel Defoe’s Roxana: or, The Fortunate Mistress (1724) ampliWes the Hobbesian critique that the eighteenth-century English domestic novel continues ambivalently to represent. This critique is advanced, Astell states, by the “certain great Man” whose “Original State of things” she invokes to repudiate “the Natural Inferiority of our Sex, which our Masters lay down as a Self-Evident and Fundamental Truth.”9 Because Hobbes’s “Original State” does not assign natural superiority to men, his representation of marriage forcibly anticipates Astell’s; in the civil commonwealth which succeeds Hobbes’s state of nature, marriage serves legally to institute arbitrarily sexed dominance. After her improvident choice of husband, Roxana’s “intollerable” subjection to “the most incorrigible Temper in the World” (9) dictates as the remainder of her plot the marital destiny projected by Astell: “what can the poor Woman do? the Husband is too wise to be Advis’d, too good to be Reform’d, she must follow in all his Paces, and tread in all his unreasonable steps, or there is no Peace, no Quiet for her.”10 Roxana’s

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terminally foolish, “positive and obstinate” (9) husband harbors the worst species of “disagreeable Temper” cited by Astell; he models “the Haughty, Imperious, and Self-conceited” man whose capacity to render a wife “as unhappy as any thing in this World can make her”11 is sealed by his imperviousness to improvement. In bemoaning her husband’s insusceptibility to her inXuence, Roxana demonstrates the postmarital agency of a Lockean woman’s tongue—also with a vengeance: “I did as well as I could, and held my Tongue, which was the only Victory I gain’d over him” (9). Having exhausted her tongue’s contractarian powers in the act of willing to marry “a weak, empty-headed, untaught Creature,” Roxana can henceforth exert wifely volition only by silencing that organ, thereby simulating her inferiority to, as she Astell-ishly puts it, “this Thing call’d a Husband” (7). The infelicities of subjection to a “Thing” that is not naturally stronger or more able would Wll Defoe’s novel if Roxana’s husband did not, at this preliminary moment, leave the scene. By failing to discover an expedient that would vindicate Roxana’s husband’s superiority—whether the capacity to rape or the “Mystical,” “Prudential and Charitable” “Reason” cited by Astell—Defoe refuses to enlist Roxana in the practice of ingenuous subjection which, were she able to animate it with more than a bitten tongue, would ratify the self-evidence of her husband’s sexed claim to conjugal rule. Defoe thereby takes as Roxana’s alternative content a question not broached by Hobbes and Astell: what happens when the conversion of not naturally inferior women into wives is reversed ? Abandoned by a husband whose superior strength and ability would determine her sexed weakness, Roxana has no choice but to become something else. By failing to “starv[e] to Death” (28) after her husband absconds, Roxana’s entire person sustains her difference from a naturally subject wife. The next section of this chapter suggests that Roxana, left unprotected by her husband, acts like the not naturally inferior person whose generically unsexed aptitude for self-preservation is theorized by Hobbes: the Hobbesian individual. Not abstract, not necessarily masculine, and without universalizing or humanizing pretensions, Hobbes’s extra-civil and extrafamilial individual is qualiWed solely in terms of its radically particularized effort to survive. Galvanized not by Locke’s freely acting freeman but by a generically unsexed, fear-driven physiology, Hobbes’s genealogy of the contractarian commonwealth cannot, as a result, rationalize its wholesale conversion of not naturally inferior women into legally subject wives. By illuminating the methodological urgency, for feminist literary history, of a category of the person whose obligation is not determined by its sex, Roxana anticipates a domestic novel whose

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attempt to rationalize the transformation of “Women” into wives cannot always close the gap between them.12 In another novel’s conversion of a woman into a wife, the tongue of the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) also has a role to play: after ceding her love for her formerly rakish master, who has not yet offered to marry her, the servant Pamela asserts herself “ready . . . to bite my forward Tongue (or rather to beat my more forward Heart, that dictated to that poor Machine) for what I have said.”13 Unlike Amoranda, whose tongue bears responsibility for the fate of her whole body, and unlike Roxana, whose wifely volition is dedicated to holding hers, Pamela Wnds that her “forward Tongue” eludes the control of her will. As a “Machine”—a word whose deletion from Pamela’s 1801 edition might register the taint of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Machine Man (1748)—Pamela’s tongue escapes her control to move Pamela forward on its own. Unlike Amoranda’s Herculean denial of assent, Pamela’s mechanical lapse enables the advance intimation of her willingness to be transformed into a wife, advance intimation necessary to a plot that must motivate Pamela’s obligation to a man whom, until now, she has repelled with unprecedented strength and ability. Pamela’s reXexively loving machine fuels the practice of ingenuous subjection that ratiWes her master’s Lockean claim to be stronger and more able. But, in a more or less vestigial afWrmation of Astell’s feminist physiology, Pamela’s machine will not always support that claim. This chapter’s third section argues for the applicability of the Hobbesian category of the individual even to a novel that exhaustively attempts to rationalize its protagonist’s transformation into an ingenuously subject wife. In the same gesture with which Pamela devotes its formal and epistemological resources to this transformation, the novel represents the profundity of the dilemma entailed in securing the inferiority of a wife who was once Pamela. Pamela’s even radical critical force resides in its protagonist’s intermittent resemblance to Hobbes’s individual, a resemblance that threatens to undo the transitively modernizing agency of Pamela’s ingenuous subjection.

The Individual Who Is Not a Subject: Roxana’s “Vicious Liberty” In bemoaning “the horrible novelty of some Propositions” to which his refusal “brutishly to submit” will cost Charles I his head, the narrator of Eikon Basilike (1648) ascribes the content of these “ambiguous, dangerous, & un-authorized novelties” to the number of men capable of proposing them: “But the unreasonableness of some Propositions is not more evident to Me than this is, that they are not the joint and free

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desires of those in their Major number, who are of right to Sit and Vote in Parliament.”14 In correlating the quantitatively “evident” fact of a revolutionary minority to an “Itch of Novelty” most men do not naturally feel, the speaker of Eikon Basilike absolves his constituents with the assurance that “I shall never gratiWe the spightfulness of a few with any sinister thoughts of all their Allegiance, whom pious frauds seduced.”15 His claim for “the fraud and faction of some, and not the malice of all”16 is anticipated by Hobbes’s On the Citizen (1642), the logic of whose defense of contractual yet unimpeachable sovereign power rests upon the impossibility not of political novelty but of holistic political novelty: “By no stretch of the imagination could it ever happen that all the citizens together would unite in conspiracy against the sovereign power, without one single exception.”17 Hobbes’s On the Citizen narrates “how and by what stages, in the passion for self-preservation, a number of natural persons from fear of each other have coalesced into one civil person to which we have given the name of commonwealth.”18 For Hobbes, this process is irreversible; after they have coalesced into one civil person, “all the citizens together” can never reunite to form an equally inclusive revolutionary body.19 Because Hobbes’s commonwealth, once formed, cannot re -aggregate (there will always be “one single exception”), the most volatile entity in his text is the crowd, composed of imminently civil persons driven to ratify a state which, Hobbes states, “once instituted take[s] on the personal qualities of men.”20 First among these qualities, then, is the fact that they are irreducibly personal: “a commonwealth which is one person cannot take up arms against itself.”21 Hobbes recruits his crowd only once, just before the moment of compact when it becomes “one person” that cannot authorize harm against itself. His refusal to envision any less uniWed increment of political will inversely deWnes Hobbes’s state of nature: “in a crowd which has not yet coalesced into one person in the way we have described, the state of nature persists.”22 DeWned not as one prospective person but as “a crowd of individual persons,”23 the state of nature whose population cannot cohere into any unit smaller than a future commonwealth deWnes the role of the word “individual” in Hobbes’s genealogy of civil society: Because a crowd is a collective word, it is understood to signify more than one object, so that a crowd of men is the same as many men. Because the word is grammatically singular, it also signiWes one thing, namely a crowd . . . Hence a crowd cannot . . . do, have, possess, and so on, except separately or as individuals, so that there are as many promises, agreements, rights, and actions, as there are men . . . But if the same crowd individually agree that the will of some one man or the consenting wills of a majority of themselves is to be taken as the will of [them] all, the number then becomes one person.24

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As a signiWer of either the rigorously atomized constituents of the crowd or the civil person that the crowd becomes, Hobbes’s “individual” refers both to a unit of extra-contractual will that cannot be augmented and, paradoxically, to a medium of sovereign power that precludes disintegration back into those units. The fact that “the whole crowd, as a person distinct from every individual”25 can act only “individually” deWnes a regicidal intention that would be directed, impossibly, against itself. Become an irreducibly personal unit of political agency, the individual that is no longer a crowd of individuals exhibits the same will to “self-preservation” driving men in the state of nature which antedates civil society “by a real necessity of nature as powerful as that by which a stone falls downward.”26 Peter Stallybrass has explored the inconsistency of this word’s meaning in “the ‘Shakespearean’ context’”: it signiWes both an “individuated” entity and the “indivisibility” of multiple, fused entities.27 Yet the word does, just as urgently, achieve coherence in an adverbial capacity, because Hobbes predicates the durability of sovereign power upon the necessity of selfpreservation which dictates that both precontractual persons and whole commonwealths act individually. He admits precisely one exception to an imperative so relentlessly singularized that it deWnes as the motive of Hobbesian contractarianism not trust but, On the Citizen states, a “supreme stage of fearfulness”:28 the instant when, in deWance of a necessity as powerful as gravity, a “crowd individually agree[s]” to become the individual that is the state. At that strictly impossible instant, the discrete members of a crowd summoned into being only as such crystallize, leaving no trace of the anterior passions that previously existed in a state of radically particularized disarray. The founding claim of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) for the “similitude of the thoughts, and Passions of one man, to the thoughts, and Passions of another”29 thereby asserts the irreversibility—as represented by Leviathan’s famous title page—of a form of sovereign power substantiated by the equally fearful assent of persons who are, as a result, no longer individuals. As we have seen, the Tory elaboration of faction as its power, according to Eikon Basilike, to “seduce” serves Astell’s Some ReXections upon Marriage to qualify the courtship of suitors as Whiggish Xattery. Like miscreants whose rhetoric threatens “the enslaving of the whole Nation,”30 Astell’s husbands cannot retroactively legitimize, or justly exercise, power acquired through the medium of romance. Uneducated women, who lack the fortitude to withstand romantic jargon, thus resemble a credulous people evoked by Eikon Basilike as “the vulgar (who are taken with novelties, as children with babies, very much, but not very long.)”31 Its susceptibility deWnes eloquence aimed at this audience as, according to Hobbes, “an agitator of the passions,”32 a mode of inXuence antipathetic

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to the royalist historiography projected by Eikon Basilike as the writing of “unpassionate representations.”33 In condemning “all the Compliments [suitors] make, all the Address and Complaisance they use . . . to get the poor Woman into their Power,”34 Astell transposes Eikon Basilike’s indictment of the “blind obedience”35 commanded by Xatterers turned tyrants into an indictment of all, constitutionally tyrannical, husbands: “A Blind Obedience is what a Rational Creature shou’d never Pay, nor wou’d such an one receive it did he rightly understand its Nature.”36 Astell’s imminently arbitrary suitors reWne the Tory charge of conjugal tyranny aimed at ostensibly liberty-loving heads of families, an analogy which, for Astell, ultimately leverages the difference between domestic and monarchical government; because Astell’s A Fair Way with the Dissenters (1704) argues that “[n]either the Laws of GOD nor of the Land, gave his [Charles I’s] Subjects any Authority to use him as they did,”37 her opposing claim, in the case of husbands, for “the badness of his Title” likens husbands not to tyrannical kings but to seditious “Usurpers.”38 To refute the ends of the Filmerian credo “that we may call Adam’s family a commonwealth,”39 Hobbes also reworks the analogy of domestic and sovereign power afWrmed by On the Citizen’s claim “that the family is a small commonwealth.”40 Whereas Robert Filmer argues that monarchical “title comes from the fatherhood” to disavow “any such thing as an independent multitude, who at Wrst had a naturall right to a community,”41 Hobbes inverts this proof; in advance of the moment of coalescence that produces the civil person of the state, he posits extrafamilial individuals whose similitude of thoughts and passions repudiates the patriarchalist analogy of fathers and divinely ordained monarchs. Hobbes’s commonwealth transforms discrete individuals into one civil individual, a transformation derided by Filmer as rank “Wction, or fancy.”42 But, because Hobbesian sovereignty does not draw its mandate from the naturalized dominance with which Filmer invests fathers, the individual who subsists outside the “kingdom [that] is a large family” does not analogously coalesce into a “little kingdom” whose apparition also effaces a prehistory of “distrust and fear.”43 In turning to the institution of the little kingdom that is the family, Hobbes instead asks his reader “to look at men as if they had just emerged from the earth like mushrooms and grown up without any obligation to each other.” 44 Among these “men” are, remarkably, women: of his mushrooms, or “crowd of individual persons,” Hobbes stipulates that “all adults are to be taken as equal to each other . . . the inequality of natural strength is too small to enable the male to acquire dominion over the female without war.”45 In writing of conjugal or “paternall” power in Leviathan, he repeats:

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[W]hereas some have attributed the Dominion to the Man onely, as being of the more excellent Sex; they misreckon in it. For there is not always that difference of strength or prudence between the man and the woman, as that the right can be determined without War.46

Hobbes’s contractarian commonwealth entails civil laws which, in a quantum leap he does not further explicate, secure the ends of a “War” that has already been won: “in a commonwealth . . . the power of domestic government belongs to the man; and such a contract, if made in accordance with the civil laws, is called a MARRIAGE.”47 By locating the mandate for masculine conjugal power in civil laws not “always” ratiWed by a naturally sexed “difference of strength or prudence,” Hobbes broaches a dilemma anterior to his vision of the supreme fearfulness that drives every individual’s spontaneous contractual assent. How does the single person that is the commonwealth harbor families established in the natural state, Hobbes states, by “war”? The equally fearful individuals each of whom becomes a civil subject by simultaneously “giv[ing] up his right to resist”48 are, at the same time, previously equal individuals half of whom have already been converted by force into objects of arbitrarily sexed dominion. The Hobbesian conversion of an individual into a subject happens, as we have seen, only once. The conversion of individuals into men and women would seem, however, to have to happen twice: in the state of nature, as a result of war, and, “in a commonwealth,” as a result of marriage. After cogently observing that “in the state of nature there are no ‘wives,’” Carole Pateman extrapolates the segment of Hobbesian narrative that she claims has been masked by this discrepancy, because “rational, free, and equal women would not agree to a pact that subordinated women to men in civil society. The assumption must necessarily be made that, by the time the social contract is made, all the women in their natural condition have been conquered by men and are now their subjects (servants).”49 For Tory political theorists like Astell or Aphra Behn, Pateman’s interpolation is superXuous. Women susceptible to romance are not so free or rational after all; they are easily enough conquered by Xattery.50 Pateman, however, continues to project backward the primordial chain of events that would, she speculates, win for male individuals an advantage of strength not initially granted them by Hobbes: “When a woman becomes a mother and decides to raise her child, her position changes; she is put at a slight disadvantage against men, since now she has her infant to defend too. A man is then able to defeat the woman he had initially to treat with as an equal.”51 Pateman quickly withdraws this rationale for extrafamilial women’s “defeat,” for “given Hobbes’

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assumption that all individuals are completely self-interested, there seems no reason why any woman (or man) would contract to become lord over an infant.”52 Here Pateman afWrms Hobbes’s attribution of natural dominion only to women, a singular ascription of natural power negatively represented as the persistence of mothers’ likeness to individuals: “it is obvious that a new-born child is in the power of his mother before anyone else, so that she can raise him or expose him at her own discretion and by her own right.” Because Hobbesian “life” subsists only as something “which the mother gave him (not by generation but by looking after him),”53 Hobbes deWnes maternal dominion in the state of nature not as an anatomically Wxed imperative but as the “right” to raise a child or not. Leviathan insists that because “she may either nourish, or expose it,” only “if she nourish it, [the Infant] oweth its life to the Mother.”54 Others in Hobbes’s state of nature can assume an obligation that, deWned not as “generation” but as “looking after,” is both contingent and transferable: “The person who raises the abandoned child will have the same Dominion as the mother had.”55 Pateman is not the Wrst feminist imaginatively to rationalize the discrepancy between female individuals forcibly vanquished by war and wives legally disenfranchised by civil contract. As we have seen, Astell posits the irresistible force of romance upon a sensorium not trained in the art of self-mortiWcation; in The Reformed Coquet, Davys renders one husband’s power almost identical to the irresistibly gentle governance of fathers. But no theorist of Hobbesian conundrum leaves the gap between equally strong individuals and contractually inferior women as insistently unresolved as does Defoe, whose Roxana represents the reversibility of marriage and, with it, the return to contingency of a maternal obligation secured only by a husband who fulWlls his Hobbesian side of contract: “The end of Obedience is Protection.”56 Left to starve with Wve children, Roxana cannot seal the rift between an aptitude for maternity whose sexed foundation must be entrenched by marriage and the aptitude for “advantage” required of extrafamilial individuals, Hobbes states, “for the longest possible preservation of life and limb.”57 DisqualiWed from domestic rule not by anatomical inadequacy—conceiving children is, Roxana notes, “the only Work (perhaps) that Fools are good for” (10)—but by contractual failure, Roxana’s foolish husband propels her transformation into a Hobbesian individual. This transformation is effected, precisely, when “the Misery of my own Circumstances hardned my Heart against my own Flesh and Blood” (19).58 The eighteenth-century novel’s most exhaustive refutation of the natural superiority of Lockean husbands, Roxana’s “Fool,” whose proXigacy and ineptitude leave his wife and children “bleeding to Death” (14), might alternatively be qualiWed as a “Hobbesband.” Indeed, well after its

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protagonist embarks upon an unprotected course of self-preservation, Roxana loops back upon itself redundantly to debunk this man’s claim to sexed dominance. Having disposed of her Wve children, Roxana, now mistress of a Parisian prince, discovers that her lapsed husband is lodged with a troop of soldiers in the French capital. This circumstance permits the novel to establish “that he was the same worthless Thing he had ever been” (93): forced to guard against what “would have been a fatal Discovery indeed,” Roxana monitors her absentee husband by hiring a “Spy,” whose “perfect Journal of all his Motions” (94) she summarizes as follows: By this Management I found an Opportunity to see what a most insigniWcant, unthinking Life, the poor indolent Wretch, who by his unactive Temper had at Wrst been my Ruin, now liv’d; how he only rose in the Morning, to go to-Bed at Night; that saving the necessary Motion of the Troops, which he was oblig’d to attend, he was a meer motionless Animal . . . The Journal of his Life, which I had constantly sent me every Week, was the least signiWcant of any-thing of its Kind . . . it wou’d make no Jest, to relate it; it was not important enough, so much as to make the Reader merry withal; and for that Reason I omit it. (95)

While she denies its capacity to make her reader merry, Roxana does not, in fact, “omit” this demonstration of her husband’s failure to evince voluntary motion from her plot. The “Reason” for her vigorously distilled proof of the incapacity of a “meer motionless Animal” is its vindication of the destiny inaugurated at the start of her novel with the deceptively banal remark: “I confess I did not see so much Loss in his parting with me” (14). Mustered with a scrupulousness unimagined by Astell, Roxana’s aggressively mediated testimony to the indolence of this “useless thing” renders incontrovertible her claim that “I was a Warning for all the Ladies of Europe, against marrying of FOOLS” (96). Just as urgently, the novel’s proof of her husband’s superlative inactivity justiWes the fatality of Roxana’s transformation, as she soon puts it, into a “free Agent” (147). As we have seen, Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding reserves the term “free agent” for men who have acquired the “power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will.” The capacity “to suspend . . . present satisfaction,”59 a “consequence of Thought and Judgment,” deWnes the liberty of Locke’s free agent as the success of the contractarian pedagogical directive anticipated by his Essay as “the moderation and restraint of our Passions.”60 Abandoned by her husband to become a female individual, Roxana does not resemble this kind of free agent. She instead occupies the state of nature of whose governing necessity Hobbes states: “outside the commonwealth is the empire of the passions.”61 A wholly unregulated Cartesian physiology dictates the irresistibility of the “private Appetite” governing individuals, Hobbes stipulates, “in the condition of meer Nature, (which is a condition of War)”:62 for example, Roxana’s reaction to the prospect of becoming

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mistress to a prince leaves her “truly craz’d and distracted for about a Fortnight, as most of the People in Bedlam,” she explains, due to “the Effect of a violent Fermentation in my Blood; for the very Motion which the steddy Contemplation of my fancy’d Greatness had put my Spirits into, had thrown me into a kind of Fever” (234). She has already demonstrated her mechanical aptitude for “Greatness” when, surprised by another royal patron, “I saw my Neck clasp’d with a Wne Necklace of Diamonds”: “If I had an Ounce of Blood in me, that did not Xy up into my Face, Neck, and Breasts, it must be from some Interruption in the Vessels; I was all on Wre with the Sight” (73). With Roxana’s reWnement of the law of self-preservation into a physiology of unmoderated acquisitiveness, Defoe activates the passionate mechanism that, for Astell and Locke, undergirds the promise of Wnally virtuous desire. But unlike Locke’s free agent, Roxana contains individually acting “Blood.” Such “Blood” is not necessarily sexed, because Roxana refuses to adjudicate between the blood whose every “Ounce” deWnes Roxana as an individual animated by private appetite and the blood whose reappearance in the shape of Roxana’s alienated daughter Susan provokes from her mother the following response: [I]t was a secret inconceivable Pleasure to me when I kiss’d her, to know that I kiss’d my own Child; my own Flesh and Blood, born of my Body . . . No Pen can describe, no Words can express, I say, the strange Impression which this thing made upon my Spirits; I felt something shoot thro’ my Blood; my Heart Xutter’d; my Head Xash’d, and was dizzy. (277)

This passage renders Roxana’s maternal “Pleasure” as substantial as the pleasure of her “Greatness.” The problem precipitated by her Hobbesian blood therefore resides not in the fact that Roxana’s impulse to selfpreservation requires her betrayal of preexisting maternal feeling, but rather in the fact that both are mechanical “Impression[s]” equally impervious to regulatory volition. The “Excess of Passion” (277) that almost overcomes Roxana’s self-protective refusal to own her daughter claims the same density as the private appetites of a woman whose inferiority has not been Wxed by the protection of her feckless husband. This variant of Astell’s feminist physiology levels a mother’s maternal sensation and the necessity of self-preservation originally compelled by her husband’s failure to protect her. To claim Roxana as a Hobbesian individual is not, therefore, to extirpate her aptitude for motherly feeling but rather to foreground the novel’s representation of the contingency that sometimes differently moves an extrafamilial woman’s blood. In this capacity, recent assessments of Roxana’s maternal failure might underscore the hermeneutic or methodological utility of a model of the person whose passions are not essentially sexed. Toni Bowers, for example,

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assigns to Defoe’s novel a “complicated defense of . . . the myth that mothers are fully and individually responsible for choices made in constraining and even coercive social situations”;63 what would, for Bowers, be Roxana’s squarely anti-Hobbesian embodiment of entrenched maternal obligation infuses the scene of her daughter’s kiss with an “orgasmic intensity of feeling”64 that marks the irruption of indestructible, abiding motherly love. Defoe’s novel thereby represents such love, according to Bowers, not as contingent mechanism but as “an emotional connection that Roxana is afraid to feel.”65 Helene Moglen likewise concludes that Roxana’s “need to choose between autonomy and maternity produces a tragic dilemma, which is endemic to the situation of the female individualist,” deWning the inconsistency of Roxana’s maternal feeling as a species of “selWshness”66 clearly more blamable than the necessity driving all of Hobbes’s extrafamilial mushrooms. Bowers distils the critical repercussion of the premise that Roxana can “choose,” to repeat Moglen’s verb, which passion more deeply moves her: as a result of “her own maternal ‘choices’,” foremost of which is the choice to “den[y] maternal affect,” Bowers concludes that “Roxana in effect aborts her love for Susan.”67 Yet the charge of abortion requires that Roxana have something to abort: in this case, the repressed but indelible maternal love that Bowers and Moglen assign her. But as a Hobbesian individual and a Defoean wife, the naturalness of whose obligation is undone by an exhaustively documented failure of masculine superiority, Roxana might manifest maternal passion that is contingent, no more forcefully or durably sustained than the urge to advantage that likewise sometimes “shoots thro’ my Blood.” By invoking Roxana’s “need to choose” as a dilemma speciWc to “the female individualist,” Moglen Wxes maternal feeling inside a person whose husband’s contractual lapse has catalyzed a precisely opposing Hobbesian effect. Roxana fails to regulate appetites whose unadulterated mechanism deWnes them as both irresistible and, indeed, variably selWsh; but to deny the contingency of only one of these passions is essentially to sex the Hobbesian individual whose failure to materialize as a naturally subject wife Defoe extends even into the civil state of marriage. The fact that Roxana is a mother does not prevent her from being an individual. Instead, the fact that Roxana is a Hobbesian individual prevents her from consistently being a mother. By citing motherly feeling as the source of Roxana’s inability to realize the “antifeminine motivations” which constitute the norm Moglen designates “possessive individualism,”68 Bowers and Moglen shore up the extranovelistic stability of that norm. And yet Roxana’s readers might be troubled by the degree to which its protagonist does resemble a Hobbesian individual: famously, the relentless persecution of Roxana’s unacknowledged daughter Susan

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dictates the “absolute Necessity of securing her, and removing her outof-the-way” (323). What decides an individual’s aptitude for maternity, in Susan’s case, is not Roxana’s mechanical response to her daughter’s “murther” (313), a response whose abrupt oscillation between delibility and indelibility the novel never resolves: “I cry’d vehemently for above an Hour” (323); or, “she was ever before my Eyes; I saw her by-Night, and by-Day; she haunted my Imagination” (325). Rather, what conclusively determines the longevity of Roxana’s maternal obligation is the Hobbesian “Necessity” dictated by the fact that, once identiWed as Susan’s mother, “I must for-ever after have been this Girl’s Vassal” (280). Laura Brown concludes of Roxana that “feminism results in the most unwomanly form of violence—the murder of a child.”69 And yet this novel’s “feminism” might instead subsist in its representation of an extrafamilial individual whose intermittent refusals of maternal obligation, while perhaps criminal, cannot necessarily be speciWed as “unwomanly.” A feminist hermeneutic attentive to the novelistic persistence of Hobbes’s egalitarian physiology thus detaches Roxana’s “Crime” (330) from a charge of unwomanliness which presumes the prior integrity of a sexed maternal standard.70 Roxana is, Wnally, doomed by her failure to redeem private appetite as moralized desire; but the unmitigated necessity of her privatized feeling proceeds, in turn, from the failure of Lockean masculinity that renders her husband “of all the Men in the World, the least able to help me, or to have turn’d his hand to the gaining one Shilling towards lessening our Distress” (14). If Roxana’s declension into an individual happens because, after her husband leaves her, she refuses to starve to death, then the culpability of Roxana’s Wrst unregulated passion—hunger—is never clearly determined by Defoe. Roxana’s feminism resides in the loosening of sexed obligation provoked by a person that cannot help feeling as hungry as a man. Roxana’s famous refusal to marry her loyal Dutch merchant, which marks the novel’s self-conscious and obviously equivocal iteration of Astell’s ReXections, pivots upon the mechanical incontrovertibility of the fact that, as Roxana repeats in an aside, “I really starv’d for almost two Years together” (150). Defoe Xags Roxana’s recourse to Astell—Roxana advances her lack of “Inclination to be a Wife again” as her refusal again to become “an Upper-Servant” (132)71—as a moment of unprecedented epistemological lucidity; although Roxana offers to “give him [the merchant] an Answer . . . with the same ingenuous Freedom and Honesty, that I had us’d to treat him with” (145), she invokes her reference to Astell as a signally transparent instance of disingenuousness. Claiming it “really too gross for me to acknowledge” that what she cares about most is retaining her money, she warns Roxana’s reader that “I was oblig’d to give a new Turn to it, and talk upon a kind of an elevated

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Strain, which really was not in my Thoughts at Wrst, at-all” (147). And yet another interpolation, made after the merchant admits the caveat whose instrumentality to Roxana’s own plot she has hidden from him, reverses Roxana’s effort to undercut the integrity of Roxana’s anti-marital “Thoughts”: a married “Woman had nothing to do, but . . . be serv’d, and lov’d, and made easie; especially if the Husband acted as became him” (148; emphasis Defoe’s). A defense of marriage predicated upon a husband’s willingness to “act as became him” provokes Roxana’s recapitulation of the fate of the woman made legally inferior to a person who, as Roxana attests early in her plot, had “neither the Capacity nor the Inclination”: “she sees her Children starve; herself miserable; breaks her Heart; and cries herself to Death” (14). In herself testifying to the near fatality of this plot, Roxana breaks from the projected disingenuousness of her invocation of Astell, for “[h]e did not know how feelingly I spoke this” (150). Infused with the epistemological force of a feeling whose referent is hunger, Roxana’s insistence upon the fallibility of masculine protection signals her most trenchant synopsis of the impediment that prevents her reconversion into a wife: It is not you, says I, that I suspect, but the Laws of Matrimony puts the power into your Hands; bids you do it; commands you to command; and binds me, forsooth, to obey . . . all the rest, all that you call Oneness of Interest, Mutual Affection, and the like, is Curtesie and Kindness then, and a Woman is indeed, inWnitely oblig’d where she meets with it; but can’t help herself where it fails. (151)

By rejecting “not you” but the “Laws of Matrimony,” Roxana rejects the civil institution theorized by Hobbes. Roxana’s feminism consists in a refusal to ratify conjugal dominance played out by a husband who “fails” to be naturally superior and a wife who fails to be naturally weaker. The novel thus withholds an answer to the question posed by Astell’s ReXections of Locke’s foundational claim that “Man is naturally free from subjection to any Government”:72 “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?”73 Its protagonist’s failure to resolve this dilemma is plumbed by Roxana in a surprisingly literal fashion because, having stressed the inability of civil law to produce naturally superior men, the novel cannot entirely avoid projecting the apparition of not naturally inferior women. In her most aggressively Hobbesian synopsis of what marriage must do to produce wives, Roxana declares that “the very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was, in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed, a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave” (148). But if Roxana’s second marriage would make her one of Astell’s slaves, then her refusal to marry demands some opposing

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qualiWcation, broached when she announces that “it was my Misfortune to be a Woman, but I was resolv’d it shou’d not be made worse by the Sex; and seeing Liberty seem’d to be the Men’s Property, I wou’d be a Man-Woman” (171). Ann Louise Kibbey remarks that the moniker “ManWoman” communicates Roxana’s “renouncing [of] female nature.”74 Yet the logic of Roxana’s reiteration of the denial that women are born wives might instead expose the reliance of Lockean “nature” upon civil law. With this denial, Roxana aggravates the ontological instability of a “Sex” which, however brieXy, extends Hobbes’s refusal to naturalize feminine inferiority all the way down to the matter which would signify it. Roxana need not mean that, transformed from a wife into an individual, she really changes—although she does, throughout the novel— but rather that she can specify her difference from a “meer Woman” only as her best approximation of a Hobbesian mushroom, a “Man-Woman.” Astell anticipates the novel’s effort positively to represent an extrafamilial woman when she asks: “Only let me beg to be inform’d, to whom we poor Fatherless Maids, and Widows who have lost their Masters, owe Subjection?”75 By being “in Subjection to none” (149), Roxana propels the Hobbesian sexing of her “Sex” itself. Certainly, her anatomy produces children and imposes limits; once, in the process of giving birth to the child of a prince, Roxana “sent Word, I would make as few Cries as possible, to prevent disturbing him” (79). But as a Hobbesian individual who bears children, Roxana insists that it is marriage, and not reproduction, which would more or less effectively turn her into a Lockean or mere woman. By asserting the contingency of sexed nature on civil law, Roxana opens a brieXy utopian inversion of the Hobbesian plot that only belatedly, and thus never quite effectively, anatomizes the inferiority of women who have become wives: “I wou’d be a Man-Woman.” By aligning Roxana’s appropriation of the title “man-woman” with the irresolution of sex Wgured by Hobbes’s mushroom, I do not mean to suggest that Roxana deploys the term in a manner congruent with the presentday category of “gender.” The following paragraphs extend this disclaimer with the assistance of Toril Moi’s account of the origins of that term: Historically . . . gender emerged as an attempt to give to biology what belongs to biology, no more and no less. Gender may be pictured as a barricade thrown up against the insidious pervasiveness of sex.76

Moi’s “insidious pervasiveness of sex” refers to nineteenth- and twentiethcentury century Wgurations of masculinity and femininity that “picture biological sex as something that seeps out from the ovaries and testicles and into every cell in the body until it has saturated the whole person.”77 As a refutation of the instrumentality of sex framed by Moi as “biological

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facts justify social norms,”78 the category of gender would, alternatively, posit a femininity and a masculinity not reducible to norms that they would otherwise self-evidently embody. However, the poststructuralist reformulation of the sex-gender distinction, inXuentially advanced by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, reverses the priority of anatomy and social norms to assert that the performance of the latter generates the illusion of the referential stability of the former:79 Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.80

Evoked by Butler as “contingent acts that create the appearance of naturalistic necessity,” gender retroactively produces the sex whose ontological precedence Butler retracts with the phrase “a natural sort of being.” For Butler, sex is a precipitate of “regulatory Wctions” which enlist its actor in inadvertent or deliberate support of “convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression”; 81 of anatomical women whose practice of gender more or less effectively sustains a Wction of “naturalistic necessity,” Moi concludes that “[t]o behave like a woman comes to mean ‘to behave like an effect of patriarchal power.’” (Here Moi remarks that Butler exempts some persons—namely, anatomical men—who act like women from complicity in the latter project, thereby afWrming the anterior “substance” of at least some actors’ sex.82) When she calls herself a man-woman, Roxana does not refute the “pervasiveness of sex” posited by nineteenth-century biologists; nor does she deconstruct the facticity of her anatomy by revealing it, in Butler’s words, to be “an imitation without an origin.”83 If Roxana were pervasively sexed, then her heart would not harden against her own Xesh and blood, a reaction to the failure of masculine conjugal authority which conveys Defoe’s afWnity with Hobbes. By turning from a wife into a Hobbesian individual—by refusing to naturalize weakness that would be embodied not by women but by married women—Roxana does not expose her anatomy as an “imitation.” Rather, her anatomy cannot rationalize the subjection of the wife whom she once was. Roxana’s feminism resides not in its distinction of sex from gender but in its distinction of not naturally inferior women from wives. A manwoman who is at the same time a reproductive woman, Roxana’s critical elaboration of Hobbesian physiology can be aligned with the “one-sex” model of sexual difference whose persistence until “[s]ometime in the eighteenth century” is argued by Thomas Laqueur. Laqueur’s one-sex body “was not the biological bedrock upon which a host of other characteristics were supposedly based. Indeed, the paradox of the one-sex model is that pairs of ordered contrarieties played off a single Xesh in

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which they did not themselves inhere.” This “one-sex body, . . . construed as illustrative rather than determinant,”84 offers one prototype of a materialist physiology so indifferent to sex that Hobbes populates his hypothetical state of nature with mushrooms. To posit the passionate uniformity of the persons who collectively authorize sovereign power— rather than the necessity of a “bedrock” of naturally sexed dominance— Leviathan insists that all women and “all men are equal”: “The inequality that now is has been introduced by the laws civil.”85 In the case of masculine subjects the advent of whose civil inequality can no longer be ascribed to nature, C. B. Macpherson argues that Hobbes and his successors theorize the surrogate agency of the “objective” force of “the market.”86 In the case of the civil inequality of women, which Hobbes is far less able to resolve, it is the eighteenth-century domestic novel which theorizes the persistence into literary-political modernity of an individual whose anatomy lacks the resources to make her a naturally subject wife. Roxana argues that “I knew of no State of Matrimony, but what was, at best, a State of Inferiority, if not of Bondage; that I had no Notion of it; that I liv’d a Life of absolute Liberty now; was free as I was born” (171). If her claim upon “absolute Liberty” deWnes Roxana as a Hobbesian individual, then this claim also implicates her in Hobbes’s repudiation of “natural liberty” as “the liberty of the beasts,” for Hobbesian “liberty has the same relation to subjection, as desire to reason or a beast to a Man.”87 Hobbes’s etymological derivation of freedom’s modiWcation encapsulates the moral philosophical aptitude for public good, which “is called Deliberation; because it is a putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our own Appetite, or Aversion.”88 Here Leviathan echoes Eikon Basilike’s defense of the “Right” of the imperiled king’s son: [T]he setled Laws of these Kingdomes, to which you are rightly Heir, are the most excellent rules you can govern by; which by an admirable temperament give very much to Subjects industry, liberty, and happinesse; and yet reserve enough to the Majesty and Prerogative of any King, who ownes his People as Subjects, not as Slaves whose subjection, as it preserves their property, peace, and safety, so it will never diminish your Right, or their ingenuous Liberties, which consists in the enjoyment of the fruits of their industry, and the beneWt of those Lawes to which themselves have consented.89

Because the projected accommodation of sovereign “Right” and subjectivizing freedom requires that their agreement be an expedient “to which themselves have consented,” Roxana’s marriage to a fool leaves her unable voluntarily to reconstitute domestic subjection as “ingenuous” liberty. Left to starve, she occupies the universe invoked by Hobbes to amplify the necessity of a species of deliberation which not only

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admits but quite literally authorizes sovereign “Prerogative”: “Outside the circumstances of a commonwealth each man does indeed have the most complete liberty, but it does him no good.”90 By claiming not to “understand what Coherence the Words Honour and Obey has with the Liberty of a Free Woman” (171), Roxana would seem clearly to solicit the condemnation of natural liberty afWrmed by her frustrated suitor, who relinquishes his courtship by accusing her of “Vicious Liberty, which is neither honourable or religious” (157). And yet, in perhaps its deepest congruity with Astell, Roxana reminds its readers that husbands are not commensurate with kings. The novel cannot extend to every other wife the proof against starvation entailed by Roxana’s merchant in the form of an exception to the law: “I will not touch one Pistole of your Estate, more, than shall be with your own voluntary Consent . . . you shall settle it as you please, for your Life, and upon you please after your Death” (146–47). Roxana’s refusal to remarry—again to become the “passive Creature” (149) who almost starved—cannot be coded a grab for liberty akin to that of seditious men, because she cannot realize the mystiWed transformation of an individual back into a naturally inferior wife. By representing an individual who was, impossibly, already a wife, Defoe unravels Hobbes’s marital plot from the other end; herself testimony to her former resemblance to a “Slave,” Roxana cannot—without a lapse of memory—make herself ingenuously subject. Far from the mystiWed achievement of sexed inferiority, Roxana’s second marriage, which transpires the morning after her merchant buys a title, represents just another means by which an individual pursues her advantage. To locate Roxana’s feminism in its refusal to entrench an individual’s subjection in her anatomy is also to claim this insight as a hermeneutic vital to the history of a domestic novel which continues to grapple with the insolubility of Astell’s question of how—to rephrase it slightly— women are born wives. Yet unlike Roxana, the protagonists of the eighteenth-century domestic novel do “owe Subjection.” The next section of this chapter brings the Wgures of Hobbes’s individual, Astell’s feminist physiology, and Defoe’s man-woman to a novel which seems resolutely unlike Roxana. But with at least equal force, Pamela asserts its inability to Wx its protagonist’s inferiority in the fact of her sex. Unlike the starving Roxana, Pamela manifests no hunger at all: notoriously, she “eats nothing,” and her future husband vows that “he would learn me to eat heartily.”91 This denial of appetite is legible as a denial of the generically unsexed physiology that would establish the existence of Pamela’s desire prior to the event of her marriage; here, Pamela’s machine works in concert with the assurance to her future husband that “I have no Will but yours.”92 But if Pamela’s advance denial of both

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Pamela’s extramarital appetite and Pamela’s extramarital volition would render superXuous the necessity of its protagonist’s transformation from a woman into a naturally subject wife, then Pamela’s physiology does not always assist this attempt proleptically to resolve Hobbes’s dilemma. The following section Wrst takes up seventeenth-century marital conduct books that refuse, as Astell reports, to derive the biblical mandate for wifely subjection from women’s anatomy; it then turns to the masculine conjugal power that Mrs. B must, paradoxically, will her machine ingenuously to obey. The next section concludes by reXecting upon a history of the novel which, by overlooking Pamela’s intimation of its protagonist’s failure always to be a naturally subject wife, instead claims her as the prototype of an abstract individual magically unmarked by power.

Realizing Sweetness: Pamela’s Gaps In his popular conduct book Advice to a Daughter (1688), George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, represents the kind of husband who exercises gentle conjugal governance: [T]hat which you are to pray for, is a Wise Husband, one that by knowing how to Master, for the very reason will not let you feel the weight of it; one whose Authority is so soften’d by his Kindness, that it giveth you ease without abridging your Liberty; one that will return so much freedom for your Just Esteem of him . . . [S]uch a Husband is as much above all the other Kindnesses of them, as a rational Subjection to a Prince, great in himself, is to be preferr’d before the disquiet and uneasiness of Unlimited Liberty.93

In one crucial respect, this “Wise Husband” bears a strong likeness to Roxana’s fool: whereas the latter will never know, the former already knows “how to Master.” If Roxana’s fool traps her under a governor immune to rational suggestion (“every thing he said, was Right, was Best” [8]), then Halifax’s “Wise Husband” inversely conveys a promise of prefabricated “Kindness” to which his daughter can contribute nothing but anticipatory prayer. (As we have seen, Davys’s The Reformed Coquet comments upon the probability of such a husband’s existence.) Roxana’s silent endurance, on the one hand, and the premarital prayer of Halifax’s daughter, on the other, demarcate the limits of feminine agency in a world of suitors who become either Locke’s fathers or Astell’s tyrants. Halifax’s vision of his daughter’s “rational Subjection” asserts an analogy of family and state so close that her transformation into a subject wife would almost exactly resemble her incorporation into a political body that promises never to degenerate into a state of “Unlimited Liberty.” This daughter prays for a husband who so nearly simulates a “Prince” that she will never perceive the discrepancy between forms of

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authority justiWed as “rational” by Hobbes and Astell only in the latter case. But such prayer, and the practice of holding her tongue, do not exhaust the options available to wives who obey an authority that they might themselves assist in softening. As we saw in Chapter 1, the practice of “ingenuous subjection,” described by Richard Allestree’s Ladies Calling (1673) as a wife’s capacity to “make the Yoke sit so lightly,” hinges upon the susceptibility of husbands to a different species of wifely inXuence.94 An ingenuously subject wife lightens her yoke by banishing from her practice of duty any testimony to the fact that her husband might not always gently or rationally elicit it. Pamela begins with a bad-tempered man and, perhaps more thoroughly than any other domestic novel, it imagines an ingenuously subject wife’s capacity to modernize him. Pamela is an epistolary novel; the servant Pamela’s disinterested defense of her chastity, her irrepressible passion for her master, and her will to defer to his reformed authority are proven by the letters to her parents that the rakish, aristocratic Mr. B intercepts over the course of his conversion into her future husband. But still, despite proof of the virtue of her future compliance manifest as the very stuff of Pamela’s subjectivity—“the naked Sentiments of my Heart”95— Richardson cannot resist spelling out the conduct-book ramiWcations of the practice that will reconstitute Mr. B’s conjugal power in far more graphic detail than is provided by Allestree’s warning against wifely “frowardness and little perversness of humor.” When on the fourth day of her marriage, Mrs. B begs her husband for “more of your sweet Injunctions to honour me with,”96 he responds with the following reWnement of Allestree’s suggestion that a wife behave in a manner that will not “wear off the kindness” 97 of her husband’s authority: —I need not, I hope, say, that I would have you diligently preserve this sweet Appearance: Let no thwarting Accident, no cross Fortune, (for we must not expect to be exempt from such, happy as we now are in each other!) deprive this sweet Face of this its principle Grace: And when any thing unpleasing happens, in a quarter of an Hour, at farthest, begin to mistrust yourself, and apply to your Glass; and if you see a Gloom arising, or arisen, banish it instantly, smooth your dear Countenance, resume your former Composure; and then, my Dearest, whose Heart must always be seen in her Face, and cannot be a Hypocrite, will Wnd this means to smooth her Passions also . . . And so shall I, my Dear, who, as you once, but too justly, observ’d, have been too much indulged by my good Mother, have an Example from you, as well as a Pleasure in you which will hardly ever be Palled.98

It is difWcult sufWciently to stress the degree to which this passage deviates from the epistemological assurance of “naked Sentiments” transmitted by the servant Pamela’s letters. Through the medium of a signiWer whose arbitrariness is reversed by the somatic traces it bears, “this miserable

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Scribble, all bathed and blotted with my Tears”99 fuses the truth of Pamela’s text to the extravolitional truth of her heart. The imminence that she restores to the letter—“Yet I cannot hold my Pen!—How crooked and trembling the Lines!—I must leave off, till I can get quieter Fingers!”100— enables Pamela’s resolution by proving the ingenuousness of a love that might otherwise be motivated by money. But in explaining how Mrs. B must preserve the “sweet Face” that will, through the force of her “Example,” moderate her husband’s conjugal authority, Richardson broaches complexities unanticipated by Allestree’s terse prohibition of wifely sullenness. Moving to the medium of an appearance which Mrs. B must “diligently preserve” entails that she “mistrust” herself; unlike the writing whose truth is assured by the immediacy with which it is “tremblingly”101 relayed, Mrs. B’s countenance admits a Wfteen-minute delay in its assumption of exemplary sweetness. Rather than trusting the mechanical “Composure” of her body, Mrs. B must, before her quarter of an hour has elapsed, “apply to your Glass” to stave off the gloom that would spur Mr. B’s own relapse into bad temper. She Wnds herself, in other words, in the same epistemological situation occupied by Mr. B before he began stealing her letters: she can read her body only from the outside. Because her practice of sweetness requires the assistance of a mirror, Mrs. B threatens to reconvert the practice of ingenuous subjection into what Astell alternatively qualiWes as mortiWed duty. Yet at the same moment that Mr. B admits a distinction of natural passion and dutiful action aggravated by the time it takes his wife to make herself look sweet, he insists that she “cannot be a Hypocrite.” If Locke imaginatively engenders ingenuous sons who do not remember that they were once forced to obey, then it would seem that, sincerely to realize sweetness, Mrs. B would have to forget her effort to banish her encroaching gloom. The specter of disingenuousness unleashed not by the “radically subjective”102 orientation of Pamela’s writing to the moment but by her body’s capacity reXexively to manifest marital happiness threatens, it would seem, to punctuate Mrs. B’s cheerful composure with Wfteen-minute spells of amnesia, vestiges of the willed duty that makes up the whole of Astell’s marital plot. The antecedent to a practice of duty that would, as closely as possible, implicate Mrs. B’s heart and her face is represented by Daniel Rogers’s Matrimoniall Honour; or, The Mutuall Crowne and comfort of godly, loyall, and chaste Marriage (1650), which wonders where inside a wife to locate the referent of her dutiful practice: What is then this subjection, and wherin stands it? For the former I say its such a convincement of spirit in the woman touching the equity of Gods ordinance . . . By this description, it may appeare, in what particulars this subjection standes:

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to wit, cheeXy in the spirit of the wife, and nextly in her demeanure. The former . . . meaneth an inward principle of subjection of the heart . . . No framing of a woman, by most exquisite education, outward forming of the bodie to delicate behavior and semblance of subjection, can compasse this . . . No artiWcall respectivenesse of the eye, the curtesie of body, the silence or composure of the tongue, or the like, can secure an husband of subjection, except all these be acted from an heart of subjection . . . But, if the principle be sound, and . . . issuing from Christ his love & a willing mind, not from necessity, credit, or restreint (which will go farre, & make a great shew) then is this duty well planted, & wil endure . . . The woman then, must set up her husband there, and shrine him in the secret of her heart; and then, all her externall subjection will Xowe sweetly, fully, constantly, without grudging, and Wt comely as a garment Wt for the body.103

The truth of this wife’s virtue Wnally inheres neither in her “bodie” nor in her “heart” but in the adverbial elaboration of how her duty “Xowe[s] . . . without grudging” or, more broadly, how it is “acted.” If her subjection must be galvanized by a “convincement of spirit . . . touching the equity of Gods ordinance” apparently not innately Wxed by the fact of her sex, then that “inward principle” surfaces as the “Wt” of mind and body visible in time as evidence of how “fully” and “constantly” the former infuses the latter.104 The doubt broached by Mr. B as the specter of hypocritical wives would be assuaged by the palpable difference between “artiWcall” and “willing” obedience, the difference of compliance motivated by “necessity, credit, or restreint” from practice that testiWes to the redundancy of necessity itself. In representing wifely duties “that may run like a smooth Stream,” Halifax’s Advice also cites their “unconstrained” temporal progress as crucial “Evidence of their being sincere.”105 As Allestree asserts, the Xow of an ingenuous wife’s duty makes superXuous the necessity of her husband’s command. Yet Richardson’s Mrs. B does not quite achieve this Xow; there remains a Wfteen-minute gap in the otherwise close Wt of her mind and body, a lag in which her husband must ask her to assume the sweetness that will obviate any further exertion of his power. Here we reach a paradox already implicit in Rogers’s attempt to translate biblical ordinance into the eagerness with which a wife animates her obedience, because Rogers prescribes the inner convincement that fuels her alacrity.106 But can the convincement of spirit that renders wifely subjection more than forced “semblance” be itself effected by force? Here Rogers reiterates the dilemma already posed by William Whateley’s sermon A Bride-Bush (1623): O thou wife, let thy best understanding be to understand (that, that makes for thy peace), that thine husband is by god made thy governour and ruler, and thou his inferiour, to bee ruled by him. Though hee be of meaner birth, and of lesser wit . . . yet after the tying of this knot, God will have thee subject, and you must put upon thy selfe a willingnesse to confesse thy selfe so to bee . . . This duty . . . is withall so hard, that it can hardly bee yeelded unto: but unlesse the

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judgement be truly informed, and soundly convinced of this point, the will and affections will never be kept in good order, set it downe therefore as a conclusion, not much as once to be called into question; My husband is my better. Secondly, the wife being resolved that her place is the lower, must carry her selfe as an inferiour: for it boots little to confesse his authority in word, if shee frame not her selfe to submission in deede . . . And this reverence of hers must bee both inward and outward.107

Whateley’s “soundly convinced” wife translates the imperative of inner sincerity into perceptible gesture. But even more emphatically than Rogers, Whateley represents inward conviction as itself a result of willed duty: unlike a wife whose subjection to her husband transpires naturally, the wife whose husband might, indeed, be “meaner” and “lesser” than she must “put upon thy selfe a willingnesse” to ratify his superiority. She approximates the mandate of her subjection to a “better” husband as the result of her willingness not simply to act inferior but to “bee” inferior.108 The preliminary, inferiorizing duty of Whateley’s bride, like the Wfteen minutes during which Mrs. B wills her face to be sweet, remains extrinsic to the dutiful practice that thereafter engrosses both the inside and outside of a wife. Just as her desire for conjugal “peace” assists the former woman’s willingness “to confess thy self so to be,” so Mr. B urges his wife to serve as his model of composure with the warning that he was “too much indulged” by his mother. As he notes, his servant Pamela has already “but too justly, observ’d” the result of this lapse in Lockean pedagogy: “His poor dear Mother spoil’d him at Wrst. Nobody must speak to him or contradict him, as I have heard, when he was a Child, and so he has not been us’d to be controul’d, and cannot bear the least Thing that crosses his violent Will.”109 Mr. B’s acknowledgment of his miseducation would seem to exempt him from a pretense to rational conjugal governance that he mimes, comically, with the following aspiration: “I hope I shan’t be a very tyrannical Husband to you.”110 Yet among his sweet injunctions to his wife are the following rules, which enjoin her to defuse a “violent Will” that seems, like the obstinacy of Roxana’s fool, well past the point of improvement. In transcribing her husband’s rules, Mrs. B appends italicized commentary: 24. That if she would overcome, it must be by Sweetness and Complaisance; that is, by yielding, he means, no doubt. 25. Yet not such a slavish one neither, as should rather seem the Effect of her Insensibility, than Judgment or Affection! 26. That the Words COMMAND and OBEY shall be blotted out of his Vocabulary. Very good! 27. That a Man should desire nothing of his Wife but what is signiWcant, reasonable, just. To be sure that is right. 28. But then, that she must not shew Reluctance, Uneasiness, or Doubt, to

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oblige him; and that too at half a Word; and must not be bid twice to do one thing. —But may not there be some Occasion, where this may be a little dispens’d with? But he says afterwards, indeed; 29. That this must be only while he took care to make her Compliance reasonable, and consistent with her free Agency, in Points that ought to be allow’d her. —Come, this is pretty well, considering. 30. That if the Husband be set upon a wrong Thing, she must not dispute with him, but do it, and expostulate afterwards. —Good-sirs! I don’t know what to say to this!—It looks a little hard, methinks!—This would bear a smart Debate, I fansy, in a Parliament of Women.111

With remarkable precision, Richardson’s rule 28 stipulates exactly how Mrs. B must deploy what her husband designates, in this capacity only, her transitively modernizing exercise of “free Agency.” But by extending the prohibition of “Reluctance, Uneasiness, or Doubt” that would aggravate a bad-tempered man’s authority, Mr. B reverses the logic that would place Mrs. B’s conviction of her inferiority in advance of its inward and outward effect. By commanding that his wife oblige him “at half a Word; and . . . not be bid twice to do one thing,” Mr. B aims to dissolve the stimuli that manifestly compel her; but unlike Whateley or Rogers, who Wrst command wives to believe that they serve a “better,” Mr. B simply prescribes the dutiful gesture that such belief ideally effects. The impracticability of his approach is intimated in rule 26; even before telling his wife how she must ingenuously comply, Mr. B anticipates the disappearance of “the Words COMMAND and OBEY” from his “Vocabulary.” Whereas Locke modernizes the “arbitrary imperiousness”112 of Filmerian fathers only as the insensible effect of incremental Wlial habituation, Mrs. B must practice ideally unprompted duties as the result of neither inferiority-inducing conviction nor the childhood equivocation of duty and desire. Instead, the compliant practice that reduces Mr. B’s show of power to “half a Word” is the effect of yet another command. Mrs. B reacts to this paradox as it is most resonantly posed by rule 26 with the bemused annotation “Very good! ” At the moment that Mr. B commands his wife’s ingenuousness, then, the inscrutability of her response precipitates another paradox; at this instant, Pamela’s epistolary form exacerbates the difWculty posed by the wife whose Wfteen-minute effort to align her face and her heart testiWes to the arbitrariness of the authority that moves her. Here, Mrs. B’s transcription of her husband’s rules generates as their remainder not simply an anterior, soon-forgotten exertion of will, and not simply testimony to the work it takes to “bee” inferior, but an italicized supplement that is her subjectivity itself. At this remarkable moment in a novel whose protagonist is composed of her own letters, Mrs. B’s commentary emanates from a site peculiarly eccentric to the text that otherwise lets the reader see the naked sentiments of her heart. In repeating rules that she would ingenuously obey not

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only as gesture but also as writing to the moment, Mrs. B generates an excess of text that cannot be absorbed into the otherwise uncoerced and unprotesting practice of subjection that deWnes her, inside and out. At this juncture, Mrs. B occupies the Hobbesian slippage between naturally inferior wives and not naturally inferior women in just as graphic a fashion as Roxana. As she repeats rules whose arbitrariness would dissolve only if they were no longer rules at all—only, Locke states, if they had already imperceptibly and gradually “bent her mind”113—Mrs. B materializes as italicized type distinct from the epistolary print that proves her an inwardly subject wife.114 Here the epistolary text that vindicates Mrs. B’s inner virtue replicates the gap opened by Roxana on Mrs. B’s inside: Mrs. B repeats commands that a wholly subject wife would render redundant at the same time that her other epistolary voice testiWes to the irrationality of power whose naturalness she thereby fails to ratify. Yet Pamela’s italicized commentary is not necessarily disingenuous, because it might instead intimate how “hard” the willed adjustment of not naturally inferior thought might be. By invoking the sympathetic commentary of “a Parliament of Women,” her italicized voice constitutes some portion of Mrs. B’s interior as a woman not precisely identical to the wife whom she should already have become. Michael McKeon comments upon the “extraordinary tonal range” conveyed by Pamela’s italicized annotation of her husband’s rules as follows: So the remarkable utopianism of Pamela’s achievement is faintly colored, at the end, by the recognition that there may yet be something more to be achieved. But the problem remains unformulated: for Pamela to aspire to the social status of a man might seem as humanly untenable to the progressive Richardson as Gulliver’s aspiration to the condition of Houyhnhynm does to the conservative Swift.115

For McKeon, Pamela’s “achievement” resides in its thoroughgoing, but still incomplete, articulation of “the progressive ideal of meritocracy, which envisions the replacement of arbitrary aristocratic culture by a rigorous consistency of moral and social success.”116 According to McKeon, Pamela’s supplemental commentary clearly communicates the “something more to be achieved”: her aspiration to “the social status of a man.” But Pamela’s italics need not represent her pretension to become the “man” who remains the default subject of McKeon’s “progressive ideal” even in a novel about a woman; rather, they precipitate her Xeeting apparition as a Hobbesian individual—or, indeed, a Defoean man-woman. By activating even in the medium of epistolary print its protagonist’s failure consistently to materialize as a naturally subject wife, Pamela illuminates the capacity of the Hobbesian individual to track the novelistic persistence of a person who is neither a wife nor the presumptively masculine Wgure of progressive merit posited by McKeon.

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McKeon’s gloss reveals the debilitating irony of a history of the novel that, engrossed by its critique of the abstract or bourgeois individual, does not register Richardson’s elaboration of Hobbes’s and Astell’s not naturally subject woman, a Wgure whose feminist physiology Richardson reWnes as her mentalized inability to ratify her husband’s claim to conjugal dominance. While McKeon reads Pamela’s intimation of Mr. B’s persistently arbitrary domestic power as, instead, the impossibility of its protagonist’s desire to become a Houyhnhynm, Nancy Armstrong activates a rigorously symmetrical critical outcome by enlisting Pamela to support the claim that “the modern individual was Wrst and foremost a female.”117 As either McKeon’s “man” or as Armstrong’s “female,” the default subject of their eighteenth-century domestic novel remains the prototype of the abstract “individual,” an entity whose coordinates exactly obscure Hobbes’s egalitarian person, Astell’s feminist physiology, and, most graphically, Defoe’s man-woman. Yet the latter Wgures constitute the durability and speciWcity of the novel’s own critique of a domestic modernity populated by still residually Hobbesian women unable magically to become Lockean wives.

Coda: Domestic Subjection and Defoe’s Family Instructor Roxana is not the Wrst text in which Defoe, theorizing Hobbesian conundrum in reverse, imaginatively undoes familial obligations divested of any palpable advantage. In a twist unanticipated by Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Defoe’s conduct book The Family Instructor (1715) envisions a change of domestic governance that reconverts loving parents into tyrants and, in so doing, propels the reversion to disingenuousness of elder children whose desires abruptly cease to animate their Wlial duty. Published one year after the death of Queen Anne, the removal of her recently installed Tory government, and Defoe’s resulting shift of political allegiance,118 Family Instructor explores in dialogue (for which Defoe coins the generic neologism “Religious Play”119) the repercussions of the abrupt conversion to ascetic penitence of a previously indulgent mother and father. Belatedly moved to reform their “uninstructed unreprov’d Children” (31), these parents undertake a change of governance whose magnitude they evoke as follows: [We] must set up a Family-Government entirely new: We must be angry now at what we were pleas’d at before, and pleas’d now with what we were angry at before . . . What we not only allow’d to be done, but even did ourselves before, we must forbid now: What we accounted pleasant before must be frightful now; and what we delighted in before, must be dreadful to us now: IN SHORT, every part of our Government, or of our Children’s Obedience, must be alter’d. (103)

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Defoe asserts the novelty of this “Family-Government” not by retailing its reforms but by stressing the abrupt retrenchment of feeling which they demand. With the projected exchange of pleasure for dread, he portends obstacles to “our Children’s Obedience” that will precisely reverse the capacity of Lockean pedagogy insensibly to naturalize parental power, because Family Instructor’s mother requires of her children more than a “bare Amendment of Life”; she wishes to command the reconstitution of Wlial passion ensuring that such amendment will be “submitted to chearfully” (98). In accordance with Locke’s stress upon the subjectivizing necessity of infantile habituation, the dialogue between her pair of daughters bases the likelihood of each girl’s cheer upon the length of time that she has persisted in her “prophane habit” (31–32). “1 Sist.” is the eldest: 2 sist. 1 sist.

2 sist.

1 sist.

My Mother said nothing to me but what I like very well, and am very willing to comply with . . . Why I suppose my Mother has not been in your Chamber, and riXed your Closet, and taken all your choice Books, and your Plays, and your Songs, and your Novels, &c. and carry’d them away, and thrown them into the Fire. No, no my Dear! For what my Mother said to me was so affecting, so fully convincing, and so unanswerable, that I immediately fetch’d them all down my self, and put them into the Fire with my own Hands. A pretty complying, easy Fool! (84–85)

“2 Sist.” is younger and thus not “too Old and too Big to be wrought upon by Instruction or Perswasion” (31); she has also, Defoe reveals, acquired “the Foundation of that Willingness to be govern’d and reform’d” from the “pleasant” inXuence of an aunt whom she once visited (105). Lacking anterior “Willingness,” however, “1 Sist.” can experience the unprecedented imposition of her mother’s authority only as her parent’s Hobbesian effort to “conquer” her (80). Their dialogue accordingly plays out the difference between an individual in a state of nature and a subject who has surrendered her right to resist; while Family Instructor’s younger sister possesses the pedagogical foundation that predisposes her to burn her own books, the elder is too insolubly “passionate” (107) to preempt her parent’s imposition of force with her (sister’s) “Inclination” (111). At best, the elder daughter can be compelled to the uncheerful practice of passive obedience: dau. fa.

I oppose nothing as I know of. And comply with nothing. (156)

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Defoe represents the selective failure of Locke’s pedagogical trajectory just as clearly in the case of Family Instructor’s two sons. Unable to comprehend a precipitous change of government as “Reason” (73), Family Instructor’s eldest son instead provokes from his father an “abundance of Threatenings, and other positive Testimonials of his Patriarchal Authority” (136). And yet, while not entirely able to exempt oncenegligent parents from Lockean reproach—“Why did they not bring us up to it from Children, then it had been Natural to us, and we had known no better” (156), protests the eldest daughter—Family Instructor nonetheless holds its eldest son to the standard of ingenuous practice that would preclude the Filmerian devolution of paternal government into “Patriarchal Authority.” Among the children “who I expected would not give me the trouble of Commanding, or using the Authority of a Father or Governour with them; but that I might with Reason and Argument perswade, and with Affection and Tenderness invite” (123), the eldest son compels his father to conclude: fa.

I Wnd your Temper is such, that I am rather to let you know what I expect, than to hope for your observing it; and that you will put the Hardship upon me of doing all with you by force: This is a Treatment, I think, very disingenuous, and unlike a dutiful Son. (127)

Defoe’s representation of the contingency of Wlial obligation hinges upon the son who cannot be restored to ingenuousness by a “FamilyGovernment” that changes course in midstream. Family Instructor stages their Wnal dialogue to frame the eldest son’s reversion into a Hobbesian individual: son. fa.

Liberty is a Native Right, the Brutes seek it; not a Bird will be in a Cage, if it can be free. Liberty to do Evil is an abandon’d Slavery, the worst of Bondage; and ConWnement from doing Evil, is the only true Liberty: But to cut this Discourse short . . . if you will not submit to my Government, you must quit my Dominions. (125)

His father’s adjudication of the meanings of “Bondage” and “true Liberty” seals the destiny of this disingenuous son, because a model of freedom supplied by “Brutes” deWnes his appeal to his father as rebellious cant. (Hobbes comments: “When private citizens, i.e. subjects, demand liberty, what they are demanding in the name of liberty is not liberty but Dominion.”120) No longer simply sullen, but an “Obstruction to the Resolution I have taken to reform my Family” (159), this eldest son must indeed

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“quit” a “House [that] that condemns you now” (149). Having demonstrated, as Family Instructor’s most topical correction of Hobbes, that political party might render subjection reversible, the son squanders his independent fortune, “comes Home a Criple and a Beggar; and . . . dies miserable”; the daughter’s story “ends at last in her compleat Reformation, by marrying one of her Cousins, a sober religious Gentleman” (159). And yet the marriage of Family Instructor’s eldest daughter to a sober cousin does not effect her complete reform. Like the starving Roxana, 1 Sist. retains the “Heart” which, “when . . . made hard” (61), threatens the reciprocal harshness of the domestic government to which she can no longer be ingenuously subject. Become a wife, 1 Sist. not only “visited oftner than ever . . . play’d at Cards abroad . . . [and] went almost nightly to the Play”; she adds insult to injury by accusing her preternaturally tolerant husband of aspiring to “absolute Government of your Family” and treating her like “an upper Servant” (322–24). Defoe arrests this wife’s clearly self-serving use of Astell’s ReXections by synchronizing her reform with the moment when her exhausted husband “went immediately into his Closet . . . to pray very sincerely for his Wife” (337). The husband later deduces that “the Change was wrought in her that very Time, nay, as near as he could guess the very Moments that he, as is noted before, was earnestly Praying to GOD, not only to give him Patience to bear the AfXiction, but in his own Time to open her Eyes to her Duty” (347). Defoe thus inspires “a sincere Repentance for her former Errors” (340) in a wife whose husband is pre constituted as a man who “could never frame my Temper to use any Violence or Restraint with her” (342). Only through a miracle “that must be wrought by the immediate hand of GOD” (351) can Family Instructor preserve the gentleness of a husband whose wife’s “hardned Heart” (340) would amply authorize the counsel given him by her father: “you must restrain her” (347). Because the conversion of this hardened woman into an ingen-uously subject wife must be wrought by divine intervention, Defoe’s “Religious Play” might therefore resemble Roxana after all: both texts represent the Hobbesian transformation of forcibly vanquished women into naturally subject wives as, literally, impossible. More to the point, Defoe’s novel lacks the resources of his religious play. Without the help of God’s “immediate hand”—and even with the exception to civil law that would preserve Roxana’s peculiar property—Roxana cannot rationalize the conversion of a Hobbesian individual back into a wife. Defoe instead answers Astell’s question with a protagonist who names herself a man-woman, a Wgure whose Hobbesian resonance extends, as we will see in Chapter 3, into the not always cheerful compliance of the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s most virtuous wife.

Chapter 3

“The Words Command and Obey” Pamela and Domestic Modernity

Pamela’s Halves; or, the Metaphysics of Conjugal Rights In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume offers the following scene to illustrate the “principle of the connexion of fear with uncertainty”: A virgin, on her bridal-night goes to bed full of fears and apprehensions, tho’ she expects nothing but pleasure of the highest kind, and what she has long wish’d for. The newness and greatness of the event, the confusion of wishes and joys so embarrass the mind, that it knows not on what passion to Wx itself; from whence arises a Xuttering or unsettledness of the spirits, which being, in some degree, uneasy, very naturally degenerates into fear.1

By calling his new bride “uneasy,” Hume revises the deWnition of the word advanced by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding : “what is it that determines the Will in regard to our Actions? . . . [It] is not, as is generally supposed, the greater good in view: But some (and for the most part the most pressing) uneasiness a Man is at present under . . . This Uneasiness we may call, as it is, Desire.”2 “Uneasiness” provides a mechanical rationale for marriage that Locke quite conspicuously restricts to men: “It is better to marry than to burn, says St. Paul; where we may see, what it is, that chieXy drives Men into the enjoyments of a conjugal life.”3 When Hume exempliWes the corrected postulate “that uncertainty alone is uneasy”4 with a wife, he seems to assert the applicability of the term to an unsexed physiology in which, for women or men, “whatever causes any Xuctuation or mixture of passions, with any degree of uneasiness, always produces fear.”5 Yet to at least as great a degree as the desire that “drives” a Lockean man to marry her, the fear felt by Hume’s bride seems to solicit some anatomical qualiWcation; her generic “unsettledness of the spirits” cannot be entirely disconnected from the fact that she is, as Hume speciWes, a “virgin.” By claiming the event of a virgin’s bridal night to illustrate a “principle” of “mix’d passions”6 whose efWcacy would be demonstrated by everybody, Hume also

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refers, in the same gesture with which he refuses to refer, to a person external to her spirits’ representative confusion. A wedding night marvelously evacuated of its husband signals Hume’s solitary exception to his Treatise’s boldest refutation of Locke’s Essay, in which, as we have seen, Locke deWnes liberty as the capacity of a “free Agent” to reconcile his uneasiness and his volition—the “power to suspend any particular desire, and keep it from determining the will.”7 Hume’s Treatise refutes Locke’s “fantastical system of liberty” by insisting that “human actions” claim the same “uniformity”8 as mechanical passions (Hume’s redacted Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding [1748] footnotes men’s “fantastical desire of showing liberty”9). To reject the medium of Lockean liberty, Hume assigns the same ineluctable “necessity” to “sentiments, actions, and manners” as he does to “the operations of body.”10 In the face of Locke’s proposed determination of action by a deliberative will as opposed to “impetuous uneasiness,”11 Hume asserts their indifference: We must now shew, that as the union betwixt motives and actions has the same constancy, as that in any natural operations, so its inXuence on the understanding is also the same, in determining us to infer the existence of one from that of another. If this shall appear, there is no known circumstance, that enters into the connexion and production of the actions of matter, that is not to be found in all the operations of the mind; and consequently we cannot, without a manifest absurdity, attribute necessity to the one, and refuse it to the other.12

Hume proceeds to demonstrate mental “necessity” with the following examples of the “constancy” of “motives and actions”: the “compliance” of taxpayers; the “Wdelity” of a merchant’s factor; the “obedience” of servants. “As there is the same constancy [of cause and effect], and the same inXuence in what we call moral evidence,” he concludes, “I ask no more.”13 It is perhaps unsurprising that Hume would claim variants of the practice of compliance as proof of the necessity that indifferently governs matter and mind. His Wnal vivid illustration of that practice compels him to level a prison guard’s “constancy and Wdelity” to the state and “the separation of the head and body; bleeding, convulsive motions, and death”: “Here is a connected chain of natural causes and voluntary actions; but the mind feels no difference betwixt them in passing from one link to another.” But if, for Hume, the inviolable constancy of the taxpayer, factor, servant, prison guard, and, indeed, “the gaoler” and “executioner” proves “motives, volitions, and actions” indistinguishable from “physical necessity,”14 then it is surprising that he does not cite new brides in this capacity. Surely, the events that “embarrass the mind” of Hume’s hypothetical virgin claim at least as much physical urgency as

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the imperative that lends Wrmness to “the operations of mind” of his hypothetical taxpayer. In this one case, Hume refuses to admit the linkage of physical and volitional causes that would deWne his bride’s pleasure as also an act of compliance. In attributing virginal fear solely to “unsettledness of the spirits,” Hume reiterates the distinction of matter and mind that his rebuttal of Locke would otherwise undo. ConWned to the medium of the latter, a bride’s uneasiness does not reference the extrinsic force that governs both the minds and bodies of taxpayers, factors, servants, prison guards, and executioners. Nor does her fear reference her inverse likeness to Hume’s doomed “prisoner,” the fatality of whose own “convulsive motions” proceeds from the “obstinacy” of a jailer whose will Hume likens to “stone and iron.”15 By removing from his exposition of her unsettledness the necessity that is a virgin’s husband, Hume denies the resemblance between masculine conjugal power and the power wielded by a “prince, who imposes a tax on”—or, who beheads—“his subjects.”16 In this signal instance, Hume agrees with Locke concerning not only the metaphysical speciWcity of mind but also the naturalness of masculine domestic rule. The logic of Hume’s endorsement of the latter is crudely recapitulated by the contemporary pamphlet Man Superior to Woman; or, a Vindication of Man’s Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman (1739): “The general Content with which they [women] submit is plain Proof, that they look upon Submission as a natural Duty they owe to us; and that, conscious of the Legalness of our Authority, they pass the same Judgment on their Dependency as every Man does.”17 The “general Content” invoked by this pamphlet to equate feminine subjection and “natural Duty” resembles the pleasure that Hume cites as his bridal night’s imminent necessity; a bridal mind which “very naturally degenerates into fear” fails to refer to a source of anxiety entailed not by nature but by civil law. By denying the likeness of the physical necessity of a beheading and the physical necessity of a bridal night, Hume reWnes Locke’s effort to classify masculine domestic authority as “a Conjugal Power, not Political.”18 A night selectively relieved of the will to comply that otherwise represents, for Hume, “an essential part of causation”19 serves as a particularly graphic symptom of a “Political” modernity in which, according to Carole Pateman, masculine domestic power is overdetermined as simultaneously contractual and natural: The husband’s conjugal right is the clearest example of the way in which the modern origin of political right as sex-right is translated through the marriage contract into the right of every member of the fraternity in daily life.20

Pateman explains the provenance of her term “sex-right”:

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During the genesis of civil society, the sphere of natural subjection is separated out as the non-political sphere. The non-political status of familial and private life is conWrmed by Locke’s label “paternal power” for its constituent relationship. Sex-right or conjugal right, the original political right, then becomes completely hidden.21

According to Man Superior to Woman, the general content with which women marry effectively neutralizes the “political right” that Pateman calls sex-right or conjugal right; but Hume’s Treatise does not, in fact, render this “original” variant of political power “completely hidden.” Bridal fear instead constitutes a doubled exception to the necessity essential to Humean causation: Wrst, it marks a metaphysical exception, because a bride’s mind would seem to eclipse the density of her husband’s body; second, it marks a political exception because, unlike his taxpayer, servant, executioner, and prisoner, a bride is not represented by Hume as a “subject.” These exceptions implicate one another; they obfuscate the possibility that a bride’s mechanically assured joys are not the sole link in the chain of causation which would attribute her fear strictly to the novelty of her future pleasure. The metaphysical and political determination of the necessity governing a wife’s bridal night did not trouble only Hume. The opening section of the present chapter suggests that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1741) also does not completely hide the event which transpires, famously, during a blank in the epistolary text that distils the occasion of Pamela’s transformation into Mrs. B, the gap in Pamela’s letters between “Amen, Amen, if it be his blessed Will” and “O How this dear, excellent Man indulges me in every thing!”22 Here Richardson refuses to represent the transaction that serves as Pateman’s “clearest” indicator of the persistence of patriarchal sex-right or conjugal right into contractual modernity. By exempting from intelligibility the exercise of sex-right as it is mediated by the marriage contract, Richardson’s novel would seem simply to opt out—or rather, as a number of readers afWrm, effectively to conceal the determination of that event as a species of “political right.”23 The movement of Pamela’s plot from the wedding day to those succeeding it—from “my Hand shook so, I spilled some of my Chocolate, and so put it down again” (2: 173; EK 288) to “I attended him to Breakfast, and drank my Chocolate with great Pleasure” (2: 206; EK 306)—would seem, like Hume’s Treatise, to mystify the persistence of Mr. B’s right regardless of that red herring feminine “Pleasure.” In the 1741 edition (published November 6, 1740) of Richardson’s novel, Pamela’s appeal to “his blessed Will” occupies the Wnal section of epistolary text—headed “Eleven o’Clock Thursday Night”—before her bridal night. The novel’s 1801 edition, published posthumously and

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incorporating Richardson’s exhaustive revisions, ends Pamela’s representation of her Xuttering spirits at ten o’clock.24 In the present section of this chapter, I read Richardson’s revisions to suggest that the novel’s references to Mr. B’s sex-right grapple with the metaphysical and political speciWcation of a necessity that resists easy alignment with Pamela’s overarching attempt imaginatively to modernize this husband’s domestic power. The second section of the chapter pursues exceptions to the ingenuous practice with which Pamela would soften her husband: Wrst, her transformation from a servant into a wife is compelled by passion, despite the novel’s claim to repudiate a mode of causation endemic to romance; and, second, Mrs. B cannot refrain from practicing servility. If these inconsistencies limit the novel’s reconstitution of Mr. B’s conjugal right, my third and fourth sections suggest that Pamela’s ending and its sequel deviate from this project, conserving a form of domestic power secured—and, indeed, made hereditary—by a lordly, passionate, and superior man. My fourth section critiques Jürgen Habermas’s misreading, advanced in his inXuential account of literary-political modernity, Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, of an eighteenthcentury domestic novel which projects a sphere of paciWed and humanized “voluntariness,” Habermas argues, governed solely by “love.”25 In Habermas’s account of Pamela’s assistance to literary-political modernity, I suggest, masculine sex-right does indeed remain completely hidden. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben Kimpel suggest that the changes to his Wrst edition reXected in Richardson’s 1801 novel make Pamela’s epistolary style “more elegant” by mitigating the explicitness of her selfreference: “Pamela is not allowed to hurry out ‘with a Flea in my Ear,’ nor does she describe herself as ‘as clean as a Penny’ . . . ‘Body’ in the sense of ‘person’ becomes ‘girl’ or ‘creature’ . . . Mr. B puts his hand in Pamela’s bosom only in the second bedroom scene . . . his other mammary explorations are deleted.”26 On Pamela’s wedding day, Eaves and Kimpel observe, the 1801 edition reXects the following changes: “Pamela’s modesty is less excessive, especially her fears . . . Perhaps Richardson came to agree with Pamela’s following remark (also cut), ‘Nobody, surely, in such delightful Circumstances, ever behav’d so sillily!’”27 Scrutinized in light of Mr. B’s conjugal right rather than his bride’s modesty or silliness, however, the discrepancy between Pamela’s Wrst and last editions commands additional attention. Although Eaves and Kimpel “agree” with Pamela’s repeated efforts to dismiss premarital anxiety as “little bashful Folly” (2: 117; EK 256), the 1741 edition’s representation of the uneasiness entailed by her “awful Joy” (2:127; EK 262) elaborates a more complex and dilated rationale for bridal “Over-scrupulousness, and unseasonable Timidity” (2: 160; EK 281). All except the last two sentences of the following passage, composed

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by Pamela at eight-thirty on the morning of her Thursday wedding, are removed from the novel’s Wnal edition: But, Oh! how kind it is in you, to supply the want of the Presence and Comfortings of a dear Mother; of a loving Sister, or of the kind Companions of my own Sex, which most Maidens have, to sooth their Anxieties on the near Approach of so awful a Solemnity! —You, Sir, are All these tender Relations in One to me! Your Condescensions and Kindness shall, if possible, embolden me to look up to you without that sweet Terror, that must confuse poor bashful Maidens, on such an Occasion, when they are surrender’d up to a more doubtful Happiness, and to half strange Men; whose good Faith, and good Usage of them, must be less experienced, and is all involv’d in the dark Bosom of Futurity, and only to be proved by the Event. This, my dear Pamela, said he, is most kindly said!—It shews me, that you enter gratefully into my Intention. For I would, by my Conduct, supply all these dear Relations to you; and I voluntarily promise, from my Heart, to you, what I think I could not with such assured Resolutions of Performance, to the highestborn Lady in the Kingdom. For, let me tell my sweet Girl, that, after having been long tost by the boisterous Winds of a more culpable Passion, I have now conquer’d it, and am not so much the Victim of your Love, all charming as you are, as of your Virtue. (2: 169–70; EK 286)

It is remarkable how unerringly this passage shifts from Pamela’s discreet reference to the source of her “Anxieties”—a reference conveyed in the “Sex” of the women who would assuage them—to her husband’s attempt to Wt conjugal right to the medium of exemplarity ideally conveyed by the form of her letters: he is “not so much the Victim of your Love, all charming as you are, as of your Virtue.” Yet the persistence of his wife’s “charming” person at the center of this seminal articulation of the novel’s metaphysical and political promise might not serve wholly to “embolden” her; if the projected metamorphosis of the object of Mr. B’s desire from “Love” into “Virtue” would effect the parallel transformation of “doubtful Happiness” into “good Usage,” then the latter change cannot correlate quite as neatly with the difference of body and mind as the former. A reconstitution of rakish appetite insistently represented by Pamela as the sublimation of desire into the greater good of mental or textual virtue faces an obvious obstacle in husbandly passion’s legitimized apparition (indeed, Locke exempts the pleasure of his free agent from abstraction in just such cases).28 Rather than entirely dissolving Mr. B’s “more culpable Passion,” his marriage converts an outcome once clearly enunciated as rape into an “Occasion” whose likeness to the prior event—its implication of the person, if not of Pamela, then of Mrs. B— would be defused by the projected feminization of “my Conduct.” Mr. B promises to embolden his bride by being able “to supply the want of the Presence and Comfortings of a dear Mother; of a loving Sister, or of the kind Companions of my own Sex.” But how will he simulate his

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wife’s “own Sex” at the very instant when the exercise of “Conjugal Power, not Political” derives its most explicit rationale from Mr. B’s own sex? At ten o’clock on Pamela’s wedding night, in the novel’s Wrst edition only, she writes to her parents: He took notice, in the most delicate manner, of my Endeavour to conquer my Foibles, and said, I see, with Pleasure, my dear Girl strives to comport herself in a manner suitable to my Wishes: I see even thro’ the sweet tender Struggles of your over-nice Modesty, how much I owe to your Desire of obliging me. As I have once told you, that I am the Conquest more of your Virtue than your Beauty; so, not one alarming Word or Look shall my beloved Pamela hear or see, to give her Reason to suspect the Truth of what I aver . . . After Supper, of which, with all his sweet Persuasions, I could hardly taste, he made me drink two Glasses of Champaign, after afterwards a Glass of Sack; which he kindly forced upon me, by naming your Healths: And as the Time of retiring drew on, he took notice, but in a very delicate manner, how my Colour went and came; and how foolishly I trembled. Nobody, surely, in such delightful Circumstances, ever behav’d so silly! (2: 184–85; EK 294–95)29

At Wrst, this passage deWnes the reconstitution of domestic power as an exercise of literary propriety. The metaphysical condition of Mr. B’s “Conquest”—the redirection of his desire from Pamela’s “Beauty” to her “Virtue”—Wnds its security in the absence of the “alarming Word or Look” that would endanger this conquest’s “Truth.” Is Mr. B’s proffered guarantee just one instance of the overscrupulous distinction of mind and body that locates Pamela’s representation of attempted rape among the “least erotic” encounters that Nancy Armstrong claims ever to have read?30 Does Richardson delete even the attenuated threat of alarming words or looks from his 1801 edition because the novel, as Armstrong suggests, has already reconciled “a struggle between the sexes that can be completely resolved in terms of the sexual contract?”31 And yet this passage’s proffered schematics of the conduct that would subsume even conjugal right into a Weld of textual modesty whose abstracting tendencies are facilitated by the printed “Word” are, again, equivocal. The passage’s clearest formulation of how sex-right might be reconstituted as gentle governance is conveyed by the drinks that Mr. B “kindly forced upon me.” Kind force, and Mr. B’s “very delicate manner,” do not communicate the immateriality that afWrms, according to Armstrong, the power of the marriage contract to turn Pamela’s “permeable body into a self-enclosed body of words.”32 Pamela’s “sweet Terror” instead activates the limits beyond which masculine conjugal power can be represented by the novel only as the less transparent exercise of kind force—and the Humean inevitability of Pamela’s bridal pleasure can be qualiWed only as “your Desire of obliging me.” Pamela’s 1801 edition suggests that Mr. B’s regulation of his words and

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looks does not simply enable Richardson’s reluctance to represent the persistence of masculine sex-right into the medium of literary-political modernity. In this edition, the ten o’clock Thursday passage begins: As we sat at supper, he was generously kind to me, as well in his actions as expressions. He took notice, in the most delicate manner, of my endeavor to conquer my follies.—I told my dear girl once before, said he, that I was more the admirer of her virtue, than even of her beauty. My behaviour to you, my pain for your concern, causeless as it is, must convince you that I am. Loveliest of women, behold in me lover, husband, protector, all in one; and let your afWance in me answer those tender characters. (1801 2: 136; S 379–80)

Here Richardson replaces the novel’s sanction of alarming words or looks with Mr. B’s abbreviated promise of “My behaviour to you.” Mr. B extends this promise by reiterating the claim made by the Wrst edition’s three o’clock passage, as we have seen, that he is “all these tender Relations in One to me!” Most striking in Richardson’s revision and displacement of this assurance is its conversion of “Comfortings” linked to Pamela’s more or less graphic stipulation of femininity into practice now animated by an apparently homologous series of men. Richardson’s 1801 text thus retains a trace of the 1741 edition’s more pointed question: how can a prerogative whose exemption from Pamela’s modernizing inXuence would seem guaranteed by Mr. B’s sex be mitigated by conduct that Pamela restricts to a “dear Mother”? That the identity of “lover, husband, protector” cannot wholly effect the dissolution of sexright into “generously kind” practice is suggested by comments to his Lincolnshire neighbors made by Mr. B on the Monday after his wedding: “I do assure you, my Pamela’s Person, all lovely as you see it, is far short of her Mind; That Wrst impress’d me in her Favour; but that only made me her Lover : But they were the Beauties of her Mind, that made me her Husband” (2 258; EK 335). Three days after Mr. B’s marriage, “Lover” correlates with “Person,” and “Husband” with “Mind.” What the proposal made by Mr. B at ten o’clock on his wedding night—“behold in me lover, husband, protector, all in one”—suggests, however, is that in the gap that lasts from eleven o’clock Thursday night until “FRIDAY Evening” (2: 186; EK 295), he occupies both metaphysical categories at once. During this time, at least, a novel that does not seem otherwise to endorse the Humean reduction of volition and more culpable passion itself equates the species of necessity embodied on Pamela’s wedding night by both a lover and a husband. This event confuses the distinction upon which Mr. B’s domestic modernity, he repeatedly proclaims, depends. Pamela’s Wnal edition shows the economy with which Richardson relays that confusion. Its claim that Pamela’s lover is also her husband expedites the transformation drawn

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out with much Wner resolution in the following expurgated passage, written on three o’clock Thursday afternoon after the morning’s ceremony: We both got up, when he came in; Fie, Pamela, said he! why this Ceremony now? —Sit still, Mrs. Jewkes! —Nay, Sir, said she, I was loth to sit down, but my Lady would have me! —She is very right, Mrs. Jewkes, said my Master, and tapp’d me on the Cheek; for we are not yet half marry’d; and so she is not yet above half your Lady yet! . . . —Mrs. Jewkes, have you no pleasant Tales to tell my Pamela, to make her smile, till I return? —Yes, Sir, said she, I could tell twenty pleasant Stories; but my Lady is too nice to hear them; and yet, I hope, I should not be shocking neither . . . My Master said, Tell her one of the shortest you have, in my Hearing. Why, Sir, said she, I knew a bashful young Lady, as Madam may be, marry’d to— —Dear Mrs. Jewkes, interrupted I, no more of your Story, I beseech you! I don’t like the Beginning of it. (2: 181; EK 292–93)

Most obviously, Mr. B coordinates Pamela’s change in status with the event of his conjugal right: “we are not yet half marry’d.” This formula indicates that the conversion of a lover into a husband can be divided into at least two parts; and, given the scrupulousness with which Richardson attempts to purge his novel of alarming referents, his removal of this passage might signal his awareness that dividing the ratiWcation of Pamela’s marriage into halves might, indecently, invite further subspeciWcation.33 As the pornographic Xip side of beauty’s dissolution into virtue, Mrs. Jewkes offers the indeWnitely reWned articulation of the process whereby Pamela becomes Mrs. B. Jewkes’s surrogate obscenity demarcates as Pamela’s referential horizon the “shocking,” almost obsessively distilled, occasion of sex-right necessarily immune to dissolution into polite text. In a neat offer to undo the novel, Mrs. Jewkes advances words to Wll the gap (indeed, it is Mrs. Jewkes, and not Mr. B, whom Pamela succinctly accuses of trying to “ruin me by Force” [1: 163; EK 116]).34 In the wedding day’s three o’clock passage, Pamela proclaims: And thus, my dearest, dear Parents, is your happy, happy, thrice happy Pamela, at last, marry’d; and to who?—Why, to her beloved, gracious Master! the Lord of her Wishes!—And thus the dear, once naughty Assailer of her Innocence, by a blessed Turn of Providence, is become the kind, the generous Protector and Rewarder of it. (2: 176; EK 289–90)

Richardson left this announcement unchanged in the novel’s Wnal edition. It would appear directly to contravene yet another expression of anxiety, posed on the preceding Wednesday evening: “for why should I fear the kind Protector of my Weakness?” (2: 164; EK 283) Unlike its projected response, however, this question is deleted. Whatever the reason for its removal—certainly, in the context of the Wrst edition, it is redundant—its insinuation that Pamela’s future “Protector” inspires the

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same “fear” as her “once naughty Assailer” serves powerfully to underscore the mystiWcation of conjugal power that the unexpurgated passage would seamlessly effect. Fear indifferently produced by either an assailant or a husband implicates the sex-right whose retention by contractarian men is enabled, precisely, by marriage. Here the reWnement of masculine conduct that would distinguish the “naughty” as opposed to the “kind” practice of an identical necessity proves too much for the novel decently to insinuate (although, as we will see, its sequel tries). Insofar as Pamela cannot consistently extend the terms of its reform of Mr. B’s power into his bridal night, the gap which communicates the integrity of his sex-right signals the blind spot of a reading of Pamela that locates the novel’s representation of domestic modernity in Pamela’s loss of body.35

Pamela’s “Master”; or, the Persistence of Mrs. B’s Servility To reconcile his formerly rakish desire and his newly dutiful volition, Mr. B marries one exceptional woman: Pamela is, according to a host of men who draw upon distinctly anachronistic standards, “but one Angel come down for these thousand Years, and you have got her” (2: 266; EK 339). The clergyman Mr. Williams remarks that “when she becomes yours; . . . you will then have a Treasure that Princes might envy” (2: 124; EK 260); and, proving the use-value of expired rakes to the domestic novel, Sir Simon Darnford, “who has been a sad Rake in his younger days, swore he never saw so easy an Air, so Wne a Shape, and so graceful a Presence” (2: 91; EK 242).36 Yet to secure her husband’s modernity, Pamela must do more than be an “Angel.” She must also exercise the agency of ingenuous subjection that, through her unforced reciprocation of his power, promises transitively to modernize her husband. Indeed, the novel’s recourse to Pamela’s ingenuousness predates her wedding. She responds as follows when, on the brink of his conversion from an assailant into an honorable suitor, Mr. B makes her the Wnally “honest compliment” of marriage: Cruel as I have thought you, and truly shocking and detestable as your attempts ever were to me, you, sir, are the only man living, my father excepted, who ever was more than indifferent to me. Yet allow me to add, that not having the presumption to raise my eyes to you, I knew not myself the state of my own heart, till your kindness to me melted away, as I may say, the chilling frost that prudence and love of virtue had cast about the buds of— What shall I say? Excuse, sir— My dearest Pamela, clasping me to his bosom, I do excuse, and will spare your sweet confusion. I am fully satisWed. (1801 2: 39; S 307)

The text following Pamela’s “Yet allow me to add” was itself added to the novel’s 1801 edition. Made, possibly, more strongly to convey the servant

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Pamela’s virtuous disinterest in marriage to her master, the interpolated passage demonstrates the power of epistolary form to prove her incapable of harboring “presumption.”37 In advance of the revelation that would transmute her steady state of “melting” into a deWnitive speech act, Pamela’s innovation of writing to the moment protracts Pamela’s ignorance of the passionate mechanism that operates independently of her will: she “knew not myself the state of my own heart.” Propelled by a heart whose feelings even epistolary text cannot represent, Pamela’s “What shall I say?” turns out to be the only reply whose ingenuousness can “fully satisfy” her future husband. Rather than a canny attempt to hedge her bets, Pamela’s inability to qualify her “confusion” testiWes to her uncoerced reciprocity, afWrming the integrity of the passion that fuels her assent to marry.38 Pamela’s “What shall I say?” overcomes an impediment central to Pamela’s plot: her love can reveal itself neither in anticipation of nor in response to Mr. B’s proposal of marriage. In either case, she would exploit the reform of his power that her ingenuous feeling should spontaneously motivate. A response to Mr. B that obviates presumption while unknowingly intimating her passion’s truth ideally counters the temporal infelicity of promises between “naturally selWsh” men claimed by Hume’s Treatise : “these mutual performances cannot be Wnish’d at the same instant.”39 Pateman reprises the logic that deWnes the contractual aptitude of selWsh or Hobbesian individuals: “The only contract that can be made in a contractarian world is a simultaneous exchange. If there is a delay in the fulWllment of the contract then it is extremely unlikely ever to be completed, and if one individual performs Wrst, it is always in the interest of the other to break the contract.”40 Pamela’s “What shall I say?” mimics the logic of simultaneous exchange which, in this case, ensures that Mr. B’s love does not happen “Wrst.” At the same time, her extravolitional heart offers resources to resolve the difWculty posed by another kind of contract. The ideal of simultaneous exchange presumes, Pateman states, the “natural equality” of individuals whose Hobbesian selWshness is uninXected, as we have seen, even by sex; but what of contracts in which one partner “has no choice but to agree to the disadvantageous terms offered by the superior party”?41 Contracts that deWne “property in the peculiar sense of property in the person”—contracts that, as Hobbes stipulates of the conversion of individuals into subjects, “involve an exchange of obedience for protection”—compel Pateman to conclude: “Contract theory is primarily about a way of creating social relationships constituted by subordination, not about exchange.”42 It is the equivocation of “exchange” and “subordination” initially realized by her “What shall I say?” that Pamela’s ingenuous subjection promises to sustain. As a moment of contractual assent whose disinterested

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spontaneity enlists the mechanical aptitude of her heart, her “What shall I say?” anticipates Pamela’s likeness to neither, as Armstrong suggests, an abstract individual nor, as Janet Todd and Robert FolkenXik propose, an openly servile object of power.43 Rather, Pamela’s ingenuous practice would mitigate her husband’s conjugal power and, in so doing, mystify its persistence. But Pamela’s plot seems to obstruct Pamela’s transformation into this kind of wife; most obviously, she is Mr. B’s servant, whom he has kidnapped and incarcerated at his country estate. How can Pamela’s ingenuousness not be compromised by the fact of her capture by “an arbitrary Gentleman” who wields “Power” over her, she contends, “wickedly” (2: 22; EK 204) and, in 1801, “illegally” (1801 1: 313; S 271)? If Mr. B’s “lawless Attempts” (1: 156; EK 112) will be redeemed by the exchange of conjugal rights for protection, then how does the victim of Mr. B’s “lawless Tyranny” (1: 219; EK 147) muster the capacity to engage in a contractual transaction with him? Pamela afWrms the deWning conditions of that exchange: “Whatever you have to propose, whatever you intend by me, let my Assent be that of a free Person, mean as I am, and not of a sordid Slave” (1: 182; EK 126). How does Pamela become the “free Person” whose ingenuous “Assent” will, by converting Mr. B from an arbitrary master into a “dear generous man” (2: 205; EK 306), reciprocally transform “my bondage” (1: 189; EK 130) into “my happy Nuptials” (2: 197; EK 301)? But Pamela does not entirely disprove the likeness of “bondage” and “Nuptials,” because when Mr. B releases his servant from his Lincolnshire estate, she discovers that “now, my poor mind is all topsy-turvy’d, and I have made an Escape, only to be more a Prisoner!” Pamela experiences freedom nowhere because “love is not a voluntier Thing: —Love, did I say!—But, come, I hope not! . . . creep, creep it has, like a Thief upon me; and before I knew what was the Matter, it look’d like Love” (2: 40; EK 214). Mr. B’s redundantly disinterested choice of wife—“Love, true Love, is the only Motive by which I am directed” (2: 72; EK 231)— Wnds its complement in the passionate mechanism that facilitates Pamela’s satisfaction of his crucial demand: “I so much value a voluntier Love, in the Person I would wish for my Wife, that I would have even Prudence and Interest, hardly nam’d, in Comparison with it” (2: 72; EK 231). Only as a result of passion that is, she writes, “not a voluntier Thing” does Pamela manifest the “voluntier” reciprocation of sentiment cited by Mr. B as the standard of his conversion to domestic modernity. Here the novel exploits the Humean collapse of mechanical and mental necessity—precisely, as Hume argues, the collapse of what is “voluntier” and what is “not”—to violate the principle of “suspence, deliberation, and scrutiny of each successive desire” that enables Locke’s free agents to “exercise all the liberty Men have.” 44 (Nicholas Malebranche, whose

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“mechanically” driven but moralized physiology anticipates Locke’s, reWnes the liberty sustained by this person: “only our consent is truly ours. This consent must be regulated and kept free in spite of all the efforts of the passions.”45) In its collapse of the voluntary and the not, the return of this “free Person” to her master anticipates the event of conjugal right whose ineluctably pleasing necessity prevents it, for Hume, from resembling an act of consent at all. Famously, Pamela spurns Mr. B’s taunting invitation to “make out between us, before we have done, a pretty Story in Romance” (1: 31; EK 42). She later demonstrates her knowledge of the central plot element of the genre as it is reformulated, in particular, by Richardson’s contemporary Eliza Haywood: “And so, if I was wicked enough, he would keep me till I was undone, and ’till his Mind changed; for even wicked Men, I have read, soon grow weary of Wickedness of one Sort, and love Variety.” This revelation of what Pamela has “read”—and its rationale for her punning refusal to become “a vile abandon’d Creature” (1: 44; EK 49)—are removed from Pamela’s 1801 edition. Their deletion may be a response to the gloss of this passage provided by Pamela Censured (1741): “Fine Instruction truly! That is, . . . if I should consent, he may be tired perhaps in a Month or two, or meet with Somebody he likes better, then poor Pamela will be turn’d off.”46 With this revision, Richardson expurgates from Pamela’s Weld of reference a genre of reading that too explicitly grounds Pamela’s virtue in the amorous competence evinced by familiarity with the truism that rakes “love Variety.” DeWned along these lines, Pamela’s virtue becomes her power not to reform but simply to protract an inconstant man’s passion—an aptitude incisively parodied by Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725).47 By removing this trace of Pamela’s literary facility, the novel seems to afWrm William Warner’s suggestion that Pamela, staunchly antagonistic to Wctions of “amorous intrigue,” “claim[s] to inaugurate an entirely new species of writing.”48 And yet by exploiting the agency of her “treacherous, treacherous Heart!” (2: 41; EK 215) to motivate her return to Mr. B, Pamela stresses the necessity of the mechanism entrenched, for Pamela as for any other romantic person, in her “lumpish, contradictory, ungovernable Heart” (2: 35; EK 212). A heart able to topsy-turvy the difference between the voluntary and the not—the difference which previously deWned Pamela’s freedom as the strictly voluntary exercise of her servitude—is neither a generic oversight nor an isolated expedient. Rather, the “strange wayward Heart of mine” (2: 36; EK 212) that would singlehandedly inaugurate Pamela’s transformation into a wife facilitates this novel’s claim no longer to resemble “a pretty Story in Romance.” Nowhere is the instrumentality of Pamela’s heart demonstrated with more economy than in the appeal that, on eight-thirty Thursday morning,

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anticipates Pamela’s becoming “Mind and Person, intirely his” (2: 171; EK 287): Foolish Heart! lie still! Never, sure, was any Maiden’s perverse Heart under so little Command as mine!—It gave itself away, at Wrst, without my Leave; it has been, for Weeks, pressing me with its Wishes; and yet now, when it should be happy itself, and make me so, it is throb, throb, throb, like a little Fool; and Wlling me with such unseasonable Misgivings, as abate the rising Comforts of all my better Prospects! (2: 171–72; EK 287)

If the novel can justify Pamela’s return to Mr. B only by invoking the Humean or romantic expedient of an ungovernable heart, then the same “throb, throb, throb” apparently insinuates too graphic an intimation of maidenly “Misgivings” to be retained in the 1801 edition of the novel.49 (Pamela Censured remarks: “The Xuttering Heart before Marriage is prettily described.”50) Likewise, Richardson cuts the preceding imputation “that will, for half an Hour more, at least, keep my Spirits in a brisk Circulation”: her future husband’s hint that observers, “not knowing how to account for your too nice Modesty, may think there is some other Person in the World, whose Addresses would be still more agreeable to you” (2: 171; EK 287). With an incentive to dissimulate her anxiety reduced in 1801 to the admonition “be chearful!” (1801 2: 126; S 372), Pamela’s Wrst edition offers an exposition of the physiology of maidenly misgiving which is far more Wnely elaborated than Hume’s. Indeed, to establish the imminence of her circulating “Spirits” to the writing to the moment that charts her bridal night’s approach, Pamela asserts immediately before her apostrophe to her heart that “I have got such a Knack of writing, that, when I am by myself, I cannot sit without a Pen in my Hand” (2: 171; EK 287). Her precipitation of briskly circulating spirits into, as it were, real time translates into Pamela’s highest resolution the “throb, throb, throb” which breaks virginal anxiety into its smallest syntactic and physiological units. The assiduity with which the novel reduces too-nice modesty to its constituent throbs might suggest that far from defusing the mandate of her husband’s conjugal right, the mechanical agency of Pamela’s “foolish” heart serves, in this instance, to intimate her failure to confuse the voluntary and the not. Referred to as an “it,” the heart that, of its own accord, Wlls a new bride with uneasiness brieXy dedicates the content of Pamela’s letter to the representation of a necessity whose arbitrariness her future pleasure cannot modestly dissolve; in this instance, Pamela’s mechanism transmits her virtue by remaining immune to the “better prospects” of as yet unsubstantiated comfort. If Pamela’s heart collapses the contractual and natural (voluntary and not) modalities of obligation which promise to make her a Lockean wife, then here that heart registers the integrity of masculine sex-right as the

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imperviousness of virginal innocence to the Humean promise of duty’s future conXuence with pleasure. After Pamela obeys her heart and returns to Lincolnshire, Mr. B states to Pamela’s former warden: “Mrs. Jewkes, after this Instance of my good Pamela’s Obligingness in her Return, I am sure we ought to leave her intirely at her own Liberty” (2: 51; EK 220). But, as it turns out, Pamela’s heart exacts subjection more complete than that required by the reformed Mr. B. This is manifest in her attachment to the mode of address whose incongruity Mrs. Jewkes remarks well before the ceremony that will turn him into a husband: It must not be Master now, sure!—O, return’d I, that is a Language I shall never forget. He shall always be my Master; and I shall think myself more and more his Servant. (2: 118; EK 257; 1801 2: 79; S 337)

Here Pamela endorses the equivalence of wife and “Servant” that, according to Mary Astell, dictates a husband’s retention of the title “Master.” Pamela underscores the impediment that this word poses to Mr. B’s modernity when his new bride writes at three o’clock on Thursday: [T]he dear man forbade me to use the word master, either in speech or writing. But I insisted, that I could not dispense with it for the present. In obedience to him, I said, it might wear off by degrees. (1801 2: 127; S 373)

This prohibition does not appear in Pamela’s Wrst edition. As another of Richardson’s few additions to the novel, it signals an irony deeply indicative of what constitutes the “Liberty” of Mr. B’s new wife. She demonstrates that liberty “in obedience to him”; he wields his freshly modernized power to expurgate Astell’s mnemonic from his wife’s “writing.” In Pamela’s unwitting or enthusiastic attachment to the term that inserts the equation of wives and upper-servants into the manifest content of the novel lies one of its more resounding paradoxes, for at this point in her plot Pamela’s slavish interpellation of her husband constitutes the only act that would impair her transitively modernizing agency. Even though Mr. B wishes to “talk of nothing henceforth but Equality” (2: 183; EK 294), she remains unable to relinquish the signally indeterminate formulation “my dear Master and Husband” (2: 196; EK 301). The 1801 text of Mr. B’s prohibition, and Pamela’s insistence that “I could not dispense with” the term “master,” attribute its persistence to the servant Pamela’s overly emphatic disqualiWcation of herself from her former assailant’s rakish attentions: “Your Honour . . . would not let you stoop to so mean and so unworthy a Slave, as the poor Pamela” (1: 255; EK 167). Here the very criterion that would seem brilliantly to exempt the novel from Hobbesian conundrum—because she is already a servant, Pamela need not be transformed from a woman into a wife—is deployed

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by Richardson to underscore the limits of her husband’s pretense to “Equality.”51 The change Richardson makes to the following line provides conXicting motives for Pamela’s mode of address: My good Master, I hardly have yet the Courage to call him freely by a tenderer Name. (2: 197; EK 301) My good master, (for I delight, and always shall, to call him by that name). (1801 2: 145; S 386)

This redaction of lapsed “Courage” into “delight” obviously revises the source of Pamela’s postmarital servility; whereas in 1741 Mr. B solicits the name “master” because Pamela is afraid too “freely” to relinquish Astell’s title, in 1801 she takes permanent pleasure in the same exercise. Two postmarital recriminations deleted from the 1801 text stress this difference; on three o’clock Thursday, the just-married Pamela writes: My good Master, for I cannot yet have the Presumption to call him by a more tender Epithet. (2: 180; EK 292)

By the Tuesday after Pamela’s wedding, her text repeats: My dear, dear—Master (I’m sure I should still say; but I will learn to rise to a softer Epithet, now-and-then). (2: 222; EK 315)

By 1801, Pamela has lost the desire to “learn.” Yet the outcome remains the same: whether his wife is animated by fear or delight, Mr. B still solicits the reference to contractarian men’s domestic prerogative insistently deployed by Astell. Richardson revises not more forcefully to dispense with the term but to respecify the passion motivating a wife’s inability to relinquish it. In a development which suggests how Pamela’s mechanism might be marshaled to effect her subjection rather than to register her postmarital likeness to a servant, the 1741 edition’s promise that Pamela will learn freely to extrovert conjugal virtue is reclaimed as Mrs. B’s insistence upon the stubbornness of servility’s delights. In its equivocation of passion and volition and, in 1741 only, of wishful and misgiving throbs, Pamela extends the formal, generic, and philosophical stakes of Pateman’s broadest recapitulation of the role of marriage in contractarian modernity: “Modern contractual patriarchy both denies and presupposes women’s freedom and could not operate without this presupposition.”52 Upon hearing Pamela address her husband, the old rake Sir Simon quips, “Master, sweet one . . . I hope you won’t always call the ’Squire by that Name, for fear it should become a Fashion for all our Ladies to do the like thro’ the Country” (2: 93; EK 243). Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741), of course, takes Pamela’s servility as

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either bad acting or mockery of a duped husband. Sir Simon, an equally conservative but perhaps more astute commentator, imagines delightedly servile wives “thro’ the Country” Xaunting the presupposition and the denial which make explicit the deWning condition of a contractarian wife’s “Equality.” But Mrs. B’s contradictory practice of freedom is divested of comedic potential by the end of Pamela’s second volume. Five days after Mr. B’s unannounced marriage, his prejudiced and “passionate” (2: 269; EK 341) sister Lady Davers, accompanied by her “rakish Nephew” (2: 226; EK 318) Jackey, Wnd Pamela alone and, discovering her claim to be married to Mr. B, attempt to convince the “miserably trick’d!” (2: 234; EK 322) servant that she is “not the Wrst in the List of his credulous Harlots” (2: 240; EK 325). Much of this scene’s drama revolves around the fact that Pamela has, as Lady Davers observes, “assum’d a Carriage” (2: 233; EK 321); while Pamela “thought I should be unworthy of the Honour I was rais’d to, tho’ I was afraid to own it, if I did not shew some Spirit” (2: 230; EK 320), Lady Davers reads this change in a servant’s demeanor as a sign that she has “been in Bed with thy Master” (2: 232; EK 320). Disdainfully rejected by Lady Davers as “how Wnely thou canst act the Theatrical Part” (2: 234; EK 322), the elevation that Pamela must “shew” rather than “own” is punctured, for Jackey, by one incriminating slip: I am glad she says her Master!—You see, Madam, she herself does not believe she is marry’d, and so has not been so much deluded as you think for. (2: 237; EK 323–24)

For the “Tinsel’d Toy” (2: 237; EK 324) Jackey, this address constitutes proof that a servant is powerless to revise. Rather than an indicator of the married Pamela’s unprecedented accommodation of servility and “Spirit,” Jackey hears in the term Pamela’s reXexive acknowledgment that her mobility is restricted to the inevitability of her metamorphosis into, as Lady Davers famously claims, “painted Dirt” (2: 245; EK 328). Here the “foolish” (2: 228, 290; EK 318, 352) Jackey cannot anticipate, in Mr. B’s defense of the “Beauty, Virtue, Prudence, and Generosity too” of which Pamela “has more than any Lady . . . naturally; they are born with her” (2: 285; EK 350), the progressive recuperation of Pamela’s value that will reduce Lady Davers’s aristocratic qualms to “silly Childishness” (2: 292; EK 354).53 Yet because the repercussions of this face-off are not limited to Lady Davers’s tearful concession “Well, Wench . . . Pamela, I mean, thou art very good in the main!” (2: 299; EK 358), the “barbarous” (2: 237; EK 324) Jackey’s political instincts are not, in the end, entirely wrong. Having already “too meanly” intervened on her aristocratic sister-in-law’s

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behalf, Pamela infuriates her husband by offering “May I, Sir, said I, beg all your Anger on myself, and to be reconciled to your good Sister?” Mr. B responds: Presuming Pamela! reply’d he, and made me start, art thou then so hardy, so well able to sustain a Displeasure, which, of all things, I expected, from thy Affection and thy Tenderness, thou wouldst have wished to avoid?—Now, said he, and took my Hand, and, as it were, tost it from him, begone from my Presence, and reXect upon what you have said to me! I was so frighted . . . that I took hold of his Knees, as he was turning from me, and I said, Forgive me, good Sir; you see I am not so hardy! I cannot bear your Displeasure! And was ready to sink. (2: 301–2; EK 359)

Michael McKeon deWnes the importance of what he calls these “remains” of Mr. B’s aristocratic prerogative as follows: “the progressive empowerment of individual merit leads in the end to the crucial case of women, a condition of social injustice so deeply rooted that its very disclosure only marks the limits of progressive ideology, the point beyond which it will not venture.”54 Glossed as the “empowerment of individual merit,” Pamela’s plot would resort only “in the end” to the intimation of its protagonist’s difference from McKeon’s presumptively male individual; as we have seen in Chapter 2, McKeon qualiWes this difference only insofar as it marks the infallibility of the limit beyond which even “progressive ideology” withdraws its promise. McKeon’s Pamela, in other words, represents the leveling powers of merit whose threat to class hierarchy would be contained by the revelation of its protagonist’s sex. Yet these are coordinates whose stability would seem manifestly not assured by Mr. B’s rage: it is Pamela’s servility, and not her sex, which Wnally allays the threat that her proposal to “beg all your Anger on myself” poses to the authority of her blustering husband. The fury with which Mr. B witnesses his wife’s offer to endure his displeasure suggests that his claim to conjugal dominance is not securely “rooted” in his sex after all, just as the eagerness with which she seizes “hold of his Knees” points to the reserve of servility with which this claim must Wnally be fortiWed. Notably, Mrs. B’s pacifying inXuence—“I would wish,” Mr. B promises, “to shew every one the Force your Example has upon me” (2: 297; EK 357)—cannot extend to the rage that activates this foundational attribution of value to her husband’s display of power. In this crucially remedial scene, Mrs. B is “so frighted” because her husband is angry that she is not frighted enough. Like the injunction which, as we have seen in Chapter 2, grants her Wfteen minutes to make herself look sweet, Mrs. B’s offer to “sustain [his] Displeasure” compels Mr. B to prescribe the submissive mechanism that his wife should already manifest. The readiness “to sink” (in 1801, “to faint”; 2: 235; S 455) which would prove Mrs. B “not so hardy” only retroactively reclaims willed duty

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as naturalized reXex. Yet the restoration of physiological imminence to Mr. B’s sexed authority, even if slightly after the fact, in turn infuses the word “master” with the archaic force now re-embodied by the displeased B: “So my dear lordly Master (O my dear Parents! he is very dreadful when he pleases, I see!—But, I hope, I shall never incur his Anger).” (2: 305; EK 361)

In 1801, Mrs. B writes: “My dear master (I think, after this instance of his displeasure with me, I must not forbear calling him so).” (1801 2: 238; S 456)

Jackey takes this address as the sure sign of slavishness that disproves Pamela’s claim to be a wife. Yet after the scene in which Mr. B insists that his temper rematerialize as his wife’s incapacity to “bear” it, the idiosyncrasy of the word’s persistence can no longer be attributed to servile excess. If the term remains excessive, Richardson Wnally weights that excess not in favor of a wifely will to submit superXuous to the pretensions of her contractarian husband but, on the contrary, in favor of a “lordly” and “dreadful” authority the threat of whose anger is henceforth enough to make its object faint. In this scene, Mrs. B is governed by the “present anger” whose capricious and mortifying inXuence Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education disclaims for its failure to engender freely acting sons.55 A contractarian revision of domestic power restricted to the medium of parental authority, Locke’s repudiation of masculine “anger” does not extend to a husband’s command that “I cannot bear that you should wish . . . to have me angry with you, or not to value my Displeasure, as the heaviest Misfortune that could befal you” (2: 312; EK 365). And yet by angrily stipulating the “value” of his anger, Mr. B poignantly exposes the liability of a claim to conjugal dominance grounded only in the threat of more anger. In a telling reversal of Locke’s projected reconstitution of “Political” power, the husband who cannot bear to see his wife fail to value his rage must appeal to the standard offered by his “spoiled” older sister (2: 252; EK 332); Wnally, the domestic novel recruits the “Violence of a Temper so like my dear Sister’s here” (2: 311; EK 364) to ballast Mr. B’s claim to wield naturally sexed dominance.56 Pamela I concludes with a rationale for masculine conjugal power aided by the sister who cements Mr. B’s likeness to both Locke’s gentle governor and Sir Robert Filmer’s Adamic monarch: “And there is as much Majesty as Goodness in him” (2: 311; EK 351). This rationale holds through the Wrst letter of Pamela’s sequel, which iterates the question that Mrs. B’s reanimated susceptibility to his power would Wnally resolve: “My dear Master (why should I not still call him so . . .?).”57 The

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next section of this chapter traces how Mr. B’s equivocation of “Goodness” and “Majesty” is disturbed, with unmistakable symmetry, when he enforces his sex-right. Along with a majestic husband, Pamela’s reversal precipitates a wife whose practice of virtue might sometimes be, she unhappily concedes, “a little sullen” (4: 26).

“Are you not a little sullen?”: Domesticity’s Resolution At the conclusion of volume 2, Pamela stakes its irreversibility on the transformation from body into mind of the object of Mr. B’s desire: “when I tell you that the Charms of her Person, all lovely as she is, bind me not so strongly to her as the Graces of her Mind, congratulate me, that my Happiness is built on so stable a Basis!” (2: 348; EK 385) The novel’s sequel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents: And Afterwards, in her exalted Condition (December 7, 1741), projects this formula up to the present moment of her marriage to demonstrate that Pamela’s “Mind” has indeed maintained its inXuence over the virtue of her husband’s “Happiness.” In a scene that proves Mrs. B able to overcome the prejudice of her loutish uncle-in-law Sir Jacob Swynford, she is introduced to him as the daughter of a local countess. Unsurprisingly, she compels Sir Jacob to swear that she “carried Tokens of her high Birth in her Face”; more remarkably, Mr. B’s pregnant wife thereby succeeds in passing as a “Maiden Lady” (3: 313). Buttressing Mrs. B’s now redundant capacity to prove “no other Difference but that of Descent, between the supposed Lady Jenny . . . and the Girl your dear Nephew has so much exalted” (3: 319) are the “marry’d” women also present for Sir Jacob’s inspection, women whose difference from Mr. B’s dissembling wife Sir Jacob isolates with the invasive query: “But will you pretend to blush with that Virgin Rose?” Of what would seem the insurmountable obstacle to virginity posed by Mrs. B’s pregnancy, Sir Jacob declares, “I thought it was something! . . . But ’tis the Hoop, I see plainly enough” (3: 313).58 Pamela II aligns the “every Feature, and Look, [that] shew’d her to be nobly descended” (3: 316) with what would seem the absurdly remedial extent of Mr. B’s “conjugal Chastity”—which, volume 3 again clariWes, precludes “in Company, or when alone, the least shocking Expression, or such frothy Jests, as tend to convey impure Ideas to the most apprehensive Mind” (3: 422). Long after the passage of her bridal night, Mrs. B’s “deeper Crimson” (3: 313) establishes, as she conWdes to Sir Simon’s daughter Polly Darnford, “That I could never have hoped I should be so happy as I am, in other Particulars, from a Gentleman who has given himself the Liberties Mr. B. has done” (3: 422). “Virgin Rose” thus does far more than vindicate wifely modesty; it transitively effects the modesty

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of Mr. B, as Sir Jacob’s comment on Mrs. B’s “shamefac’d” reaction to his scrutiny obtrusively attests: “I’m sure . . . she’s a Maiden—For our Sex give the married Ladies a freer Air in a trice” (3: 313). As a barometer of the “Particulars” of postmarital chastity now set to the standard of “a Maiden,” Mrs. B even overemphatically afWrms the stability of the “Basis,” Mr. B asserts, upon which his happiness is built. Claimed by Pamela’s Wrst two volumes as the Lockean conversion of “headstrong Appetites” into “virtuous Love” (2: 196; EK 300), Pamela’s transitively modernizing agency is proven, after marriage, by the superXuity of innocence that makes Mr. B’s pregnant wife impossible to distinguish from a virgin. To extend Pamela’s trade of person for mind even into the extratextual occasion when Mr. and Mrs. B are “alone,” Mrs. B’s blush trumps the evidence of reproductive anatomy dismissed by Sir Jacob as a maiden’s hoop. Her virginizing mechanism sustains his conviction that “some of the best Blood in the Kingdom runs in your Veins” (3: 318), leading to what seems the predictably progressive outcome of the discovery that Lady Jenny is really Mrs. B: “By my Soul, I’m confounded with her Goodness, and her Sweet Carriage! . . . And the Tears, as he spoke, ran down his rough Cheeks” (3: 320). But Sir Jacob’s tearful renunciation of his snobbery does not, in fact, endorse the indeWnite applicability of the plot invoked by Mrs. B just after his acknowledgment of her value as “a happy Exception to the Rule” (3: 324). Instead, following Sir Jacob’s vigorous agreement with that qualiWcation—“I could not have believed there had been such a Person breathing” (3: 320)—the sequel veers into a synopsis of Pamela so resistant to generalization, Wnally, that its narrator Mr. B simply cites verbatim from the novel’s Wrst two volumes (requirements for a servant’s approximation of Pamela include “exquisite Beauty,” “honest and conscientious, tho’ poor and obscure Parents,” “Precepts, laid deep in the Girl’s Mind,” and so on, until Pamela’s double must exactly repeat her rejection of Mr. B’s vicious proposals; 3: 326– 27). The sequel’s recapitulation of Pamela denies its “setting an Example to Waiting-maids to aspire, and to young Gentlemen to descend” (3: 325) by translating the apparently indelibly subjective imminence of Pamela’s writing to the moment into a roster of speciWcations pointedly aimed at any “Booby” who “cannot reXect and compare, and take the Case with all its Circumstances together” (3: 328). If, as McKeon observes, the insistent claim to materiality of Pamela’s letters (“O how my Eyes run!—Don’t wonder to see the Paper so blotted!” 1: 2; EK 25) renders “the epistemological status of Pamela difWcult to disentangle from that of Pamela,”59 then a hopelessly reWned index of features—the near-objective impossibility of whose duplication Mr. B Xags by labeling them “almost peculiar to herself” (3: 327)—extracts

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the truth of her plot from the epistolary text in which that truth seems to have been so deeply embedded. Retailed not as writing to the moment but as the statistical assurance that his wife’s excellence “would rather make such an Example as is apprehended, more, than less, difWcult than before” the novel’s publication (3: 328), this explicitly extradiegetic episode refutes Mr. B’s resemblance to the Booby who occupies a plot relayed by Henry Fielding’s Shamela as “Instruction . . . to Servant-Maids . . . To look out for their Masters as sharp as they can.”60 In the end, Mr. B’s conjugal chastity underwrites his uncle’s conservative prejudice; Pamela’s inimitability is guaranteed by a pregnant wife whose impossible retention of “Purity” (3: 331) rules out the ambition of any other waitingmaid “breathing.” To the extent that they occupy contemporary histories of the novel at all, Pamela’s third and fourth volumes Wgure as the retraction of what has been called Pamela’s progressive, “carnivalesque,” or “revolutionary” promise.61 As the sequel’s claim for the longevity of Pamela’s innocence might portend, Pamela II constitutes an almost dizzyingly recursive effort to establish, in the words of Lady Davers’s refusal to censor Pamela’s original letters, that “it must be a very unvirtuous Mind, that can form any other Ideas from what you relate, than those of Terror and Pity for you” (3: 44–45). Pamela’s letters, the sequel declares, do not require this gloss: having “intended to have carried the piece no farther than the two former volumes,” its preface notes, Pamela’s editor should offer “reasons whereby he was provoked into a necessity of altering his intention. But he is willing to decline saying any-thing upon so well-known a subject.”62 Framed as a reluctant defense of the preceding volumes’ virtue—whose “necessity” requires Richardson to extirpate “other Ideas” from a text which does not harbor them in the Wrst place—Pamela II registers the palpable strain of Richardson’s insistence, here reiterated by Mr. B just after he afWrms his plot’s singularity, that “[t]hese are obvious Inferences . . . and not ReWnements upon my Pamela’s Story” (3: 328). An exposition of what is, to any reader but an anti-Pamelist, already “obvious,” Pamela’s sequel should be redundant—its own virtue resides, paradoxically, in its superXuity to the virtue of the preceding volumes. The almost wholly negative critical history of Pamela II might testify to the tenacity with which Richardson isolates readerly unvirtue as his sole incentive for producing the sequel. Yet despite its claim to elucidate the obvious, Richardson’s sequel does elaborate “ReWnements” of Pamela whose revision of its inaugural Wction of reciprocal exchange (“What shall I say?”) disturbs the irreversibility of the novel’s modernizing plot. Pamela’s third volume begins, perversely, by worrying that Mrs. B’s ingenuous agency may too ideally dissolve any trace of her difference from a naturally subject wife:

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The dear Gentleman was every Hour pressing me . . . to take one Diversion or other; frequently upbraiding me, that I seemed not to chuse any thing; urging me to propose sometimes what I could wish he should oblige me in, and not always to leave it to him to chuse for me; saying he was half afraid, that my constant Compliance with every thing he proposed, laid me sometimes under a Restraint; and he would have me have a Will of my own, since it was impossible, that it could be such, as he should not take a Delight in conforming to it. But . . . how was it possible for me not to receive with Pleasure and Gratitude every Intimation from him, in such a manner, as that tho’ it might seem to be the Effect of an implicit Obedience to his Will, yet was it (nor could it be otherwise) intirely agreeable to my own? (3: 61)

Richardson cannot, it would seem, resist articulating the one command that Pamela’s happy ending precludes, that Mrs. B manifest a “wish” not dedicated to the dissimulation of her husband’s power. Of course, because Mrs. B would evince her wish only as the result of his “upbraiding,” her disclosure of desire remains hopelessly overdetermined; because “he would have me have a Will of my own,” even Mrs. B’s extramarital volition must be authorized by a will that she cannot “own.” And yet despite his “pressing,” Mrs. B refuses to admit any wishes not satisWed by her “constant Compliance” with those of her husband. By reclaiming “implicit Obedience to his Will” as the exactness of its Wt with her “Pleasure,” Richardson opens Pamela’s sequel with a fraternal patriarchal marriage in which Mrs. B manifests a will not perfectly congruent with her husband’s command only by refusing to concede that will’s existence. This contractarian marital idyll includes a trial run of the agency of Mrs. B’s ingenuous subjection. She writes a harmlessly satiric letter after the gouty Sir Simon throws a book at Polly’s head; Sir Simon complains to Mr. B, who, with assumed severity, accuses his wife of an unspeciWed “Crime” (3: 132). Mrs. B’s reXexive penitence compels her husband to admit: I could hardly hold out. What infatuating Creatures are these Women, when they can think it thus worth their while to sooth and calm the Tumults of an angry Heart! When, instead of scornful Looks darted in Return for angry ones, Words of DeWance for Words of Peevishness, persisting to defend one Error by another, and returning vehement Wrath for slight Indignation, and all the hostile Provocations of the Marriage Warfare; they can thus hide their dear Faces in our Bosoms, and wish but to know their Faults, to amend them. (3: 133)

Pamela II exploits this solitary instance of masculine writing to the moment to extend in epistolary time the reciprocal softening of Mr. B’s “angry Heart.” As Pamela’s single representation of how Mr. B feels himself modernized, so to speak, from the inside, the passage goes out of its way to predicate his imminent “calm” upon his conservation of power— his wife, after all, does not “know” the fault for which she is automatically

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sorry. These schematics of how an angry husband is soothed “in Return” isolate as the condition of that exchange the one “wish” that B’s wife can independently entertain, the wish to know, yet again, what rule she has failed to anticipate. Of course, B fakes anger to appease Sir Simon, to whom he writes. The setup instead serves to show how infallibly Mrs. B works—and, impossibly, to stress the imperviousness of her modernizing agency to the justice of the “Error” of which she has not yet been informed. Mrs. B evokes the practice which soothes her husband when she fails to return “scornful Looks,” “Wrath,” and “DeWance” as, also, her effort to sustain an absence. But she does not represent the deWance whose epistolary expression, given her letters’ proximity to her heart, might lend that feeling too much substance—only text exceptionally penned by Mr. B advances the surrogate expression of his wife’s hostility. She frames her transitively modernizing agency as a directive which quite graphically leaves her husband’s claim to conjugal dominance intact: “He is pleased to entertain very high Notions (tho’ he puts them not in Practice; and, indeed, I think it my Duty to avoid giving him Occasion for it) of the Prerogative of a Husband” (4: 15). Mrs. B’s “Duty,” again, is not simply to obey but rather, as her enclosure of this mandate in parentheses economically afWrms, to defuse the necessity of arbitrary “Practice” whose rationale she does not even attempt to recover. Yet although she passes the litmus of her husband’s staged anger, by the sequel’s fourth volume Mrs. B becomes an “Occasion” in spite of herself. To motivate “the Wrst will not I have heard from him, or given Occasion for” (4: 9), Richardson selects a wifely wish rigorously immune to the charge of deWance: “We have had a Debate or two on the Subject (which I maintain) of a Mother’s Duty to nurse her own Child” (3: 416). By voicing a defense of Mrs. B’s duty to nurse whose neglect the sequel equates with “Sin” (4: 20)—a cognate sanctioned both by the biblical derivation of unnatural motherhood and by contemporary approval of maternal nursing as “evidence of their love to their Children”63—Richardson isolates an exertion of masculine domestic prerogative that Mrs. B is unable preemptively to desire. The intractable disparity between “the natural Duty of a Mother . . . a Divine Duty,” on the one hand, and “a Wife’s Duty to obey” (4: 10), on the other, precipitates the novel’s abrupt recourse to an analogy of family and state which coordinates wifely duty drained of “natural” sanction with the most regressive possible determination of Mr. B’s authority: “He sets up a dispensing Power, in short, altho’ he knows, that that Doctrine once cost a Prince his Crown” (4: 15). Contemporary support for a prohibition of maternal nursing deWned by the novel as the “Fault he is pleased to make you commit” (4: 21) is offered by the grossly misogynist pamphlet Man Superior to Woman: “With

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the Milk they suck in, they generally imbibe a Tincture of the Follies, Passions, and Imbecillities of that Sex.”64 Clearly unable to cite his wife’s imbecility, Mr. B instead defends his command by invoking her mental excellence: I shall not care to have my Rest disturbed; and it may not be quite so well, perhaps, to lay us under the Necessity of separate Beds. Besides, my Fondness for your personal Graces, and the laudable, and I will say, honest Pleasure, I take in that easy, genteel Form, which every body admires in you, at Wrst Sight, oblige me to declare, that I can by no means consent to sacriWce these . . . Moreover, my chief Delight in you is for the Beauties of your Mind; and unequall’d as they are, in my Opinion, you have still a Genius capable of great Improvement; and I shan’t care, when I want to hear my Pamela read her French and Latin Lessons, which I take so much Delight to teach her, (and to endeavour to improve myself from her Virtue and Piety, at the same time) to seek my Beloved in the Nursery . . . . . . You know I am not govern’d by the worst Motives: I am half overcome by your Virtue; and you must take care, that you leave not your Work half done. (4: 13–14)

In what reads as Mr. B’s obviously meretricious iteration of the metaphysical pretense of Pamela I, he defends the unadulterated “Necessity” of his sex-right as his desire to hear his wife’s “French and Latin Lessons.” As vestiges of his modernizing pretense to “improve myself,” these lessons Xag the near-comic exactness of an exchange that now proceeds backward: the “Beauties of your Mind” expedite Mr. B’s defense of his undisturbed access to his wife’s body. This use of Pamela’s plot threatens to reconvert the novel into what, Pamela Censured argues, it already was: “Virtue encouraged with a Vengeance and the most obscene Idea express’d by a double Entendre, which falls little short of the coarsest Ribaldry.”65 Just as remarkably, Mr. B’s appeal to the desirability of his wife’s “Form” compels the revelation that her “Work” is only “half done”; Pamela’s conversion back into the medium of body exactly correlates with “high Notions” which she cannot refrain from occasioning. Mrs. B’s encroaching resemblance, as Pamela Censured reductively insists, to “a beautiful Girl”66 coincides with an activation of masculine conjugal right now opposed—marking perhaps the single instance when the novel can dislodge undeniably anatomical prerogative from Mr. B’s body—to his wife’s desire to exercise maternal virtue. The sequel leverages the arbitrariness of Mr. B’s command, that is, from his wife’s opposing claim for her naturalized maternal duty. Mr. B’s reversion to only “half overcome” implicates “honest Pleasure” no longer approximated by his wife’s likeness to a virgin. However, it is not only Mrs. B’s density but also her resolution which the sequel adjusts to match a computation of the extent of domestic power’s reform stalled at “half” through the novel’s end. By becoming exchangeable for

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a wet-nurse—for, her mother advises, any “wholsome, good-humour’d, honest Body” (4: 22)—Mrs. B loses the hyperbolic singularity that anchored Pamela’s resistance to repetition. Now speciWed by Mr. B as both inimitable and prone to replacement by any distressingly generic “Body,” Mrs. B never recovers her novelistic focus—at the conclusion of Mr. B’s later dalliance with a widowed Countess, his wife regains the manifestly fragile distinction of being one of “the Two charming’st Persons in England” (4: 227). And yet despite the fact that Mr. B’s high notions of his power would seem, by now, not always susceptible to the inXuence of his sometimes replaceable wife, the mandate that she ingenuously obey remains unchanged. This mandate is relentlessly parsed in the sequel’s reWnement of the command that Mrs. B manifest cheer: the pivotal question activated by Mr. B’s nursing proscription is not whether he might relent—as Mrs. B’s parents afWrm, “he will have his Way, that’s sure enough” (4: 27)—but whether his wife can “submit to it, and with Chearfulness too.” Required “to shew his Honour, that you will chearfully acquiesce” (4: 26) even though she does not, Wnally, feel the passion that would predate her husband’s wish, Mrs. B must extrovert ingenuousness despite her imminent replacement either by a nurse or by a polygamist countess whose charm trumps Mrs. B’s, her husband later explains, because while his wife revealed “Grief,” his mistress was “ever chearful and lively” (4: 231). Despite the impeccable virtue of her desire to nurse, Mrs. B must “acquiesce in this Point with Chearfulness” (4: 27), a rule Mr. B repeats when she resigns her claim upon the naturalness of her duty: “But do you yield it up chearfully, my Dear?” (4: 23) In framing her less than eager reply to Mr. B’s warning that “I will have no sullen Reserves, my Dearest,” the novel arrives at the following scene: He gave me a gentle Tap on the Neck: Let me beat my beloved Sauce-box, said he: Is it thus you railly my watchful Care for your own Good? But tell me truly, Pamela, are you not a little sullen? Look up to me, my Dear—Are you not? I believe I am; but ’tis a very little, Sir—It will soon go off—Please to let me withdraw, that I may take myself to Task about it . . . [G]iving me another Tap, Get you gone . . . [F]or I must not be put off with a Half-compliance; I must have your whole Will with me, if possible. (4: 26–27)

Confronted with a command which she cannot reclaim as her own desire, Mrs. B reXects back at her husband the supplemental burden of the practice of more than “a Half-compliance.” (Pamela II’s most excruciating exposition of forced cheer happens when Mrs. B must fake ignorance of his inWdelity: “he was upon the Catch, and looked stedfastly upon me whenever I moved my Lips . . . he can read the Lines of one’s Face” [4: 151].) With this staging of domesticity’s regression, the extra-epistolary

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duration when Mrs. B must “take myself to task” signals a gap in her text as decisive as the one that marks her bridal night. The determination of Mr. B’s authority as “half done” is afWrmed by his complementary accusation that his wife has failed to modernize him: “you put upon me a hated, because ungenerous, Necessity of pleading my Prerogative, as I call it” (4: 24). By blaming his “ungenerous” wife for her desire’s failure to mitigate his power, Mr. B deploys a meaning of the word illuminated by Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755): “not ingenuous.”67 Pamela II projects a domestic modernity whose perfectly virtuous wife might, despite her best efforts, materialize as the not ingenuous object of her sometimes tyrannical husband’s “gentle Tap.” I now turn to Habermas’s claim that this very novel effectively dissolves the difference between contractarian masters and half-compliant wives.

Jürgen Habermas’s Humanizing Novel and the Ends of Pamela’s Agency Joan Landes maps the limits of what she calls the “universal public” theorized by Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere as follows: [B]ecause the public sphere and the conditions for publicity presupposed a distinction between public and private matters, it was ill equipped to consider in public fashion the political dimension of relations in the intimate sphere . . . Under ideal conditions, then, the members of a theoretical public were to behave according to the bourgeois liberal principle of abstract equality . . . Still, Habermas never asks whether certain subjects in bourgeois society are better suited than others to perform the discursive role of participants in a theoretical public.68

Structural Transformation correlates contractarian modernity with technological developments able to sustain what Habermas calls the “implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons” (54). By dissolving court-based “publicity of representation” (9) into a “new form of bourgeois representation” (28), the medium of print, according to Habermas, supports the historically unprecedented premise that “everyone had to be able to participate” (37). While arguing for the persuasiveness of a form of bourgeois publicity constituted as “in principle inclusive” (37), Habermas does ask whether “certain subjects” perceived themselves to be able to participate: Women and dependents were factually and legally excluded from the political public sphere, whereas female readers as well as apprentices and servants often took a more active part in the literary public sphere than the owners of private property and family heads themselves. Yet in the educated classes the one form of public sphere was considered to be identical with the other; in the self-understanding of public opinion the public sphere appeared as one and

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indivisible. As soon as privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings ceased to communicate merely about their subjectivity but rather in their capacity as property-owners desired to inXuence public power in their common interest, the humanity of the literary public sphere served to increase the effectiveness of the public sphere in the political realm. (56)

By claiming that Habermas “never asks” whether print might extend its inclusive pretense all the way, in particular, to women, Landes reafWrms the pervasive critical presumption of his “gender-blindness.”69 Yet by leveling the charge that Habermas’s public sphere dissimulates its limits, Landes overlooks Structural Transformation’s reconciliation of “women” who are, Habermas pronounces, “excluded from the political public sphere” and “female readers” for whom “the literary public sphere” would effect their remedial achievement of bourgeois public “selfunderstanding.” This attempt to Wt public subjectivity to female readers does not endorse the constitutive limits of a civic sphere that, as Iris Marion Young states, “excludes from the public those individuals and groups that do not Wt the model.”70 Rather, women whose political exclusion Habermas even too emphatically afWrms are susceptible to the corrective “humanity” lent bourgeois public self-understanding, he claims, by literary history.71 When Landes declares “the public sphere . . . ill equipped to consider in public fashion the political dimension of relations in the intimate sphere,” she herself afWrms their “distinction” by exempting from political intelligibility the genre crucial to Structural Transformation’s own claim for bourgeois publicity’s indivisibly uniWed self-understanding: the “domestic novel” (49).72 Landes is not alone in projecting as the object of feminist critique a medium of public subjectivity more restrictive than that evoked by Habermas as the indeWnitely capacious reach of “ideology” (88); disenfranchised persons contest the limits of her rigorously exclusive “theoretical public” in venues which must alternatively materialize as theatre, performance, libel, engraving, and pornography, while the “competing” entities named by Nancy Fraser include “woman-only, voluntary associations” and “street protests and parades.”73 Landes’s “liberal principle of abstract equality” would facilitate a public “through which the (male) particular was able to posture behind the veil of the universal”; her response to Structural Transformation takes its direction from Joan Scott’s inXuential claim that “the abstract individual, the foundation of liberal democracy, has been revealed to be male.”74 My point here is not to argue that Locke’s exemplar of contractarian practice is neither abstract nor, according to Mary Astell, necessarily male; rather, I mean to suggest that by taking Habermas’s “implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons” as the literal schematics of a universalized, disembodied, male individual which relegates other persons to a range

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of variously particularized media, this critique reinforces, far more decisively than does Habermas himself, the same metaphysical coordinates that it aims to contest.75 And yet a domestic novel like Pamela might advance critical commentary from the very inside, so to speak, of the Habermasian public sphere. By placing print publicity in service of a coherent, preemptively masculine universal, Landes ignores the reliance of Habermasian ideology’s “effectiveness” upon the domestic novel. Yet Pamela, which Habermas invokes precisely to effect that effectiveness, fails to ratify Structural Transformation’s claim that the literary sphere effaces women’s political difference. Remarking Pamela’s failure to support Habermas’s account of literary-political modernity does more than raise the obvious or incidental point that he is not a good close reader. Because Habermas cites an aptitude named “voluntariness” (47) to deWne the reservoir of humanizing sentiment that he ascribes to the domestic novel, his misreading of Pamela compels, I will suggest, a feminist disagreement with Structural Transformation of some magnitude. Habermas’s account of literarypolitical modernity cannot admit Pamela’s refusal to sanction the efWcacy of the transitively modernizing agency, Mrs. B suggests well after her husband proves himself “jealous as a Tyrant of his Prerogative” (3: 103), that only unevenly “humanizes, as one may say, their more rugged Hearts” (4: 59). While Structural Transformation’s implicit law of the parity of cultivated persons has drawn Wre for its more or less emphatic abstraction, the humanity Habermas ascribes to Pamela has attracted no critical challenge.76 Indeed, Structural Transformation’s recurrent synopses of its own plot are—not unlike Pamela’s sequel—ambivalent on the topic of domestic Wction’s assistance to literary-political modernity, an ambivalence that can be captured in the shape of a loop. The line that begins at the left margin of page 116 traces the Habermasian process according to which an autonomous economic man is humanized by passing through a sentimentalized and paciWed domestic sphere; upon reaching the right margin, he Wgures the contours of representative humanity that mask the persistence of his class interest. This endpoint deWnes how bourgeois ideology works. I insert this loop to underscore Structural Transformation’s insistence upon both the necessity and the Wnal invisibility of the domestic sphere’s literary representation. Domestic Wction Wne-tunes the humanity of the property owner who transmutes economic dominance into a model of representative feeling, but Habermas does not dwell upon Structural Transformation’s use of literary history. As a necessary but disavowed accessory to Habermas’s claim for the power of ideology to incorporate both men and women, the humanizing utility of domestic Wction has not been queried by his critics. To return to this plot’s

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property owner in the market

START

human being as such in the bourgeois public sphere

END

starting point, it is well known that Habermas employs the family to facilitate the humanity of men whose freedom Wrst transpires in the market: In a certain fashion commodity owners could view themselves as autonomous . . . Such an autonomy of private people, founded on the right to property and in a sense also realized in the participation in a market economy, had to be capable of being portrayed as such. To the autonomy of property owners in the market corresponded a self-presentation of human beings in the family. Thus it was a private autonomy denying its economic origins . . . that provided the bourgeois family with its consciousness of itself. It seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to be maintained without coercion; it seemed to rest on the lasting community of love on the part of the two spouses; it seemed to permit that non-instrumental development of all faculties that mark the cultivated personality. The three elements of voluntariness, community of love, and cultivation were conjoined in a concept of the humanity that was supposed to inhere in humankind as such . . . the emancipation . . . of an inner realm, following its own laws, from extrinsic purposes of any sort. (46–47)

Habermas enlists this family as the counterpart of a state qualiWed by Marx and Engels as “the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt . . . for the mutual guarantee of their property,” a state whose dissimulation of “common interests” sustains “the illusion that private property itself is based solely in the private will.”77 The Habermasian family promulgates a complementary illusion: the “consciousness of itself” which doubly privatizes economic autonomy as autonomy “as such,” the “self-presentation of human beings in the family” which only

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retroactively posits the private sphere as the “non-instrumental” site of freely acted “humanity.” To reject the deracinated autonomy that funds the “self-presentation” of Habermas’s “free individuals,” J. G. A. Pocock opposes commercial men’s “passions” to the Marxist “assertion of ego-centered individual rights.”78 Here, I wish simply to ask where Habermas Wnds an eighteenthcentury family “capable of being portrayed as such.” For, notably, he does not liken the “real functions of the bourgeois family” (47) to those of a paciWed “inner realm” whose emancipation from “extrinsic purposes” reWnes property ownership into ideally sentimentalized and privatized volition: At any rate, the independence of the property owner in the market and in his own business was complemented by the dependence of the wife and children on the male head of the family; private autonomy in the former realm was transformed into authority in the latter and made any pretended freedom of individuals illusory. Even the contractual form of marriage, imputing the autonomous declaration of will on the part of both partners, was largely a Wction. (47)

How does the “conjugal family’s self-image” (47) come about, then, if the humanizing illusion which it promotes hinges upon a faculty of “voluntariness” belied, Habermas states, by “the contractual form of marriage”? By citing marriage as an impediment to the domestic sphere’s capacity to foster the contractarian Wction of “the autonomous declaration of will,” Habermas isolates the obstacle to domestic modernity posed by a wife whose “pretended freedom” is sometimes punctuated by the mechanical necessity of her sullenness. Structural Transformation thus reiterates as the obstacle to its own modernizing plot the fact that the wifely voluntariness required to humanize contractarian husbands—for, crucially, a “community of love” is contingent upon the unforced participation of “two spouses”—is really, he states, “illusory.” In turning to Pamela after he afWrms the difference between wives and ideally unencumbered free individuals, Habermas does not deploy the Jamesonian hermeneutic that, as we have seen, reads the novel for its invented resolution of just such contradictions. Instead, Habermas enlists Pamela to invent his own resolution of the problem posed by a family characterized by both uncoerced voluntariness and marital “dependence.” He crafts his resolution from what he claims as the mediating inXuence of eighteenth-century literary form—speciWcally, the form of the letter, the diary, and the “authentic achievement of that century: the domestic novel” (49). As “experiments with the subjectivity discovered in the close relationships of the conjugal family” (49), these forms inaugurate a readerly disposition that is, paradoxically, located “at the

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innermost core of the private” and “always already oriented to an audience” (49). Habermas states: On the one hand, the empathetic reader repeated within himself the private relationships displayed before him in literature; from his experience of real familiarity (Intimitat), he gave life to the Wctional one, and in the latter he prepared himself for the former. (50–51)

Habermas activates the humanity of the conjugal sphere by imagining a reader who conXates the Wctional and the real, a reader who “repeated within himself” the experience of an already humanized literature. This literature disseminates self-imaged “voluntariness” to both husbands and wives—for Habermas, as we have seen, implicates female readers in bourgeois ideology’s inclusiveness. A domestic novel that effects the equation of property owners and human beings must be qualiWed, then, by its advance readiness to dissimulate not only the economic origins of masculine autonomy but also the persistent arbitrariness of the husbandly prerogative that would otherwise impede a female reader’s self-presentation of (her) freedom. Habermas’s stress upon the humanizing form of eighteenth-century literature thus seems to beg the question: what about its content? How well does the “most inXuential” (49) of the intersubjectivizing novels to locate “humankind as such” in the domestic sphere—the novel he infamously cites as “the mediocre Pamela” (43)—serve Structural Transformation’s plot? Does Pamela offer the schematics of humankind as such that would effect the self-imaging of bourgeois individuals whose autonomy is “maintained,” Habermas speciWes, “without coercion”? I have suggested that the novel instead refuses to mitigate the prerogative that Mrs. B’s own attempted voluntariness cannot dissolve, a fatality to which the novel recurs at moments such as the following, when, as she is confronted by her husband’s imminent devolution into a polygamist, he declares to her, “All that Chearfulness which used to delight me whenever I saw you, I’m sorry for it, is quite vanished of late” (4: 160). This intersubjective subject is structured, in large part, as the manifestation of Mrs. B’s failure ingenuously to comply or, that is, to extrovert the freedom through which Habermasian ideology would draw its resources. Pamela instead projects an eighteenth-century domestic novel populated by men who still cite their likeness to “Patriarch Husbands” (4: 15). Here the cost, for feminist literary historiography, of Habermas’s indictment of the indeWnitely pervasive reach of bourgeois ideology is clear: Structural Transformation ignores the domestic novel’s refusal to sanction the Wction of voluntariness that would underwrite the extension of a humanized self-image to sometimes “Patriarch” husbands. In other words, Habermas recruits literary history to replicate the blind spot that deWnes

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Lockean modernity; according to Structural Transformation, the domestic novel itself seamlessly eases the discrepancy between “Conjugal, not Political” prerogative and a medium of public power sustained by ideally autonomous men. I now turn to a dénouement which is, perhaps, redundant. An “authentic ‘public sphere’ . . . constituted by private people” (30) comes into being by drawing upon “its background experience of a private sphere that had become interiorized human closeness” (52). Property owners, the economic origins of whose freedom have been dissolved by literary form, are equipped to realize the conversion of class into representative humanity: The fully developed bourgeois public sphere was based on the Wctitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple. (56; emphasis Habermas’s)

Habermas’s formula dictates its own critique: namely, the speciWcation as human beings of those persons who are not property owners. But his synopsis of the “Wctitious identity” that heralds the historical apparition of ideology solicits what I will call anterior feminist commentary. What has become of the family whose humanizing utility no longer surfaces in Habermas’s culminating equivalence? Habermas’s “interiorized human closeness” recedes to the “background” of that closing identity, as he afWrms when he does reprise its assistance to bourgeois modernity: “The representation of the interests of the privatized domain of a market economy was interpreted with the aid of ideas grown in the soil of the intimate sphere of the conjugal family” (51). As an instrument of the illusion of non-instrumentality, Habermas’s family claims the historical resolution of “soil”—and a domestic novel which, at one remove, effects the humanized self-imaging of that family likewise does the work of bourgeois ideology’s “soil.” Yet if Structural Transformation reduces the literary-political agency of the domestic novel—and, more precisely, of Pamela—to its service as ideology’s resource, the novel’s own representation of domestic modernity refutes Habermas’s use of it. The faculty of uncoerced voluntariness which would effectively dissolve the difference between public and private power, represented by Pamela as Mrs. B’s ceaselessly willed effort to manifest cheer (that is, voluntariness itself), instead afWrms the persistence of that difference. I conclude by turning to the sequel’s end, which projects not the evaporation of Mr. B’s more or less arbitrary conjugal power into privatized and humanized autonomy but rather a claim to masculine superiority tailored to admit the prerogative of Mrs. B’s persistently lordly husband. Pamela’s sequel revises its rationale for Mr. B’s conjugal power, an

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adjustment whose most unmistakable betrayal of the novel’s plot resides in Mrs. B’s condemnation of “that sad, sad notion, That a reform’d rake makes the best Husband ” (4: 430). When one of her auditors objects, Mrs. B justiWes this apparently paradoxical application of Pamela: Madam, reply’d I, the gentleman you mean, never was a common Town-Rake: He is a Gentleman of Sense, and Wne Understanding; and his Reformation, secondarily, as I may say, has been the natural Effect of those extraordinary Qualities. But, besides, Madam, I will presume to say, That that gentleman, as he has not many Equals in the Nobleness of his Nature, so is not likely, I doubt, to have many Followers, in a Reformation begun in the Bloom of Youth, in full health, upon Self-conviction, and altogether, humanly speaking, spontaneous. (4: 430–31)79

Exempting Mr. B from rakishness compels an even more Xagrant redaction of Pamela’s Wrst volumes. Mr. B differs from a common town-rake, his wife testiWes, because his reformation was “humanly speaking, spontaneous.” A “reformation begun in the Bloom of Youth, in full health”— criteria recalling Parson Williams’s stipulation that Mr. B is “no profess’d Deboshee” (EK 118)—thus reconstitutes Pamela’s plot as a “natural effect.” Although he refers to himself, at the end of its second volume, as an only transitively reformed, “happily convicted” (EK 287) husband, Mr. B has now always evinced the “Nobleness” that credits his reform to unassisted “Self-conviction.” Mrs. B’s auditor might understandably register dismay at Mrs. B’s disingenuousness—that is, her disavowal of the agency of Pamela’s ingenuousness—for, at the sequel’s end, Mrs. B transitively effects her husband’s virtue by afWrming its literally incredible spontaneity. By defying the limits of what it would seem able to claim as humanly speaking, spontaneous, Pamela II solicits Carole Pateman’s evocation of social contract theory as a “story”: “At the turning-point between the old world of status and the modern world of contract another story of masculine political birth is told. The story of the original contract is perhaps the greatest tale of men’s creation of new political life.” Of the liabilities attending a Wguration of “political birth” which is restricted to men, Pateman remarks that “a section of the story of political origins must be repressed if the claim is to be made that modern society is built on the defeat of patriarchy, or if the law of male sex-right is to be ignored and the claim made that sexual relations are consensual and non-political.80 As we have seen, Pamela has not “repressed” or “ignored” Mr. B’s sexright: when, during the nursing debate, Mr. B invokes “the Obedience which a Wife naturally owes, as well as voluntarily vows, to a Husband’s Will” (4: 19), he communicates the overdetermination of “voluntarily” and “naturally” exacted obligation that qualiWes wives as both like and

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unlike contractual subjects. To resolve Pamela’s equivocation of the natural and the voluntary, Mrs. B negotiates her exit from what qualiWes, only belatedly, as a “story of masculine political birth”: Pamela II reassigns the agency of Mr. B’s reform to his, and not her, “extraordinary qualities.” Yet its vindication of the unassisted modernity of one reformed rake— who, it turns out, was not really a rake at all—compels the sequel’s remarkably scrupulous return to Locke’s vision of the pedagogical origins of public virtue. Asked by her husband “How I relish Mr. Locke’s Treatise of Education? which he put into my Hands some time since” (4: 297), Mrs. B defends her ability to tutor her eldest son Billy by debunking Locke’s claim for the superiority of naturally abler and stronger men: [M]y good Lord Davers, with all his Advantages, born a Counsellor of the Realm, and educated accordingly, does not surpass his Lady, your noble Sister . . . Let me presume, Sir, to name Mr. H. [Jackey]; and when I have nam’d him, shall we not be puzzled to Wnd anywhere in our Sex, one Remove from vulgar Life, a Woman that will not out-do Mr. H.? Lady Darnford, upon all useful Subjects, makes a much brighter Figure than Sir Simon . . . Mr. Arthur excels not his Lady. Mrs. Towers, a Maiden Lady, is an Overmatch for half a dozen of the neighboring Gentlemen I could name . . . Upon the Whole, therefore, I conclude, that Mr. B. is almost the only Gentleman, who excels every Lady that I have seen; so greatly excels, that even the Emanations of his Excellence irradiate a low Cottage-born Girl, and make her pass among Ladies of Birth and Education for Somebody. (4: 366–67)

Like Mrs. B, who, to prove the inimitability of Pamela’s plot, acquires perfections “almost peculiar to herself,” Mr. B, who needs a mandate for his power impervious to the existence of fools like Jackey, becomes “almost the only Gentleman” superior to “every Lady” in the novel. Mr. B’s “Excellence” exposes the peculiarly recursive logic of all four of the novel’s volumes; Pamela’s duty cheerfully to modernize a rake, or an almost-rake, is Wnally rationalized in advance by the fact that he already embodies Locke’s rationale for his right to command it. (Here we might note that Richardson’s next novels sidestep the dilemma of how retroactively to justify the authority of an incrementally reformed master. In Clarissa [1747–48], Lovelace laments his insoluble viciousness by asking “Why, why, did my mother bring me up to bear no control?”;81 the exemplary protagonist of Sir Charles Grandison [1753–54] has been “almost from infancy” trained by “My Mother” in “Mr. Locke’s” “notions of moral rectitude.”82) Pamela I’s progressive defense of a wife whose value is “born with her” thus gives way to the needs of a husband whose unparalleled excellence, it turns out, is most surely vindicated by his capacity

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to transform “a low Cottage-born Girl” into “Somebody.” Pamela II concludes, then, with the specter of transitively modernizing agency that may be too efWcacious after all, for the novel Wnally entrenches Mr. B’s power in a claim to superiority rooted once more in the force of the lordly and bad-tempered Mr. B’s “Birth.” The Wnally troubling variable in this plot is not the mobility of a wife who marries up but, rather, the rationale for masculine domestic authority destabilized by the very perfection that justiWes her move. Mrs. B’s exception to “Locke’s Treatise” might come as less of a surprise, then, because it tailors the novel’s selective defense of one husband’s superiority to the stubbornness of temper evident in her “dear bold Boy (for every one sees how greatly he resembles his Papa in his dear forward Spirit)” (4: 373). Although, like Locke, Mrs. B abjures “slavish and corporal Punishments in the Education of those who would be wise, good, and ingenious Men” (4: 305), Pamela II salvages “forward Spirit” not as the result of indulgence but as a conservation of temper restricted to eldest sons.83 Billy—“Poor little Dear! he has indeed a little sort of Perverseness and Headstrongness, as one may say, in his Will” (4: 381)—compels Mrs. B to reappraise the primary obstacle which, Locke states, “perverseness in the will” poses to an ingenuous education whose assistance to contractarian modernity resides in the effort “keep their wills right.”84 Billy perpetuates a domestic sphere in which eldest sons retain a species of paternal temper whose etiology is transformed, in the solitary instance when Pamela contradicts itself without defending the logic of the change, from the fact that “His poor dear Mother spoil’d him at Wrst” (EK 210) to maternal testimony to the innateness of Mr. B’s forward spirit which he ventriloquizes from his mother’s grave: “I am sure I took great Pains with you; but alas! to very little Purpose. You had always a violent headstrong Will” (3: 197). Mrs. B thus pronounces Pamela’s signal departure from a Lockean pedagogical regime not geared to the production of naturally superior, sometimes “headstrong” husbands: “we should not insist upon it, that the Child should so nicely distinguish away its little innate Passions, as if we expected it to be born a Philosopher” (4: 308). Yet Billy’s retention of “innate Passions” does not extend to Mr. B’s natural daughter Sally Goodwin, untainted by the “InXuence” (4: 272) of her ruined mother, Mrs. B reports, because “the Wrst Four Years in the Child were a perfect Blank” (4: 363). Devoid of any vestige of what Ruth Perry designates “consanguinal”85 inXuence, Sally—and not Billy, who makes hereditary the excellence of “his Papa’s Spirit” (4: 349)—Wgures the domestic novel’s best approximation of, at least, the Wrst four years of a Lockean boy. Billy portends a domestic novel in which, as Mrs. B observes at the end of the nursing episode:

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I can see one Thing, nevertheless, on this Occasion, that the words Command and Obey are not quite blotted out of his Vocabulary, as he said they should be. (4: 28)

The Wnal sentence of Pamela’s sequel claims that it will not tell, in the words of its editor, “how” Mrs. B responds when her husband asks her to redistribute the effects of a loyal servant’s dying bequest: For it is easy to imagine, how chearfully, and how gracefully, his benevolent Lady discharged a Command so well suited to her natural Generosity. (4: 456)

Pamela fails entirely to blot the words “Command and Obey” from the domestic novel; the sequel concludes by again insisting that Mrs. B’s cheer makes them redundant. Yet if this resolution of contractarian modernity’s domestic limits is “easy to imagine,” Pamela does not, for all that, Wnally leave the task up to its reader. By once again showing “how chearfully” Mrs. B obviates the need for a word which nonetheless persists into the novel’s last sentence, Pamela’s closing “Command” anticipates representations of domestic modernity which might not, my next three chapters suggest, be so easy for Habermasian literary history to imagine.

Chapter 4

Eliza Haywood’s Philosophical Career Ingenuous Subjection and Moral Physiology

“Wanting the Avocatives of Baseness”: Amorous Fiction and the Physiology of the Vent The protagonist of Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725), a nameless “Young Lady of distinguished Birth, Beauty, Wit, and Spirit,” assumes a series of disguises to seduce the same inconstant man.1 Haywood’s young lady passes as Wve wholly distinct women to resuscitate the amorous “Vigour” of the rake Beauplaisir, who himself repeatedly becomes, after achieving “Possession” of his conquests, “but a cold, insipid, husband-like Lover.” 2 By turning herself into a sequence of notyet-possessed objects, Haywood’s lady avoids the fate suffered by every woman unlucky enough to occupy only one body: So had I been deceived and cheated, had I like the rest believed, and sat down mourning in Absence, and vainly waiting recovered Tendernesses.— —How do some Women (continued she) make their Life a Hell, burning in fruitless Expectations and dreaming out their Days in Hopes and Fears, then wake at last to all the Horror of Despair?3

Haywood’s protagonist is entitled to gloat, for she recapitulates the plot endured by all the “rest” of the ruined heroines populating Haywood’s vast literary output.4 This plot is assured by a physical constant: “like other Men,” Beauplaisir will “grow satiated.” 5 In her novella The City Jilt; or, the Alderman turn’d Beau (1726), Haywood glosses the mechanics that dictate rakish desire’s deterioration into, at best, a husband’s “Show of Love”: “The very word Desire implies an Impossibility of continuing after the Enjoyment of that which Wrst caused its being.”6 Her conduct book The Wife (1756) gives a more dilated rationale for Fantomina’s succinct pejorative “husband-like”: “Can a man wish for what he has obtain’d? . . . —Surely to do this would be an inconsistency in nature!” 7 To realize the “inconsistency” that would make Beauplaisir want a person whom he has already possessed, Fantomina does what, apparently, constitutes a lesser violation of nature: to re-excite Beauplaisir’s desire, she renders

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herself inconsistent. With this feat, she escapes a fatality anticipated by Haywood with just as much conWdence as Beauplaisir’s conversion into a husbandly lover: the fatality with which, in response, Fantomina’s jilted physiology turns romance into “Hell.” For Haywood as for Mary Astell, men who can only transiently manifest passion transform women’s experience of romance into hell. The present chapter suggests that Haywood’s representations of how women embody—or, like Fantomina, avoid having to embody—this hell deWne the shape of her novelistic career. Haywood’s proliWc literary output, which extends from Love in Excess (1719–20) to the conduct books The Wife and The Husband (1756), has been divided by literary historians into amorous and moralistic halves, a division attributed by Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) to the “severe . . . castigations” of Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728), whose “Eliza”—“two babes of love close clinging to her waste; / Fair as before her works she stands confess’d, / . . . ‘With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes’”—is Wrst prize in the pissing contest of Pope’s assembled dunces.8 Paula Backscheider has recently evoked Haywood’s departure from, according to Reeve, “amorous novels” 9 to virtuous Wction as a literary-historical “Story” whose expiatory turn to domesticity is “still seen as dishonest camouXage for mercenary desires and a nymphomaniac personality.”10 To advance a corrective account of this “bipolar career,” Backscheider suggests that “Haywood led in the movement of Wction away from portraits of courtship to critiques of marriage.”11 In what follows, I thematize this movement, more precisely, as a shift of analytic focus from the “hell” of romance to the “hell” of marriage whose stakes are elaborated in Haywood’s divergent constructions of amorous and marital women’s physiology. To suggest that Haywood implicates her conWguration of women’s bodies in her analysis of masculine domestic authority—both before and, as we will see, especially after marriage—is to argue for a relation of materiality and power broadly evoked by Judith Butler, who recapitulates Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to conclude that “the body is not an independent materiality that is invested by power relations external to it, but it is that for which materialization and investiture are coextensive.” The coextensivity of matter and power dictates “why,” for Butler, “feminists ought to be interested, not in taking materiality as an irreducible, but in conducting a critical genealogy of its formulation.”12 By critically Wguring the process of “investiture” through which women might materialize as ingenuously subject wives, Haywood’s novels themselves innovate such a genealogy.13 But, given the constitutive blind spot of a Foucaultian account of power-as-discipline oblivious to the persistent nontransparency of masculine domestic authority, it is worth more closely anticipating the speciWcity of Haywood’s feminism. Women

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resistant to anxiety, women selectively incapable of thought, and women able to convert reXex into voluntary motion represent exceptional resolutions of the “hell” entailed by post-Richardsonian men’s retention of conjugal prerogative. Unlike Fantomina, who for a time escapes the effects of Beauplaisir’s inconstancy by serially escaping the persons of which he serially tires, Haywood’s domestic protagonists—each Wxed in a body now deWned, The Wife states, as “the property of another”14— elaborate responses to the following moral philosophical conundrum: how might one woman’s not necessarily sexed physiology be rewired virtuously and painlessly to accommodate her husband’s tyranny and inWdelity? Haywood’s implication of feminine physiology and masculine conjugal power begins not with Pope’s Dunciad but with Richardson’s Pamela. But before turning to Haywood’s Anti-Pamela (1741), I revert to the amorous bodies which are not, as Haywood theorizes in ReXections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), satisWed by being possessed: “Women . . . generally love for ever: They have not Strength enough of Mind to repel the sweet Remora’s which past Pleasures yeild,—they re-enjoy them in Imagination.”15 In The Search After Truth (1674–75), Nicholas Malebranche, who is included in Haywood’s voluminous corpus of natural philosophical references, explains why Haywood’s women might—or, indeed, must— “love for ever.”16 Of the “stupefaction” induced in the mechanistic sensorium by new objects of perception, Malebranche writes:17 The animal spirits do not Xow into the various parts of the body to perform even their ordinary functions, but instead impress such deep traces of the objects they represent that they rupture enough of the brain’s Wbers to make the idea that they have excited indelible.18

Feminine susceptibility to the particular species of stupefaction that is love at Wrst sight would be enhanced by what Malebranche claims as the feminized “delicacy of the brain Wbers”: “because insigniWcant things”— like, perhaps, incontinent rakes—“produce great motions in the delicate Wbers of [women’s] brains, these things necessarily excite great and vivid feelings in their souls, completely occupying it.”19 Rather than a volitional or moral aptitude, feminine constancy is a fatality which materializes as ruptured brain Wbers; the mechanics of loving forever render Wdelity a quite literal effect of deWcient “Strength” “of Mind.” For Malebranche and for Haywood, women are doomed mentally to “re-enjoy”— or, as Fantomina anticipates, to “[burn] in fruitless Expectations” for— the indelibly deep traces left upon their brains by long-since satiated men. But Haywood’s ReXections provides another rationale for the indestructibility of women’s love:

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[W]anting the Avocatives of Baseness, or those Amusements which a Variety of Company affords the other Sex, they have more Leisure, as well as more Desire to indulge their Thoughts, and sooth deluded Fancy: Thus do they, selfdeceiv’d, supply Feul to the unceasing Fire which consumes their Peace, and rarely is extinguish’d but by Death.20

From this explanatory vantage, feminine brain Wbers have little to do with the inevitability of women’s “unceasing Fire,” because the amorous advantage claimed by “the other Sex” resides not in superior resilience but rather in men’s privileged access to “Avocatives” that permit the salutary distraction of baseness. What fuels these women’s constancy is the “Leisure” sustained by a person that craves the same “Amusements” as men. What happens to women who “indulge their Thoughts” because they lack avocatives to engross their bodies? Thomas Willis, anatomist, physician, and tutor to John Locke, offers infrastructure that might qualify the condition of amorous protagonists who, with the exception of Fantomina, “vainly [await] recovered Tendernesses.”21 In his Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock (1681), Willis provides an “Aetiologie” of “Convulsive Distempers” predicated upon the disequilibrium of nerves, Wbers, and animal spirits. Like that of Descartes and Malebranche, Willis’s person is powered by animal spirits, the miniscule particles of blood whose location at the juncture of mind and body, nerve and muscle, grants them the equivocal density of “winde”:22 In truth it was in the sick person, as it is in musical Organs, which if Wlled above measure, by too great a blast of winde, unless presently the passages of more Pipes be opened, the whole frame of the Organ is quickly shaken, and in danger to be broken to pieces . . . [W]hen the animal Spirits, actuating the pipes, and the depending Wbres, of some of the nerves, were moved beyond their due tenour, there was a necessity, that their force should be bestowed . . . wherefore, when their madness was hindred in on[e] part, by and by like winde pent up, creeping somewhere else, it broke forth more violently, in some other part.23

Not only does love’s “too great blast of winde” leave cast-off women “cheated,” as Fantomina puts it, of salutary circulatory movement: what seals the likeness of Haywood’s amorous heroines to Willis’s “sick person” is the inescapability of the fact that, as one exemplary narrator confesses, “Love taught me a cunning which before I was a Stranger to.”24 A practice of cunning whose Haywoodian equivalent is, inexorably, “dissimulation”25 dictates that “more Pipes” can not be “opened” to relieve the hydraulic pressure that is love. Given the implication of mechanics and narrative that Haywood plumbs as the novelistic repercussion of cheated women’s cunning, her amorous Wction can be more precisely classiWed as her “pent up” amorous Wction.

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The hydraulic violence triggered by amorous “dissembling”26 is represented by The Injur’d Husband (1722), whose protagonist Montamour, forced to discuss her lover’s treachery with the insinuating gossip Sansfoy, Wnally Xees the interview: It was something wonderful indeed, that a Woman who lov’d to that prodigious degree of Tenderness as [Montamour] did, and had such Appearances how much that Tenderness was abus’d, cou’d so well dissemble the Disorders of her Soul . . . But what the unhappy Montamour suffer’d while under so cruel a Constraint can hardly be imagin’d. As soon as she was alone, she shut herself into her Chamber, and gave a loose to the long labouring pent-up Passions of her Soul,—her Couch,—her Bed, were now no longer able to sustain the force of her wild Grief,—she grovell’d on the Floor,—she beat her Breast,—she wrung her lovely Hands,—the celebrated Lustre of her shining Eyes was now extinct in Tears; and whoever had seen her in this Condition wou’d have believ’d it impossible she cou’d, but some Moments before, have worn such an Appearance of Serenity.27

Needless to say, perhaps, this is not a person with an unconscious. The “Disorders of her Soul” are contingent not upon her more or less successful dissipation of her desire—its more or less successful conversion into impalpability—but, rather, upon how that passion more or less “violently,” as Willis states, exits her body. In Montamour’s case, the “necessity,” again to use Willis’s word, that her passion’s “force should be bestowed” devolves, spectacularly, upon external objects. But the necessity that passion go somewhere inversely portends that it might have nowhere to go, as Haywood writes in The Unequal ConXict; or, Nature Triumphant (1725) of “that silent earthquake of the tumultuous soul, which debarr’d of vent, shakes the whole frame and struggles in each nerve.”28 If Willis’s “whole frame of the Organ is quickly shaken” by the prospect of circulatory overload, then Haywood’s amorous narratives specify that generic threat as “the inward convulsions! the heart-rending agonies! the brain-distracting whirls of shock’d reXection! which, in a smother’d passion, are endured”29 by insolubly constant women. Haywood’s amorous plots are galvanized by a hydraulic physiology that vents or, for a time, smothers its passion. Like that of Willis’s person, this passion can be shunted from “part” to “part,” but it cannot, Wnally, be repressed. Indeed, as graphically as does Haywood, Willis attributes women’s “inward convulsions” to mechanical blockages defused by avocatives that are more easily procured by men: [W]hen at any time, the nervous juice is hindred somewhere, in its motion or circulation, from thence stagnating in the nervous parts, and loading them, [it] does often bring in a convulsive disposition . . . Yea, it may obtain here some place, what is wont commonly to be noted for a cause, of the hysterical passions, in maids and widdows, to wit, the untimely restraint of the seminall humour,

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which ought to be bestowed about the pleasures of Venus ; at least, if they receive help from the state of a conjugal Life, it therefore happens, because the restagnations of the nervous humour, which often Wx a taint to the brain and nervous stock, by this means are prevented.30

With this attribution of “the hysterical passions, in maids and widdows” to “restagnations of the nervous humour,” Willis deWnes an illness that resists the psychoanalytic etiology evoked by Ros Ballaster to qualify “Haywood’s representation of a ‘hystericized’ female” who manifests the “inability to control her unconscious desires from being manifested through her body.”31 Rather than the difference between unconscious and conscious mental content that propels the Freudian “conversion”32 of repressed desire into a bodily symptom, the stagnation of Willis’s maid is effected by an opposition of pent-up to bestowed nervous juices whose diagnostic force resides in the fact that both terms claim the same density. If, according to Freud, “unconscious psychical structures” lose their foothold in the hysterical body only by being turned “back . . . into . . . ideas that will now have become conscious,”33 then the “help” prescribed by Willis does not entail the dissolution of symptoms into consciousness but, rather, nervous “motion” which incarnates the therapeutic mechanics of “pleasure.” This body’s desires are consistently materialized; what determines their disposition to pathology is not their change from ideas into symptoms but their “untimely restraint.” For Haywood, passion whose density dictates that it be either be “bestowed” or “endured” deWnes the practice of repression, according to The Unequal ConXict, as “the art of dissimulation . . . [of] concealing, under an appearance of serenity, the most violent disorders that humane nature is capable of sustaining.”34 A body that sustains such dissembling as the threat, Willis warns, of being “broken into pieces” endures inner convulsions whose antidote, according to the narrator of The British Recluse; or, The Secret History of Cleomira (1722), resides in a past undisturbed by mechanical imbalance: “every thing was indifferent to me, and had this Insensibility continued I had lived one of the most contented Women in the World.”35 An indifference external to the “World” of amorous narrative—an “Insensibility,” Haywood’s ReXections repeats, which, “with all the DeWciencies imputed to it, is a State of Ease and Tranquility”36—marks a modality of cure remarkable as much for its sigularity as, after the onset of romance, for its impossibility. Only Fantomina’s protagonist reconciles Haywood’s incommensurable, but equally pressing, reasons for a passion that cannot be “extinguish’d”: constant women are mechanically unlike (possessed of more impressible Wbers than) and mechanically like (denied the distractions enjoyed by) men. Haywood’s ruined heroine is indelibly impressed—“She loved

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Beauplaisir ” 37—but, by serially transforming the person that houses her love, she circumvents the necessity of her nervous juices’ untimely restraint. By Wnding new bodies to vent her desire, Fantomina’s resolution of the hell of feminine passion respects its indestructibility to an even parodic degree. Haywood’s amorous Wction represents desire that must either be bestowed or endured (whose only silver lining resides in Haywood’s critically infamous scenes of wholly mechanized sexual vent38). But her domestic novels imagine the contingency of passion upon the demands of wifely virtue, inventing reWnements of a hydraulic physiology which could not otherwise desire to obey. Haywood’s parody of Pamela anticipates her domestic Wction’s implication of feminine mechanism and the persistence of masculine conjugal power. In representing a woman who refutes Pamela’s transitively modernizing agency, Haywood innovates an anti-Pamela whose mastery of passion enables her to fake ingenuousness itself.

Immechanizing Pamela: Syrena’s Literary Trick In An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, published on April 2, 1741, Henry Fielding compresses Pamela’s protracted anticipation of her wedding night into the following crudely telescoped passage: In my last I left off at our sitting down to Supper on our Wedding Night, where I behaved with as much Bashfulness as the purest Virgin in the world could have done. The most difWcult Task for me was to blush; however, by holding my Breath, and squeezing my Cheeks with my Handkerchief, I did pretty well.39

By limiting the repertoire of gestures that would simulate a servant-girl’s representation of her “Vartue” to such crude expedients as Shamela’s pinching of her cheeks, Fielding afWrms the diagnosis of Mr. B that begins his parody: “he is a Fool.”40 Duped by a performance of “Bashfulness” as indicative of Shamela’s viciousness as her orthographic lapse, Fielding’s Squire Booby falls for the doubly materialized fakery of which Shamela accuses Pamela: the power of the printed book to “make black white, it seems” and the power of its protagonist to “counterfeit a Swoon.”41 When he translates the “naked Sentiments”42 ingenuously penned by Pamela into Shamela’s exposition of clumsily faked reXex (“I kept my Eyes wide open, and pretended to Wx them in my Head”43), Fielding satirizes the epistemological fraudulence of both Pamela’s fainting Wts and her writing to the moment. Extended to the spontaneous feeling that would dictate Pamela’s letters, his revelation of counterfeit mechanism intimates that she neither swoons nor writes sincerely.

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Haywood’s Anti-Pamela: or, Feigned Innocence Detected appeared on June 16, 1741. Anti-Pamela is not wholly composed of letters; its narrator intervenes early on to gauge its protagonist’s ability to perform Shamela’s “difWcult Task”: [S]he excell’d the most experienc’d Actresses on the Stage, in a lively assuming all the different Passions that Wnd Entrance in a Female Mind. Her young Heart affected with imaginary Accidents . . . gave her whole Frame, Agitations adapted to the Occasion, her Colour would come and go, her Eyes sparkle, grow Languid, or overXow with Tears, her Bosom heave, her Limbs tremble; she would fall into Faintings, or appear transported, and as it were out of herself; and all this so natural, that had the whole College of Physicians been present, they could not have imagin’d it other wise than real.44

Fielding’s Shamela counterfeits modesty so badly that only a Booby could be taken in. The “lively assuming” of Haywood’s Syrena Tricksy, however, passes as empirically “real”—and Haywood enlists witnesses qualiWed to adjudicate that reality’s truth. In 1738, the Royal Society and Royal College of Physicians were willed beneWciaries of “a plan for instituting certain Lectures” on the topic, inaugural Royal Society speaker Alexander Stuart states, of “nerves and muscles” and “muscular motion,” respectively.45 The force of Haywood’s intervention in what Stuart designates “the several classes of the natural, vital, and animal functions . . . a large Weld open for improvement”46 can be gauged by the recapitulation of the difference between reXex and willed action offered by George Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion: Containing the Elements of Natural Philosophy (1705): “The Voluntary Motions of Rational Creatures are altogether unaccountable from the Laws of Mechanism.”47 Cheyne traces the logic of the latter laws: In the Heart, while the Auricles are full of Blood, they are distended, and the inXuence of the nervous Juices into their Muscles thereby stop’d; but when once this Blood begins to Xow into the Ventricles, the resistence arising from the distension of the Auricles to the inXux of the nervous Juice is taken off, and so it Xows into the muscular Substance of the Auricles . . . And thus, by a Mechanical Necessity they act alternately . . . [U]niversally in all the involuntary Motions there is a Mechanical Necessity for the derivation of the nervous Juices into the Muscles employed in those Motions. But in voluntary Motions there neither is nor can be any such Mechanical Necessity, it being a plain Contradiction to their Nature; and therefore voluntary Motion is quite contrary to the Laws of Mechanism.48

Cheyne’s lengthy illustration of “Mechanical Necessity” ampliWes the brevity of his opposing schematics of voluntary motion: “we can move our Hands and Feet how and when we please in an Instant.”49 Voluntary motion is rationalized not by proportionately exhaustive causality but by the fact, Cheyne states, that it is voluntary:

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But this Action of the Mind or Will upon these Animal Spirits being altogether unaccountable from the Laws of Motion, it is plain that voluntary Motion is altogether immechanical. And indeed were it Mechanical, it cou’d not be Voluntary; for what ever acts Mechanically, acts constantly and necessarily, and so can never act voluntarily.50

The unaccountability of voluntary action isolates it under the solitary qualiWer “immechanical.” What Joseph R. Roach designates the Cartesian “mechanization of physiology”51 leaves the faculty of “Will” as that physiology’s unaccountably immechanical remainder. Unlike Hume, as we saw in Chapter 3, Cheyne exempts his musician’s “Action of the Mind” from laws whose necessity would prevent it from being action at all. Indeed, Willis’s Anatomy of the Brain (1681) (to whose explanation of muscular motion Cheyne attributes “all the Advantages of Eloquence and Metaphor”52) has already mapped the mutual exclusion of action and passion onto lawful and extralawful sectors of the mind. Willis locates necessity as follows: [T]he Cerebel is a peculiar Fountain of animal Spirits . . . wholly distinct from the Brain. Within the Brain, Imagination, Memory, Discourse, and other more superior Acts of the animal Function are performed . . . But the ofWce of the Cerebel seems to be for the animal Spirits to supply some Nerves; by which involuntary actions . . . made after a constant manner unknown to us, or whether we will or no, are performed . . . Wherefore whilst the Brain is garnished as it were with uncertain Meanders and crankling turnings and windings about . . . [T]hose in the Cerebel, as it were in a certain artiWcial Machine or Clock, seem orderly disposed after that manner within certain little places and boundaries, that they may Xow out orderly of their own accord one series after another without any driver, which may govern or moderate their motions.53

Willis’s distinction between “superior Acts” and “involuntary actions” proceeds from the greater regularity of the “Meanders and crankling turnings” which inscribe necessity upon the surface of the “Cerebel.” Its “orderly” crinkling deWnes as an “artiWcial Machine or Clock” not an entire Cartesian body but the “certain little places and boundaries” that resolve mechanical necessity into a subset of predetermined mental “windings.” After establishing the driverless Cerebel as necessity’s “ofWce,” Willis’s Anatomy admits a certain confusion: [T]he Nerves but now described, which owe their stock to the Cerebel . . . sometimes some of them, though of another Dominion, are compelled to obey the beck and government of the Brain: for we are wont to draw the parts of the Face, usually moved pathetically and unthought of, and also at our pleasure, into these or those ConWgurations or postures . . . The reason of these is, partly because the Nerves of either Government communicate variously among themselves with

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shoots sent forth one to another, so that oftentimes the ofWces of the one are drawn into the parts of the other.54

Nerves ruled by “either Government”—either the arbitrary Cerebel or the uncertainly meandering brain—compel opposing derivations of facial motion. On the one hand, parts of the face move “pathetically,” demonstrating the adverbial operation of Willis’s “Pathetical” nerve, which, by imparting to “the motion of the Eyes . . . a certain manifest Sympathy” with the passions, dictates that the former “clearly shew the Affections of the Mind.”55 On the other hand, a face able to be moved “at our pleasure” harbors the capacity, despite the legibility “usually” assured by Willis’s epistemologically felicitous nerve, to “dissemble.”56 Willis’s concession to “shoots” that “communicate variously” in the government of facial movement anticipates Cheyne’s later concession, made in The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (1733), to the therapeutic effect of thought: It is well known to Physicians what wonderful Effects, the Passions, excited by lucky or unlucky Accidents, (which are justly reckon’d Intellectual or Spiritual Operations) have on the Pulse, Circulation, Perspiration, and Secretions, and the other Animal Functions . . . I have felt a Pulse languishing, interrupting, and just dying away, render’d strong, full, and free by a joyful Surprize.57

The patient whose “organical Machin”58 responds to such “Spiritual Operations” as joy occupies the overlay of mechanical and immechanical motion represented by Cheyne as the point of contact between the “intellectual” and “material,” because “in Substances of all Kinds, there may be Intermediates between pure, immaterial Spirit, and gross Matter, and . . . this intermediate, material Substance, may make the Cement between the human Soul and Body, and may be the Instrument or Medium of all its Actions and Functions.”59 When she asserts the unprecedented reach of Syrena’s volitional self-command, Haywood represents a woman able to will “pathetically” or mechanically derived motion. By representing to herself “Imaginary Accidents,” she drives motion’s necessity further inward, the one exception to reXex that Descartes’s Passions of the Soul concedes, for “in general the actions of both the face and the eyes can be changed by the soul, when, willing to conceal its passion, it forcefully imagines one in opposition to it.”60 But Cheyne’s “intermediate, material Substance” just as suggestively evokes how Syrena’s person transmits a more mediated critique of Pamela than that leveled by Fielding. Whereas the referent which leverages Fielding’s spoof of Pamela remains a blush that cannot be faked, Anti-Pamela does not represent the simply improved specter of virginizing mechanism. Instead, Syrena mimics the antipathy of physical necessity and immechanical volition itself; by locating

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Syrena’s approximation of Pamela in her capacity to simulate the play between passion and action, Haywood’s anti-Pamela infuses volition into even Willis’s machinelike matter. From the Wrst, the response to Pamela Wgured by a woman who can make herself blush—a woman who obviates the gross discrepancy of “Mind” and “Frame” through which Fielding rejects a servant’s claim to literary virtue—resides in the alternative content of Syrena Tricksy’s thoughts. For Syrena applies herself to a task that is both like and unlike the one retailed by the awkwardly counterfeiting Shamela. Sent out to service at the home of a kinswoman, Syrena writes to her mother of her role in her Wrst, still unconsummated, encounter with a “gentleman” who, like Mr. B, offers her “Stockings.” She justiWes her refusal of the gift as follows: I verily believed he loved me; but then, as it was a Passion of so late a Date, it might want a little Hope to give it Strength; and tho’ it was necessary I should seem coy, yet it should have been such a Coyness, as might give him room to fancy I might at last be won; and so have drawn him in by Degrees, till it was not in his power to go back. These ReXections kept me awake all Night. (17)

These are not “ReXections” about how to blush; rather, Syrena reXects upon how to command her already willed reXex in service of the only law still “necessary” to her: “I should seem coy.” But Syrena is not preoccupied by the demands of a performance of “Coyness” that would oppose her real desire. She instead spends all night reXecting upon how she will enact that very opposition. In remarking what he calls “the peculiarly textual nature of the heroine’s existence,” Lennard David makes an assessment of Pamela germane to Syrena’s night thoughts. Davis suggests that “Richardson’s textualization of experience requires that language replace, in a sense, reality. It is not simply that language becomes verisimilar, as we have seen was true of earlier novels, but that the narrative itself becomes an object in reality.”61 The “reality” assumed by Pamela’s language is ineluctably bound to her body—to her tears, to her trembling hand, and to the stops and starts whose urgency would show that her writing is unmediated by extrinsic contrivance. The “objects” that Pamela’s letters would become thus incarnate truth at the crucial instant of her reformed master’s proposal of marriage: at that instant, as we have seen, Pamela can ask only “What shall I say?” In this near proximity to the moment when her text will Wnally represent her knowledge of her passion, Pamela’s letters transmit the imminence of her discovery of her love. The slight lag of her signiWer after the intimation of what it already signiWes draws on Pamela’s still-mechanical person to render her desire to marry as disinterested as Mr. B’s. Shamela poorly apes the semiotics of feminine virtue and, in so doing,

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afWrms that its material litmus cannot be faked. According to the testimony of Anti-Pamela’s College of Physicians, however, this litmus no longer holds: Syrena’s practice of coyness is distinct from Shamela’s claim upon a lost body part. By being able simultaneously to seem chaste and as if “I might at last be won,” Syrena would be able, albeit on baser terms, to mimic the rigorous spontaneity of Pamela’s practice of reciprocation. Davis’s suggestion helps distinguish the literary-critical salience of Syrena’s effort: by planning in advance an “at last” whose contingency materializes as Pamela’s letters, she mimes a reality instantiated not as Pamela’s body but as Pamela’s text. This anti-Pamela simulates not the tokens of anatomical innocence but rather the mechanics of ingenuousness whose literary form would render them antithetical to anterior “ReXection.” Fantomina’s lady’s impersonation of the maid “Celia” helps isolate the critical novelty of Syrena’s performance of coyness. After following Beauplaisir to Bath, Celia, as yet unknown to him, enters into service at his lodging. He soon answers her expectations of “Amorous Violence”: Coming the next Morning to bring his Chocolate as he had ordered, he caught her by the pretty leg . . . then pulling her gently to him, asked her, how long she had been at Service? . . . and many other such Questions, beWtting one of the Degree she appeared to be . . . He compelled her to sit in his Lap; and gazing on her blushing Beauties . . . he soon lost the Power of containing himself.— — His wild Desires burst out in all his Words and Actions: he . . . swore he must enjoy her.62

This passage demonstrates two truisms that qualify pre-Richardsonian masters’ passion for their servants: unadulterated by any restraint, it is “wild”; and its sole principle of discrimination, other than the fact that Celia is “pretty,” resides in the fact that Beauplaisir has not yet enjoyed her. To win the “Solicitations” of the unreformed B(eauplaisir), then, Haywood’s heroine need embody only two criteria. She is pretty and, as far as her master can tell, she has not yet made him “weary.”63 Mr. B Wrst assaults Pamela because he also thinks his servant “very pretty.”64 Yet Pamela’s projected reconstitution as something other than Celia dictates the species of post-Richardsonian artiWce signaled by a statement Syrena makes to her mother early in her narrative: “how to carry myself, so as that my complying should not give too much Encouragement, employed my Thoughts the whole Day” (73). By Wlling her thoughts, as she does throughout Anti-Pamela, with reXections upon “how” virtuously to manifest “complying,” Syrena does not aim, like Fantomina, to impersonate another pretty body; nor does she aim, like Shamela, to embody a missing part. Haywood reWnes what can be called the literary-critical schematics of Syrena’s practice of compliance in the

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following dialogue with Mr. L——, the eldest son of the family with whom Syrena is next in service: [W]ere you ever try’d by one you loved?—with these Words he look’d full in my Face: (I saw his Drift was to Wnd out if I had any liking to him, and thought that to seem as if I had, would give him the greater Opinion of my Virtue, in so resolutely withstanding his Offers) so feigned to be in a great Confusion—trembled—set my Breasts a heaving—and in a faultering Voice cry’d, I don’t know what you call Love, Sir—but I am sure I could refuse giving up my Virtue to one that I would give my Life to oblige in any thing else. (84)

If the women projected by this passage nest, like textual Russian dolls, one inside the other, then what is most striking about Syrena’s revelation of artiWce is the lucidity with which it embeds her inside not only Pamela but also Shamela. Syrena’s outermost body, the body external to the printed page and perceived by Mr. L——, resembles Pamela, who trembles on the brink of comprehending that she feels “Love.” Her middle body, found in the print external to Syrena’s parentheses, then resembles that of Shamela. Here Syrena exactly iterates the exposition of mock reXex that would, for Fielding, constitute the real referent of Pamela’s letters—what is, for Fielding, Pamela’s deepest interior. But Haywood adds a still deeper interior, Xagged by the explanatory parentheses that Wnally coincide with the content of Syrena’s own “thought.” In this last pocket of text, Syrena choreographs the confusion of “liking” and “Virtue” that deWnes how Pamela ingenuously occupies both amorous and epistolary time. Haywood thereby represents an anti-Pamela whose deepest core is revealed neither as Willis’s orderly “series” nor as Fielding’s incontrovertibly ruined vartue but as Syrena’s capacity to immechanize Pamela’s ungovernable heart. By planning to mime not what Pamela is (again, for Fielding, vartuous) but how Pamela ingenuously complies, Syrena exploits the volatility of the romantic expedient selectively deployed by Richardson’s novel. Syrena’s success with a married “Mercer” (whose own “Inclinations,” Haywood interpolates in an especially graphic rewording of Locke, “by not being nipp’d in the Bud . . . extend themselves to the most dreadful and enormous Size,” 160) extends Anti-Pamela’s commentary on the novel’s localized appropriation of romance: Never had Syrena given a greater Proof, how perfect a Mistress she was in the Art of Dissimulation, than by the Amazement she put on at hearing him talk to her in the Language of a Lover—a half Resentment, and a half Compliance were blended with it, so as not to dash his Hopes too much, nor lessen herself with him by approving too easily of his Addresses. In Wne, she behaved in such a Fashion, as made him think her an Angel of Virtue, and at the same Time, a Woman not a little attached to him by a secret liking of his Person. (164)

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A crucial point of relay between the two halves of Haywood’s career occurs in the simultaneous novelty and redundancy of the phrase “a half Resentment, and a half Compliance,” which echoes the evocation of semi-reXexive amorous surrender repeated by Haywood in Fantomina, in The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity (1724), and in The Mercenary Lover; or, the Unfortunate Heiress (1726): “half yielding, half reluctant.”65 With the latter formula, Haywood poises imminently ruined amorous women on the hinge of the volitional and mechanical; imported into the domestic novel, the phrase permits Pamela to confuse contractual and natural obligation at the crucial moment of her “What shall I say?” But by making wholly volitional the “half” and “half” that enables Pamela’s plot, Syrena claims Pamela’s ingenuousness as the standard of an entirely willed “Art of Dissimulation.” In this light, Anti-Pamela’s most trenchant critique of the writing to the moment which substantiates Pamela’s transitively modernizing agency resides in its claim that, appropriated by Syrena as a gestural trope, the novel can happen ingenuously only once. Haywood repeats this suggestion when Syrena is offered the present of a “Wne India Cabinet” from a Mr. E——, who “had seen her in the Park” (267): [S]he call’d so much Tenderness into her Voice and Eyes, whenever she look’d upon him, or spoke to him; yet at the same time blended with it such an Innocence, as made him, while he Xatter’d himself with having inspired her with the softest Passion, imagine also, that she was asham’d of her own Thoughts, and was endeavouring all she could to suppress the rising Inclination: He fancy’d he saw in every Glance, Desire struggling with Modesty, and the sweet Contest, which he fancy’d he found there, so heighten’d the Idea of her Charms, that he look’d upon himself as the happiest Man alive. (268)

Syrena reXects back at this stranger Mr. B’s own, inarguably quite potent, irresistibility, whose force is augmented by her “Innocence.” The latter resides, again, not in crudely anatomical virtue but rather in Syrena’s extroversion of the “blended” halves of Pamela’s own “Thoughts.” By making perceptible a “sweet Contest” that would, according to Pamela, infallibly reference virtuous mental content, Syrena deWnes a new species of Booby: this is not a squire driven by lust to accept threadbare tokens of feminine chastity but rather a post-Richardsonian rake now excited by the perceptibility of passion “struggling” with virtue. AntiPamela claims as its “happiest Man alive” a reader whose desire is reWned not by his object’s conversion into the medium of mind but by her transformation of Pamela’s thoughts back into spectacle. Given Anti-Pamela’s assistance to the pleasure of literary rakes, it perhaps comes as no surprise that Syrena, unlike Shamela, does not end up married—indeed, in an interpolated disclaimer that signals her deepest

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refusal of Pamela’s plot, Syrena writes that “if I were a Woman of Fortune, I’d marry none of them” (58). Her physiology refuses the residual mechanism that, for another avatar of Pamela who is almost as total a mistress of reXex, compels the protagonist of John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–49) to differentiate “passive bodily effect” from the “rage of active delight” which functions to naturalize the conjugal power of the one lover who becomes her husband—a husband who thereby assumes “the sovereign authority which love had given him over me.”66 Syrena’s terminal failure to marry thus does not transpire, to recall Shamela, as her fall from poorly pretended innocence. When an old man who “desired nothing more than to make Syrena his Wife” (227) introduces her to his son, with whom she has previously engaged in “some Extravagancies” (231), the following encounter ensues: “the young Gentleman started back as if he seen a Gorgon, nor could the reality of that Fiction have been more shocking to him” (230). With Syrena’s apparition as “the reality of that Fiction” and not as the Wction of that reality, Anti-Pamela announces an event of epistemological crossing-over cognate with its protagonist’s confusion of the mechanical and the willed. Syrena’s downfall does not consist in the fact that, like Shamela, she inadvertently shows the unreality of the virtuous servant Pamela; instead, her perfectly volitional practice effects the “reality” of the novel Pamela. For, like Pamela’s own parents, Syrena’s mother has not neglected her daughter’s education. Upon hearing Syrena worry that she might appear “too rigidly honest” to stimulate her present master’s “amorous Inclinations,” Ann Tricksy rejoins: [H]ave not I instructed you how to play at fast and loose, as I call it, with the Men—sometimes kind, sometimes reserv’d.—Coy when they’re free, and Tender when they seem more cold; and all as if by Accident, and as if Design had not the least share in your Conduct? (191)

Here Ann Tricksy approximates Locke’s ingenuous education to the virtue of daughters who read Richardson: Syrena need only learn how to act like Pamela.

Becoming Politically Unconscious: Betsy Thoughtless The contradiction that, I will suggest, Haywood’s moralized protagonists resolve can be conveyed by a crisis of exemplarity whose diagnosis is not quite as obvious as its translation into an image would seem to promise. The image in question (Figure 1) is the frontispiece of Pierre Charron’s popular treatise De la Sagesse (1601), translated into English throughout the eighteenth century and contained, to remark its genealogical inXuence, in Locke’s library. Most notably, Charron illustrates the achievement

Figure 1. Frontispiece of Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, translated by George Stanhope (London, 1729). Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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of wisdom with a woman. Chained to the base of her pedestal are forces to which she would otherwise herself be enslaved: from left to right, pedantry, superstition, opinion (supported by a “vulgar” crowd), and, Wnally, passion, whose “meagre and discomposed Countenance,” Charron observes, “intimat[es] Disorder and Fury.” How does a woman represent freedom from “that Captivity of the Mind,” Charron states in the frontispiece’s accompanying gloss, “which all these Qualities bring Men under?”67 Yet the real impediment to this woman’s exemplarity resides not in the metaphysical or anatomical speciWcity of her difference from “Men” but rather in the moral mandate awaiting her a thousand pages after Charron’s inaugural image, the task of “complying with [her husband’s] Humours, and bringing over her own Inclinations to his . . . She should have no Design, no Passion, no Thought particular to herself.”68 In her novel of anti-coquettish reform The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), Haywood represents the deviation of moral practice deWned as the extirpation of wifely “Thought” from the ideal of masculine virtue laid down by Malebranche’s The Search After Truth, which offers the following formula for sin-resistant men: Before the Fall, the soul could erase the body’s images of bodily good that were too lively and make the sensible pleasure accompanying these images disappear. With the body under the mind’s dominance, the soul could instantaneously arrest the disturbance in the brain’s Wbers and the agitation of the spirits merely by considering its duty. But since the Fall this is no longer in its power.69

Malebranche offers a fantastically theologized reversal of the tendency of mechanistic physiology to reduce what is good to what feels good. Especially for Malebranche, an occasionalist theologian for whom God ceaselessly occupies every body to facilitate its linkage to its mind, the declension of morality into desire constitutes a speciWcally phenomenological problem: the agency of a God who occasions men’s ability to perceive is nonetheless itself imperceptible. Malebranche concedes that “we do not sensibly perceive our natural union with God . . . for He is and works with us in such a recondite and insensible way that we are unaware of Him. Our natural union with God, therefore, does not excite our love for Him.”70 A god who “does not excite our love for him” fails to move the physiology of whose galvanizing passion Malebranche writes that “the soul’s impulses toward the good are but impulses of love.”71 Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding restates this dilemma to qualify the inability of moral abstraction to “work” upon the faculty of desire, for “nothing will be in the mind as a present good . . . till it raises our desire . . . Till then the Idea in the mind of whatever good, is there only like . . . the object of bare unactive speculation; but operates not on the will, nor sets us on work.”72 The opposition of mechanically

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“bodily” good to “bare unactive speculation” is resolved, as we have seen, by the expedient of pedagogical training which adulterates masculine desire with temporal “suspence”:73 [T]here is a case wherein a Man is at Liberty in respect of willing, and that is the chusing of a remote Good as an end to be pursued. Here a Man may suspend the act of his choice from being determined for or against the thing proposed, till he has examined, whether it be really of a nature in it self and consequences to make him happy, or no.74

Here Locke imaginatively levels the phenomenological appeal of a drunkard’s present pleasure—“the idle chat of a soaking Club”—and the remote promise of “the joys of another life” held out by an imperceptible God. Men who successfully suspend the act of their choice, Locke contends, by “mak[ing] things or actions more or less pleasing to themselves”75 thus transform the material or physiological consistency of desire. No longer a mechanical necessity dictated by agitated brain Wbers, Lockean pleasure is susceptible to the change in density inaugurated by an educational program dedicated to the moral habituation of young boys. Lockean men who suspend their choice offer a postlapsarian variant of Malebranche’s vision of moral agents able instantaneously to arrest the disturbance of their nerves and animal spirits. Yet men who make actions more or less pleasing also serve the end whose efWcacy is discussed in Chapter 1: a boy’s ability to calibrate pleasure promises the concurrence of his desire with the law that he encounters when he enters the political sphere. Haywood retraces Locke’s developmental trajectory in Life’s Progress Through The Passions; or, the Adventures of Natura (1748), an account of masculine moral acculturation which, taking as its starting point Natura’s unalloyed “love of play,” reafWrms the sensory underpinnings of Lockean morality: “the worst passions are apt to get the better of the more noble, as the prospect they present is more alluring to the eye of sense: all men . . . being born with the same propensities, it is virtue alone, or in other words, a strict morality, which prevents them from actuating alike in all.”76 In Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736), the representative of Haywood’s anti-Walpolean utopia Oozoff afWrms the identity of volitional self-government and disinterested political virtue, because “those who know how to command their Passions, who make the Happiness of Mankind their Care . . . are with us the Great Men.”77 A moral practice that dissolves the imminence of pleasure clearly deWnes the anti-exemplarity of the Wgure of the coquette. Indeed, Haywood begins Betsy Thoughtless by providing an aggressively Lockean diagnosis of the coquettish “inadvertency”78 easily identiWed as a deWning case of feminine moral laxity:

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[Betsy] was not of a humour to give herself much pains in examining, or weighing in the balance of judgment, the merit of the arguments she heard urged, whether for or against any point whatsoever. She had a great deal of wit, but was too volatile for reXection, and as a ship, without sufWcient ballast, is tossed about at the pleasure of every wind that blows, so was she hurried thro’ the ocean of life, just as each predominant passion directed. (31–32)

Betsy’s susceptibility to “each predominant passion” dictates the punishing and redundant logic of her marital fate: after the independent heiress loses her morally impeccable suitor Trueworth to a bland anticoquette, she marries the devious Xatterer Munden, who, metamorphosed into a brutal husband, forces her into an “Egyptian bondage” (501).79 When he and Trueworth’s wife both conveniently die, the chastened Betsy sees “the errors of her past conduct, in their true light” (577). Because her stoic endurance of her Wrst husband’s “tyranny” (590) has amply realized the “opportunity of showing the command she had over herself” (610), Betsy proves by her acquisition of Lockean self-mastery that she is ready to marry the man whose Trueworth she can now perceive—“a happiness,” Haywood concludes, “retarded only till she had render’d herself wholly worthy of receiving it” (634).80 The lack of “ballast” that renders Betsy prototypically vulnerable to the present pleasure of masculine Xattery explains her failure to achieve, as George R. Rousseau neatly puts it, “Locke’s integration of ethics and physiology.”81 Indeed, Betsy’s marriage to a man, Haywood states, who “took pleasure in giving pain to her” (509) exploits the remedial misery generated by Munden’s “splenetic and barbarous” (509) domestic government—under which “the only relief,” Haywood stipulates, “was in patiently submitting” (504). Having “determined to be entirely passive in this affair” (524), Betsy “performed” so well, Haywood asserts, that she “left [her husband] no room to accuse her of the least failure in what might be expected from the best of wives” (531). It is Betsy’s painful, “entirely passive” submission which anchors the irreversibility of the fact, parenthetically inserted by Haywood into the last sentence of this novel, that her coquette is “fully corrected” (634). Yet Betsy’s manifestation of correction deviates widely not only from Lockean men’s achievement of moralized pleasure but from the directives laid out in Haywood’s conduct book The Wife, which isolates as wifely virtue’s litmus a single, precisely opposing, criterion. Haywood’s conduct-book wife is exemplary not because she obeys passively but because she obeys cheerfully: She may be chaste, —temperate, —discreet, —a lover of home, —a good oeconomist, —an affectionate wife, —a careful mother: —in Wne, may perform all the duties of her station with the utmost exactness; yet if what she does be not accompanied with chearfulness, she will deprive herself of half the praises she deserves.82

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In this instance of Haywood’s deepest agreement with Richardson’s elaboration, as we saw in Chapter 3, of the necessity of Mrs. B’s happy practice, cheer constitutes an epistemological standard reciprocally geared to satisfy Haywood’s model husband, who in The Husband enjoins his spouse: “spare nothing that may contribute to chear your spirits; —this is all the proof I shall ever exact of your obedience as a wife.”83 By specifying cheer as the only “proof” which reciprocally good husbands would ever have to “exact” from their wives, Haywood approximates the reconciliation of masculine virtue and pleasure that ratiWes the legitimacy of Locke’s contractarian power: to the same end, a wife’s “Chearfulness” would, Haywood repeats, “testif[y] she takes a pleasure in obliging.”84 And yet, to recall the plot of Betsy Thoughtless, Haywood’s wife might well Wnd herself governed by a painfully splenetic husband. For Malebranchean and Lockean men, the constitutive dilemma of postlapsarian morality entails the restoration of sensory urgency to a good now imperceptible to the mechanistic sensorium, a dilemma recapitulated by David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature with the observation: “’Tis seldom men heartily love what lies at a distance from them . . . our passions do not readily follow the determination of our judgment.”85 Haywood’s The Wife deWnes a starkly divergent difWculty indicated by the salve it offers fruitlessly obliging wives. Of husbands unmoved by cheer, Haywood explains: Some men have such a plenitude of Wery particles in their composition, that the least triXe which contradicts their present humour sets them in a blaze;— they will roar,—they will stamp,—they will say the most violent things;—but then these turbulent emotions are seldom of any long continuance;—a wife therefore must be very imprudent who makes any efforts to stem the torrent at its height. . . . [I]t is therefore best for a person who is obliged to be within reach of it, to be entirely passive . . . The overXowing of the gall,—a melancholy wind running through the veins,—any obstruction of the heart, the liver, or secretory vessels, may occasion such a restlessness thro’ the whole frame as must render it impossible for the person affected with it to preserve an equanimity of behaviour; and though himself is ignorant of what he feels, can no more throw it off than he could a Wt of gout or any other disease.86

This intractably mechanical rationale for husbands’ bad temper—or, more to the point, unpleasing domestic authority—poses a formidable barrier to the “perpetual chearfulness”87 that vindicates the moral performance of wives. Here Haywood accommodates only to husbands both Willis’s hydraulics and Hume’s assessment of humor’s stubbornness: “it being almost impossible for the mind . . . to cure itself of a passionate or splenetic temper, when they are natural to it.”88 Because Haywood’s conduct book reconstitutes “splenetic and barbarous” domestic power

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as a mechanized effect of “Wery particles” whose reform is, she and Hume repeat, “impossible,” The Wife and Betsy Thoughtless offer opposing characterizations of the government that dictates wives’ entire passivity. On the one hand, Munden Wgures the political anachronism shorthandedly repudiated as “Egyptian bondage,” an iteration of Locke’s contractarian indictment of paternal absolutism as “Egyptian tyranny”;89 on the other, he suffers from an insolubly medical “restlessness thro’ the whole frame” that demands in response only more wifely fortitude. A form of conjugal authority that, by claiming the incorrigibility of “gout,” renders useless the “practice [of] any softening arts she had been advised to win her lordly tyrant into temper” (506–7) is clearly instrumental to Betsy’s plot. Not only does her Wrst husband teach the coquettish Betsy to desire the remote promise of postmarital benevolence; he also determines the gentler power of Betsy’s second husband, whose own need to exact nothing more from Betsy than cheer is assured by the tyranny that corrects her in advance. Yet rather than redeeming lordly tyranny as the moralizing antidote to coquettish wives, Haywood’s complementary conduct book The Husband enjoins husbands to make obedience pleasing, for “it is not the design of these pages to inform a husband how far it is in his power to have his will obey’d, but how it may be obey’d without creating trouble and distraction in his family.”90 By applying to husbands the modernizing litmus “how it may be obey’d”— and by ostentatiously refusing to query “how far” conjugal authority “is in his power”—Haywood’s conduct book reiterates the Lockean precept that galvanizes the free practice of ingenuous sons: a “slavish discipline makes a slavish temper.”91 Haywood’s The Husband condemns men who “imagine they have a right not only to command, but to expect a blind, implicit, and indeed a slavish obedience from their wives”;92 Haywood’s novel takes recourse in the very form of “severity” which, Locke’s Thoughts warns fathers who exploit the “pains and pleasures of the body,” threatens to replace a son’s “present unruly distemper” with “a worse and more dangerous disease by breaking the mind”: “in the place of a disorderly young fellow, you have a low spirited, moped creature.”93 This directive marks the crucial turn in Locke’s claim for the freely acted autonomy of ingenuous men’s virtue. Betsy’s Wnally moralized person, however, mirrors the equivocal determination of conjugal power that is both terminally gouty and prone to reform: she is broken and then, impossibly, resurrected. Unlike Locke’s indelibly broken boy, Betsy animates mutually exclusive species of political virtue: the Wrst entirely passive and the next cheerfully obedient—or, rather, the Wrst “moped” and the next ingenuous. Betsy is, in this respect, not unlike the protagonist of Haywood’s Fantomina; to

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recover from the moralizing necessity of a tyrannical husband, she materializes as two entirely distinct kinds of wives. Like Locke’s boy, Haywood’s conduct-book wives, The Husband promises, “will do many things through love which they would never be subjected to thro’ fear.”94 But Betsy’s tardy conversion into a Lockean moral agent requires the supplemental assistance of an incorrigibly “Egyptian” tyrant. Needless to say, this wife’s belated approximation of ingenuousness renders strictly provisional an achievement of painless moral practice that remains contingent upon the volume of “Wery particles” harbored by would-be tyrants. Seen from this vantage, the obstacle to exemplarity communicated by Charron’s frontispiece does not reside in the fact that his avatar of wisdom occupies a woman’s body. Nor does it reside in the fact that coquettes like Betsy crave the present pleasure of Xattery. Rather, what precludes Betsy’s resemblance to a Lockean man is the fact that becoming a wife might entail becoming the object of domestic power which, composed of gall, Wery particles, and melancholy humor, is not remote enough to be reclaimed as pleasingly moralizing good. What physiological magic permits a broken wife’s redemption? Haywood’s paired conduct books advance no distinct answer. Together, The Wife and The Husband aim to reconstitute “imperious and arbitrary” 95 authority as the cheerful compliance of its subject; despite the imperviousness of “turbulent” husbands to softening, The Wife reiterates the reWnement of transitively modernizing agency advanced by Mr. B’s demand that even a “Princess” “must have lessen’d, not aggravated, my Failings . . . she must have watch’d and study’d my Temper.” 96 Haywood repeats: [W]hen once they come to live together, a thousand little incidents, impossible to be enumerated, will every day, almost every hour, present her with opportunities of shewing her readiness to oblige him,—none of which she should on any account let slip. That she may Wnd no difWculty in this, I would have her, from the Wrst moment of her marriage,—nay, from the Wrst moment she resolves to be his wife . . . to be studiously attentive to his humour . . . and thus, by foreknowing what will please him, she will have it in her power to prevent any injunction he might take into his head to lay upon her, and even to anticipate his very wishes.97

Rather than just a will to submit, wifely “readiness” promises a reform of conjugal power which requires her to acquire foreknowledge. By avoiding the necessity of her husband’s “injunction,” his wife dissolves the vagaries of masculine humor into, presumably, an unbroken spell of postsplenetic authority. What disrupts The Wife’s promise is not the time, as we have seen of Pamela, required for a wife to assume anterior knowledge after her husband has, ideally only once, commanded it. Instead, the modernizing

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agency of Haywood’s wife is derailed by the irritable propensity of the men represented by The Husband: I am pretty conWdent that the disobedience so much complain’d of in wives is, in a great measure, if not chieXy, owing to the too great authority assum’d by the husband.—I have known a man Wnd fault with his wife for doing the very things he wanted to have done, merely because she had not waited to receive his commands for that purpose.98

To the studiously attentive wife who achieves semi-reXexive foreknowledge, Haywood opposes a man who is irked precisely because she has thus circumvented his show of authority. This dilemma is registered by her books’ representation of, respectively, a wife who “will nevertheless have a satisfaction within herself in a consciousness of having deserv’d better treatment”99 and a husband who is somehow cured of his “arbitrary and authoritative way of proceeding.”100 This pair reXect the insoluble mismatch of an ingenuously subject wife and a husband peeved by the very alacrity that would modernize him. Haywood acknowledges her conduct books’ lack of Wt when she remarks in The Wife : [T]he greatest part of my female readers . . . may also farther add, that no husband has a right to expect from his wife those proofs of complaisance which she never receives from him. . . . I would only have the women remember, that it is not the intent of these pages to make a perfect husband, but a perfect wife.101

And yet a “perfect” husband does not appear in the complementary pages where Haywood promises to locate him. Betsy Thoughtless indeed exploits this very failure, because Betsy’s virtue is produced by her detour through a scene of terminally splenetic government cured, precisely, only by Munden’s death. How is Betsy saved from being irreversibly broken? Finally, the very etiology of her Xaw facilitates Haywood’s guarantee of her resilience. Betsy’s lack of ballast now ensures that she will forget her difference from a pleasantly moralized boy: She was, indeed, of a humour the most perfectly happy for herself that could be . . . —On any real cause, either for grief or anger, that happened to her, no body, it is certain, felt them with a more poignant sensibility; —but then she was affected with them but a short time. —The turbulent passions could obtain no residence in her mind, and on the Wrst approaches of their opposite emotions entirely vanished, as if they had never been. —The arrows of afXiction, of what kind soever they were, but slightly glanced upon her heart, not pierced it, much less were able to make any lasting impression there. (455)

Both The Wife and Betsy Thoughtless concede the insusceptibility of gouty force to wifely cheer. But if this impediment to wives’ painless moral practice cannot be cured, it can, in violation of Lockean law, make no

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“lasting impression.” What must “entirely vanish” from Betsy’s thought is the Wery conjugal authority still embodied, as we have seen, even by Mr. B.

“She was Made to Say She Loved”: Jenny Jessamy’s Dispassionate Passion To discourage her reader from governing “as if he meant to enforce obedience,” Haywood’s The Husband invokes the perceptibility of politically regressive power even to wives: “it is not to be wonder’d at if a woman, on such a behaviour, does not begin to call into question the lawfulness of his authority, and look upon him rather as her tyrant than her rightful sovereign.”102 The Husband defends the logic of this complaint by appealing to the indifference of Cartesian passion to sex: “No one is more sensible of the duty of a wife than myself; and I believe those who shall read my admonitions to the ladies on that score, will not accuse me of any partiality to the sex:—they must be allow’d to have their passions as well as the men, and why should it be expected that they are better able to subdue them?” 103 Wives who “have their passions as well as the men” signal the persistence of Astell’s feminist physiology into not only Haywood’s amorous hydraulics but also her domestic novel. Yet Haywood does not consistently refer to passions that are equally hard for wives “as well as the men” to govern; under the heading of Parties of Pleasure, how far a Wife ought to be indulged in them, she grants husbands the following license: “The least a man can do, is doubtless to take very sparingly those pleasures or amusements which he refuses to his wife . . . for there are some peculiar to the men, and which no prudent woman will desire to share.” 104 In an obvious departure from unsexed urgency of desire elaborated by her amorous Wction, Haywood’s speciWcation of pleasures “peculiar to the men” would seem to rationalize the double standard which those plots so insistently decry. It is the paradox Wgured by women who have passions as well as the men, but who, after marriage, would evince no “desire to share,” that Haywood’s The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753) imaginatively resolves. To do so, however, the novel does not innovate the expedient of sexed modesty; rather, it works directly on Jenny Jessamy’s brain. In this sense, Haywood is true to the logic of Astell’s feminist physiology, because Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy engineers its protagonist’s lack of desire by returning to a scene of infantile habituation granted the capacity not to feminize but rather to wife-ize a woman who would otherwise “have [her] passions as well as” her absentee husband. What most strikes the reader about Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy’s plot is the profundity of its confusion of love and duty—a confusion so complete

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that these cousins’ will to marry precedes the impressions that would lend empirical signiWcance to that verb. Of the paternal determination of Jemmy and Jenny’s future union, Haywood explains: [A]ll imaginable care was taken to excite in the children a mutual affection for each other, and to make the name of love familiar to them long before they knew what was meant by the words, much less could have any notion of the passion . . . Jemmy, who had four years the advantage of Jenny, was taught to call her his little wife, even while in her cradle, and Jenny no sooner began to speak than she was made to say she loved her husband Jemmy in her heart.105

Buttressing the Lockean induction of “mutual affection” which assures the conversion of extrinsic duty into “a kind of second nature in them to love each other” (1: 4) is an equally striking peculiarity of Jenny’s constitution: she is, Haywood states, able “to love without anxiety, and glad as she was whenever she saw the object of her passion, was never angry or unhappy when she saw him not” (1: 183). Thus conWgured as “of a different complexion from the generality of her sex” (1: 183), Jenny, Haywood afWrms, “had not the least tincture of jealousy in her composition” (1: 224). One rationale for Jenny’s difference from “the generality of her sex” is provided by Willis, whose anatomy of the brain is not limited to his attempt to regionalize mechanical motion. Willis also, remarkably, provides an anatomy of human freedom, for, of the brain “cells” that compartmentalize sensory experience, he writes: [M]anifold convolutions and infoldings of the brain are required for these divers manners of ordinations of the animal Spirits, to wit, that in these Cells or Store-houses severally placed, might be kept the species of sensible things, and as occasion serves, may be taken from thence. Hence these folds or rollings about are far more and greater in a man than in any other living Creature . . . they are garnished with an uncertain, and as it were fortuitous series, that the exercises of the animal Function might be free and changeable, and not determined to one. Those Gyrations or Turnings about in four footed beasts are fewer, and in some, as in a Cat, they are found to be in a certain Wgure and order: wherefore this Brute thinks on, or remembers scarce any thing but what the instincts and needs of Nature suggest. In the lesser four-footed beasts, also in Fowls and Fishes, the superWcies of the brain being plain and even, wants all cranklings and turnings about . . . for that in such, distinct Cells, and parted one from another, are wanting, in which the divers Species and Ideas of things are kept apart.106

For Willis, freedom can be rationalized: it inheres in the distinctness, fortuitousness, and quantity of “cranklings and turnings about” that constitute the anatomical foundation of men’s “free and changeable” disposition. This paradoxically mechanistic explanation of indeterminacy ultimately squares with the opposition later taken as axiomatic by Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion—“That Freedom and

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Liberty of choosing or refusing which we Wnd in our selves is altogether inconsistent with Mechanism”107—because the infrastructure of Cheyne’s freedom of choice resides in Willis’s proliferation of “folds or rollings.” But I wish to pause at Willis’s more evocatively literal anatomy of freedom as the number of discrete “Cells” in the human brain to ask the following, also literal, question: if a superXuity of folds or rollings assures the open-endedness of men’s narrative future, then how might the novel qualify the brains of women whose own destinies are more resolutely “determined”? Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy posits as the condition of Jenny’s preternatural ability to tolerate a sexed dispensation of pleasure not innately feminized modesty but, again quite literally, a brain which magically tranquilizes the hell of amorous betrayal. Like that of Willis’s cat, Jenny’s brain “wants all [the] cranklings and turnings about” that would, speciWcally, store memories to trigger the mechanical unhappiness of pent-up amorous duress. She instead occupies a state of feline insensibility that threatens to rob this novel of any pretense to a plot, for her “different complexion” and her Lockean habituation render Jenny— “who knew very well that [Jemmy] convers’d freely with the ladies” (1: 232)—able to tolerate the novel’s lengthy exposition of her Wancé’s absences, “transient amours” (1: 152; 2: 98), “little frailties” (1: 126), and “merely casual” (1: 99) sexual indulgences. This plot admits one deviation. Upon her receipt of a misdirected letter to Jemmy’s mistress—a letter whose admissibly casual intentions Jenny cannot clearly discern—Jenny does turn into a palpably betrayed object. She is moved by the evidence of Jemmy’s inWdelity as follows: Grief and indignation in the Wrst moments were absorbed in wild astonishment, convulsions seiz’d her breast,—her brain grew giddy,—her eyes dazzled, while attempting to look over again some passages in this fatal letter, and her whole frame being agitated with emotions too violent for nature to sustain, she fell back in the chair where she was sitting, and every function ceas’d its operation. (2: 54–55)

For the Wrst and only time in this novel, Jenny’s “whole frame” is shaken by passion unadulterated by anterior habituation. Yet Haywood activates Jenny’s singular moment of unalloyed “emotion” not to afWrm the physiological depth of even unjealous women’s Wdelity but rather to signal the gravity of the crisis posed to a process of infantile training that has produced a future wife who, according to Jemmy, does not “stand in need of the least rectiWcation” (1: 172). Jenny’s suddenly “giddy” brain threatens to undo the particularizing education that prepares her to tolerate a poorly moralized husband. Like Betsy’s broken spirits, Jenny’s “wild astonishment” portends a state of mind characterized, The Husband warns, by its irreversibility:

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Yet all this [husbandly penitence] would not avail to restore to her breast the tranquility she enjoy’d before;—she would be always in fear that what had once been, might be again;—every little absence would give her pain;—imagination is very strong in that sex, especially when enXam’d with the least spark of jealousy.108

Jemmy’s letter would seem to anticipate the generic reversal of Haywood’s novel to the iteration of amorous “torment” of “mind” modeled by her Love-Letters on All Occasions (1730): “Oh God! when I begin to reXect, so many Proofs of your Unkindness crowd on my tortur’d Mind, that I could wish for Madness, Stupidity or any Thing that would ease me of the pain of Thought.—’Tis insupportable!”109 How can Haywood reclaim the agitated Jenny from a terminal “pain of Thought” that would reverse the success of “my father’s care in training me up to love where interest and convenience would accompany my passion” (3: 176)? What permits Jenny’s recovery as a perjured but untormented Wancée is the very inadvertency that Haywood now cites for its beneWts to constant women: [A]s to his having enter’d into an affair of gallantry, she had too plain a proof of that under his own hand to admit the least room for doubt . . . Upon the whole, however, few young ladies in her circumstances would have suffer’d less inquietude . . . Neither grief nor anger had the power to affect her long, or to drive her to any excesses while they lasted, a humour extremely volatile, —a great deal of good nature, and an equal share of understanding, were happily united in her composition, and made her always ready to believe the best, and to forgive the worst. (2: 192–93)

Here we reach the post-hydraulic variant of Fantomina’s resolution of the dilemma of rakish betrayal. Because her brain lacks the cells whose capacity to retain memories of masculine incontinence is otherwise amply proven by Haywood’s amorous Wction, Jenny is “happily” able to sustain a torment of mind otherwise assuaged only by “Madness, Stupidity,” insensibility, or, as we have seen, Fantomina’s adoption of successive bodies. The mental “composition” that assures Jenny’s imperviousness to premarital torment dictates as the remainder of this plot a series of happily sustained “disappointment[s]” (3: 195) whose narration is cut off with the event of her marriage. By representing the physiology of a pre- and postmarital brain able to defer the mechanical and literary inevitability asserted by Fantomina, this novel advances three, equally uneasy resolutions of its own marital, moral, and generic future. The Wrst is conveyed in Jenny’s request that her husband henceforth insulate her from the shock of “too plain a proof”: “all I desire is, that when we marry you will either have no

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amours, or be more cautious in concealing them” (3: 58). The second has already been sealed by the enforced confusion of passion and habit, now expressly cited by Jenny for the salutary conversion of love into “practice”: “Love for each other, my dear Jemmy, was the Wrst lesson taught us in our most early years, and I have been too long accustomed to the practice, to be capable of swerving from it” (3: 106). The novel’s third resolution requires slightly longer exposition; Haywood repeats the central metaphysical tenet of Richardsonian morality only after Jenny has shown her capacity to tolerate her Wancé’s unrevised susceptibility to “the baits of sense” (1: 109): How preferable are the enjoyments of the mind to those of the body! Persons of a truly delicate way of thinking Wnd a much greater pleasure in their own contemplations . . . than those of less reWned ideas are capable of tasting in the utmost gratiWcation of the senses. Our amiable Jenny felt a more perfect satisfaction in the proof she had received of her lover’s affection, and in that she had just shewn of her own for him, than she had ever known when with him. (3: 121)

The “proof” in question has transpired in letters: Jemmy wills his estate to Jenny; she immediately writes a will returning it to him (3: 114–17). This abstraction of affection’s positive proof—or, in other words, of the “perfect satisfaction” Jenny derives from it—usefully extends her future husband’s inconstancy, because the virtuous “enjoyments” of Jenny’s “mind” thereby accommodate the pleasures of Jemmy’s absent “body.” In sustaining a plot which exchanges infantile training for romantic impression, Jemmy and Jenny’s “almost imperceptible glow of a pure affection” (3: 108) guarantees the durability of a marriage that transmits a husband’s pleasure to the wife who is not, at the time, “with him.” It is not claiming too much for Betsy Thoughtless and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy to suggest that they elaborate the moral, physiological, and political difWculties of the attempt imaginatively to reconWgure a person able to tolerate her brutal or faithless husband. Indeed, by imagining the mechanical revisions that facilitate wives’ virtue, Haywood articulates the latter practice as the physiological exception required to sustain a persistently unpleasing medium of conjugal power. We might locate the continuity of her amorous Wction and her domestic novels, then, in a postmarital person whose whole frame registers the discrepancy between wifely virtue and Lockean morality’s pleasures. My next chapter turns to the paradox framed by a novel that tries to divest women’s domestic virtue of the generic assistance of romance.

Chapter 5

Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance Ingenuous Subjection and Genre

Arabella’s “Sublime Language” and the Anti-Romantic Novel The following passage from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) amply conveys this novel’s sense of its generic mandate. Lennox’s protagonist Arabella, left motherless in the country with her reclusive father, has devoted her childhood to reading “a great Store of Romances . . . not in the original French, but very bad Translations.”1 At The Female Quixote’s midpoint, when Arabella is seventeen, she receives a love letter written in the same idiom from her mercenary, mock-chivalric suitor Sir George. Upon reading the extravagant missive, Arabella’s cousin and Sir George’s rival Mr. Glanville masks his laughter by feigning disgust at the letter’s failure correctly to reference Arabella: [E]very line increasing his strong Inclination to laugh, when he came to the pathetic Wish, that her fair Eyes might shed some Tears upon [Sir George’s] Tomb, no longer able to keep his assumed Gravity, he threw down the Letter in a counterfeited Rage. Curse the stupid Fellow! cried he, is he mad, to call the Wnest Black Eyes in the Universe, fair. Ah! Cousin, said he to Arabella, he must be little acquainted with the InXuence of your Eyes, since he can so egregiously mistake their Colour. And it is very plain, replied Arabella, that you are little acquainted with the sublime Language in which he writes, since you Wnd Fault with an Epithet, which marks the Beauty, not the Colour, of those Eyes he praises; for, in Wne, Fair is as indifferently applied, as well to Black and Brown Eyes, as to Light and Blue ones . . . [Sir George] has very happily expressed himself, since therein he has the Sanction of those great Historians, who wrote the Histories of Lovers he seems to imitate, as well in his Actions as Stile. (188)

This exchange rehearses Don Quixote’s dominant concern and, in quixotizing not the eyes that see a world of objects but the eyes that objectify themselves, feminizes it. The overarching fear remains the same: that the real, transformed by romance into a referent, will become susceptible to the inXuence of the signiWer. In a reversal of the Lockean scenario whereby the infant mind is “imprinted by external Things . . . long

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before it has the use of Words,”2 the text absorbed by Arabella as a child determines the truth of even the most irreducibly material thing, her own body, subordinating it to a “Stile” that renders “indifferent” the egregious discrepancy of black and blue. Because she reads as “Historians” writers who confuse empirical color and literary style, Arabella constitutes herself as an amorous object for one hundred percent of the men whom she encounters (as opposed to the Wfty percent who would presumably get this “Epithet” right). She thus solicits the diagnosis of romantic incontinence made by Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673): Those amorous Passions, which ’tis their [romance narratives’] design to paint to the utmost Life, are apt to insinuate themselves into their unwary Readers, and by an unhappy inversion a Copy shall produce an Original. When a poor young Creature shall read there of some triumphant Beauty, that has I know not how many captiv’d Knights prostrate at her feet, she will probably be tempted to think it a Wne thing . . . and then her business will be to spread her nets, lay her toils to catch somebody who will more fatally ensnare her.3

In Wtting her eyes to the terms of Sir George’s letter, Arabella indeed becomes the “Original” retroactively produced by his “Copy.” But it is harder to ascribe to her the duplicity that Allestree takes as juvenile romance reading’s more ominous fallout; rather than a coquettish attempt to spread her nets, Arabella’s belief in the truth of Sir George’s epithet shows her inability to resist interpellation by his “sublime Language.” This is not a case of coquettishness but an epistemological handicap Wnally resolved by the corrective implicit in Glanville’s reaction to her letter: at the end of The Female Quixote, Arabella recovers the “free Use of all her noble Powers of Reason” (382), a recovery that afWrms as her standard of reality a feminine “Life [which] may be passed without a single Occurrence that can cause much Surprize, or produce any unexpected Consequence of great Importance” (379). This life substitutes for romance the nodal points of agreement with parental commands glossed by a model woman the second half of whose plot Arabella will, by the novel’s close, also occupy: “[W]hen I tell you . . . that I was born and christen’d, had a useful and proper Education, receiv’d the Addresses of my Lord—through the Recommendation of my Parents, and marry’d him with their Consents and my own Inclination . . . I have told you all the material Passages of my Life” (327). For many present-day readers, the fact that Arabella’s romantic delusion terminates in this life has deWned The Female Quixote’s role in the rise of the novel. Margaret Anne Doody makes the following representative assessment: “We can posit an almost exact date signaling the new Realism’s usurpation of the major realms of prose Wction. Charlotte

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Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) records this moment.”4 Like Doody, Laurie Langbauer takes Lennox’s anti-romance at its word as the text of literary history, as itself the sign of the retreat of romance into “a lost realm, an illusory female heritage [that the novel] can never forget and never retrace.”5 For these and for many other commentators, The Female Quixote’s closing substitution of reason for style marks an exchange that leaves no literary-historical remainder, the exchange of romance for a novel with “no real place for women.”6 Despite the eye scene’s appeal to the remedial powers of fact, this chapter takes Doody’s claim for the usurpation of romance by realism as something of a red herring. I instead suggest that Lennox’s novel negotiates the generic implications of the paradox recapitulated, as we have seen, by Carole Pateman, according to whom a politically retrograde form of masculine sex-right persists into contractual modernity under cover of the marriage contract. The term sex-right designates a God-given or natural masculine prerogative over women that in a postpatriarchal world cannot be exercised indiscriminately but, as Thomas Salmon states in A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage (1724), is ratiWed by those women who choose to become wives: [T]he Superiority [of man over woman] seems to be given by the positive Command of God, upon the Fall, in that Text, Thy Desire shall be to thy Husband, and he shall rule over thee. Nor is that Right of the Man’s now so indefeasible, but we see the laws of Kingdoms, or particular Compacts, may restrain or alter it. And no Man can say that this or that particular Woman is subject to him, until she has made her self so by Compact.7

The power of the modernizing discourse of contract to support men’s biblical conjugal prerogative inaugurates the paradox that Pateman calls “fraternal patriarchy.” Because a wife “makes her self” subject, defusing the arbitrariness of the masculine sex-right that her contractual assent nonetheless operates to sustain, Pateman takes as deWnitive of contractarian modernity the following contradiction: “Modern contractuality both denies and presupposes women’s freedom.”8 As I suggest in Chapter 4, Eliza Haywood implicates this paradox in the physiological expedients required painlessly to moralize wives; to imagine how Arabella makes herself subject despite her failure to acquire a “useful and proper Education,” Lennox supplements her novel with the vestige of romance, her plot suggests, still necessary to effect a novelistic daughter’s ingenuous assent. To suggest that The Female Quixote projects the generic consequences of a contractual modernity that “both denies and presupposes women’s freedom” is to undertake a recapitulation of Lennox’s plot distinct from Doody’s claim for the displacement of romance by the novel. According

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to Doody and Langbauer, the latter event entails Arabella’s surrender of “individual power, the will unchecked and omnipotent”9 to a reality that makes her “forgo her own control of the world, renounce narrative power, and submit to the role of object of the paternal authority which also claims the name of reason.”10 Yet The Female Quixote does not simply reiterate the rationale for anti-romance whose least common denominator François Fénelon voices in his 1687 Traité de l’education des Wlles: “How [the nouvelle-reader] will hate to descend from this romance to the sordid details of housekeeping!”11 The feminist resonance of Lennox’s own literary-historical plot resides not in its zero-sum replacement of omnipotence by servility but in its difWcult motivation of a protagonist who, given the task of making herself subject, cannot relinquish the assistance of romance. Lennox’s effort to purge her heroine of romantic passion will leave the novel unable to motivate the signal event of Arabella’s recovery, her spontaneous choice of the man whom her father has already willed her to marry. To recast the novel’s repudiation of romance as Lennox’s inability to specify what Wnally moves her heroine’s heart, I place The Female Quixote alongside the mechanistic scheme of affective causality exempliWed by René Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649). With this juxtaposition, I aim to revise the coordinates that deWne our account of the novel’s departure from romance, a departure that, according to Michael McKeon, replaces the immanence of divine meaning in the world with “an explicit and strenuously argued dualism.” This rift between the signiWer and its truth deWnes the rise of the novel, McKeon states, as the “transformation from metaphysics and theology to epistemology”; the novel “emerge[s] under the conditions of epistemological and historiographical self-consciousness that characterize the modern period.”12 Arabella and Glanville’s competing readings of the word “fair” encapsulate this literary-historical shift “to epistemology”; and, as we will see, Lennox’s attempt to settle the word’s meaning in Glanville’s favor cannot entirely eliminate a Cartesian physics of amorous cause and effect from her novel. Lennox’s inability to expurgate romance from the very novel which declares its antipathy to irrational passion might compel a dialectical feminist history reminiscent of McKeon’s “dialectical theory of genre,”13 an account of the implication of romance and novel required by a marriage plot that both denies and presupposes Arabella’s freedom. Such an account attempts to coordinate our post-Lukácsian, postWattian history of the novel and its evolving feminist history,14 for nowhere does Maximillian E. Novak’s recent bemused statement—“I cannot believe that we are condemned to separate male and female versions of the rise of the novel”15—signify with greater force than in the disjunction

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of a Marxist or materialist history of genre from which The Female Quixote remains absent and a feminist history in which the same text plays a pivotal role.16 Reconciling these histories requires not simply that we insert Lennox’s text into the former, but that we consider the power of modern political contradiction to install romance at the heart of even the most stridently novelistic body.

Incarnating Descartes: Arabella’s Materialism René Descartes’s explanation of affective cause and effect explains the material continuity of internal passion and “external signs” such as “actions of the eyes and face, changes in color, trembling, languor, fainting, laughter, tears, groans, and sighs.”17 To suggest that Descartes theorizes the readability of the body before the novel’s turn “to epistemology” is also to suggest that the Cartesian person provides a hermeneutic central to our grasp of Arabella’s delusion. Indeed, Descartes’s external signs make up a world of somatic legibility whose “visible Marks” (47) Arabella, one hundred years later, vainly seeks. In coaching a servant who must relay her “History” to Sir George, Arabella dictates romance as the unsifted sum of those marks: “relate exactly every Change of my Countenance; number all my Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale, Glances, Pauses, Full-stops, Interruptions; the Rise and Falling of my Voice; every Motion of my Eyes; and every Gesture which I have used for these Ten Years past” (121–22). But Arabella’s effort to perceive in lovestruck men “Fever” (23), “awful Tremblings” (32), “Deluge[s] of Tears” (113), and “Signs of Contrition” like “los[ing] their colour” (47) and becoming “thinner and paler” (23) does not simply parody the anachronistic semiotics of the person that embellish seventeenth-century heroic romance. External signs are only the most risible reminder of a mechanics of corporeal feeling whose implications for Arabella can be sounded in Descartes’s attempt “to explain the Passions [not] as an Orator, or even as a moral Philosopher, but only as a Physicist.”18 Descartes’s most comprehensive Wgure for mental activity situates its inaugurating disturbance outside the body: “the least thing that moves the part of the body where the end of any of [the nerves] is attached thereby makes the part of the brain it comes from move, in the same way in which, when we pull one end of a cord, we make the other move.”19 Here, movement in the brain is induced, Descartes repeats in his Treatise of Man (1662), “just as, pulling one end of a cord, one simultaneously rings a bell which hangs at the opposite end.”20 But if a pulled cord asserts the self-evidently reXexive process whereby the outside world agitates a person’s inside, then it is movement in the reverse direction—from

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inside the brain to the body’s outer ends—that ampliWes the relation of Cartesian physics to romance. With the following plot, Descartes illustrates the brain’s power to move the body: If someone were suddenly to thrust his hand near our eyes as if to strike us, even though we know that he is our friend, that he is doing this only in jest, and that he will be very careful not to injure us, it would nevertheless be hard for us to keep from closing them. This shows that it is not by the mediation of the soul that they close, since it is against our volition—which is [the soul’s] only or at least its principal action—but that it is because the machine of our body is so composed that the movement of that hand toward our eyes excites another movement in our brain, which guides animal spirits into the muscles that make the eyelids lower.21

Most remarkable in this collapse of striking and seeing is the irreversibility of the causal sequence Wgured by Descartes’s cord. To show how the brain governs the body, Descartes does not change the direction of that cord’s animating pull; instead, he repeats the same order of events, locating their beginning not at the body’s outer extremities but in far more intimate and confusing proximity to the brain. His exhaustively preemptive rationale for why, despite their owners’ countervailing volition, these eyelids close accommodates even “another movement in our brain” to the model of perceptual reXex. Even knowledge of the future, even the impossible guarantee that what will hurt will not, fails to alter a sequence of events entailed by a “machine of our body” which incorporates mind itself. This passage helps qualify the features of the romantic person not only because in it Descartes reduces volition to a faculty preempted by the mechanical movement of both body and brain but also because it so strikingly conXates mental movement and perception: as Descartes’s hypothetical blink indicates, even actions that would seem to begin on the inside of the body claim their real origin at its exterior. Indeed, passion claims the power to move people not because it closely resembles perception but because it too is a species of perception, as Descartes states: “This reason [why the soul cannot readily alter or check its passions] is that they are almost all accompanied by some excitation taking place in the heart, and consequently also throughout the blood and the spirits, so that until this excitation has ceased they remain present to our thought, in the same way as objects capable of being sensed are present to it while they are acting on our sense organs.”22 For Descartes, passions “may also be named sensations, because they are received into the soul in the same manner as the objects of the external senses”;23 like the friend’s mock slap, they admit the mediating inXuence of volition only after their motion has “ceased”—only after such inXuence

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ceases to matter.24 The mechanics of materialist passion thereby dictate a consequence crucial to narrative, because they refute the following logic of affective cause and effect: external object → [mental] representation → passion → bodily change. This chronology places passion in advance of the bodily change that passion would provoke; Descartes reverses the order of those events to deWne passion as bodily change: external object → [mental] representation → bodily change → passion.25 Rather than distinguishing bodily movement and passion—as we have seen, Descartes equates them—the second sequence might more usefully be read to stress the priority of affective motion over the remote and tardy powers of a body’s will. This insubstantial volition cannot alter the movement of the animal spirits, the most “rareWed” and “Wnest parts of the blood” that nonetheless remain, Descartes states, “nothing but bodies.”26 One of Arabella’s primary sources, to which she refers throughout The Female Quixote, is Madeleine de Scudéry’s 1643 heroic romance Artamenes; ou Le Grand Cyrus (translated into “bad” English in the same year). The following passage from the English illustrates one narrative repercussion of materialist passion’s priority over the belated action of the will. Here de Scudéry evokes her hero Artamenes’ reXections upon his Wrst sight of the princess Mandana: He was continually expostulating with himself what it was which thus troubled him, not well knowing whether it was Love or no: What kinde of torment (said he to himself) is this which I endure? From whence proceeds this restlessness of minde? If the sight of the fairest Angel upon earth, be the cause, then am I the most miserable man alive? Yet methinks such beautifull Objects should not infuse any Passions but delight and joy: How comes it to pass then that the Fairest Prospect which ever eye beheld, should cause my sorrow? I know not (said he) whether I should think it Love, or whether some worse humour? But what is it I would have? or what is it I can have? Alas, alas, I neither know what I would, or what I can have; and hence comes all my misfortunes and my sorrows.27

If materialist physics stress the superXuity of volition to feeling’s more urgent movement, then the narrative effect of that distinction is evident in Artamenes’ bewildered “expostulations” on the love that has happened to him. The likeness of passion and perception propels a coincidence of sight and love that precludes interruption as surely as the Cartesian person’s Xinch; a friend’s slap dictates as unavoidable a reaction as the feeling that Artemenes has, in Descartes’s terms, “received into [his] soul.”28 In response to passion triggered directly by “Objects,” what Wlls Artemenes’ thoughts is not the torment of unrequited love but the torment of trying to grasp a passion that is not yet wholly his.

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De Scudéry thus dilates as romantic “misery” a lag that remains implicit in the Cartesian scheme: the temporal lag between the passion that the soul receives and its understanding by the hero who, like Artamenes, does not yet “know” it, between the immanence of passion’s mechanics and the effort of some still-alienated “minde” to know “But what is it I would have? or what is it I can have?” If Artamenes occupies a certain epistemological gap, the gap between the mechanical excitation of his animal spirits and the bafXed cogito that does not yet understand “from whence [my restlessness] proceeds,” then this reWnement of mechanism is not visible from the outside. For Artamenes is one of the heroes whom Arabella cites to stipulate the amorous retentiveness of her suitors, and her shortened gloss of the romance plot conWdently retails the progress of masculine passion: A Lover should never have the Presumption to declare his Passion to his Mistress . . . [H]e must struggle with the Violence of his Passion, till it has cast him into a Fever. His Physicians must give him over, pronouncing his Distemper incurable, since the Cause of it being in his Mind, all their Art is incapable of removing it. Thus he must suffer, rejoicing at the Approach of Death, which will free him from all his Torments . . . At length, when he has but a few Hours to live, his Mistress, with many Signs of Compassion, conjures him to tell her the Cause of his Despair . . . [He] acknowledges his Passion with the utmost Contrition for having offended her; bidding her take the small Remainder of his Life to expiate his Crime; and Wnishes his Discourse by falling into a Swoon. (284)

Arabella’s faith in the physical constancy of masculine passion generates the same inXection of plot that characterizes Artamenes: what matters to this plot is not what his passion does to her but what it does to him. De Scudéry alienates passion from masculine knowledge; Arabella lists the steps leading to what might be called passion’s next fatality, because at the end of romance love claims as its “Remainder” men’s wholly motionless bodies. Descartes provides the following rationale for the retentive suitor’s demise: Love so engrosses the soul with the consideration of the object loved that . . . [if] one imagines that it is impossible then to do anything useful to that end, all the agitation of Desire remains in the brain, without passing into the nerves at all, and being entirely employed in strengthening the idea of the desired object there, it leaves the rest of the body languishing.29

The power of love to engross the soul violates the materialist tenet pronounced by Epicurus and repeated by Descartes, which corporealizes the soul by rendering it coextensive with the entire body: “the soul is truly joined to the whole body, and . . . one cannot properly say that it is in any one of its parts to the exclusion of the others, because [the body] is one, and in a way indivisible.”30 If this indivisible body is also

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indivisibly soul, then restricting its animating movement to the brain divests all a suitor’s other parts of life. As Arabella stipulates, that remainder languishes in a state of inanition that is, of course, the materialist and the romantic equivalent of death. Arabella’s materialism—her insistence that love consume whole men— deWnes much of the comedy of The Female Quixote as the inability of her suitors properly to swoon, languish, and almost die. Indeed, when Glanville is “a little elevated with . . . wine” Arabella, “not perceiv[ing] the Condition he was in” (124), applauds drunkenness as the eighteenthcentury novel’s best approximation of romance; when, overcome with annoyance at his cousin’s “Foible” (58), Glanville’s “ill Humour was so visible in his Face,” Arabella mistakes properly novelistic semiotics for his “Excess of Despair” (116) at her romantic rigor. Yet Lennox does not cite Arabella’s requirements simply to spoof the absurdity of romantic physics. Lennox also refutes materialism’s indivisibly passionate body by representing that body as political anachronism, equating the empirical impossibility of wholly loving men with the founding prohibition of social contract theory. This is a deWning moment in her novel, because Lennox thus advances an anti-romantic vision of the contractarian person whose features would, perhaps, qualify both men and future wives. Arabella’s cousin and would-be husband Glanville hopes to cure her of her delusion by teaching her post-absolutist physics. To do so, he informs Arabella that a man whom she has rejected is not, despite the laws that govern her own standard of narrative “Probability” (73), in danger of imminent death: ’Tis impossible, Sir, reply’d Arabella, according to the Nature of Things, ’tis impossible but he must already be very near Death—You know the Rigour of my Sentence, you know— I know, Madam, said Mr. Glanville, that Mr. Selvin does not think himself under a Necessity of obeying your Sentence; and has the Impudence to question your Authority . . . My Authority, Sir, said Arabella strangely surpriz’d, is founded upon the absolute Power he has given me over him. He denies that, Madame, said Glanville, and says that he neither can give, nor you exercise an absolute Power over him; since you are both accountable to the King, whose Subjects you are, and both restrain’d by the Laws under whose Sanction you live. Arabella’s apparent Confusion at these Words [gave] Mr. Glanville Hopes that he had fallen upon a proper Method to cure her of her strange Notions. (320)

To debunk Arabella’s claim that her suitor Selvin has “given” her absolute power over him, Glanville cites Locke’s argument for the impossibility of such a gift: “no Body can transfer to another more power than he has in himself; and no body has an absolute Arbitrary Power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own Life, or take away the Life

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or Property of another. A Man . . . cannot subject himself to the Arbitrary Power of another.”31 Selvin cannot pledge absolute submission to Arabella because, Locke and Glanville argue, he inalienably possesses himself. In a formula that seals Locke’s equation of biological and political life, the Bible’s injunction against self-murder proscribes this willful act of political suicide. For Locke, even royalist patriarchalists—and, in the case of Selvin, even chivalric suitors—cannot relinquish the “Power” of which they so urgently desire to be dispossessed. Alternatively, de Scudéry’s hero Artamenes would embody the Hobbesian person whose contractual assent is sustained not only by his fear of other individuals but, Hobbes’s Leviathan suggests, by the sensory impression of his sovereign’s near-unimpeachable power, an impression that threatens to level political subjection and the quintessentially romantic reXex analogized by the state of being, Hobbes claims, “in love.”32 In one indication of the materialist body’s amenability to a passionate derivation of political obligation, Hobbes’s claim for the sensory sway of “sovereign power” “revered,” On the Citizen (1643) argues, by its subjects “as a kind of visible deity”33 is exempted from the wholly volitional consistency of moral choice otherwise endorsed by Nicolas Malebranche: “it is always advantageous to the body’s welfare for the imagination to humble itself when perceiving sensible grandeur and for it to give external indication of its internal veneration and submission. This occurs naturally and mechanically, with the will having no role and often in spite of its resistance.”34 Likewise, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87) imagines the infallibility of political deference as its narrator’s testimony to the appeal of a king whose “eyes have in ’em something so Werce, so Majestick.”35 Passionate mechanism that operates in advance of a subject’s will to obey would, clearly, render moot the Lockean argument that a man “cannot subject himself” to a power that reXexively hobbles his deliberative—or regicidal—intentions. The power of Behn’s king’s “eyes” is theorized by Thomas Willis, whose Anatomy of the Brain (1681) concedes of Descartes’s smallest particles that “in the Brain and Nerves, neither the rushings on or impressions, viz. the Animal Spirits themselves, nor their tracts or footsteps, can any ways be seen. Wherefore to explicate the uses of the Brain, seems as difWcult a task as to paint the Soul.”36 Yet through the mediation of the “Pathetical” nerve, a romantic person’s eyes make her mental movements perceptible: [T]he Eyes do so clearly shew the Affections of the Mind, as Sadness, Anger, Hatred, Love, and other perturbations, that those who are affected, though they should dissemble, cannot hide the feeling and intimate conceptions of the mind. Without doubt these so happen, because the animal Spirits, tending this way and that way . . . do at once strike those Nerves as the strings of a Harp.

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Wherefore from this kind of conjecture which we have made concerning the use of these Nerves, we have called them Pathetical.37

Eliza Haywood’s The Unequal ConXict; or, Nature Triumphant (1725) compresses the anatomy of Willis’s eye into a presumption of the legibility of passion’s “mute language” assured enough to indict the “lover” as “stupidly dull, who waits the language of the tongue to inform him of his power.”38 In her amorous Wction, Haywood grants Willis’s pathetical nerves the power to propel mute narrative: “returning her glances with others as languishing, as the most melting longing love cou’d teach the loveliest eyes in the world, they continued, for some moments, thus transmitting souls.”39 Lennox’s Wrst novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1750), also cites “the language of transport, [the] sweet unintelligible discourse, which the soft melting eloquence of his eyes were only able to explain”; in this novel, “the soft language of [the] eyes” constitutes “a sort of eloquence in love” whose epistemological force trumps merely verbal self-restraint to compel “those dear enchanting eyes [to] confess.”40 Harriot Stuart endorses the equation of true love and “involuntary transport” by inserting a poem “On reading Hutchinson on the Passions” (on Francis Hutcheson’s An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections [1728]), which accuses his “philosophy” of equating moral practice and “calm of thought” to engender persons, the poem concludes, “Whose souls by love or hate were ne’er possest . . . Serenely stupid.”41 By lampooning the moralizing but “stupid” calm that produces women whose “eyes . . . not animated with any thing but motion, could more properly be said to see than look,”42 Harriot Stuart would seem sympathetically to anticipate the exception to the novel conveyed in Arabella’s own effort to “decypher . . . Thoughts” (123). For Harriot, at least, the irresistible sway of sight extends well into adulthood. Yet Willis’s student Locke restricts the instrumentality of a face that “clearly shew[s] the Affections of the Mind” to the assurance that it gives fathers who, forced in the last instance to whip their sons, will be able to see “the impressions of it on the mind . . . legible in the face, voice, and submission of the child . . . melting in true sorrow under it.”43 By preventing an excess of parental force, the legibility of a Lockean son’s “true sorrow” enables the unbroken but virtuous boys whose ingenuous practice repudiates the passionate necessity of Hobbesian men’s subjection. Romance’s strictly limited utility to contractarian political theory resides, for Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education, in its assistance to the anti-Filmerian parent who could not otherwise presume to recognize the instant when his “blows . . . reach the mind and you perceive the signs of a true sorrow, shame, and purpose of obedience.”44

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By invoking the Lockean refutation of “Arbitrary Power” Wrst assisted by the perceptibility of an internally penitent son’s “signs,” Glanville seems to underscore Arabella’s departure from a still romantic protagonist who is, Harriot coquettishly declares, “a most arbitrary monarch.”45 Yet if Glanville rejects Arabella’s pretense to resemble Harriot, he cannot reciprocally invest Arabella with a Lockean man’s claim to occupy the suggestion that “you are both accountable to the King . . . and are both restrain’d by the Laws.” By citing the likeness of “both” Arabella and her suitor to citizens, Glanville ignores the failure of Locke’s Two Treatises consistently to afWrm that identity; he overlooks Arabella’s future obligation not to her king but, Locke clearly stipulates, to a husband whose title to wifely “Subjection” claims “a Foundation in Nature” exempt from the legitimizing necessity of freely acted assent.46 Arabella’s response to Glanville’s argument thus corrects his misrepresentation, if not of her amorous present, then of her domestic future, because she replies: “Love requires a more unlimited Obedience from its Slaves, than any other Monarch can expect from his Subjects; an Obedience which is circumscrib’d by no Laws whatever, and dependent upon nothing but itself” (321). Whereas Glanville cites Locke, Arabella cites Mary Astell; an “unlimited Obedience” exempt from public law recalls not just Artamenes’ embodiment of romantic physics but Astell’s equation of slavery and marriage. Whereas Glanville claims that political “Laws” dissolve Arabella’s pretense to arbitrary inXuence, Astell’s ReXections upon Marriage asserts the immunity of the domestic sphere to precisely this species of reform: “For Covenants between Husband and Wife, like Laws in an Arbitrary Government, are of little Force, the Will of the Sovereign is All in All.”47 Restricted to men, the opposition of absolutist tyranny and postabsolutist covenant masks what Pateman, as we have seen, designates contractarian modernity’s signal paradox, the equivocation of natural subjection and contractual assent that characterizes “Obedience” Arabella will owe not as a would-be romantic person but rather as a fraternal patriarchal wife. Indeed, by citing a refutation of arbitrary power activated by Locke’s free agents, Glanville exposes the fact that, to become a wife, Arabella must surrender the very faculty that Lockean men are constitutionally unable to forfeit. To the degree that she fails to resemble a Lockean citizen, then, Arabella might still be a romantic person. Against our contemporary emphasis on literary history’s uneven but unilateral departure from a romantic episteme—a departure that, following Lukács and Watt, aligns the history of the novel with the history of the individual—the object of domestic power theorized by Astell opposes the reverse trajectory, whereby nominally contractual women who become naturally subject wives do somehow “transfer to another more power than he has in himself.”

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But Glanville’s inattention to contractarian political theory’s domestic limits does not, The Female Quixote makes clear, implicate him in the Xagrant abuse of conjugal power; rather, the novel implicates Arabella in the dissimulation of that power. For if Arabella, as Glanville insists, cannot wield absolute sovereignty, then neither can she be treated like its object. Because Glanville envisions Arabella’s “cure” as her future likeness to a Lockean person, he cannot countenance coercion like that exerted by Arabella’s father, the Marquis, who urges her to wed Glanville himself in the following manner: I’ll hear no more . . . of your foolish and ridiculous Objections: What Stuff is this you talk of? What Service am I to expect from my Nephew? And by what Sufferings is he to merit your Esteem? . . . I perceive you have no real Objection to make to him; therefore I expect you will endeavor to obey me without Reluctance; for, since you seem to be so little acquainted with what will most conduce to your own Happiness, you must not think it strange, if I insist upon directing your Choice in the most important Business of your Life. (42)

Arabella’s father rejects the entirety of Lennox’s novel as “foolish and ridiculous Objections”; by making Cartesian requirements immaterial, her father’s adjudication of the “real” aligns Arabella’s happiness with his command. This is an endpoint of the domestic novel as noxious as Fénelon’s sordid details of housekeeping. By projecting as the outcome of anti-romance the lack of “Reluctance” with which daughters exorcised of amorous illusion obey their fathers, the Marquis Xouts Glanville’s Lockean pretenses, transforming Arabella’s future sanction of the marriage contract into an obviously forced act. Such a tradeoff of romance for reality is no tradeoff at all; by exchanging the arbitrary inXuence of passion with his equally arbitrary command, Arabella’s father recalls a moment when Allestree’s The Ladies Calling deviates from the promise of ingenuous subjection elsewhere envisioned by that text: “’tis most agreeable to . . . make Marriage an act rather of their obedience than their choice.”48 If the Marquis’s command threatens to convert anti-romance into a novelistic dead end, then Lennox has already rejected the only permutation of plot that might lend this scenario interest. The aspiration of her protagonist to “heroic Disobedience” is accompanied by commentary freighted with more than Lennox’s usual urgency: What Lady in Romance ever married the Man that was chose for her? In those Cases the Remonstrances of a Parent are called Persecutions; obstinate Resistance, Constancy and Courage; and an Aptitude to dislike the Person proposed to them, a noble Freedom of Mind which disdains to love or hate by the Caprice of others. (27)

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By equating Arabella’s resistance to the man her father has chosen with an undiscriminating mode of romantic obstinacy, Lennox rejects Arabella’s claim to something that might resemble possessive individualism. By glossing her novel’s solitary representation of deliberately resistant feminine intention as the deludedness of Arabella’s appeal to “Freedom,” Lennox indicts the “Aptitude to dislike” that would, for Glanville, inversely approximate Arabella’s political modernity. Arabella’s projected escape from “a tyrannical Exertion of parental Authority, and the secret Machinations of a Lover, whose aim was to take away her Liberty, either by obliging her to marry him, or by making her a Prisoner” (35) anticipates the crux of the literary-historical dilemma which this novel attempts to resolve: if Lennox cannot sanction her protagonist’s projected act of “heroic” disobedience, neither can she dismiss Arabella’s refusal to love on command solely as a romance reader’s hypertrophied fantasy of persecution. Lennox stresses the superXuity of her heroine’s imagined disobedience to a novelistic world in which lovers do not take prisoners. For this moment at least, her deWnition of resistance as just another romantic symptom obscures a contradiction whose generative difWculty is far more subtle than unadulterated patriarchal tyranny. For if Lennox can easily burlesque the irrelevance of the latter to Arabella’s situation, she has a harder time specifying the kind of feminine amorous “Aptitude” that would presumably move her protagonist in its place. The complexity of the latter effort is intimated later in the novel, during an exchange taking place after Arabella’s father has died. Here, Glanville and his own father, who is now Arabella’s guardian, deWne their attenuated relation to the command that the Marquis has left in his will. Glanville’s father begins: But . . . when [Arabella] shall know, that her Father has bequeathed you [Glanville] one Third of his Estate, provided she don’t marry you, ’tis probable her Mind may change; and you may depend upon it . . . that, as I am her Guardian, I shall press her to perform the Marquis’s Will. Ah! Sir, resumed Mr. Glanville, never attempt to lay any Constraint upon my Cousin in an Affair of this Nature: Permit me to tell you, it would be an Abuse of the Marquis’s generous ConWdence, and what I would never submit to. Nay, nay, said the old Gentleman, you have no Reason to fear any Compulsion from me . . . my Niece is quite her own Mistress in that Respect; for tho’ she is directed to consult me in her Choice of an Husband, yet my Consent is not absolutely necessary. The Marquis has certainly had a great Opinion of his Daughter’s Prudence; and I hope, she will prove herself worthy of it by her Conduct. (64–65)

Glanville is disturbed by the specter of paternal “Compulsion,” by the fact that Arabella’s father’s will implicates him in a conservation of patrimony

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forced through the aristocratic expedient of cousin marriage.49 Thus one might expect him to defend Arabella’s freedom to return his love. Yet this defense is oddly framed; rather than decrying the incentive that impinges on Arabella’s exercise of choice, Glanville asserts the difference of his father’s proposed imposition of “Constraint” from the “generous ConWdence” of her own father the Marquis. Glanville’s father threatens to “Abuse” that conWdence only by too strenuously pressing the command that the Marquis himself has issued; reciprocally, Arabella promises to vindicate her father’s “great Opinion” not simply by obeying him but by appropriating his choice as her own. At stake in this exchange, then, is not Arabella’s freedom to choose a husband but Glanville’s desire that she ingenuously choose (him). For although her uncle opposes unbounded choice (“my Niece is quite her own Mistress in that Respect”) and open coercion (“I shall press her”), that opposition fails to communicate Glanville’s ambivalent claim upon one-third’s-worth of paternal force. The fact that Arabella stands to lose a third of the estate that she, her father’s sole heir, can preserve intact only by marrying his brother’s son comically quantiWes Glanville’s effort to defuse this conservative mandate: Arabella exercises feminine choice that is, at best, two-thirds free. Rather than using her freedom to marry whomever she wants, Arabella must convert her father’s “Compulsion” into her own unforced “Prudence.” Might this dissimulation of her father’s will signal the intractability not of romantic delusion but, rather, her future husband’s power? In 1752, the challenge facing Lennox is not the demystiWcation of romance, an operation whose success is preemptively resolved by her own novel’s title as well as by the degraded status of “the machines and expedients of the heroic romance” taken for granted by Samuel Johnson’s Rambler 4 (1750).50 The more insoluble challenge resides in Lennox’s effort to specify an aptitude for anti-romantic assent not already determined by the arbitrary imperative of cousin marriage laid down by Arabella’s father. How, then, does Arabella pick Granville and dissolve that fraction of paternal force from which he so uneasily stands to beneWt? How, to repeat Salmon’s Critical Essay Concerning Marriage, can Arabella make herself subject, if her choice of the right man transpires only as an effect of her father’s command? Lennox mediates between novelistic impossibilities—between romantic and paternal tyranny—by recourse to the very physics she has repudiated. Indeed, that repudiation has transpired most forcefully through Arabella herself, who cannot always instantiate passion. Just as materialist physics fail to govern postromantic men, sometimes Arabella’s own body cannot perform. Sometimes that body refuses to faint, as at the moment Arabella fancies herself lost to a ravisher:

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[She] fell back in her Chair in a Swoon, or something she took for a Swoon, for she was persuaded it could happen no otherwise; since all Ladies in the same Circumstances are terrify’d into a fainting Fit, and seldom recover till they are conveniently carried away; and when they awake, Wnd themselves many Miles off in the Power of their Ravisher. (300)

Here we reach the limit of Arabella’s tireless effort to act like romance’s referent, because an infelicity enforced by her own body holds open the distinction between “a Swoon” and “something she took for a Swoon.” The Cartesian physics that would move Arabella’s suitors is exposed as impossible prescription by Arabella’s own failure to embody it. ReXex’s resistance to imitation constitutes it, at this moment, as an inXexibly antiromantic piece of the real, distinct from Arabella’s performance of such things as an “exalted” (54) or “majestic Tone” (93). Ironically, the very integrity of romantic mechanism dooms Arabella’s postromantic attempt to repeat it. It is worth marking our arrival at a deWning anxiety of Lennox’s own epistemological and novelistic moment. If the Cartesian person in whom soul cannot be localized lacks that insubstantial zone interiority, then Lennox cites the capacity of “conveniently” fainting bodies to host some deeper, wilier interior under cover of the automatic motion that would preclude it. This collusion of mechanistic and volitional faculties would, as we have seen in Haywood’s Anti-Pamela, render feminine reXex in particular prone to the insinuation of some species of dissimulating will. Haywood’s Syrena Tricksy most acutely stresses the possibility of mutually mechanical and textual inauthenticity broached by Pamela; Lennox’s intermittently coquettish Harriot also mimics the ingenuousness of Pamela’s agency by faking the opposition of love and modesty: “The tone in which I pronounced these words, convinced [my lover] that I strove, under the appearance of raillery, to hide the confusion which my weakness, in not being able to keep my resolution, must necessarily cause.”51 By suggesting that swoons and other somatic devices conveniently, and not “necessarily,” facilitate women’s ruin, Lennox shorthandedly afWrms the irreversibility of Anti-Pamela’s suspicion of feminine mechanism. With the assistance of Pamela, Arabella’s swoon is among the signiWers implicated in the novel’s turn “to epistemology.” Lennox’s thoroughly contemporary indictment of women’s fainting Wts would seem to group them with such hopelessly romantic expedients as the word “fair.” Yet it is this apparently debased mode of somatic response which Wnally compels Arabella to embrace the terms of her father’s will. Not long after her anti-romantic body refuses to approximate Cartesian passion, Arabella reacts to a false account of Glanville’s inconstancy as follows:

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Our charming Heroine, ignorant till now of the true State of her Heart, was surpriz’d to Wnd it assaulted at once by all the Passions which attend disappointed Love. Grief, Rage, Jealousy, and Despair made so cruel a War in her gentle Bosom, that unable either to express or to conceal the strong Emotions with which she was agitated, she gave Way to a violent Burst of Tears. (349)

If in the swooning scene Arabella’s person cannot obey romantic directives, then here that same person lends itself to fraternal patriarchal directives.52 For what stresses the latter mandate if not Lennox’s recourse to the passion that, just as it did Artamenes, suddenly assaults Arabella’s “surpriz’d” heart with the revelation that she loves the man whom her father has chosen for her? As in the case of Artamenes, Arabella’s plot is effected by the alienability of this passion: now, the revelation of the previously “ignorant” Arabella’s love facilitates her spontaneous assent to a prearranged marriage. Because the sensation that impinges on her soul immunizes Arabella’s discovery of her love from any taint of paternal coercion, romantic mechanism solves the problem generated by the very aggressiveness of Lennox’s anti-romance. Her designation “Our charming Heroine” Xags the literary-historical irony of this resolution. Ultimately, Lennox can claim her protagonist as a postromantic agent only after Arabella’s “strong Emotions” have both forwarded and obfuscated her plot’s most conservative ends. In this paradox I read Lennox’s articulation of the generic difWculty with which women make themselves subject in the domestic novel. Yet it would be hasty to accuse Lennox of refusing to expose the pains of a truly anti-romantic world, a world in which Arabella’s choice of her fraternal cousin would resist representation as the conXuence of willed duty and spontaneous passion. For anti-romance that Xatly refuses to convert duty into love, we must return to Astell’s ReXections. Instead, Lennox’s closing compromise—a Wnally reasonable heroine who harbors a homeopathic dose of romance—lays bare the contradiction claimed by Lennox to characterize her own novelistic moment. This is a moment, again, that would deWne a daughter’s choice of husband as two-thirds free. Rather than afWrming the stark opposition of Descartes’s chronology to its generic reversal, as this is recapitulated by Hannah Woolley’s Gentlewomans Companion (1675)—“Now the difference betwixt a wise and a wild love is this; The one ever deliberates before it loves; and the other loves before it deliberates”53—Lennox afWrms the necessity of passion’s assistance to a plot whose protagonist’s simultaneously free and unfree choice of her cousin cannot be catalyzed by strictly novelistic means. As we have seen of Richardson’s Pamela, which itself exploits Pamela’s treacherous heart to confuse the voluntary and the not, we can read The Female Quixote not as the stark opposition of romance and novel but as

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a revelation of the continued reliance of the latter upon the political resources of the former. For only the love that Arabella abruptly discovers transforms the persistent arbitrariness of her father’s command into the arbitrariness of her own persistently romantic heart. Arabella is thus neither romantic nor anti-romantic but, impossibly, both: she embodies one resolution of contractual modernity’s marriage plot.

The Female Quixote and Feminist Literary History Lennox’s difWcult motivation of an assent to marry that is only two-thirds free might revise a history of the novel that dictates the expulsion of romance from the novelistic subject’s discursive person, a history that tends to take the political signiWcance of the domestic novel as its afWrmation of a newly transparent or sentimentalized medium of conjugal power.54 The Female Quixote instead refutes a literary-historical narrative that, after Watt, tends to stress the rupture of the “bourgeois” novel from the “aristocratic” romance, because Lennox’s domestic plot instead retains a trace of romantic mechanism as a function, precisely, of its contractarian political moment.55 In what follows, I suggest that Arabella’s still-romantic heart might also compel us to reconsider The Female Quixote’s place in feminist literary history.56 In assessing the persistence of passion in The Female Quixote, I aim to dislodge Arabella from the opposition of romantic feminine power to novelistic patriarchal tyranny. Certainly, the physics of mechanistic love belie the equation of romance—in which these physics are elaborated as narrative—and the unchecked will ascribed to the romantic heroine by readers such as Doody and Langbauer. For, as we have seen, volition is the very aptitude foreclosed by the collapse of passion and sensation that effects Arabella’s surprised heart. Indeed, Langbauer does note the peculiarly extrinsic, obviously formulaic logic of romantic progress charted in de Scudéry’s celebrated map of love, the Carte de Tendre (Figure 2).57 As Joan DeJean observes, the Carte de Tendre, which is found in de Scudéry’s Clélie (1654), graphically translates passion’s mechanics into the species of constrained play characterizing many games: “Scudéry’s map is an ancestor of board games such as Monopoly.”58 Yet at the same time that Langbauer notes the likeness of Scudéry’s “game of love”59 to the ex-centricity of a symbolic order that activates a person’s interior only from the outside—as Jacques Lacan puts it, “the signiWer enters the signiWed”60—Langbauer reads the romantic requirements invoked by Arabella as a symptom of her proneness to “repetition compulsion.”61 Such an etiology sits oddly with the fact that the laws governing not only Arabella’s disease but also her cure come from the outside, because this cure transpires through Lennox’s own, Wnally salutary, repetition of

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romance. The closing recourse of The Female Quixote to the agency of romance marks its commentary on an authority whose power to dictate Arabella’s choice cannot be defused by novelistic means. In a twist that turns anti-romance on its head, the signiWer that has so lamentably entered the body of its signiWed Wnally operates in service of the Name of the Father himself: now embodying the agency of romance, Arabella’s heart compels her to marry her father’s brother’s son.62 If, according to recent readers, Arabella’s effort to embody Cartesian reXex marks a “daring bid for personal power,”63 “female power,”64 or “individual power,”65 then the anti-romantic redress apparently conveyed in the form of Lennox’s novel inversely acquires a coherent repressive agenda. As we have seen, Margaret Doody, who deWnes the usurping form prescriptive realism as “a kind of ideology,”66 admits no ambivalence in summarizing its Wnal effect: “Arabella now forgoes her own control of the world, renounces narrative power, and submits to the role of object.”67 Janet Todd also reads Lennox to implicate The Female Quixote in the purely prescriptive enforcement of women’s reality: “Instead [the

Figure 2. Carte de Tendre, in Madeleine de Scudéry, Clelia, an Excellent New Romance . . . Written in French by the exquisite pen of Monsieur de Scudery (London, 1678). Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago.

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female novel] will serve as conduct book, colluding with the new ideology of femininity and teaching the sentimental image of womanhood.” 68 Yet this stark antagonism of romantic power (if Monopoly players do indeed “control the world”) and novelistic defeat obscures Lennox’s representation of the generic paradox embodied by a protagonist who, to mitigate the deWning omission of social contract theory, is neither free nor constrained, but both. Here one can appreciate anew McKeon’s proviso that “genres are contingent,”69 for rather than the advent of a form whose unilaterally repressive apparition occurs solely in feminist literary history, Lennox’s novel represents the contradictory Wgure of a woman who, in the instant of Cartesian passion that fuses her duty and her choice, is free enough to make herself subject. In juxtaposing The Female Quixote and the mechanics of passion that it almost repudiates, I aim to avoid Wnding in its recapitulation of literary history a protagonist whose romantic delusion is identical to her will to transgress, a protagonist Wnally and totally surrendered to the novel’s patriarchal future. Instead, The Female Quixote deWnes as an epistemological and a generic impasse the task of converting Arabella’s Wlial duty into her unforced choice. Lennox’s rendering of this contradiction thus frustrates the authorial intention lent her by Patricia Meyer Spacks: “Arabella’s plots, like Lennox’s, challenge the status quo yet Wnally succumb to it.”70 This opposition of “subversive desire”71 and the status quo ascribes to Lennox the inevitability of a failure that might sound familiar, a failure whose major change is rung as follows: “Arabella’s struggle is really the author’s.”72 That a recognizably subversive but preemptively thwarted intention has become the dominant Wgure for eighteenthcentury women’s writing (for Spacks, both “Arabella’s” and “Lennox’s”) signals the promise of a dialectical feminist awareness of The Female Quixote’s representation of anti-romance as epistemological and generic contradiction. Arabella might be neither an avatar of recognizably feminist resistance nor, Wnally, patriarchy’s inevitably passive object; The Female Quixote’s recapitulation of anti-romance instead exposes the insolubility of the impasse deWning a novelistic woman who must extrovert as free choice the imperative that she marry her cousin. By activating the modernizing agency of Arabella’s ingenuous subjection only with the help of romance, Lennox underscores the necessity of an exception whose magnitude might itself surprise the heart of contemporary literary history.

Chapter 6

Frances Sheridan’s “disingenuous girl” Ingenuous Subjection and Epistolary Form

Moral Sense Philosophy and the Instrumentality of Feminine Pleasure In An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699; revised 1711), Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, reverses the genealogy of the “civil state or public” laid out by his tutor, John Locke, to imagine the geneticizing force of an education designed to “lead men into that path which afterwards they cannot easily quit”: For thus a people raised from barbarity or despotic rule, civilized by laws, and made virtuous by the long course of a lawful and just administration, if they chance to fall suddenly under any misgovernment of unjust and arbitrary power, they will on this account be the rather animated to exert a stronger virtue in opposition to such violence and corruption. And even where, by long and continued arts of a prevailing tyranny, such a people are at last totally oppressed, the scattered seeds of virtue will for a long time remain alive, even to a second generation, before the utmost force of misapplied rewards and punishments can bring them to the abject and compliant state of long-accustomed slaves.1

Perhaps most notably, this passage advances as the core of Shaftesbury’s Wdelity to Lockean moral and political philosophy the persistence of infantile habit into the unslavish practice of a “second generation.”2 For Shaftesbury as for Locke, “while the will is neither gained nor the inclination wrought upon, but awe alone prevails and forces obedience, the obedience is servile, and all which is done through it merely servile.”3 By granting his “scattered seeds of virtue” a half-life twice as long as the strictly adverbial aptitude proposed by Locke can admit, Shaftesbury lends ontological substance to the standard of ingenuous practice to which he intermittently refers as “heartiness.” To double how long a people “made virtuous” will remain virtuous, Shaftesbury innovates a natural faculty which he calls “reXected sense,” a mode of perception that registers not the qualities of “ordinary bodies” but rather the title to virtue of “mental or moral subjects.” A Shaftesburian person’s virtue is made durable by his feeling for virtue or, more precisely, by his transformation

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of ambient practice—including his own—into “an object of his affection.”4 By feeling affection not for ordinary bodies but for “any show or representation of the social passion,” Shaftesbury’s civilized people translate their innate propensity for “pity, kindness, gratitude” into a species of judgment regulated by “affection towards those very affections themselves.” For Shaftesbury as for Locke, ingenuously or heartily virtuous men extrovert moral agency “affectionately”; but Shaftesbury appends to the near-indeWnitely malleable subject of Lockean pedagogy a natural calculus of “moral proportion” that, even after the life span of a single agent, continues to dictate a generation of sons’ Whiggishly civilizing affection for affection itself.5 As we will see, Shaftesbury’s contemporary Francis Hutcheson attempts to quantify the workings of the “moral Sense” whose affection for virtuous affection is “rooted in our Nature.”6 But to introduce the present chapter, I wish to suggest that Shaftesbury’s evocation of a people who “fall suddenly under any misgovernment of unjust and arbitrary power” is remarkable not only because it projects as the result of Locke’s contractarian pedagogy “opposition” to “despotic rule” whose momentum is assured at least one generation into the future. Because, when he turns to the analogy of family and state, Shaftesbury maintains the same exception as Locke to the reform of arbitrary power—Shaftesbury’s “master of the family” inculcates virtue by “using proper rewards and gentle punishments towards his children,” but Shaftesbury does not include husbands in the modernizing imperative of “liberal”7 conjugal rule—Inquiry is also remarkable because its heartily resistant people would seem to refer only to men. Indeed, if the specter of persons suddenly misgoverned by arbitrary power exactly parallels the domestic plot represented by Mary Astell in ReXections upon Marriage (1700), then new brides manifest duty not by being “animated to exert a stronger virtue in opposition” to illiberal rule but by sustaining the very practice of obedience whose servility Shaftesbury repudiates. (Carole Pateman’s gloss of Lockean genealogy as a story of masculine political birth underscores Inquiry’s restriction of the civilizing efWcacy of “seeds” to their transmission between men only). Shaftesbury’s neat replication of Lockean paradox might, certainly, be obscured by the fact that his Inquiry never mentions wives at all. Yet Shaftesbury does, once, admit the instrumentality of women to his text; over the course of elaborating “[h]ow much the social pleasures are superior to any other,” he gestures toward a feminized variant of something dimly akin to hearty moral practice: The courtesans and even the commonest of women who live by prostitution know very well how necessary it is that everyone whom they entertain with their beauty should believe that there are satisfactions reciprocal and that pleasures

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are no less given than received. And were this imagination to be wholly taken away, there would be hardly any of the grosser sort of mankind who would not perceive their remaining pleasure to be of slender estimation.8

To demonstrate the pervasiveness of men’s desire to “believe” that they confer “satisfactions reciprocal,” Inquiry recruits a group of women the substance of whose own virtue—and, whose own satisfaction—is obviously irrelevant to their proof of the illusion “necessary” to the conXuence of masculine pleasure and masculine virtue. Courtesans and prostitutes are, indeed, uniquely qualiWed to vindicate Shaftesbury’s application of moral law even to grosser men; in return, however, they lay bare the fact that feminine pleasure of any kind—social, selWsh, bodily, or mental— is indifferent to the evidence communicated by women who “know very well” that the appearance of satisfaction satisWes. To defend grosser men’s innate virtue, Inquiry exploits their “imagination” of women’s pleasure and not that pleasure itself; the latter entity is barred from a Shaftesburian “economy of the passions”9 which cedes it to the necessity of its conversion into an object of masculine moral judgment. Insofar as women enter Shaftesbury’s Inquiry only to sustain its extension of moralized imagination into the medium of men’s grosser desires, they offer a glimpse of the feminized mandate which complements Shaftesbury’s claim for the superiority of “society or fellowship”10 over any other kind of pleasure. Indeed, Inquiry’s courtesans constitute a strikingly explicit demonstration of the role of feminine reciprocity in Shaftesbury’s articulation of contractarian men’s autonomous aptitude for virtue. Shaftesbury enlists not a wife but a prostitute, and he clearly couldn’t care less about the infelicities of her more or less hearty reciprocation of pleasure; but the latter practice nonetheless isolates the transitively modernizing agency of feminine compliance whereby courtesans effect his text’s defense of post-absolutist men’s spontaneously moralized desire.11 Over the course of the eighteenth-century elaboration of moral sense philosophy, the courtesans who incarnate proof of Shaftesburian men’s desire to imagine satisfaction dissolve into Inquiry’s less graphically evidenced claim for the “pleasures of sympathy.”12 Yet Hutcheson’s student Adam Smith returns to the agency of feminine reciprocity just at the point when his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) cites as the antecedent to “habitual” moral practice the motive to be habituated, which Smith, after Hutcheson, designates “an original instinct, called a moral sense.” To illustrate the difference between “moral faculties” whose “peculiar ofWce . . . [is] to judge”13 and secondarily naturalized virtuous habit, Smith takes a woman as his most resonant example of the failure of the former to lend heartiness to the latter:

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A wife . . . may sometimes not feel that tender regard for her husband which is suitable to the relation that subsists between them. If she has been virtuously educated, however, she will endeavor to act as if she felt it, to be careful, ofWcious, faithful, and sincere, and to be deWcient in none of those attentions which the sentiment of conjugal affection could have prompted her to perform. Such a friend, and such a wife, are neither of them, undoubtedly, the very best of their kinds; and though both of them may have the most serious and earnest desire to fulWl every part of their duty, yet they will fail in many nice and delicate regards . . . Though not the very Wrst of their kinds, however, they are perhaps the second.14

As is the case with Shaftesbury’s courtesan, Smith’s wife serves to signify not her own pleasure but her husband’s moralized desire to perceive it. Like that of Inquiry’s hypothetical prostitute, then, her duty to Theory’s vindication of the desires of naturally sympathetic men requires that she “endeavor to act as if she felt it.” Yet if, for Shaftesbury, that endeavor constitutes more than ample testimony to even gross men’s innately social affection, then Smith evinces a more exacting anticipation of the “nice and delicate” failures of acting to pass as authentically “tender regard”: his wife should really feel the sentiment whose apparition makes up the bulk of moral men’s pleasure. By thus, so to speak, raising the bar, Smith would seem to extend his text’s referential reach to include wives whose practice of feeling is also ideally prompted by “original instinct.” And yet, to turn to the friend who occupies this passage as the masculine avatar of a “virtuously educated” bride, it is worth commenting upon the schematics of Smithean men’s sentimental failure. Before evoking its ofWcious but unfeeling wife, Theory states of second-best friends: The man who has received great beneWts from another person, may, by the natural coldness of his temper, feel but a small degree of the sentiment of gratitude. Though his heart therefore is not warmed with any grateful affection, he will strive to act as if it was . . . The motive of his actions may be no other than a reverence for the established rule of duty, a serious and earnest desire of acting, in every respect according to the laws of gratitude.15

Comparison of Smith’s man and his bride might illuminate the latter’s resemblance to Shaftesbury’s courtesan after all. Whereas the moralizing inevitability of masculine sentiment is propelled by “great beneWts,” Smith does not bother to gauge the capacity of Theory’s representative husband to elicit tender regard. Unlike a moral mandate clearly restricted, for Theory’s men, to its Wguration as gratitude, a wife’s sentimental duty is immune to any contingency other than the fact of “the relation that subsists between them”—the fact, simply, that she is a wife. Because marriage renders wifely reciprocity impervious to the incentive required to warm men’s hearts, Smith’s “conjugal affection” deviates

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from a model of “grateful affection” which rationalizes the unforced necessity of masculine sentimental practice only. From this vantage, we can appreciate how Smith reWnes the standard of Shaftesburian men’s virtuous pleasure. Rather than the crude reXection of moralized desire performed by courtesans, Smith’s “Wrst” wife lends both her exterior and her interior to a vindication of the masculine virtue which, Wrst posited as the unslavish practice that engenders Locke and Shaftesbury’s “civil state or public,” would now also characterize the liberality of men’s private sentiment. As testimony to the sympathetic pleasure felt not only by citizens but also by husbands, this wife’s tender feeling imports into the conjugal sphere a claim for the autonomy of civil men’s virtue already expressed by Smith in the form of an analogy. He observes of “the rules which our moral faculties observe in approving or condemning whatever sentiment or action is subjected to their examination”: They have a much greater resemblance to what are properly called laws, those general rules which the sovereign lays down to direct the conduct of his subjects. Like them they are rules to direct the free actions of men: they are prescribed most surely by a lawful superior.16

Locke’s alignment of dutiful volition and unforced desire, hypostatized as the tertiary function of innately virtuous judgmental “faculties” by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Smith (and introjected by Shaftesbury as “conscience”17), permits this highly impacted rendition of contractarian political causality. For Smith, public or civil law itself models the level of urgency which “rules” of moral judgment impose on the minds of already ingenuous subjects. It is the virtue exercised by already “free” men— whose practice of political modernity Theory takes for granted—which Smith’s Wrst wife helps transpose into the domestic sphere. Her tender practice of reciprocation masks the possibility that she, unlike the beneWciary who models masculine sentimental exchange, might have no tenderness to reciprocate. Like Smith’s citizen, his Wrst wife appears to be governed by a moral sense which, as Shaftesbury claims of two generations of Whiggish men, dictates compliance only to “lawful” power. Divested of the motivating sentiment of tender regard, however, Smith’s other wife ranks “second” because she instead extroverts that sentiment as arbitrary duty. Indeed, the virtuous education of a Smithean woman is dedicated to defusing precisely this fatality; she has been schooled to minimize her future difference from an automatically tender wife. Theory’s women’s interiority thus claims two levels of resolution: either it spontaneously afWrms the extension of men’s sympathetic desire into the conjugal sphere or it is dedicated to the simulation of spontaneity itself. Smith’s reWnement

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of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry breaks the transitively modernizing assistance afforded men by courtesans into the insinuation of this “nice and delicate” difference. As I have suggested, the domestic novel more precisely philosophizes feminine moral duty. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, in particular, parses the exigency of unconditional wifely reciprocity into gradations of ingenuous and sullen practice whose uneven capacity to modernize a lordly husband is captured, from the other side, in Pamela’s words. In this chapter, I focus on the moral philosophical burden borne by Richardson’s novel’s form. As the representation of a woman who comes as close as humanly possible to being Smith’s Wrst wife, Pamela aims to transpose the virtue of an MP who declares himself “attach’d to no Party”18— who “think[s] the Distinctions of Whig and Tory odious; and love[s] the one or the other, only as they are honest and worthy Men”19—into the medium of equally disinterested domestic “love.” In this capacity, Richardson’s novel sustains a remarkably elaborated insistence upon Mrs. B’s failure spontaneously to embody hearty subjection, despite the virtue and the passion that usually move her. The present chapter turns to an epistolary novel whose protagonist’s virtue is unmotivated by love: Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, published in March 1761 to become, according to Sheridan’s granddaughter Alicia Lefanu, “an immediate and permanent favourite.”20 Unlike Shaftesbury’s wholly undifferentiated prostitute, Smith’s Wrst and second wives admit the perceptibility of the distinction between duty compelled by love and duty exposed as the arbitrary mandate to love. In claiming as its content the latter practice, Sheridan’s epistolary novel represents a formal and moral philosophical paradox: lacking the sentiment that makes up Pamela’s inextricably virtuous and passionate letters, the text produced by Memoirs’ loveless wife materializes as pure duty lacking the sanction of any original instinct whatsoever. As such, Sidney’s letters substantiate the arbitrariness of the feminized moral mandate which, to extend men’s sympathy into the domestic sphere, requires wives to reXect back at their husbands the conjugal affection that half, perhaps, of Smith’s women really feel. While Hutcheson’s An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728) devises formulas to quantify the amount of affection properly provoked by moral objects, Sidney, this chapter’s second section suggests, violates the logic that universalizes men’s moral sense. In the third section of the chapter, I assess Memoirs’ deviation from the model of Lockean consciousness sustained by Shaftesbury’s claim that moral judgment deWnes the infrastructure of a “self-system”21 in which men’s thoughts are legible to themselves. The letters that open Sidney’s own mental content to moral judgment,

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however, are rendered opaque by her refusal to expose the arbitrariness of the mandate which it is a virtuously educated wife’s duty to naturalize. Thus, I deWne what I will call Sidney’s “unconscious” as a formal artifact engendered by letters that cannot sustain Sidney’s unconditional conjugal affection and the unmediated spontaneity of her writing to the moment at the same time. The chapter concludes with Memoirs’ sequel, The Continuation of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph; in derailing the promise of a bequest that would enable Sidney’s two daughters to choose husbands whom they really love, Sheridan’s sequel protracts the revision of novelistic consciousness which no longer manifests the transparency of Pamela’s approximation of ingenuous desire. It is not the Whiggish aptitude for autonomous virtue but the extra-Lockean anomaly of Sidney’s epistolary unconscious that this novel transmits to a second generation of wives.

“(for I will not answer for the feelings of my heart at that instant)”: Sidney Bidulph and Obligation’s Exception Set at “the beginning of queen Ann’s reign,”22 Memoirs is composed of letters from Sidney to her “friend of my heart” (11), Cecilia. Sidney, left fatherless in childhood, is raised by a “good literal ” (13) mother whose “piety, genuine and rational as it is, is notwithstanding a little tinctured with superstition” (55). After Sidney consents to marry her brother Sir George’s wealthy, well-born, and reWned acquaintance Orlando Faulkland, an anonymous letter informs her mother that Faulkland once ruined “an innocent creature.” Despite the novel’s own reference to Faulkland’s lapse as a “trivial affair” (39–40), Mrs. Bidulph forbids Sidney’s marriage. In her “endeavor to imitate” her mother’s “rigid . . . notions of virtue,” Sidney “suppressed the swelling passion in my breast” (44) and resigns the engagement; shortly thereafter, convinced by the neighboring “tyrant” (70) lady Grimston that this reversal will damage her daughter’s reputation, Mrs. Bidulph compels Sidney to marry her “tolerable” (75) suitor Mr. Arnold. Sidney’s “perfect submission to [her] mother’s will”—a will, her brother observes, “as absolute as that of an Eastern monarch” (83)—isolates as the sole incentive for Sidney’s marriage obedience to a parent who “has ever been despotic in her government of me” (45). As Mrs. Bidulph urges her daughter to wed the “unexceptionable” (77) Arnold, Sidney writes to Cecilia: —Oh! she knows I am Xexible by nature, and to her will, yielding as air. What can I do? My heart is not in a disposition to love — Yet again and again I repeat it, Mr. Faulkland has no interest there. What he once had he has lost; but I cannot compel it to like, and unlike, and like anew at pleasure. Fain would I bring

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myself chearfully to conform to my mother’s will, for I have no will of my own. I never knew what it was to have one, and never shall, I believe; for I am sure I will not contend with a husband. (77–78)

Sidney’s disavowal of contentious “will”—and the escalating, hyperbolic provocation that she subsequently tolerates—have sealed Memoirs’ critical fate as, according to Ruth Perry, an “unrelenting representation of miserable, obsessive, Wlial obedience” whose “masochistically passive protagonist” exhibits “suicidal docility”;23 for Janet Todd, Memoirs exempliWes “altruism and family piety that could so easily become self-destructive masochism.”24 Certainly, by taking as its starting point the “despotic” conjugal government that trains Sidney to surrender wifely volition in advance, Memoirs cements her difference from moral agents who further the autonomous virtue of Lockean sons. Yet Sidney does gauge her consent to marry against a standard that likens some wives’ conjugal affection to masculine gratitude: by stipulating that she cannot obey her mother “chearfully,” Sidney underscores the failure of her “heart” to motivate her dutiful resignation of postmarital will. (It is worth remarking that masochists, unlike Sidney, do heartily desire to be divested of volition.) After her mother learns of Faulkland’s affair, Sidney evokes her promise “never to see him more” as an “answer, dictated perhaps by female pride (for I will not answer for the feelings of my heart at that instant)” (44). By withdrawing the sanction of Sidney’s “feelings” from this inaugural act of compliance, Memoirs graphically afWrms the moralizing force of the axiom, advanced by Shaftesbury’s Inquiry, that “the heart cannot possibly remain neutral but constantly takes part one way or other.”25 As the organ whose passionate mechanism answers Inquiry’s founding question—“what honesty or virtue is considered by itself ”—a heart that necessarily takes part deWnes Shaftesburian “wrong” not as “barely” volitional harm but, rather, as “insufWcient or unequal affection.”26 In anticipation of Immanuel Kant’s vision of a “metaphysic of morals . . . [u]nmixed with the alien element of added empirical inducements,”27 Shaftesbury disqualiWes the virtue of any act compelled by the extrinsic forces of “fear or hope”28 rather than unforced feeling; Hutcheson likewise rejects as foreign to the “natural Character of Good” the “constrained Course of Action, inforced only by Penalties contrary to our natural Affections and Senses.”29 What preserves morality from external misgovernment is the Lockean agency of dutiful desire, which, Hutcheson repeats, cannot be reduced to the power that would command it: “let any Man consider whether he ever acts in this manner by mere Election, without any previous Desire ?”30 But if Sidney’s loveless heart dictates, in Hutcheson’s words, “such an unaffectionate Determination, as that by which one moves his Wrst Finger rather than the second,” then, as Smith shows by retaining

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second-best wives among his exemplars of sentimental morality, the virtue of women’s “unaffectionate Election”31 cannot be so summarily dismissed from the domestic sphere. Because Smith relieves virtuously educated women’s conjugal affection of the necessity of desire which makes morality “itself ” durable, Sidney’s practice of “arbitrary Election”32 marks the limit of Hutcheson’s claim that an incorruptibly hearty “moral Sense is universal.”33 Because, Hutcheson repeats, “all Men feel something in their own Hearts recommending Virtue,” no amount of mental effort can transmute unaffectionate choice into moralized feeling: “no Affection or Desire is raised in us, directly by our volition or desiring it.”34 Here, again, the Smithean wife who must “endeavor to act as if she felt” deviates from the criterion that anchors the necessity of masculine reciprocity in the sentimental mechanics of gratitude. But by acknowledging this second wife’s difference, Smith grants her a heart as impervious to “volition” as that of moral philosophy’s prototypical man; in so doing, Smith registers a trace of the feminist physiology whose intractable passion might inversely signal wives’ predilection for moral autonomy too. As she narrates the early progress of her marriage, Sidney respects the impossibility of love that would be induced by “desiring it”: I am more and more reconciled to my lot, my dear Cecilia, every day that I live. Mr. Arnold’s assiduity and tenderness towards me deserve the gratefullest return my heart can make him; and I am convinced it is not necessary to be passionately in love with the man we marry, to make us happy. Constancy, good sense, and a sweet temper, must form a basis for a durable felicity. The two latter I am sure Mr. Arnold possesses; Oh! may I never experience his want of the former! I hope my own conduct will for ever ensure to me his love. (97)

Sidney’s “gratefullest return” seals the likeness of her attempted feeling to masculine virtue. Yet her epistolary depths do not portend the love to which Pamela’s text defers its own reference but rather a different, secondarily moralizing passion. Of love which “I should be ungrateful not to do my utmost to return” (88), Sidney writes: “I am every hour more obliged to him, and should hate myself if I did not Wnd that he had an intire possession of my love” (98). With this suspension of reference, Memoirs does not transmit the integrity of Sidney’s feeling as a writer to the moment’s ignorance of its imminence. Instead, the passion Sidney cannot yet “Wnd” sustains her resemblance to the Smithean Wguration of masculine heartlessness initially proposed by David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) as a “man that really feels no gratitude in his temper”—“a person,” Hume speciWes, “who feels his heart devoid of that motive, [and] may hate himself upon that account.”35 Rather than the love that, in Pamela’s case, transforms unconditional

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reciprocity into natural obligation, Sidney’s text harbors the far less pleasantly moralizing expedient of “hate” for herself. If the necessity of Sidney’s “return” might incrementally permit her letters to manifest Pamela’s virtue, then Sidney’s discovery, made two years after her marriage, that “I am unhappy!” (124) precludes her text’s happy ending. Of the inWdelity to which “Mr. Arnold adds cruelty too,” Sidney vows to Cecilia, “but let it be so; far be reproaches or complaints from my lips; to you only, my second self, shall I utter them; to you I am bound by solemn promise, and reciprocal conWdence, to disclose the inmost secrets of my soul, and with you they are as safe as in my own breast” (125). Perhaps the most remarkable effect of Sidney’s “promise” is the formal mutation caused by wifely duty respeciWed as the “endeavor . . . to skreen Mr. Arnold from censure” (125). If the inadequacy of Smith’s second wife—felt as such, again, by men who want both their public and domestic pleasures to satisfy—is perceptible only in the nice and delicate register of less hearty reciprocity, then Sidney now materializes as a “second self” wholly detached from Smithean equivocation of gratitude and conjugal affection. Letters that manifest the moral philosophical impossibility of “arbitrary election” precipitate Sidney’s most exacerbated possible difference from Smith’s Wrst wife, text that almost hides the “inmost secrets of my soul” within “my own breast.” Sidney’s duty to “skreen” an unfaithful, perjured, and cruel husband clearly derives its rationale from something other than the sensory appeal of virtue. Because Shaftesbury’s moral phenomenology observes a “certain just disposition or proportionable affection of a rational creature towards the moral objects of right and wrong,” Shaftesburian “wrong” proceeds, again, not from bad intentions but from “whatsoever causes a misconception or misapprehension of the worth or value of any object.”36 Virtue sustained as the “right application of the affections” requires that the latter be stimulated by “nothing unexemplary,”37 a condition which Hutcheson afWrms by endorsing the trustworthiness of moral judgment’s sensorium: Affections, Tempers, Sentiments, or Actions, reXected upon in our selves . . . are the constant Occasions of agreeable or disagreeable Perceptions, which we call Approbation, or Dislike. These Moral Perceptions arise in us as necessarily as any other Sensations; nor can we alter, or stop them . . . any more than we can make the Taste of Wormwood sweet, or that of Honey bitter.38

The empirical bedrock upon which Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding bases language’s claim to signify—“For a Child knows . . . before it can speak, the difference between the Ideas of Sweet and Bitter”39—qualiWes Hutchesonian “Moral Perceptions” whose own imminence would render them as inalterable as the meaning realized by a child’s

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tongue. The continuity of moral objects “reXected upon in our selves” and “Ideas of” wormwood or honey stresses Sidney’s distortion of the perceptual immediacy of moral value: it is her duty, in a case of “unequal affection” whose transitivity modernizing agency Shaftesbury and Smith endorse from the vantage of men’s desire to see it, to sustain the virtue of a palpably “unexemplary” object. Neither Shaftesbury nor Smith seem troubled by the deviation of wifely reciprocity from the laws of proportion that regulate the freedom of contractarian men; however, Astell’s ReXections offers a seminal look inside the betrayed wife who, like Sidney, “hardly mentions her Misfortune to her most intimate Acquaintance . . . but wou’d if it were possible conceal his Crimes.”40 ReXections opposes a wife’s feminist physiology to the empirical pretenses of the language that would try to reclaim “Misfortune” as virtue: But a little time wears off all the uneasiness, and puts her in possession of Pleasures, which till now she has unkindly been kept a stranger to. AfXiction, the sincerest Friend, the frankest Monitor, the best Instructor, and indeed, the only useful School that Women are ever put to, rouses her understanding, opens her Eyes, Wxes her Attention, and diffuses such a Light, such a Joy into her Mind, as not only Informs her better, but Entertains her more than ever her Ruel did . . . She now distinguishes between Truth and Appearances, between solid and apparent Good; has found out the instability of all Earthly Things . . . never truly a Happy Woman till she came in the Eye of the World to be reckon’d Miserable.41

Astell mimics the accommodation of duty and desire which Hutcheson claims as universal nature: “all virtuous Men have given Virtue this Testimony, that its Pleasures are superior to any other.”42 As ReXections’s mock Platonism makes clear, miserable wives embody this incentive only by betraying the physiological integrity of pleasure itself. Astell thus satirizes not only the convenience of persons who come to feel just as their “Domestic Governors”43 would wish but also the truth of words that can no longer refer to “the Original of those Ideas,” Locke’s Essay states, “which a Man observes, and is conscious to himself he has in his Mind.”44 By detaching a betrayed wife’s pleasure from its miserable “Original,” Astell cedes ideas of which men cannot fail to be “conscious” to an arbitrary practice of signiWcation which might, as Memoirs will also suggest, compel some difference between the literary form of this wife’s “Mind” and Lockean men’s understanding. Might the truth of Sidney’s “World” be susceptible, as Astell would suggest, to her letters’ expression of miserable virtue? By inventing ratios which standardize morality’s sensory appeal, Hutcheson usefully offers a measure of the “instability of all Earthly Things” represented by the letters of a virtuously educated but unhappy wife. Hutcheson’s formulas

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distil a Cartesian person’s passions into the quanta of love that passion’s objects continue reXexively to elicit: The Quantity of Love toward any Person is in a compound Proportion of the apprehended Causes of Love in him, and of the Goodness of Temper in the Observer. Or L = C X G . . . The Goodness of Temper is therefore as the Quantity of Love, divided by the apprehended Causes, or G = L/C. And since we cannot apprehend any Goodness in having the Degree of Love above the Proportion of its Causes, the most virtuous Temper is that in which the Love equals its Causes, which may therefore be expressed by Unity.45

Sidney clearly breaks the laws of Hutchesonian proportion. “Causes of Love” afforded by an egregiously undeserving husband (especially as these work on a wife who weds to obey her mother) are slim; by manifesting a “Degree of Love above the Proportion of its Causes,” Sidney evinces a species of wifely “Goodness” that Hutcheson’s ratios cannot admit at all. My point is not simply to note the clarity of this domestic novel’s lack of Wt with moral philosophy’s maximally expansive claim for the mechanics of freely acted virtue. Hutcheson’s formulas register Memoirs’ quite literal refusal to iterate humanizing standards of autonomous moral feeling assigned to the domestic novel, as we saw in Chapter 3, by Jürgen Habermas and others who Wnd in the genre an ideological reservoir of sentiment untainted by any trace of force. Yet Hutcheson’s derivation of “the most virtuous Temper” illuminates a more local dilemma, because he bases his computation of that superlative on the infallibility with which properly “apprehended Causes” compel love. Because Hutcheson stakes moral feeling’s consistency on a denominator whose value, Shaftesbury afWrms, is beyond dispute—“[f]or of the reality of such a good and ill, no rational creature can possibly be insensible”—Memoirs, like Astell’s ReXections, Wgures a world in which domestic virtue is not “rational” and miserably happy wives must, indeed, be “insensible.” In her epistolary novel The Delicate Distress (1769), Sheridan’s contemporary Elizabeth GrifWth offers advice to a new bride which accommodates Hutcheson’s claim that persons “cannot extirpate, more than their external Senses” the faculty of moral judgment whose acuity he computes.46 In Delicate Distress, a seasoned wife writes to promote the beneWts of willed insensibility to her recently married sister: There cannot, in my mind, be a more pitiable object, than a virtuous woman, who ceases to love her husband. —What a dreadful vacuity must she feel in her heart! How coldly, and insipidly, must her life pass away, who is merely actuated by duty, unanimated by love! . . . I would, therefore, most earnestly recommend it to all those, who are so happy as to be united to the objects of their choice, to set the merits and attractions of

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each other, in the fairest point of view, to themselves, and never, even for a moment, to cast their eyes on the wrong side of the tapestry.47

Delicate Distress promotes an exercise of wifely perception tailored to the Smithean mandate of conjugal reciprocity: that she “never, even for a moment” take her husband as the object of her own moral sense—or, in other words, that she selectively extirpate the capacity for moral judgment whose innateness deWnes its Hutchesonian virtue. Yet GrifWth gives this advice to a new bride (who, Delicate Distress goes on to show, refuses to let a loveless husband impede her own practice of reciprocal affection). What about Sidney, who, through no fault of her own, has perceived her husband’s betrayal? How can she redeem his inWdelity, after the fact, as her failure to have seen it? Memoirs’ plot adheres to the premise, repeated by Sidney’s mother, that “a woman certainly ought not to marry a loose man, if she knows him to be such; but if it be her misfortune to be joined to such a one, she is not to reject him” (237). But to justify Sidney’s forgiveness of “all the afXiction he had occasioned” (237)—with his inWdelity, Arnold has, her brother reminds her, “beggar[ed] you and your children, turn[ed] you out of doors, and brand[ed] you with infamy” (236) by baselessly accusing her of an affair with Faulkland—Memoirs undertakes its own adjudication of the solidity, as Astell puts it, of all earthly things. After her Wnally penitent husband returns to her, Sidney defends her moral practice as follows: You know I could never bear to consider love as a childish divinity, who exercises his power by throwing the heart into tumultuous raptures: my love, tho’ of a more temperate kind, was sufWciently fervent to make Mr. Arnold’s coldness towards me alone capable of wounding my heart most sensibly . . . I did not till then know the progress he had made in my affections. Sorrows, my Cecilia, soften and subdue the mind prodigiously; and I think my heart was better prepared from its sufferings to receive Mr. Arnold’s returning tenderness, than an age of courtship in the gay and prosperous days of life could have framed it to. I exult in his restored affections, and love him a thousand times better than ever I did. He deserves it; I am sure he does: he was led away from me by enchantment; nothing else could have done it. But the charm is broke, thank heaven! and I Wnd him now the tenderest, the best of men. (247)

As we have seen of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, Cartesian passion can still facilitate the novel’s marriage plot; to retrieve the referent of an obligation that Sidney’s heart refuses to ratify, however, Memoirs uses romance differently. Sidney’s exchange of initially “temperate” feeling for the more “sensibly” felt inXiction of pain manages, like Astell’s satire, to reclaim “sufferings” as pleasure—or, at least, as relief that they

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are over. What Wnally moves Sidney is not, as in Pamela’s or Arabella’s case, the revelation of a love that she did not “till then know” but rather the surprising degree to which “sorrows” prepare her heart to appreciate their absence. By trading the tedious process of being “more and more reconciled to my lot” for the exponentially augmented rate of return driven by “restored affections,” Sidney reconstitutes sorrow as, remarkably, her second chance to become Smith’s Wrst wife. Unlike Arabella, Sidney is not a deluded believer in romance. Her marvelously rationalizing claim for her truant husband’s “enchantment” would seem, then, to have to refer to something else: to an authorial intention that disturbs the spontaneity of her writing to the moment with her choice of arbitrary signiWers. A word like “charm” does more than exclude Sidney’s domestic sphere from Hutchesonian laws of moral proportion; it also betrays the transparency of letters which, in Pamela’s case, refer to nothing other than the imminence of her virtue. If Hutchesonian moral sense “is plainly a Perception arising without a previous Volition,”48 then Sidney’s epistolary self-system adulterates the immediacy of moralizing “Perception” with romance. Sidney’s authorial “Volition” adjusts for the irrationality of a second-best wife’s practice of virtue with words like enchantment. As we saw in Chapter 3, Pamela contains its own gaps—for example, the Wfteen-minute intervals when she smoothes her face. These are, the remainder of Richardson’s novel afWrms, exceptions to the wifely cheer which otherwise constitutes the sine qua non of domestic modernity; they mark the limits of Mrs. B’s conjugal reciprocity as the sullenness that sometimes transpires more deeply inside her. Memoirs, however, extends its representation of the irrationality of Sidney’s virtue to external bodies. Sidney’s unmotivated practice of reciprocal affection imports magic into the world of her novel in at least two cases: the machinations whereby Faulkland engineers her dissolute husband’s return to her and, later, the appearance of a cousin who saves Arnold’s impoverished and neglected widow. In the Wrst case, if Sidney invokes enchantment, and not desire, to motivate her husband’s inWdelity, then Faulkland occupies the same world of alternative causation when he recounts as “the story of my knight-errantry” (159) the plot through which he separates Arnold from the “vile sorceress” (229) whose “infernal witchcraft” (159) compelled the fabulous event of masculine inconstancy. As Faulkland relates his abduction of Arnold’s mistress Mrs. Gerrarde, whose interest he diverts while conveying her across the Channel, he interrupts his letter to Sir George: You may soon expect to have the second part of this my delectable history; “Shewing how Orlando, not being able to prevail, with all his eloquence, on the fair and beautiful, as Werce and inexorable, Princess Gerradina, to put the

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Wnishing hand to his adventures and most wonderful exploits, did, his wrath being moved thereby, like an ungentle knight, bury his sword in her snow-white, but savage and unrelenting breast . . .” Would not this be a pretty conclusion of my adventures? (174–75)

Restricted to Faulkland’s letter, Memoirs’ full-blown exercise of “delectable history” permits the novel to claim, as the most “wonderful” resolution of Sidney’s plot, its recourse to the “hero of romance,” the “giant,” and the “necromancer” (199) able fantastically to rationalize objects of wives’ moral perception. When, following the success of Faulkland’s knight-errantry, an onlooker states, “[i]t amazes me, Mr. Arnold . . . that you could ever entertain a doubt of” Sidney’s devotion, he replies, “So it does me now, madam . . . but I have been for this year past in a dream, a horrid delirium, from which that vile sorceress, who brought it on, has but just now rouzed me” (229). Sheridan’s plays The Discovery (1763) and The Dupe (1764) also stage the necessity of magic to the strictly local recuperation of masculine conjugal tyranny as a passing phase of “horrid delirium.” One can in this capacity appreciate Lefanu’s remark upon the genre to which her grandmother “appears to have been addicted— I mean the old romances.”49 After Arnold’s death in a riding accident, Sidney—whose husband went into debt for his mistress, lost his inheritance to an illegitimate niece, and sold Sidney’s jointure—descends into poverty unrelieved by her wealthy, fed-up brother. When an unknown man, “mean in his apparel” (331), comes to her lodgings claiming to be her “cousin Ned Warner” (334) returned from a career in the West Indies, he responds to Sidney’s attempt at charity: He suffered me to drop the shillings into his unclosed hand. He Wxed his eyes eagerly on my face, but instead of replying to what I said, he only cried out, Good God! good God! and undoing two or three buttons at his breast, he sobbed as if his bosom was bursting. I was affected with his gratitude, and tried to disperse the tears that mounted to my eyes. I wish I could weep, said he, but I can’t; and may these be the last tears ever you shall have occasion to shed! . . . He then drew a red letter-case out of his bosom, and, opening it, he put into my hand a bill for two thousand pounds on the bank of England. Think, my dear, how I started at such a vision! (336–37)

The forces that drive Warner to “undo two or three buttons at his breast” reveal a motive extrinsic to the mechanical stimulant of gratitude. Warner’s “bosom was bursting” with sentiment alone for only several lines of text, because the gesture with which he releases grateful feeling also restores to Sidney the money squandered by her husband. This wife’s virtue is rewarded, after the fact, by a supplemental, randomized compensation whose effusion by the only man whose money she can accept—who urges her to “consider me as your father, and I will

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be a father to you” (341)—compels her to comment upon the probability of her plot: I begin to doubt, my Cecilia, whether I am really awake or not! ’Tis all enchantment! I am afraid my old kinsman is a wizard . . . [sic] I have been talking to, and examining my servants, to see if they are real living people, or only phantoms; I look at it, and handle the rich furniture of my apartments to try if it be substantial!—’Tis all so—every thing real—I beg my cousin’s pardon for suspecting him of sorcery; I believe he deals in no charms, but that all-powerful one—money. (343–44)

In the end, enchantment and charm—and, indeed, even Sidney’s ellipsis, which would seem to refer to nothing but what she elects not to express—resurface to make the entirety of Sidney’s Wnally happy novel less “substantial.” An exception to the “real” caused not by Arabella’s still-Cartesian heart but by epistolary text which refers to “phantoms” might offer another vantage on the moral sense claimed by Hutcheson as the referent of otherwise meaningless words: “Whoever explains Virtue or Vice by Justice or Injustice, Right or Wrong, uses only more ambiguous Words, which will equally lead to acknowledge a moral Sense.” Hutcheson’s insistence that ambiguous genealogies of virtue “explain the same Word by itself in a Circle”50 is adopted by Hume, who excavates morality’s “Wrst virtuous motive” by dispensing with terminology whose emptiness would likewise drive him “to reason in a circle.” As a motive immune to tautology, the perception of “moral beauty”51 constitutes virtue’s origin for Hume too; but he pauses to ponder the solitary practice for which, among all “the faculties of the soul,” he cannot name a cognate “natural passion”:52 the practice of promising. And yet promises cannot effect obligation, Hume insists, by force of volition alone: ’[T]is certain we can naturally no more change our own sentiments, than the motions of the heavens: nor by a single act of our will, that is by a promise, render any action agreeable or disagreeable, moral or immoral; which, without that act, wou’d have produced contrary impressions, or have been endow’d with different qualities. It wou’d be absurd, therefore, to will any new obligation, that is, any new sentiment of pain or pleasure.53

As “new obligation” stripped of the assistance of “new sentiment,” promises occupy Hume’s Treatise as the exceptional instance of morality moved by a wholly willed “sense of duty.”54 Because “sentiments” are resolutely impervious to the agency of volition, then, wholly willed promises must inversely borrow passion from elsewhere. For dispassionate obligation to stick, Hume speculates, moral agents “feign a new act of the mind”55 which acquires sentimental urgency from their awareness that a reputation for reliability enhances their likelihood of advantage in the market.

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For men whose obligation is dictated by proWt, “[a]fterwards a sentiment of morals concurs with interests.”56 Hume’s reXections on overly abstracted moral practice do not apply most forcefully to persons in the market, persons whose interest is sufWciently strongly felt “afterwards” to resemble passion. Rather, the metaphysical absurdity of unsubstantiated virtue more intractably devolves upon wives like Sidney, whose obligation is divested of the almostpassionate incentive of advantage. Concerning the metaphysical anomaly posed by promises, Hume continues to muse: “since this new obligation arises from his will; ’tis one of the most mysterious and incomprehensible operations that can possibly be imagin’d, and may even be compar’d to transubstantiation.”57 By invoking “transubstantiation” to qualify the agency of a will that conjures something from nothing, Hume, apparently unwittingly, theorizes the impossibility of domestic obligation whose exception to universal law or, as Hume puts it, to the laws of “the motions of the heavens” Sidney’s letters also cite as “sorcery.” Like Hume’s Treatise, Memoirs recruits the same sorcery both to effect the transubstantiation of “disagreeable” into “agreeable” feelings and to work on the outer world—in Sidney’s case, to produce rich furniture from her unhappily proWtless promise. Yet the latter event compels Sidney to “doubt . . . whether I am really awake or not!” Extended to the question of whether objects conjured by her originally loveless obligation are real, Sidney’s dispassionate virtue implicates the substance of both furniture and thought itself. This chapter’s next section takes up the revision of Lockean consciousness precipitated not only by sorcery but by feelings to which Mrs. Arnold’s letters can no longer virtuously refer.

“This (as it is called) joyful occasion”: Marriage and the Unconscious of Epistolary Form According to Locke, the empirical origins of moral discourse reside in a body’s love of pleasure, because “[t]hings then are Good or Evil, only in reference to Pleasure or Pain.”58 Yet if morality’s origins permit Shaftesbury to redeem “Pleasure,” at one remove, as affection for affection itself, they also sustain the likeness of Locke’s person to an individual whose desires do not automatically coincide with civic virtue, as Locke explains: “Principles of Actions indeed there are lodged in Men’s Appetites, but these are so far from being innate Moral Principles, that if they were left to their full swing, they would carry Men to the over-turning of all Morality.”59 To Locke’s persistently Hobbesian account of “Men’s Appetites,” Hutcheson opposes the claim that “each Individual is made, previously to his own Choice, a member of a great Body, and affected with the Fortunes of the Whole.”60 By arguing that “[o]ur Mechanism . . .

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is wholly contrived for good,”61 Hutcheson circumvents the contractarian necessity of civilizing “Choice,” preemptively Wtting men to a “great Body” in which their difference from citizens is effaced in advance. Innately contrived “Mechanism” qualiWes not only men who are naturally born citizens but women who are naturally born wives because, Shaftesbury anticipates, “in every . . . distinct sex there is a different and distinct order, set or suit of passions, proportionable to the different order of life.”62 Shaftesbury’s sexed “suit of passions” cancels the likeness of equally self-interested individuals who are naturally subject to neither domestic nor public power, individuals whose refusal to embody a rationale for masculine conjugal dominance Hobbes stresses by imaginatively sexing them all as mushrooms. An opposingly “proportionable” order of passions would perhaps naturalize Sidney’s failure to feel masculine virtue’s pleasure; Memoirs, however, extends the contractarian anomaly of miserably dutiful practice into the medium of a self-system that can no longer sustain the transparency of Sidney’s epistolary thought. The example Locke gives to solder morality to an irreducibly mechanized sensorium is love, for “when a Man declares . . . that he loves Grapes, it is no more, but that the taste of Grapes delights him.” This intimation of the palpably obvious—for if anything should “destroy the delight of their Taste, then he can be said to love Grapes no longer”— lends weight to the moralized desire achieved when an agent “feels an uneasiness in the want of” some “confessed greater good.”63 Locke elucidates the propensity for “greater good” sustained by grapes when he comments on the semantic impropriety of the question “Whether a Man be at liberty to will which of the two he pleases, Motion or Rest”: This Question carries the absurdity of it so manifestly in it self, that one might thereby sufWciently be convinced, that Liberty concerns not the Will. For to ask, whether a Man be at liberty to will either Motion, or Rest; Speaking, or Silence; which he pleases, is to ask, whether a Man can will, what he wills; or be pleased with what he is pleased with. A Question, which, I think, needs no answer.64

This “Question” qualiWes as redundant because men already will what they please: to will something is to please it or, as Locke often repeats, to prefer it. Because bodily “taste” dictates the bent of Lockean volition in general, he dismisses the divergence of willing and pleasing as the very “absurdity” debunked by Essay’s empirical corrective (it is this absurdity which, as we have seen, Humean transubstantiation would Wx). By failing to realize the congruence of will and desire Wrst exempliWed by a man’s love for grapes, Sidney forces the dissociation of moral virtue from even the most attenuated materiality of delight. The literaryhistorical resonance of the refusal to prefer conveyed in her disavowal of a “will of my own” can be ampliWed by a woman who, alternatively,

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admits her desire to desire; Harriet Byron, protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), writes after encountering the novel’s hero, Sir Charles: I thought him, the moment he enter’d, the handsomest man I ever saw in my life. What a transporting thing must it be, my Lucy, to an affectionate wife, without restraint, without check, and performing nothing but her duty, to run with open arms to receive a worthy husband . . . O do not, do not tell me, my dear friends, that you love him, that you wish me to be his. I shall be ready, if you do, to wish— I don’t know what I would say: But your wishes were always the leaders of mine.65

Although not quite as directly as a man and his grapes, Harriet does anchor the mechanics of imminently virtuous “love” in delighted perception. Yet her proof of Locke’s collapse of willing and pleasing cannot support his primary political end. Locke claims the necessity of men’s desire as the deWning condition of their freedom: “For how can we think any one freer than to have the power to do what he will? . . . [W]e can scarce tell how to imagine any Being freer, than to be able to do what he wills.”66 Rather than the solely gluttonous impulse to fruit that Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education warns parents to chasten, a man’s taste for grapes constitutes the foundation of his liberty; Locke’s free “Being” is a necessarily desiring being. But if Harriet expresses a preference, she fails to exemplify a being able to do what he wills; she hopes to demonstrate not the freedom but the good luck to be pleased with what she must do in any case. In fact, by wishing not for Sir Charles but for the conversion of her preference into duty, Harriet ideally evades the Lockean necessity that she embody desire in some medium other than her letter. Harriet hopes to illustrate the Lockean scenario in which “there may be thought, there may be Will, there may be Volition, where there is no Liberty”;67 she would thereby underwrite Locke’s equation of will and desire, of desire and an irreducibly bodily taste, and, Wnally, of the lucky conXuence of that desire and “nothing but her duty.” Whereas Richardson imagines how this species of feminine “Volition” might transitively assist domestic men’s modernity, however, Sheridan’s novel advertises the anachronism of the authority modeled by Lady Grimston, who, when solicited for her own daughter’s hand, dismisses the prospect of “putting any force on [her] inclinations” by rejecting “such romantic notions, as to think a girl . . . capable of having any ideas of preference for one man more than another” (60). Before the discovery of his lapse, Sidney’s mother recommends Faulkland along the same lines: I have no objections (if you have none, my dear) to admit Mr. Faulkland upon the terms he proposes. What answer ought I to have made, Cecilia? Why, to be sure, just the one I did

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make—I have no prepossessions, madam, looking down and blushing, till it actually pained me, for I was really startled. (20–21)

Her mother’s lack of “objections” enables the pained and blushing substance of Sidney’s “no prepossessions.” After thus Wxing the advent of her preference, Sidney exploits her letters’ capacity to protract duty’s transformation into love: My mother likes him better even than before—Thy mother—disingenuous girl! why dost thou not speak thy own sentiments! (There is an apostrophe for thy use, my Cecilia.) Well then, my sentiments you shall have . . . I do think Mr. Faulkland the most amiable of men; and if my heart were (happily for me it is not) very susceptible of tender impressions, I really believe I should in time be absolutely in love with him. This confession will not satisfy you: may be it is not enough—yet, in truth, Cecilia, it is all that at present I can afford you. (21)

More explicitly than Pamela, Sidney occupies a “present” prior to the moment when her love coincides with her understanding of it: “Indeed, Cecilia, if I am in love with him, I do not yet know it myself” (25). As she defers the disclosure of her desire until its redundantly moralized apparition—“But I think we women should not love at such a rate, till duty makes the passion a virtue” (25)—Sidney promises to become Smith’s Wrst wife. But Sidney never arrives at the moment when her love achieves the resolution of spontaneously virtuous text; she instead discovers “how false” (37) Faulkland is. Within a minimal number of pages, this discovery compels Sidney’s reversed effort to convert duty into passion: “I can tell you I am trying to like Mr. Arnold as fast as I can” (80). By opposing the “rate” of Sidney’s love for Faulkland to the speed with which she tries “to like” Arnold, Memoirs broaches a problem of reference which Sidney’s letters prove unable to resolve: does her virtuous attempt to feel conjugal affection for one man overtake the imminence of her passion for the other? Long after the fact, the widowed Sidney elaborates the novel’s resolution of this conundrum by responding to Faulkland’s second offer of marriage as follows: You know, sir, the interest you once had in me; you cannot think me so light a creature, as to suppose I so soon after my breaking with you, bestowed my affections on another. I did not; obedience to my mother’s commands was the sole motive which engaged my vows to Mr. Arnold; and I married him with no other sentiments, than those of esteem and gratitude for the great love he bore me. (293)

Sidney isolates as “the sole motive” for her marriage the dutiful will which would, initially, permit her to simulate “gratitude.” Yet because “affections” for Faulkland persist external to her letters’ representation

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of that effort, Sidney’s rejection of Faulkland’s next offer places further pressure on the instant of her marriage: I loved [you], ’tis true; but it was with temperance; and though my disappointment afXicted me, it did not subdue me. I got the better of it, I think I got the better of it even before I married; but sure I am, I totally conquered all remembrance of it after I became a wife. (310)

By adjusting the referential capacities of her “remembrance” to coincide with the moment when she “became a wife,” Sidney evades the criterion that underwrites Hutcheson’s derivation of virtue: “In this Inquiry we need little Reasoning, or Argument, since Certainty is only attainable by distinct Attention to what we are conscious happens in our Minds.”68 But Sidney’s interpolated “I think” and “sure I am” undo the “Certainty” of her self-reference. Her virtue compels her to represent her mind with words of whose ideas she denies she is “conscious,” as her response to a friend’s query concerning her readiness to marry Arnold graphically indicates: “I told her, my heart was not engaged (as it really is not; for indeed, Cecilia, I do not think of Mr. Faulkland)” (74–75). Her parentheses render the epistemological status of Sidney’s thought decidedly ambivalent. Despite Sidney’s claim for the initially Richardsonian immediacy of her writing to the moment—her “custom of throwing upon paper every thing that occurs to me” (94)—Memoirs fails to sustain the practice of “throwing upon paper every thing” which facilitates Pamela’s virtue.69 Here, the reliance of Pamela’s claim to transmit naked sentiment upon Locke’s model of consciousness as “white Paper [that] receives any Characters” deserves notice, because an understanding whose Wrst objects are not innate ideas but “sensible experience”70 realizes that revised origin only by making men sensible of themselves: if “[e]very Man” is “conscious to himself,” Locke asserts, then “having Ideas, and Perception . . . [are] the same thing.”71 By taking consciousness as the necessary substance of thought—by presuming, in other words, that “thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks”72— Locke asserts the unimpeded receptivity of the medium in which “being conscious” happens by likening the brain either to unmarked paper or to a “mirror [that cannot] refuse, alter, or obliterate” the objects “set before it.” A rigorously blank, rigorously unobtrusive mind “forced to receive the Impressions” that it transmits to “their Audience in the Brain, the mind’s Presence-room (as I may so call it)”73 Wgures the transparency of thought’s signiWcation to itself. In an encomium published a month before Richardson’s Wrst novel, William Webster imagines how Pamela’s practice of thinking mitigates the density of the letters that transmit it: “She pours out all her Soul in them before her Parents without Disguise; so that one may judge of,

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nay, almost see, the inmost Recesses of her Mind. A pure clear Fountain of Truth and Innocence, a Magazine of Virtue and unblemish’d Thoughts!”74 Pamela’s “pure clear Fountain” dissolves the residual opacity of the printed book, accommodating this speciWcally textual articulation of the Wt between inner and outer “Virtue” to a model of consciousness that posits the latter as no more than a reXection of the former. Because Pamela’s “inmost Recesses” remain “unblemish’d” by their extroversion as letters, their virtue is, one could almost say, their conversion of feminine thought into an object of masculine moral perception. Shaftebury’s claim for an activity of virtuous judgment mediated by “pictures . . . which the mind of necessity Wgures to itself” deWnes the role of Pamela’s letters inside the “mind” of a reader like Webster, because whether or not the “pictures” present to his mind were Wrst his own, Pamela occasions “a new trial or exercise of [his] heart.”75 Pamela’s operation on the “heart” of its reader hinges upon the rigorous purity, as envisioned by another reviewer, of the event of the novel’s form, “the Letters being written under the immediate Impression of every Circumstance which occasioned them, and that to those who had a Right to know the fair Writer’s most secret Thoughts.”76 The ideal simultaneity of Pamela’s thought and its expression—or, even more ideally, the slight lag of the latter after the disinterested emanation of the former (again, “What shall I say?”)—impels the theorist of acting Aaron Hill to call this novel “a Kind of Dramatical Representation,” a kind of phenomenology of the imminence of Pamela’s virtue.77 The “dramatical” immediacy of thought undisguised by either body or signiWer marks the happy epistemological ending of a novel which achieves the transparency of the truth of wifely virtue by making it a mental object that readers “may judge of.” Sidney’s belated redaction of her mental content might solicit another Shaftesburian cognate for his moral sense: “criticism.” Because a moral agent is “forced to receive reXections back into his mind of what passes in itself,” the activity of virtue entails a “home survey” or “self-inspection” that fractures men into readers of themselves.78 This divided or split subject is alienated neither by its mind’s signiWcation of itself nor, as Webster and Hill assert, by its mind’s reading of Pamela; by instead feeling more affection for the moralized affection that constitutes his most proximate object, Shaftesbury’s inspector shows the peculiar redundancy of virtuous feeling deWned as its feeling for already virtuous feeling. And yet, as we have seen, Sidney’s self-inspection does alienate her mind from its virtue when, as in her inaugural statement of her deviation from Pamela’s formal and moral achievement, she remarks to Cecilia that “had I ever been inclined to dissent from [my mother’s] judgment in a matter of this importance, it would have been to no purpose; but this was really far from my thoughts” (45). Rather than dramatical impressions

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which unerringly transmit wifely morality’s truth, Sidney’s plot occasions her effort to bring her thoughts back to Richardson’s standard: I call that Being to witness, who knows the secrets of all hearts, that since I have been his wife, I have never, even in thought, swerved from that perfect and inviolable Wdelity which I vowed to [Arnold]. (215)

Sidney mimics Pamela’s testimony as a letter writer who has “not so much as in Thought, swerv’d from her Innocence.”79 But the novel’s third repetition of Faulkland’s proposal again aggravates the incapacity of her letters to transmit Pamela’s virtue. After binding himself to an oath that Sidney must consent to marry her desperate suitor, Sidney’s cousin Warner exonerates himself as follows: [I]f I did not know that at the bottom of your heart you love Faulkland, I would not make this a point with you; but notwithstanding all your pretended demurs I am sure that is the case. I should be disingenuous to deny it, answered I. (400)

The restoration of Sidney’s ingenuousness, hundreds of pages into Memoirs, engenders what I will call the novel’s “unconscious,” which is effected not by repression but rather by the disingenuousness that violates the promised substance of Lockean and Richardsonian thought. My Chapter 2 defends the suggestiveness of the Wgure of the Hobbesian individual as this applies to a novel which might represent something other than naturally subject wives: Roxana contains individually acting blood; Pamela splits into italicized typeface distinct from the commands that dictate the mechanics of her own ingenuous thinking. In Memoirs, Sidney never materializes as something other—except as the negative materiality, so to speak, of the parentheses or the ellipses that substantiate her denial of her will mentally to swerve. But in her recourse to signiWers that communicate almost nothing, Sidney makes opaque the very form of consciousness that transmits her denial. It is worth remarking that Sidney’s departure from the form of Pamela’s mental virtue also speaks to natural philosophy’s investigation of the state of sleep, whose total eclipse of thought is most evocatively Wgured by Locke’s fantasy of one soul able to rotate in and out of two alternately waking bodies.80 (Hume afWrms the amenability to this soulsharing arrangement of selves perpetuated only as consciousness, because when “by sound-sleep; so long as I am insensible of myself . . . [I] may truly be said not to exist.”81) Sidney’s unhappily virtuous epistolary practice does not snuff out her self; nor does it convert the substance of the novel into the illusory perception of secondary qualities whose break with primary reality is gauged by the impossible richness of her furniture. In either case, Sidney’s consciousness would, in Lockean or Humean

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fashion, still work: whether wholly shut down, or wholly deluded, it would remain, precisely, whole. Sidney’s “demurs” instead impair the sensibility of its self sustained by Locke’s waking—and, just as urgently, Richardson’s writing—person. A self-system that transmits the imminence of thought neither to its “mind’s Presence-room” nor to its reader, Memoirs projects a literary-political modernity in which the consciousness of moralized men corresponds to the entirety of their thought while the consciousness of, at least, second-best wives does not. Thus, rather than a “psychic cost” of the “possessive individualism”82 which Helene Moglen assigns to eighteenth-century novels in general, Sidney’s epistolary unconscious can be ascribed to the incapacity of enchantment to sustain the equivocation of willed duty and ingenuous love that constitutes the happiest ending of (the interior of) a wife who is not a free agent. As a precipitate of the formal technology whose ideally unmediated manifestation of wifely virtue admits neither romanticizing literary intention nor competing preference, Sidney’s epistolary unconscious communicates the novel’s failure to reconcile the substance of Lockean thought to the solely dutiful letters of loveless wives. Her unconscious emerges as her text’s intimation that her epistolary thought is not free or, more precisely, that it is not freely acted. Immediately after marrying Faulkland, Sidney discovers that his Wrst wife has magically survived apparent death; her pretended demurs are thus exposed to the Wnal act of epistemological alchemy at Sheridan’s disposal. At the end of Memoirs’s sequel, The Continuation of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (published posthumously in 1767), Sidney’s deathbed scene permits another calibration of those volumes’ virtue.83 As narrated by her servant, Sidney’s priest says to her: [Y]ou are a good woman; your life has been uniformly pious; and I think, as far as humanity will admit of the eulogium, you are blameless. I would not be guilty of arrogance, answered Mrs. Arnold; yet I have the inexpressible satisfaction to declare, that, upon taking a survey of my past life, I do not recollect ever to have been wilfully guilty of an action contrary to the duty I owe my Maker.84

Sidney has not, her letters amply attest, been “willfully guilty.” With this last reference to a novel that manifests almost nothing but dutiful will, Sidney seals Memoirs’ difference from the epistolary form of ingenuous thought.

Sidney’s Continuation Sidney’s benefactor Warner leaves her daughters Dorothea and Cecilia “twenty thousand pounds each,” his will stipulates, “to the end that they may not (as their mother was) be compelled, through fear, to accept of

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a man they do not like” (5: 57). By opening Memoirs’ Continuation with this bequest, does Sheridan afWrm the power of money to prevent the sequel’s repetition of Sidney’s plot? Claimed by Warner as Memoirs’ antidote, will “twenty thousand pounds” prove sufWcient to excavate each daughter’s Richardsonian preference—the preference that promises, Wnally, to render both voluntary and pleasing the reciprocal sentiment manifested by virtuously educated wives? Can money, to recall the verb with which Habermas grants sentimentalizing ideological agency to the genre, humanize this domestic novel?85 At the sequel’s start, Sidney cites the “unhappy circumstance of his birth” (4: 21) to exclude Faulkland’s illegitimate son, whom she has raised with her daughters, from their otherwise unrestricted Weld of preference. No longer the revelation of one secret self, Continuation’s letters proceed to expose the interests that induce both daughters’ proscribed choice. Dorothea’s duplicitous friend Sophy corresponds with her mercenary, “rakehelly” (4: 103) brother Sir Edward; by forwarding Dorothea’s secret engagement with Faulkland, Sophy plans to set a “pattern” (4: 67) for Edward’s conquest of Cecilia. Pressed by Sophy, Dorothea admits the preference of “such a heart, that never gave me warning of my danger till it was past remedy!” (4: 60) Edward “Wle[s] off a little of that pedantic rust” with which Faulkland’s tutor “has incrusted his intellects” (4: 74), stimulates Faulkland’s “indignation” (4: 127) at Sidney’s prejudice, and reveals that Dorothea is in love with him. Sophy facilitates a meeting after which, Dorothea discovers, “I have given myself away! an irrevocable vow has passed my lips never to be the wife of any man but Faulkland!” (4: 176) Sidney and her childless brother Sir George decide that Cecilia should marry lord V——, “an exceedingly grave man (the very reverse of her own temper) with . . . ten years more added to his age” (4: 182); Cecilia’s aversion hides her own “secret love” (4: 318) for Faulkland. After revealing her prepossession with “noble frankness” (4: 318), Cecilia acquires lord V——’s “exalted” (5: 42) assistance in gaining her uncle’s permission to marry Faulkland; Faulkland, who “loves Cecilia!” (4: 91), agrees to marry Cecilia in the hope that Dorothea’s “meek forgiving temper” (5: 73) will release him from his prior vow. Instead, the crazed Dorothea interrupts Faulkland’s marriage to Cecilia by insisting upon the inviolability of his promise: “This hand is mine . . . Oh, Faulkland, you cannot, till my eyes are closed give it to another!” (5: 249) Although Falkland’s crime is Wnally ascribed to the “art” with which Sophy and Edward “pervert[ed] the minds of the two young persons on whom they had their separate inXuence” (4: 143), each daughter renounces her engagement. Faulkland kills the “arch Wend!” (5: 259) Edward in a duel; Sophy retires to a monastery in France.

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As she urges Dorothea’s illicit love, Sophy cites Sidney’s model of Wlial obedience as “old-fashion’d” (4: 66). She is not alone in condemning Sidney’s undesiring practice of virtue: Cecilia “went so far as to say that she thought her mother had made too great a sacriWce to duty, in giving [Faulkland] up so easily” (4: 137); Sir George invokes her “too ready submission” (4: 208); and young Falkland refers to her as “a slave to the capricious will of others” (4: 321). The sequel thus appears to have no trouble censuring the disavowal of anterior preference modeled by Sidney’s mother’s defense of her own premarital “silence”: “I am sure, when I married Sir Robert, he had never heard me speak twenty sentences” (18). Yet money that would inversely, Sophy argues, permit Dorothea and Cecilia to “please themselves in the choice of husbands” (4: 68) instead serves a precisely opposing end, amplifying the intractability of the single parental command that each daughter’s desire violates. In the end, both Cecilia and Dorothea forfeit (her) preference. Cecilia pledges to repeat her mother’s plot by promising to feel “gratitude” (5: 293) to lord V——, whom her mother once more commands her to marry. The sequel’s editor concludes: Miss Cecilia had too much good sense, and too much acknowledgment for her deserving lover, to propose unnecessary delays . . . [I]n a month afterwards my lord V—— had the happiness to receive the willing hand of the most charming of women from her delighted friends. (5: 312)

In this emphatic reversal of the intention of Warner’s bequest, the sequel depreciates the criteria that would qualify Cecilia as “willing”: “good sense,” and the wish to avoid unnecessary delays, substitute for the desire that would render her duty, by Locke’s standards, if not free then at least happily voluntary. By representing the failure of twenty thousand pounds to effect Sidney’s daughters’ approximation of Lockean liberty, Sheridan’s Continuation refuses to endorse the antipathy of love and money that, in Warner’s view, would deWne domestic power as a strictly extrinsic constraint upon the mechanics of feminine preference. By failing to activate desire that would permit Sidney’s daughters to resemble free agents, Continuation sustains a second generation of women whose practice of sentiment refuses transitively to effect the contractarian domestic sphere’s freely acted virtue. And yet, despite Cecilia’s repetition of her mother’s plot, a little more desire might be left over this time around. Sidney’s old correspondent Cecilia B—— recounts her namesake’s replies to her attempt to extol V——’s merits: Is not, said I, (speaking of lord V——) a very handsome man! . . . She turned her eyes at me with so arch a look, that I could scarce refrain from laughing. I

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know nothing to the contrary, madam. Has not he a Wne estate? I do not want money, Mrs. B——. Of a considerable family and noble rank? I desire not titles either. What then do you desire, Cecilia? Only to please myself; and she shook her little head so, that all the powder and the curls in her hair fell about her face, and I never beheld such a pretty wild Wgure in my life . . . She then Xew to my harpsichord, rattled away a tune on it, then turning round, she began a minuet, singing to herself, and danced two or three turns round the room with inimitable spirit and grace. In short, there is no being angry with this girl for any thing; for ’tis such a bewitching little gipsey, that I believe she could persuade any one to be of her way of thinking. (4: 211–13)

If Sidney’s letters intimate her preference by aggravating its invisibility, then here Cecilia materializes as, so to speak, the obverse of her mother’s epistolary unconscious: she embodies desire “to please myself” wholly antagonistic to the transitively modernizing agency represented by Richardson as the imminence of desire’s conversion into duty. By animating pleasure entirely incompatible with her future obligation, Cecilia afWrms, from the outside as it were, the profundity of a revision of Pamela that proceeds from the very depths of Memoirs’ heart. Composed, in part, from the vantage of a virtuous husband who Wnds himself in love with another woman, GrifWth’s The Delicate Distress is a remarkable complement to Sheridan’s representation of dispassionate conjugal obligation. In an echo of Sidney’s effort to make herself love, Delicate Distress’s virtuous Lord Woodville laments that “when I behold the ingenuous fondness of lord Mount Willis, and Sir John Straffon, to their wives, I curse my fate . . . for having reduced me to the contemptible necessity of feigning, what they are happy enough to feel.”86 Yet although Delicate Distress seems to assign a husband devoid of “ingenuous fondness” difWculties analogous to those of Smith’s second-best wife, the novel does not establish the parity of the suffering felt by unloving spouses of either sex. If Lord Woodville evinces distress at the necessity of “feigning,” his letters far more urgently register the extremity of misery that a betrayed wife also cannot—as Sheridan’s Memoirs afWrms—virtuously manifest: I have frequently imagined that her mind was distressed; but whenever she seemed to perceive that idea rising in my thought, she has instantly banished it, by assuming an air of cheerfulness and vivacity; and the transition was made with such amazing ease, that I thought it impossible she should be insincere . . . Can it be possible . . . that a creature, so young, and innocent, as lady Woodville, can be capable of disguising her sentiments, and hiding her grief, in smiles! I begin to fear that women are our superiors, in every thing. If she has perceived my passion for the marchioness, and concealed the anguish, which such a discovery must occasion, to a heart like hers, for well I know she fondly loves me, the story of the Spartan boy, should no longer be repeated; but lady Woodville be, henceforth, considered as the Wrst example, of human fortitude.87

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According to Plutarch’s Lives, the “Spartan boy” demonstrates fortitude because, after hiding a stolen fox under his coat, he “suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws, and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen.”88 GrifWth’s iteration of the analogy of stoic heroes and miserably cheerful wives is most striking for its hyperbole;89 here, Astell’s feminist physiology enables the domestic novel’s grisliest claim for the amplitude of suffering entailed by mortiWed cheer. And yet the form in which GrifWth makes this claim functions, just as unmistakably, to offset that hyperbole, because the depth of this wife’s anguish is advanced in the letter of a husband only barely able to perceive it. As the only medium in which the misery of an almost perfectly cheerful wife can be, at best, elliptically constituted, Lord Woodville’s letter locates the intimation of the extent of his wife’s unhappiness at the very center of this domestic novel. By imagining the depth of his cheerful wife’s pain, Delicate Distress uses this Smithean husband’s sympathy to augment the epistolary interior of a miserably virtuous wife. In her Wrst novel, Mary, Mary Wollstonecraft repudiates as “mock heroism”90 the fortitude that would be sustained both outwardly and inwardly by Smith’s virtuously educated wives. I conclude this study of feminine compliance in the domestic novel with Wollstonecraft’s insistence on the necessity of desire to women’s moral practice. By rejecting the heroism of miserably willed duty, Wollstonecraft radicalizes the domestic novel’s claim for contractarian modernity’s conjugal failures.

Conclusion

“Marriage has bastilled me for life” Mary Wollstonecraft’s Domestic Novel

In chapter 11 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), entitled “Duty to Parents,” Mary Wollstonecraft cites John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) to explain how women are not born, but made, “abject slaves”:1 A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes, that “if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children; if their spirits be abased and broken by too strict an hand over them; they lose all their vigour and industry.” This strict hand may in some degree account for the weakness of women; for girls . . . are more kept down by their parents, in every sense of the word, than boys. The duty expected from them is, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than reason; and thus taught slavishly to submit to their parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. (247–48)

By invoking slavishness as the effect of the “domestic tyranny” (268) imposed on girls by parents and husbands, Wollstonecraft, like Mary Astell, applies Locke’s indictment of arbitrary conjugal power to a person whose “mind” and “spirits” that power will also break. Like Astell’s mortiWed wives, the “passive indolent women” (104) effected by domestic caprice radicalize the logic of Locke’s pedagogy, repudiating a practice of compliance whose servility obviates its virtue regardless of its practitioner’s sex: “all the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience; or, the most sacred rights belong only to man” (162). In her Wrst book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Wollstonecraft promotes “Mr Locke’s system” to replace the “slavish fear” of a girl or wife “who submits, without conviction, to a parent or husband” with the ingenuous practice which, for her entire career, Wollstonecraft appropriates under the name “[a]ctive virtue.”2 Her Vindication reiterates Locke’s anti-Filmerian political genealogy to claim that broken women, like the moped sons of absolutist fathers, are not “essentially inferior”; rather, they have “always been subjugated” (107). In retracing the process that turns girls into “enervated” (91) wives, Vindication offers a grim account of the fate of a body whose education inculcates slavishness:

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With what disgust have I heard sensible women, for girls are more restrained and cowed than boys, speak of the wearisome conWnement, which they endured at school. Not allowed, perhaps, to step out of one broad walk in a superb garden, and obliged to pace with steady deportment stupidly backwards and forwards, holding up their heads and turning out their toes, with shoulders braced back, instead of bounding, as nature directs to complete her own design, in the various attitudes so conducive to health. The pure animal spirits, which make both mind and body shoot out, and unfold the tender blossoms of hope, are turned sour, and vented in vain wishes or pert repinings, that contract the faculties and spoil the temper; else they mount to the brain, and sharpening the understanding before it gains proportionable strength, produce that pitiful cunning which disgracefully characterizes the female mind—and I fear will ever characterize it whilst women remain the slaves of power! (258–59)

Wollstonecraft echoes the republican diagnosis of “supineness and inactivity” induced, Shaftesbury warns, by luxury, for “without action, motion and employment, the body languishes and is oppressed . . . the spirits unemployed abroad help to consume the parts within.”3 But Wollstonecraft’s derivation of women’s “pitiful cunning” has another antecedent. Her representation of the damage wrought by “pure animal spirits” denied the chance to be naturally “vented” sounds remarkably like the etiology of women’s “wretched incogitancy” offered by Astell in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697): “as Exercise enlarges and exalts any Faculty, so thro’ want of using, it becomes crampt and lessened.”4 For Wollstonecraft as for Astell, mind and body are inextricably spoiled, Serious Proposal states, by the “[i]ndisposition of the Bodily Organs, which cramps and contracts the Operations of the Mind.”5 Wollstonecraft’s “slaves of power”—who are also, as the effect of irrational punctilio that can be only “stupidly” observed, “slaves to their bodies” (115), “creatures of sensation” (137), and “slaves to their persons” (235)—extend Astell’s claim upon the feminist physiology whose capacity for active virtue likewise compels Serious Proposal ’s lament that “we act rather like the Slaves of Sense than Creatures endued with Reason.”6 The “wearisome conWnement” of Vindication’s girls effects the same mechanics of servility as the “vilest Slavery, the Captivation of our Understandings,” sustained, Serious Proposal asserts, because “by disuse of our Faculties we . . . are sunk into an Animal life wholly taken up with sensible objects.”7 As Barbara Taylor remarks, Vindication’s relentless denunciation of the “negative virtues” (133) characterizing the person that it designates, with Astell, an “upper servant” (111, 151) has earned this text the critical charge of at least an ambivalent “anti-womanism.”8 Yet, by stressing Wollstonecraft’s appropriation of Locke’s post-absolutist pedagogical theory—as well as Astell’s feminist response to it—I mean to suggest that Vindication’s lavishly prolix indictment of broken women’s “relaxed half-formed limbs” (91), “listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence”

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(137), and “present infantine state” (205) assigns them the same physiological mechanism that qualiWes the aptitude for freedom of Lockean boys. In this capacity, we can appreciate Wollstonecraft’s positive effort, made four years before Vindication, to represent a woman whose mind and body are unencumbered by the rules of sexed propriety Vindication labels “a system of slavery” (103). Wollstonecraft’s novel Mary, a Fiction (1788) imagines an untutored protagonist who escapes the “habitual slavery, to Wrst impressions” effected, Vindication argues, by the “mechanical exactness” with which susceptible children’s Lockean understandings “Wx . . . ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind” (201). “Neglected in every respect,”9 Mary’s mind manifests unsexed virtue as follows: [S]he hailed the morn, and sung with wild delight, Glory to God on high, good will towards men . . . [S]he could hardly conceal her violent emotions; and the recollection never failed to wake her dormant piety when earthly passions made it grow languid. These various movements of her mind were not commented on, nor were the luxuriant shoots restrained by culture. The servants and the poor adored her. In order to be able to gratify herself in the highest degree, she practised the most rigid oeconomy, and had such power over her appetites and whims, that without any great effort she conquered them so entirely, that when her understanding or affections had an object, she almost forgot she had a body which required nourishment. This habit of thinking, this kind of absorption, gave strength to the passions. (12)

Wollstonecraft’s advertisement to Mary claims that in this novel “the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers is displayed . . . Without arguing physically about possibilities—in a Wction, such a being may be allowed to exist” (3). Yet Mary’s vision of a girl not impressed by ideas of a sexual character does argue “physically” about the “movements” of this person’s mind. Indeed, the novel’s representation of Mary’s natural capacity to be, as Vindication puts it, “actively virtuous” (155) delineates the physics of that impulse as the fact, simply, that it is “wild”—or, rather, “unrestrained.” Freed from what Vindication calls “superinductions of art that have smothered nature” (201), Mary’s “habit of thinking” engenders an understanding that will not, as Vindication states, “acquire manners rather than morals” (203)—an understanding which exchanges the “luxuriant weeds” sown by Education of Daughters’s indulgent mothers for the “luxuriant shoots” of Mary’s unspoiled delight.10 Notably, Mary craves the indelibly bodily “Joys of Vertue” championed by Astell; like Serious Proposal’s votary, Mary animates the reWnement of “earthly passions” that Astell designates “Spiritual Sensation.”11 In stark antipathy to the “weakly educated” (141) women who populate Vindication, Mary is not a slave to her person; instead, she models

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the “power over her appetites and whims” that transforms Lockean boys into freely acting citizens. This entails not a wholesale renunciation of the “body” whose nourishment Mary sometimes almost forgets but rather the deliberative suspension of desire that enables Lockean men’s Wnally moralized volition. Like those men, Mary still feels desire, but she can “arrange her thoughts, and argue with herself, even when under the inXuence of the most violent passion” (14). Remarkably, then, Wollstonecraft’s evocation of her unbroken protagonist’s ability to practice “the most rigid oeconomy” does away with the necessity upon which Locke’s own claim for contractarian men’s aptitude for civil liberty still turns: the residually arbitrary paternal power that Wrst trains sons in appetite’s denial. A spontaneously virtuous person who refutes the necessity of any imposition of domestic authority whatsoever, Mary is, fantastically, exempt from the inXuence of a “culture” that, Vindication argues, makes feminine morality “localized” (133; emphasis Wollstonecraft’s). Rather than Wtting Wollstonecraft to a future politics in which, as Claudia Johnson suggests, “the subject of liberalism is always implicitly masculine,”12 Mary activates the imminently moralized physiology whose indifference to sex persists, as we have seen, into the eighteenthcentury domestic novel. In other words, Mary is the not necessarily sexed free agent who embodies the end of Locke’s contractarian pedagogy. Engineered as the opposite of “women,” Vindication states, “who have early imbibed notions of passive obedience” (104), Mary has not been exposed to the “instantaneous associations” (200) which would determine the “factitious character” (202) of her understanding’s sex. Although Vindication once invokes the modernized cognate of animal spirits, “this subtile electric Xuid” (200), Mary’s unrestrained person claims the same Cartesian infrastructure which Astell’s Serious Proposal assigns to women as well as freely acting men. Mary’s unadulterated aptitude for active virtue therefore guarantees the integrity of her reaction to the man whom her parents have “forced” (14) her to marry: “the sound of his name made her sick” (16). Mary’s closing consummation of its protagonist’s marriage, which she has eluded for the entirety of this short novel, transpires in kind: [S]he gave him her hand—the struggle was almost more than she could endure. She tried to appear calm; time mellowed her grief, and mitigated her torments; but when her husband would take her hand, or mention any thing like love, she would instantly feel a sickness . . . and wish, involuntarily, that the earth would open and swallow her. (52)

This scene does not represent merely personalized aversion; well before Mary joins her unknown husband, “her heart revolted” (18) and “her soul revolted” (31) at the juridical knowledge that she had “been thrown

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away—given in with an estate” (25). Insofar as its protagonist’s revolt constitutes both a physiological and political reXex, Mary advances the novelistic discourse of compliance which, as we have seen, distinguishes between naturally subject wives and virtuous women who nonetheless fail “involuntarily” to ratify the legitimacy of their husbands’ power. With its concluding evocation of Mary’s miserably unresolved “struggle,” Mary most vividly represents the political injustice of marriage as its protagonist’s inability actively to obey. By suggesting that Wollstonecraft radicalizes the critique of marriage sustained, in the domestic novels that precede Mary, by a person who cannot become an ingenuously virtuous wife, I mean to argue that Wollstonecraft elaborates as the core of her feminism the repudiation of blind obedience whose applicability to women’s bodies is decisively advanced by Astell.13 ReXected backward, a protagonist who “fainted when [her husband] approached her unexpectedly” (52) illuminates Mary’s critical continuity with, rather than its sudden departure from, domestic novels like Richardson’s Pamela, Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Lennox’s Female Quixote, and Sheridan’s Memoirs of Sidney Bidulph.14 To be sure, its miserably virtuous wife—the involuntariness of whose revolt is sealed by a swoon—does not exhaust Mary’s engagement with the eighteenth-century domestic novel. This engagement is most critically sustained by Wollstonecraft’s refusal to endorse as a variant of feminine moral practice the mandate that women, as Vindication puts it, “save [man] from sinking into absolute brutality, by rubbing off the rough angles of his character” (144). When Mary declares that “virtue should be an active principle; and that the most desirable station, is the one that exercises our faculties, reWnes our affections, and enables us to be useful” (46), she reclaims her own morally “desirable station” not as the effort to enlighten a “childish” (46) husband but rather as her continued Xight from him (“I will work, she cried, do any thing rather than be a slave” [40]). This refusal to reconcile active virtue and subjection to a childish man propels Mary’s most trenchant commentary on the eighteenth-century domestic novel: whereas Richardson, Haywood, Lennox, and Sheridan continue, albeit uneasily, to locate wifely virtue in the effort transitively to modernize more or less childish or brutal husbands, Wollstonecraft detaches women’s duty from a localized condition of feminine morality that serves, Vindication asserts, to perpetuate “our slavish dependence” (76). By rejecting a moral mandate which sustains the power of “tyrants and sensualists” (93), Vindication seizes as its avatar of civil liberty not an abstract or masculine bearer of rights but rather the still-Cartesian person whose animal spirits necessarily animate its freely virtuous practice. Although, as Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination states, Vindication “names itself a vindication of rights, and subsequent

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rights-based feminist struggles make it tempting to read it in this light,” Taylor crucially disproves “the imposition on Wollstonecraft of a heroicindividualist politics utterly at odds with her own ethically driven case for women’s emancipation.” That case entails, again, “not the ability to do what one pleased—which [Wollstonecraft] would have called license” but “rather an active, self-enlarging virtue.”15 As Taylor’s study suggests, we cannot appreciate Wollstonecraft’s place in the genealogy of modern Western feminism without recognizing the historically radical force of a defense of civil liberty galvanized not by women’s claim upon an abstract, necessarily masculine, universal but rather by the tenet, Vindication asserts, that “every being may become virtuous by the exercise of its own reason” (89). Like that of Locke and Astell, Wollstonecraft’s “reason” must solicit desire, as Vindication repeats: “Nature has wisely attached affection to duties, to sweeten toil, and to give that vigour to the exertions of reason which only the heart can give” (231). Her elaboration of Astell’s seminal defense of women’s aptitude for active virtue—of moral practice which implicates both desire and duty, Serious Proposal states that “if we will be Sincere and Ingenuous we cannot have a more faithfull Director than our own heart”16—illuminates the vital persistence of Astell’s feminist physiology into the very text which advances women’s claim to be able to become not abstract “citizens” (260) but rather “really virtuous and useful” (236) citizens. In Vindication’s remarkable elaboration of that physiology, women must Wrst “participate in the inherent rights of all mankind” (272) before they can actively practice the virtue of their sexed anatomy.17 By cutting off her novel with the intimation of wifely “sickness” whose gradual relief Mary simply refuses to represent, Wollstonecraft disavows the particularized morality ascribed to girls whose education, John Gregory’s conduct book A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) asserts, must prepare them to “bear domestic misfortunes better than we [men] do”—that is, to “put on a face of serenity and chearfulness, when your hearts are torn with anguish.”18 Vindication argues with Father’s Legacy as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), whose claim that “mildness of disposition on the women’s side will always bring a man back to reason, at least if he be not absolutely a brute” Wollstonecraft cites with the following commentary: Of what materials can that heart be composed, which can melt when insulted, and instead of revolting at injustice, kiss the rod? Is it unfair to infer that her virtue is built on narrow views and selWshness, who can caress a man, with true feminine softness, the very moment when he treats her tyrannically? Nature never dictated such insincerity;—and, though prudence of this sort be termed a virtue, morality becomes vague when any part is supposed to rest on falsehood. (163)

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Whatever its body’s sex, the “materials” of no human “heart” can ingenuously submit to “injustice.” Instead, this violation of any body’s “Nature” deWnes a wife’s tolerance of her tyrannical governor as “insincerity.” Here Wollstonecraft implicates the expedient wifely insincerity—fallout which proceeds, most fundamentally, from masculine “selWshness”—in an equivocally moralized practice of “art” (164) and “sinister tricks” (235) whose terms hardened into tropes over the second half of the eighteenth century. Jane Collier’s bitterly satirical endorsement of servile wives’ “mock compliance,”19 made in An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753), anticipates the specious virtue of the strategy advised by Thomas Marriott’s Female Conduct: Being an Essay on the Art of Pleasing (1759): The Woman was doom’d subject to her Mate, E’er-since Eve, the Fruit forbidden, eat; Hence ev’ry Wife her Husband must obey, She, by Compliance, can her Ruler sway; Strong, without Strength, she triumphs o’er the Heart, What Nature gives not, she acquires by Art; Preeminence, herself debasing, gains, By yielding conquers, and by serving reigns; Her soft Endearments, her Werce Master tame, As Greece, with Arts, Rome’s conquering Arms o’ercame.20

Of women’s capacity to “tame” men to whose injustice they blindly submit, Wollstonecraft comments: How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes! For instance, the winning softness so warmly, and frequently, recommended, that governs by obeying. What childish expressions, and how insigniWcant is the being—can it be an immortal one? who will condescend to govern by such sinister methods! (87)

Wollstonecraft’s incomplete and posthumously published Maria (1798) advances the eighteenth-century domestic novel’s most aggressive and explicit rejection of the moral value of wives’ attempt at transitively modernizing “softness,” reiterated by Maria’s protagonist as follows: “woman, weak in reason, impotent in will, is required to moralize, sentimentalize herself to stone, and pine her life away, labouring to reform her embruted mate.”21 Maria represents the moral fraudulence of a practice which supports what Vindication calls, in a brilliantly compressed formulation, “male aristocracy” (167) by assigning its protagonist a husband who renders feminized duty unassailably revolting: I cannot, I am sure (though, when attending to the sick, I never felt disgust) forget my own sensations . . . I think I now see him lolling in an arm-chair, in a dirty

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powdering gown, soiled linen, ungartered stockings, and tangled hair, yawning and stretching himself. (110)

Through the resources of a sensorium involuntarily disgusted by this “squallid” (110) object, Maria rejects the naturalizing speciWcation of moral duty Gregory prescribes to women “designed,” Father’s Legacy asserts, “to soften our hearts and polish our manners.”22 Gregory’s women are, more precisely, “designed” to defuse the complaint conveyed by Astell’s claim, made in ReXections on Marriage (1700), that when acquiring a husband “A Woman indeed can’t properly be said to Choose, all that is allow’d her, is to Refuse or Accept what is offer’d.”23 If this statement communicates the proscription of desire that divests wives’ nominally contractarian assent of the passion which deWnes the liberty of Lockean men, then late eighteenth-century women, Gregory insists, do not harbor such an aptitude in the Wrst place: I do not think that your sex . . . have much of that sensibility which disposes to such attachments. What is commonly called love among you is rather gratitude, and a partiality to the man who prefers you to the rest of your sex . . . As, therefore, Nature has not given you that unlimited range in your choice that we enjoy, she has wisely and benevolently assigned you a greater Xexibility of taste on this subject.24

By exchanging Cartesian passion for sexed “Xexibility,” Gregory denies women the contractarian physiology whose desire, however moralized it must become, continues to motivate its virtue. Gregory articulates feminized essence, then, as the reconstitution of a materialist body whose odds of desiring the man it must marry are otherwise, as the eighteenthcentury domestic novel suggests, improbable: if women possessed men’s “sensibility,” Gregory concludes, “there is not one of a million of you that could ever marry with any degree of love.”25 The unmitigated violence of Maria’s disgust therefore transmits the “strength of passions” whose necessity to women’s active practice of domestic virtue Wollstonecraft’s second novel more decisively asserts. Maria explains why her perWdious “husband’s renewed caresses then became hateful to me” (133): Those who support a system of what I call false reWnement, and will not allow great part of love in the female, as well as male breast, to spring in some respects involuntarily, may not admit that charms are as necessary to feed the passion, as virtues to convert the mellowing spirit into friendship . . . When novelists or moralists praise as a virtue, a woman’s coldness of constitution, and want of passion; and make her yield to the ardour of her lover out of sheer compassion, or to promote a frigid plan of future comfort, I am disgusted . . . They may be good women, in the ordinary acceptation of the phrase, and do no harm; but they appear to me not to have those “Wnely fashioned nerves,” which render the senses exquisite. They may possess tenderness; but they want that Wre of the

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imagination, which produces active sensibility, and positive virtue . . . I must insist that a heartless conduct is the contrary of virtuous. Truth is the only basis of virtue; and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us. (113–14)

Love that happens “involuntarily” disqualiWes the degraded mechanism of sexed Xexibility as a depreciation of “positive virtue.” In addressing “novelists or moralists” to repudiate coldness whose political instrumentality Gregory clearly exposes, Maria recalls Vindication’s charge against “stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales . . . retailed in sentimental jargon” (281). As a reference to rules of propriety predicated upon the factitious expedient of women’s “want of passion,” the word “stupid” means, precisely, numb or unfeeling. Vindication thereby distinguishes the “heartless” morality promulgated by stupid novelists from the strength of passion necessary for women to realize the positive virtues of “human nature”: “it is not against strong, persevering passions; but romantic wavering feelings that I wish to guard the female heart by exercising the understanding” (152). By including the practice of “love” among the duties to which women must lend strength of passion as well as men, Maria revokes the virtue not only of passive obedience but of passive reciprocation (yielding women evince, Vindication argues, “cattish” or “spaniel-like affection” [271, 103, 231]). Maria vindicates the civil independence necessary to women’s “active sensibility, and positive virtue” by afWrming, for “female” as well as “male” persons, the centrality of pleasure to Locke’s articulation of ingenuous virtue. Maria’s vindication of feminine independence targets the blind spot of contractarian modernity, which, as we have seen, Carole Pateman designates masculine conjugal right or sex-right. As a symptom of the persistence of arbitrary power into the eighteenth-century domestic sphere, Maria’s husband’s sex-right would be impervious to the legitimizing necessity of wifely desire. But by holding Maria’s practice of duty to the modernizing standard embodied by Lockean sons, Wollstonecraft insists upon the physiological indifference of pleasure to sexed anatomy even in this ostensibly particularized case. By refusing the revision of Astell’s feminist physiology that would effect wifely coldness, Wollstonecraft represents the injustice of contractarian modernity as the indifference of both virtue and pleasure to sex. Maria’s refusal to embody “false reWnement” therefore divests her brutal husband of moral or domestic authority: “He attempted to pull me into the chamber, half joking. But I resisted” (123). I end this book with Maria’s act of resistance not to mark an inaugural moment—Wnally, the domestic novel has arrived!—but rather to stress the feminist and literary-historical continuity of her act with the preceding

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century’s representations of conjugal modernity. By refusing to accommodate Maria’s “exquisite” senses to the expedient of feminine want of passion, Wollstonecraft radicalizes the domestic novel’s implication of arbitrary conjugal power in the incapacity of its objects ingenuously to obey. A feminist physiology whose “Wnely fashioned nerves” refuse to vindicate the justice of masculine conjugal right, Maria Wgures the terminal antagonism of active virtue to the practice of wifely subjection.26 With this embodiment of masculine conjugal authority’s failure, Maria illuminates the critical force of the eighteenth-century novel’s representations of nerves, “senses,” “minds,” and passions that cannot ratify the natural subjection of Lockean wives. By locating Maria’s defense of her desire to practice civil liberty at the very heart of the domestic sphere, Wollstonecraft shows her debt to the novels that precede her.

Notes

Introduction 1. Frances Burney, Evelina, or, A Young Lady’s Entrance Into the World, ed. Susan Kubica Howard (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 516. 2. Ibid., 529. 3. The Wrst passage was written by Christine Peymani; the second, by Emma Stapely; the third, by Karen Russell. They are reproduced here with their authors’ permission. 4. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 292. 5. Frances Burney’s critical recovery, which dates from her seminal reassessment by Joyce Hemlow and Margaret Anne Doody, has been almost wholly devoted to the complexity of Burney’s relation to paternal power (as exercised by, among others, her musicologist father, Charles Burney). Texts that crucially speak to the issue of Burney’s relation to men’s power include Joyce Hemlow, History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958); Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987); Margaret Anne Doody, Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Joanne Cutting-Gray, Woman as “Nobody” and the Novels of Frances Burney (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992); and Barbara Zonitch, Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997). Exemplary evocations of Burney’s or Evelina’s passivity include Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Dynamics of Fear: Fanny Burney,” Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), and Mary Poovey, “Fathers and Daughters: The Trauma of Growing up Female,” Women and Literature 2 (1982): 39–58. 6. Betty Rizzo, review of Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers before Jane Austen and associated Pandora Press reprints, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6, no. 2 (Fall 1987): 346. 7. Ibid. 8. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 71. 9. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 21, paras. 19, 20.

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Notes to Pages 4–11

10. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1990), 33. 11. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2, para. 82. 12. Ibid., para. 191. 13. Ibid., para. 82. 14. Ibid., para. 48. 15. For an important assessment of the political signiWcance of wives’ peculiar property, see Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Staves argues “that efforts to apply contract ideas to the marital relation in the mid-eighteenth-century led to results which were found socially intolerable. Thus, by the end of the period [covered in Staves’s book] the courts retreated from contract in this Weld and reimposed what I am going to argue were deeper patriarchal structures” (4). 16. Mary Astell, ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–18. 17. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 192. 18. Records for this text at the Newberry Library and the British Library assign its authorship to Behn. 19. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 37. 20. [Aphra Behn], A Companion for the ladies-Closets; or, the Life and Death of the Most Excellent Lady ——— (London, 1712), 98–102. 21. Locke, Thoughts, 37. 22. Kay’s Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988) marks a groundbreaking juxtaposition of political philosophy and the novel which aims to correct “the tendency in the movements that feed current literary theory to underestimate the role of political institutions” (15). However, Kay’s perplexing inattention to Lockean political theory distorts her alignment of texts, opening a gap in her move from Thomas Hobbes to David Hume. In Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Harriet Guest argues against the “asocial exclusion” of “domesticity” from eighteenthcentury political discourse by situating domesticity’s representations “in the network of meanings that constitute publicity” (15, 13). While Guest discusses the private and public resonance of practices such as shopping, learning, religious faith, and sensibility, she does not take up the practice of compliance as such, thereby saying little on the topic of the analogy of family and state or on the analytic continuity of domestic and political power. 23. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, in The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 6. 24. Ibid., 40. 25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. 26. Pocock’s claim that passionate men are necessarily “feminised” signals a peculiarly ahistorical refusal to acknowledge the constitutive role of masculine desire in republican social theory and political economy (J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 114). 27. Victoria Kahn, “‘The Duty to Love’: Passion and Obligation in Early Modern Political Theory,” Representations 68 (Fall 1999): 95. Kahn offers an invaluable

Notes to Pages 11–15

213

account of the instrumentality of passion in Miltonic and Hobbesian visions of domestic and public contract, importantly elucidating the necessity of passion to a hypothetical state of nature deWned as such because its population lacks the motives for contract in civil society. However, I strongly disagree with her claim— which exactly coincides with that of Pocock in the note above—that “the Hobbesian subject is . . . conspicuously feminized” (97) because he is “motivated by fear” (96). By claiming that the “feminizing” (98) effect of fear makes Hobbesian men analogous to wives, Kahn herself sexes a passion which, like love, is instrumental to both public and private consent; nowhere does Hobbes align fear with femininity. 28. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 173. 29. Ibid., 168. 30. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 223. 31. Ibid., 96. 32. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5. 33. Scott, Only Paradoxes, 5. Scott deWnes feminism as “a political movement originating in the West at the moment of its eighteenth-century democratic revolutions” ( Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 201). 34. Scott, Only Paradoxes, 5, 168–69. 35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 139. 36. Scott, Only Paradoxes, 16. 37. Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 46, 48. 38. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 32. Butler uses this term to communicate how the body is shaped by its “investiture” with power (34). 39. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 10. 40. Eliza Haywood, The Wife (London, 1756), 109–10. 41. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 28. 42. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 37. 43. Laqueur, Making Sex, 8. Moi cites this statement, cautioning that it “should not be taken to mean that people actually thought in terms of a distinction between sex and gender in pre-modern times” (Woman, 11 n. 13). Paula McDowell’s The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) argues of late Stuart women’s active participation in “state affairs” that “modern notions of the gendered subject, like that of the individual self, can only be anachronistically applied” (125). McDowell suggests that as the eighteenth century progressed, “[p]rint made it easier for notions of appropriate female behaviour to be codiWed and dispersed across social and geographic boundaries, and barriers between ‘modest’ and ‘immodest’ women came to seem as absolute as older divisions of faith, political allegiance, occupation, economic position, and even rank” (291). 44. For Butler, this statement emblematizes the contingency of femininity upon an authority which, itself extrinsic to nature, deWnes whether or not a woman

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Notes to Pages 16–18

qualiWes as “natural”: “‘I feel like a woman’ is true to the extent that Aretha Franklin’s invocation of a deWning Other is assumed” (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990], 22). 45. Moi deploys the term “pervasive” to specify the developments in “nineteenth-century biology” that deWne the scientiWc and cultural novelty of a model of essential sex which “saturate[s] the whole person” (Woman, 11). 46. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 11, 29, 50. 47. The assignment to characters and authors of an intention to subvert betrays the ontological contingency of a poststructuralist subject and text whose transgression Butler reclaims only insofar as it transpires “unknowingly.” To locate a character’s “transgressive agency” in the prospect, as Ellen Pollak states, of her “taking performative control of her enactment of desire and female subjectivity” does not, on Butler’s terms, make sense (Ellen Pollak, “Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister,” in New Casebooks: Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd [London: Macmillan, 1999], 165). 48. Certainly, the eighteenth-century person invites critical genealogies of Butler’s actor: taken to its limits by David Hume, a mind stocked by sensory impressions fails to sustain the temporal coherence of “personal identity,” precisely the characterization of the subject claimed by Nietzsche and Butler. Hume states: “all my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thoughts or consciousness. I cannot discover any theory, which gives me satisfaction on this head” (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner [London: Penguin, 1969], 676–77). 49. In Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Margaret J. M. Ezell offers a trenchant analysis of the valuation of feminine resistance in twentieth-century feminist efforts to reconstitute a woman’s canon: “Anger . . . is deWned as the characteristic mode of feminist writing—not to be angry indicates that the individual has been co-opted or assimilated into the values of the dominant culture” (64). 50. Julia Epstein, “Burney Critism: Family Romance, Psychobiography, and Social History,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 3, no. 4 ( July 1991): 279. My “Evelina’s Two Publics,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 147–67, brieXy discusses this quote. 51. Epstein, Iron Pen, 102, 96, 95, 103. 52. Straub, Divided Fictions, 51. 53. Epstein, Iron Pen, 95. 54. Ibid., 101. 55. Vivien Jones, “Introduction,” in Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed. Vivien Jones (London: Routledge, 1990), 8. 56. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 43. 57. Ibid., 38. 58. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 160. 59. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 288–89. 60. Spacks, Imagining a Self, 178, 165. 61. According to Bannet, women writers can be grouped as Egalitarians and

Notes to Pages 19–24

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Matriarchs. While Egalitarians “preached independence from all subordination,” Matriarchs “taught ladies how to obtain and deploy . . . ascendancy over men” (Eve Tavor Bannet, The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000], 3). Ultimately, the intractable radicalism of Bannet’s Egalitarian novels leaves them “no way forward” (158); Bannet’s Matriarchal novels prescribe a practice of duplicitous conformity exactly reminiscent of Poovey’s proper lady. 62. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37. 63. Ibid., 19. 64. Ibid., 66. 65. Poovey, Proper Lady, 29. 66. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 67. 67. Ibid., 123. 68. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 395. 69. Ibid., 388. 70. Michael McKeon advances this claim for the ideological agency of the domestic novel in “The Secret History of Domesticity: Private, Public, and the Division of Knowledge,” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). McKeon locates the historical emergence of “depoliticized property” in a “household divested of its economic function” (179); this household, “valued for its negative liberty from public control” (180), advances “a nearer approach to the interior domain of authenticity ‘as such’” (188). In Chapter 3, I discuss this account of bourgeois ideology’s reliance upon a paciWed or humanized domestic sphere as it is seminally advanced by Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere. 71. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Translator’s Preface,” in Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xlix, xx. 72. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 36. 73. A notable exception to Irigaray’s treatment of philosophical discourse is her reading of René Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (1649). Irigaray claims wonder, the Wrst passion in Descartes’s taxonomy of mechanized responses, and the only one which is not paired with an opposite (as, for example, desire with aversion), as “spaces of freedom between the subject and the world,” adding that “Sexual difference could be situated there, but Descartes does not think of that” (Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993], 78, 79). Here we can see how Irigaray’s strenuous respect for sexual difference occludes the historical urgency of Astell’s appropriation of Cartesian mechanism, precisely, in the name of sexual indifference. Chapter 1. Boys, Girls, and Wives 1. Aphra Behn, The History of the Nun; or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2. 2. The Memoires of the Dutchess Mazarine (London, 1676), 16. The translator of

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The Works of Monsieur de St. Evremond (London, 1714), P. Des Maizeaux, afWrms that Mancini’s Memoires are “written in her Name by the Abbot De St. Real,” César Vichard de St.-Réal (1: xxxvii). Evremond’s own adulatory character of the Duchess, whom he befriended after being invited to England by Charles II, observes of Memoires that “it speaks of her own Genius, and is like her self all over. I have particularly Observed twenty things in this Relation, that none but her self could think, or express in the manner they are Penn’d” (Works, 3: 69–70). 3. Behn, History of the Nun, 15. 4. Ibid., 29. 5. Ibid., 36. 6. For a complete account of the Duchess’s biography, see Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 151–59. Mancini’s Memoires, which cover the period until her Xight to England, retail the Duke’s tendency “continually [to] march me about” (22) overseas (“while I was big with Child” [23]), his paranoia (“I could not receive two Visits successively from any one man but he was presently forbid the House” [23]), his bigoted “Peevishness” (24), and, Wnally, “his incredible Dilapidations, and profuseness” (32), which exhaust the fortune that the Duchess brought him upon her marriage. Perry suggests that the “fanatic” Duke was “[s]exually obsessed” (155). 7. As one measure of the Duchess’s notoriety, see Mary Delariviere Manley’s introduction to The Adventures of Rivella (1714), which reports a nobleman’s (possibly spurious, if Evremond’s claims for her inimitable purity and rectitude are true) claim that “one night with Madam Mazarin made him happier, than the whole sex could do besides” (The Adventures of Rivella, ed. Katherine Zelinsky [Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999], 45). 8. Memoires, 30–31. 9. Ibid., 36. 10. Ibid., 46–47. 11. Ibid., 47. 12. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 9. 13. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 11, 13. 14. Memoires, 43. 15. Ibid., 31. 16. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8. 17. Memoires, 58. 18. Robert Filmer, Observations upon Aristotles Politiques, Touching Forms of Government, Together with Direction for Obedience to Governours in dangerous and doubtfull times, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 238. 19. [Charles I or John Gauden,] Eikon Basilike: The Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (1648), 45–46. 20. I thus differ from Lawrence Stone’s inXuential account of the rise of “companionate” marriage, which coordinates the decline of “strict wifely subjection and obedience” with the rise of social contract theory (The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 [London: Penguin, 1977], 217). In The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), Randolph Trumbach also argues that

Notes to Pages 28–31

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as the eighteenth century progressed, the English upper class “internalized egalitarian patterns of behavior in their families” (288). However, Trumbach’s Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) vividly demonstrates that eighteenth-century families of all classes had not consistently “internalized egalitarian patterns.” 21. Mary Astell, ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as R. 22. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 29. Emphasis Locke’s. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as ST. Subsequent emphasis Locke’s. 23. Filmer, Observations, 237. 24. René Descartes, Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 97. 25. See Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), which, while it does not dwell upon the practice of obedience, observes of the “men of business and affairs” produced by Locke’s education that “they are in temper neither slavish nor tyrannical but free men” (5). Tarcov later states that Locke’s Some Thoughts “is apparently attempting to make virtue consistent with happiness” (104). In John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Ruth Grant suggests that in “Locke’s work . . . the passions are discussed in general terms as one kind of hindrance to rational conduct” (182); Grant overlooks the central place of regulated desire in Locke’s post-absolutist political genealogy. On the topic of Locke’s proposed regulation of appetite, Kirstie M. McClure cogently remarks that “[t]his curbing of desire, however, is not simply a matter of repression. Rather, it involves redirecting one’s desires in a manner consonant with the imperatives of virtue” ( Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996], 171). 26. On the topic of children’s “irregular and covetous inclination” to steal other children’s property, Some Thoughts states: “But if an ingenuous detestation of this shameful vice be but carefully and early instilled into them, as I think it may, this is the true and genuine method to obviate this crime and will be a better guard against dishonesty than any consideration drawn from interest” (ST 82–83). 27. Johnson substantially revises this excerpt from Eikon Basilike, whose implications I pursue in Chapter 2. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Arno Press, 1979). 28. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2, para. 102. 29. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 87, 73. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as SP. 30. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 25. 31. Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7, 35. 32. Desiderius Erasmus, A Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, trans. Beert C. Verstraete, in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 4, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 305–6. See John E. Mason’s

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assessment of Locke’s Thoughts, advanced in Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of Courtesy Literature and Related Topics from 1531 to 1774 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), which states that “[Locke’s] doctrines are by no means as revolutionary as they might at Wrst seem” (175). Mason’s investigation of the genealogy of nobility as practice provides compelling practical and epistemological context for Locke’s Thoughts. For a more abbreviated survey, see Richard Barney, Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 46–55. 33. Erasmus, Declamation, 339. 34. Ibid., 327–28. 35. Cited by Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 30. Lamentably, Schochet nowhere remarks upon Mary Astell’s contribution to the Weld of patriarchal and antipatriarchal discourse. 36. Erasmus, Declamation, 328. 37. Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 19. 38. Locke, Two Treatises, 1, para. 6. 39. Ibid., 2, para. 55. 40. Locke frequently uses the word “temporary” to restrict the duration and hereditability of paternal power. Two Treatises, 1, paras. 55, 65, 67. 41. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kings Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Sommerville, 7. 42. James Tyrrell, Patriarcha non Monarcha, cited by Schochet, Patriarchalism, 198. 43. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 65. See Margaret J. M. Ezell’s suggestion that “the early demise of the patriarchal Wgure and transference of his authority to his widow, even if his place was later taken by a stepfather, sharply undercuts the image of seventeenth-century patriarchalism as an unbroken reign of male dominance passed from father to husband . . . Given such factors as these, there appears to be a good case for replacing the ‘patriarchal,’ with all its connotations, with a notion of ‘parental’ authority in seventeenth-century family models” (The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987], 34). Ezell’s book importantly corrects Schochet’s insistence that “the seventeenth-century English family was indeed an authoritarian institution that was well suited to be the basis of an absolutist political doctrine” (Patriarchalism, 64). See Susan Amussen’s An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) for an equally compelling assessment of the “difWculty of deWning the rules of an unequal partnership” evinced by seventeenth-century British household manuals (46). 44. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 59. 45. In this light, the political assent of Lockean men is not quite as “dynamic” as Brown’s evocation of “the continual ratiWcation of government by its citizens” might suggest (Consent of the Governed, 9, 16). Brown claims the “true radicalness” of Locke’s Thoughts as “its refusal to naturalize human institutions” (28), a gloss that mischaracterizes a text explicitly devoted to the confusion of acquired habit and natural practice. Barney makes the crucial qualiWcation: “The Wrst priority of this individualistic emphasis, however, is anything but fostering self-actualization; instead, observing a boy’s particular propensities serves later for encouraging or

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redirecting them toward the chief aim of normalizing his moral and civic persona” (Plots of Enlightenment, 133). See Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy: A Social Study of “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), for the representative claim: “Locke’s ideal is the self-directed, autonomous individual. . . [who] follow[s] the lead of his own unfettered reason” (140). For an opposing assessment of the status of Lockean political and natural philosophy as “bourgeois,” see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Myth of John Locke and the Obsession with Liberalism,” in John Locke: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar (Los Angeles: Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1980), which charges “classical and socialist critics” with “vastly exaggerating the role of liberalism (or possessive individualism or bourgeois ideology)” in “history” (19). 46. Filmer, Patriarcha, 203, 207. 47. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 101. 48. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 27, 41. On the topic of Locke and North American Indians, Locke’s comparison of the state of nature to North America is well known; see Schochet’s suggestion that the model for this state was “the actual government of the Canadian Indians.” Locke writes in his Common-Place Book, “their Kings are rather obeyed by consent & persuasion, then by force and compulsion” (Patriarchalism, 266). 49. Descartes, Passions, 46. 50. Ibid., 134. 51. Ibid., 96. 52. For this discussion of “the Nature of the Passions, by which we are led to the Use of ’em,” Astell credits “Des Cartes [and adds, in her own footnote, Les Passions de l’Ame] and Dr. More, in his excellent Account of Vertue” (SP 218). The latter credit refers to An Account of Virtue; or, Dr Henry More’s Abridgment of Morals (1690). 53. Descartes, Passions, 22. 54. Ibid., 24. 55. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 11. 56. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 47. Emphasis Locke’s. In “Locke’s Desire,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (Fall 1999), Jonathan Brody Kramnick argues that this chapter of the Essay, extensively revised by Locke, ultimately “Wts desire to modern, secular uncertainty” (194) by “Wrmly divid[ing] desire from the process of moral choice-making that resides in the understanding” (205). Kramnick’s claim for Locke’s distinction of desire and “moral choice-making” seems to afWrm the complete distantiation of the latter category, a conclusion from which I differ. Because Locke’s greater good lacks sensory appeal, moral agents must be trained as boys to lend it desire’s imminence. 57. John W. Yolton’s Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) crucially implicates the eighteenth-century “debate over liberty and necessity” in the “attempt to clarify the concept of action” (127). 58. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, paras. 50, 30, 51. Emphasis Locke’s. 59. Ibid., paras. 31, 51. Emphasis Locke’s. 60. Ibid., paras. 30, 69. 61. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 18. James makes the important point that

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Descartes has been mistakenly claimed as the philosopher “who succeeded in separating mind from body and passion from reason . . . by a wide range of feminist writers” (18 n. 68). 62. Hilda L. Smith’s All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002) excavates “the false universal at the core of the modern individual” (31) to deWne some early modern narratives of normative human development as narratives of male development. But the Stoic, Christian, or Lockean mandate that people govern their passions does not, Astell argues, apply preemptively only to men. 63. Henry More, An Account of Virtue; or, Dr. Henry More’s Abridgment of Morals (London, 1690), 39–40. 64. By arguing that Astell’s defense of education presages Foucaultian “disciplinarity,” Clifford Siskin tends to efface the philosophical and critical speciWcity of her appropriation of Cartesian passion (The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999], 57). 65. Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 160. 66. George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax, A Lady’s New-years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (London, 1688), 2, 26. 67. Ibid., 66–67. 68. Ibid., 3. 69. Schochet, Patriarchalism, 221. Nonjurors were churchmen who “refused to take the Oaths of Allegiance to William and Mary after the Revolution of 1688, because they had previously taken similar oaths to James II” (Astell, Political Writings, ed. Springborg, 244). 70. Charles Leslie, The New Association of Those Called Moderate-Church-Men, with the Modern-Whigs and Fanaticks, to Under-Mine and Blow-Up the Present Church and Government: With a Supplement (London, 1702), 9. It is worth noting that the family-state analogy served the anti-patriarchalist argument for precisely the same reason that it serves the patriarchalist Leslie. As one anti-patriarchalist, Charles Herle, writes in 1643, paternal power is too arbitrary to model sovereign power, for if a king “should governe with the providence of a Father, he may therefore governe with the Arbitrarinesse of a Father without the Consent of his people” (Charles Herle, An Answer to Doctor Fernes Reply, Entitled Conscience SatisWed [London, 1643], cited in Schochet, Patriarchalism, 109). 71. Mary Astell, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, in Political Writings, ed. Springborg, 126. 72. Mary Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom, in Political Writings, ed. Springborg, 169. 73. Astell, Fair Way, 99. 74. Springborg, “Introduction,” in Political Writings, by Mary Astell, xxvii. 75. Ibid., xxix. 76. Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 151. 77. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 168. Astell’s stance is clearly indebted to Filmer, who disqualiWes populist government from legitimacy not simply by virtue of its deviation from hereditary patriarchal right but also because it can be seized only by self-interested men: “I verily believe never any democratical state showed itself at Wrst fairly to the world by any elective entrance, but they all secretly crept in the back door of sedition and faction” (Patriarcha, 27). 78. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 141.

Notes to Pages 41–47

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79. Weil, Political Passions, 150. 80. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 197. 81. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (London, 1705), 121. 82. Astell, Christian Religion, 6. Emphasis Astell’s. 83. Mary Astell, Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John Norris (London, 1695), 99. 84. Perry, Celebrated Mary Astell, 122. 85. Astell, Letters, 128, 99. 86. Ibid., 128. 87. Ibid., 268–69. 88. Ibid., 264. 89. Astell, Christian Religion, 98. 90. Ruth Perry, unpublished paper, “Astell’s Christian Stoicism,” delivered at the MLA convention, December 29, 2002. Quoted with the permission of the author. 91. Astell echoes More’s Abridgment of Morals, which states of affectionate virtue: “Surely this Temperament sounds better than what the Stoicks, and even some Platonists, do present us with” (83). 92. Astell, Letters, 76, 128, 128, 128. 93. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 344. Patricia Springborg suggests that in her ReXections Astell may have drawn from Malebranche’s translation by Thomas Taylor, Father Malebranche his Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth (London, 1700) (Political Writings, by Mary Astell, 9 n. 4). 94. Malebranche, Search After Truth, 359. 95. Astell, Christian Religion, 278. 96. Ibid., 223. 97. Astell, Letters, 262. 98. Astell, Christian Religion, 123. 99. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 170, 196. 100. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 82. 101. Malebranche, Search After Truth, 130. 102. Astell, Christian Religion, 36. 103. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 196. 104. Ibid., 182. 105. Eikon Basilike, 129, 85. 106. Weil, Political Passions, 157. 107. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 169. Ruth Perry astutely suggests that Astell entertained “a simultaneous belief in authority and recognition of its incompatibility with justice in domestic life. . . In other words, it was because she believed in authority that Astell advised women not to marry” (Celebrated Mary Astell, 165). 108. Astell, Christian Religion, 113. 109. Filmer, Observations, 50, 49. 110. Eikon Basilike, 24. 111. Astell, Christian Religion, 296. 112. Descartes, Passions, 47. 113. Locke, Two Treatises, 1, para. 48. 114. Ibid., 2, para. 59. Emphasis Locke’s. 115. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988). Pateman deWnes fraternal patriarchy as follows: “Modern civil society

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Notes to Pages 47–51

is not structured by kinship and the power of fathers; in the modern world, women are subordinated to men as men, or to men as a fraternity. The original contract takes place after the political defeat of the father and creates modern fraternal patriarchy” (3). 116. Ibid., 3. 117. Ibid., 41. 118. Ibid., 219. 119. Astell, Impartial Enquiry, 195. 120. Springborg concludes her introduction to Astell’s Political Writings: “Her [Astell’s] protests from the heart represent [not] a call for the removal of unnecessary injustices from which women suffer, but a rejection of war-born radical contractarianism which had found its way into the theories of Hobbes and Locke” (“Introduction,” Political Writings, by Mary Astell, xxix). Like Springborg, Weil suggests that “[t]he point for Astell is not that lovers of political liberty are contradicting themselves by failing to extend contract theory into the domestic sphere. Rather, it is that rebellious subjects are precisely the sort of people who fail to restrain their egotism” (Political Passions, 152); more strongly still, Weil suggests that in the name of “anti-whig polemic,” Astell “was not so much ‘discovering’ a hidden sexist strand in contract theory as inventing it” (155). 121. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 90. 122. Springborg states: “Mary Astell’s ReXections upon Marriage is a truly political work whose target is less the injustice of traditional Christian marriage than the absurdity of voluntarism on which social contract theory is predicated” (“Introduction,” Political Writings, ed. Springborg, xxviii). One should note the Lockean bias that would qualify ReXections as “truly political” only insofar as it does not advance a critique of marriage. 123. Astell, Christian Religion, 200. 124. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 79. See Claude Lévi-Strauss’s claim that “mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution” (Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf [New York: Basic Books, 1963], 224). 125. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 70, 72. 126. Weil, Political Passions, 144–45. Halifax, Advice, 26. 127. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 391. Although here Fletcher discusses John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), this claim characterizes his assessment of the entire sweep of conduct books he surveys. 128. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination, 387. 129. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (London, 1673), part 2, 23–24. 130. In her introduction to Serious Proposal, Springborg excerpts this passage out of context (she invokes “Allestree’s claim that marriage is ‘a Bargain and a Compact, a Tyranny perhaps on the Man’s part and a Slavery on the Woman’s’” [SP 26]). By expurgating Allestree’s exception to this assessment—without love, marriage is slavery—Springborg elides his difference from Astell. 131. Allestree, Ladies Calling, part 2, 33–34. 132. Ibid., part 2, 33. 133. John Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct; or, Rules for Education, under several Heads (London, 1722), 9. 134. Mary Davys, The Reformed Coquette, in Popular Fiction by Women, ed.

Notes to Pages 54–61

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Backscheider and Richetti. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 135. Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 226. 136. For a groundbreaking account of the dialectical relation between historical and novelistic epistemology, see Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). McKeon traces the “ultimate triumph of literary standards of verisimilitude over the claim to historicity” (70), a literary standard which he initially locates in the capacity of seventeenth-century French heroic romance to “internalize” Renaissance assaults upon the integrity of its truth-claims, “justifying itself by reference to the doctrine of vraisemblance, associating its Wctionality with quasi-Aristotelian ‘probability’” (54). See also Lennard J. Davis’s Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), to which McKeon’s text must be read as a rejoinder. While discounting Aristotelian inXuence (“Aristotle never described romance”), Davis also adumbrates as “vraisemblance” claims like the following exemplary statement by the romance writer Madeleine de Scudéry: “when as falsehood and truth are confounded by a dextrous hand, wit hath much ado to disentangle them” (28). 137. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4, in The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 175. Chapter 2. Mushrooms, Subjects, and Women 1. Mary Davys, The Reformed Coquet, in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 293. 2. Ibid., 298, 292, 298, 298. 3. Ibid., 298. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 315. 6. Mary Astell, ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20. 7. Ibid., 26. 8. Daniel Defoe, Roxana; or, the Fortunate Mistress, ed. John Mullan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 7. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 9. Astell, ReXections, 9, 10. Springborg notes of Astell’s appeal that “[t]his could be a reference to Thomas Hobbes” (ReXections, 11 n. 5). It would be difWcult to imagine to whom else Astell refers, because Hobbes is alone in basing his claim that women are “Superior” (ReXections, 11) on what he takes as the only truly natural form of dominance: maternity. 10. Ibid., 47. 11. Ibid., 48. 12. In Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), Carol Kay reads Maximillian Novak’s Defoe and the Nature of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963) to include among the elements of Defoe’s “natural law theory” surveyed by Novak “the existence of family society in the state of nature,” a component of “natural law” that neither Hobbes nor Roxana endorses (69). 13. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (London, 1741), 1: 295;

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Notes to Pages 62–64

same edition, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton MifXin, 1971), 188. 14. Eikon Basilike: The Pourtracture of His Sacred Majestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings (1648), 56, 53, 78, 58. 15. Ibid., 87, 86. 16. Ibid., 160. 17. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 89. 18. Ibid., 74. All emphasis Hobbes’s. 19. In its attempt to vindicate the abdication and replacement of the Catholic James II by William of Orange in 1689, James Tyrrell’s Bibliotheca Politica; or, a Discourse by way of Dialogue, Shewing, That the Arraigning and Murther of King Charles I can by no means be JustiWed by the Proceedings of the Convention-Parliament against King James II (1702) takes as axiomatic the depravity of demands made by “(not a Tenth Part of the whole) [who] did seek to shelter themselves . . . under the Name and Authority of a Parliament” (preface, n.p.). The failure of a seditious “Part” to simulate a conspiratorial whole assures that the beheading of Charles I “was no National Sin, but the Act and Villany of a Few Miscreants, who were back’d and supported by a then irresistible Faction” (73). 20. Hobbes, Citizen, 156. 21. Ibid., 76. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 95. 24. Ibid., 76. Entire passage italicized in original. Square brackets in original. 25. Ibid., 75. 26. Ibid., 27. 27. Peter Stallybrass, “Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), 603. 28. Hobbes, Citizen, 39. 29. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10. 30. Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica, 56. 31. Eikon Basilike, 129. 32. Hobbes, Citizen, 139. 33. Eikon Basilike, 19. 34. Astell, ReXections, 66. 35. Eikon Basilike, 40, 52. 36. Astell, ReXections, 75. 37. Mary Astell, A Fair Way with the Dissenters, in Political Writings, ed. Springborg, 125. 38. Astell, ReXections, 55. 39. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kings Defended against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 16. 40. Hobbes, Citizen, 85. 41. Robert Filmer, Observations upon Aristotles Politiques Touching Forms of Government, Together with Direction for Obedience to Governours in dangerous and doubtfull times, in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Sommerville, 236. 42. Ibid. 43. Hobbes, Citizen, 102, 10.

Notes to Pages 64–70

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44. Ibid., 102. 45. Ibid., 95, 108. See James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), which suggests that Hobbes’s claim “spells out as a serious argument what contemporary pornography like L’Escole des Wlles articulated as the scandalous opinion of a nymphomaniac” (87). 46. Hobbes, Leviathan, 139. 47. Hobbes, Citizen, 110. 48. Ibid., 74. 49. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 48–49. 50. In Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–87), The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), Aphra Behn graphically correlates the disloyalty of Philander, a participant in the Duke of Monmouth’s attempt to overthrow James II, with Philander’s seduction of his wife’s sister Sylvia. Both Philander and Sylvia are “ruined” by “fair pretenses” (431) represented by Behn as their power to seduce. As for Astell, “Xattery” (361) constitutes the medium of both sedition and romance: for Behn, not only the “crowd” (397) but also “the too willing and melting monarch” (330) are susceptible to its seductive inXuence. 51. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 49. 52. Ibid. 53. Hobbes, Citizen, 108, 109. Emphasis Hobbes’s. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, 140. 55. Hobbes, Citizen, 109. 56. Hobbes, Leviathan, 153. 57. Hobbes, Citizen, 33. 58. To broach a vital qualiWcation that I cannot fully explore, Roxana can no longer be a wife, but she could be said to have one: her Hobbesian isolation is adulterated by her maid Amy, the integrity and apparent naturalness of whose devotion—she is “faithful to me, as the Skin to my Back” (25)—the novel does not attempt to rationalize (Amy is, most of the time, naturally subject). Roxana participates in a history of extramarital women’s domestic novels that has yet fully to be written; such texts as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762), for example, correlate women’s collective living arrangements with an exhaustive taxonomy of masculine conjugal failures. 59. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 21, paras. 50, 51. 60. Ibid., paras. 71, 53. 61. Hobbes, Citizen, 116. 62. Hobbes, Leviathan, 111. 63. Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680– 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113. 64. Ibid., 116. 65. Ibid., 117. 66. Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44. 67. Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, 117, 115, 117. 68. Moglen, Trauma of Gender, 43, 42. 69. Laura Brown, The Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early EighteenthCentury English Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 153–54.

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Notes to Pages 70–73

70. G. A. Starr makes a seminal argument for Roxana’s damnation in Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965). 71. The Wrst (1700) edition of Astell’s ReXections states that a suitor “wants one to manage his Family, an House-keeper, an upper Servant”; the phrase “a necessary Evil” replaces “an upper Servant” in the third edition, as Patricia Springborg notes (ReXections, 50 n. 10). 72. Locke, Two Treatises, 2, para. 191. 73. Astell, ReXections (1706 Preface), 18. 74. Ann Louise Kibbey, “Monstrous Generation: The Birth of Capital in Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana,” PMLA 110, no. 5 (October 1995): 1030. 75. Astell, ReXections (1706 Preface), 29. 76. Toril Moi, What Is a Woman? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 15. 77. Ibid., 11. 78. Ibid., 19. 79. Butler is, of course, not alone in taking “gender” as a variable which undoes the ontological stability of sex. In Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), Anne Fausto-Sterling also reverses the priority of “external genitalia and secondary characteristics” and “mysterious inner bodily signals” (76) to argue that the latter are retroactively internalized only as the effect of the former. Joan Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) also argues that analytic approximation of the category of gender requires “a more radical epistemology” (4) based in Derridean “deconstruction” (7). 80. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33. 81. Ibid. 82. Moi, Woman, 77. Butler states of drag performance: The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed. . . If the anatomy of the performer is already distinct from the gender of the performance, then the performance suggests a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance. As much as drag creates a uniWed picture of “woman” . . . , it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory Wction of heterosexual coherence. (Gender Trouble, 137)

In the most important critique of this passage to date, Moi remarks that, despite Butler’s qualiWcation of nature as itself an effect of power, drag performance relies for its transmission of “dissonance” upon, precisely, “the anatomy of the performer.” By taking a man as her exemplar of the claim that “the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (Gender Trouble, 138)—a man whose anatomy secures his difference from the scarequoted construct “woman”—Butler quite graphically naturalizes “the anatomy” that guarantees the safety of this performer’s difference from the category whose wholesale implication in “the regulatory Wction of heterosexual coherence” he is thereby able to “reveal.” Alternatively, Butler would seem to marshal anatomical women who act like woman to serve the regulatory production of “a natural sort of being” (after all, somebody has to do it). Moi’s comment upon this exception to Butler’s refusal to locate sex in nature is exceedingly salutary: “Insofar as poststructuralist work on sex and gender denounces the 1960s understanding of sex and gender while relying on the same distinction for political effects, it is deeply incoherent” (Woman, 54).

Notes to Pages 73–79

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83. Butler, Gender Trouble, 138. 84. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 149, 61, 62. 85. Hobbes, Leviathan, 107. 86. C. B. Macpherson argues that “the development of a market society had replaced or was visibly replacing hierarchical order by the objective order of the market, which did not require unequal rights for different ranks” (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism from Hobbes to Locke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962], 90). 87. Hobbes, Citizen, 101. 88. Hobbes, Leviathan, 44. 89. Eikon Basilike, 165–66. 90. Hobbes, Citizen, 115. 91. Richardson, Pamela, 1: 245; 1: 284; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 161, 183. 92. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 80; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 236. 93. George Savile, First Marquis of Halifax, A Lady’s New-years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (London, 1688), 60–61. 94. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (London, 1673), part 2, 23–24. 95. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 329–30; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 375. 96. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 210; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 309. 97. Allestree, Ladies Calling, part 2, 24. 98. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 211; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 309. 99. Richardson, Pamela, 1: 232; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 154. 100. Richardson, Pamela, 1: 242; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 159–60. 101. Richardson, Pamela, 1: 264; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 171. 102. See Michael McKeon’s assessment of literary-historical status of Pamela’s epistemological and formal achievement: “it extends the claim to historicity to the extreme frontier of writing to the moment, to the notion of an objectivity so minutely responsive to the very process of recording the truth that it must come to disclose the radically subjective bases of all cognition” (The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987], 363). 103. Daniel Rogers, Matrimoniall Honour; or, The Mutuall Crowne and comfort of godly, loyall, and chaste Marriage (London, 1650), 259–60. 104. In Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Wendy Wall notes of sixteenth-century household conduct manuals: “When women labor at domestic chores, their minds remain perilously at liberty to entertain potentially rebellious thoughts. . . [T]he unWlled psyche could detach from corporeality . . . even while the body appeared to all observers to be rigidly obedient” (13). The temporal Wt of mind and body would mitigate this discrepancy between the visible and invisible. 105. Halifax, Advice, 19. 106. Ann Rosalind Jones suggests that “[c]onduct books as a genre in this period [the sixteenth century] illustrate an uneasy confrontation between longstanding ofWcial discourses and new social practices . . . [Medicine, philosophy, religion, and law] represented female character and status as Wxed—eternal givens founded on nature, Scripture, and precedent. Conduct books appear to be based on a different assumption: men and women can be produced” (“Nets and Bridles: Early Modern Conduct Books and Sixteenth-Century Women’s Lyrics,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse [New York: Methuen, 1987],

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Notes to Pages 80–85

40–41). Mary Poovey states of this paradox as expressed in the late eighteenthcentury conduct books she surveys: “even though late eighteenth-century moralists described femininity as innate, they also insisted that feminine virtues needed constant cultivation” (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 15). 107. William Whateley, A Bride-Bush; or, A Direction for Married Persons (London, 1623), 192–93. 108. See Susan Dwyer Amussen’s An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), which reviews seventeenth-century marital conduct books to argue for the pervasiveness of “the analogy between the household and the state” (37). Amussen suggests that because in the family “authority was not always clear-cut” (66), “[t]he implications of familial language in political discourse in the long run suited neither” royalists nor Puritans. This is due to these manuals’ “fuzziness” about “the extent of a wife’s subordination to her husband” (63): on this topic, Puritans had to “deWne an unequal partnership between spiritual equals” (46), whereas royalist patriarchalists were faced not only with the fact that marriage was increasingly “used in discussions of contract theories of the state” (57) but also with the fact that proving the absolute dependence of wives meant “re-writ[ing] the experience of women” (61). Amussen’s careful assessment of Puritan women’s status as “spiritual equals” might gauge the effort required of Whateley’s wife to “bee” inferior. 109. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 32; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 210. 110. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 312; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 365. 111. Richardson, Pamela, 2: 322–3; ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 370–71. 112. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 50. 113. Ibid., 55. 114. In Clarissa (1747–48), Richardson exploits the difference between italic and Roman font to distinguish the text of a marriage license from the corrupt glosses upon it inserted by Lovelace, a distinction opened by Lovelace’s failure to have achieved the “honest desires”—“(honest desires, Jack!),” he comments— to which the legal text refers (Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross [London: Penguin, 1985], 871). I am indebted to Benjamin F. Pauley’s excellent “The Common Class of Men: Law and the Lay Reader in the EighteenthCentury English Novel” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 2004), for drawing my attention to Richardson’s use of italics and Roman font in this passage. 115. McKeon, Origins, 380. 116. Ibid., 378. 117. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 66. 118. Carol Kay relates that after Queen Anne’s death, “Defoe was convicted of libel (once again for exposing a Jacobite). To avoid a severe sentence, he agreed to work secretly for the Whig ministry while maintaining the appearance of an opposition Tory journalist who sought a moderate relation to government” (Political Constructions [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988], 53). 119. Daniel Defoe, The Family Instructor, in Three Parts; I. Relating to Fathers and Children. II. To Masters and Servants. III. To Husbands and Wives (London, 1720), Preface, sig. A3. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. All emphasis Defoe’s. 120. Hobbes, Citizen, 121.

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Chapter 3. “The Words Command and Obey” 1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1969), 493–94. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 31. Emphasis Locke’s. 3. Ibid., para. 34. Paul does not make this restriction: “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aXame with passion,” 1 Corinthians 7: 8 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 4. Hume, Treatise, 493. 5. Ibid., 494. 6. Ibid., 492. 7. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 50. 8. Hume, Treatise, 450. 9. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1977), 63. 10. Hume, Treatise, 450, 452. 11. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 53. 12. Hume, Treatise, 452. 13. Ibid., 453–54. 14. Ibid., 454. Emphasis Hume’s. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 453. 17. Man Superior to Woman; or, a Vindication of Man’s Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman (London, 1739), 12. 18. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1, para. 48. 19. Hume, Treatise, 454. 20. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 123. 21. Ibid., 93–94. 22. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (London, 1741), 2: 186; Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (New York: Houghton MifXin, 1971), 295. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. References to Eaves and Kimpel’s edition of the 1741 text are preceded by an EK. References to Pamela’s 1801 edition follow the same format with the indicator “1801.” References to Pamela’s contemporary 1801 edition (ed. Peter Sabor [London: Penguin, 1980]) are preceded by an S. 23. Most critics of Richardson’s novel have respected the apparent invisibility of Mr. B’s sex-right. See Ian Watt’s exemplary claim for Mr. B’s place in the economy of this text: “Pamela’s marriage to one so much above her economically and socially is an unprecedented victory for her sex; and although Mr. B accepts his fate with a good grace the outcome cannot be regarded as bringing him equally great satisfaction; the direction of the plot, in fact, outrageously Xatters the imagination of the readers of one sex and severely disciplines that of the other” (The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957], 153–54). Watt’s characterization of the novel

230

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fails to acknowledge both the limits of Pamela’s “victory” and the extent to which Mr. B’s reform “outrageously Xatters” a masculine self-image integral, as Pateman suggests, to progressive political mythology. 24. See T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, “Richardson’s Revisions of Pamela,” Studies in Bibliography 20 (1967): 61–88. Eaves and Kimpel state: “All the other revisions of Pamela are minor compared to that published in 1801, which has over 8400 changes in Volumes I and II, ranging from single words to whole pages cut or added. Hardly a paragraph is untouched—hardly a sentence, except in the Wrst letters and in a few letters from low characters like old Mr. Andrews and John Arnold” (78). 25. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 47. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 26. Eaves and Kimpel, “Richardson’s Revisions,” 79–81. 27. Ibid., 85–86. 28. In his sole exception to the promise of volitional self-government that Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education would instill in boys, Locke asserts that adult men’s moral continence sometimes takes on the physiological urgency of “pain.” Locke excuses men who succumb to the imperative of present pleasure in explicitly romantic terms: “Nothing, as we passionately think, can exceed, or almost equal, the uneasiness that sits so heavy upon us. And because the abstinence from a present Pleasure, that offers it self, is a Pain, nay, oftentimes a very great one, the desire being inXamed by a near and tempting Object; ’tis no wonder that that operates after the same manner Pain does, and lessens in our Thoughts, what is future; and so forces us, as it were, blindfolded into its embraces” (Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 64). 29. As we have seen above in “Richardson’s Revisions,” Duncan and Eaves cite the Wnal word of the 1741 passage as “sillily.” Both the 1741 text and their edition of it, however, employ the word “silly.” 30. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. Armstrong states that the novel’s second attempted rape “constitutes one of the least erotic bedroom encounters between male and female in literature” (5). Contemporary reactions to Pamela as pornography show that Richardson’s novel was not historically experienced as nonerotic. 31. Ibid., 49. 32. Ibid., 116. 33. The topic of incremental marital possession is not further pursued by Richardson. On the implication of marital and sexual subjection, Ruth Perry states: “An early epistolary story by Thomas Brown . . . shows the connection between chastity and independence; for as long as the husband could not possess his wife sexually he could not ‘invade’ her in any other way either. Only when ‘the Castle surrender’d’ after two months, [sic] could the husband control her entirely” (Women, Letters, and the Novel [New York: AMS Press, 1980], 21). 34. See Terry Castle’s “P/B: Pamela as Sexual Fiction,” SEL 22 (1982) for the claim that “Mrs. Jewkes possesses a penis” (481). Castle reads Pamela as “a myth of sexual development which is . . . deeply inwrought in Western culture” (471) rather than an analysis of domestic power whose pretense to modernity is graphically, if relatively brieXy, threatened by Mrs. Jewkes. 35. On Pamela’s loss of body, see William Warner’s Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of

Notes to Pages 96–98

231

California Press, 1998), which extends Nancy Armstrong’s reading: “This displacement of [Mr. B’s] attention entails a sublimation of Mr. B’s archaic desire to possess her body into the pleasure of reading her letters” (191). See also Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), which ultimately locates Pamela’s capacity to redeem Mr. B’s aristocratic honor in “the plastic powers of her mind” (378). Insofar as Armstrong’s inXuential account of Pamela’s supervisory transparency relies heavily upon the work of Michel Foucault, it is worth remarking Pamela’s exception to Foucault’s claim for the indeWnite reach of a “carefully analytical discourse . . . meant to yield multiple effects of displacement, intensiWcation, reorientation, and modiWcation of desire itself” (Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction [New York: Vintage, 1990], 23). Armstrong enlists Pamela in service of Foucaultian “techniques for regulating desire” (Desire and Domestic Fiction, 89), but Pamela fails to afWrm Foucault’s central claim for the penetration of these techniques into the conjugal sphere: “The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than anything else; more than any other relation, it was required to give a detailed accounting of itself. It was under constant surveillance” (History of Sexuality, 37). Yet the very night in which the conversion of rakish desire into discourse would Wnally transpire— the night that consummates the change of aristocratic violence into domestic love—escapes the “intense focus” of Pamela’s text. This is a striking lapse in the “constant surveillance” relayed by a novel that would, for Armstrong, itself embody the transformation of power into love. 36. For exemplary representations of indefatigable rakish inconstancy, which might propel Richardson’s recourse to the hyperbole that secures Pamela’s appeal, see Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1725) and Mary Davys’s The Accomplish’d Rake; or, Modern Fine Gentlemen (1727). 37. Peter Sabor notes of this passage that it was “inserted in 1801 to show that Pamela loves Mr. B. for himself, not for his fortune as hostile critics had suggested” (Pamela, ed. Sabor, 531 n. 233). 38. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), which argues that the “spontaneity” of Pamela’s writing to the moment contributes to “a new category of provisionally true narrative” (175). 39. Hume, Treatise, 571. 40. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 57. 41. Ibid., 57–58. 42. Ibid., 58. 43. In “Pamela: Or the Bliss of Servitude,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983), Janet Todd suggests that “Pamela is a proper wife not despite her servanthood but because of it. . . [T]he servant’s pedagogy slides into the wife’s handbook, and the maid becomes the mistress by exaggerating servility” (139). In “Pamela: Domestic Servitude, Marriage, and the Novel,” EighteenthCentury Fiction 5, no. 3 (April 1993), Robert FolkenXik provides a crucial corrective to Armstrong and others who stress Pamela’s progressive acquisition of contractual power by showing the consistency of Pamela’s pre- and postmarital behavior with the “Timidity” and general obsequiousness required of servants (260). In claiming Pamela’s servitude as a “total institution” that “den[ies] her right to selfhood” (261), however, FolkenXik, like Todd, cancels out the agency of Pamela’s ingenuous subjection. FolkenXik concludes that Pamela is “empowered as a mouthpiece for a reinscribed male authority, precisely the relation she

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Notes to Pages 98–105

bears to her author as well. Mr. B remains her ‘Master’” (268). But, as we will see, Mr. B forbids his wife’s use of this term, precisely the paradox at issue in the novel’s representation of “male authority” whose modernity she would assist. 44. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, paras. 51, 52. 45. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 357. 46. Pamela Censured (London, 1741), ed. Charles Batten, Jr. (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1976), 34. Batten remarks that “Pamela’s reasons for not succumbing to Mr. B’s advances (Letter XIX), which Pamela Censured found morally shoddy, are clariWed somewhat by the inclusion of a new moralizing passage” (vi); Peter Sabor notes of the letter’s revision that “the author of Pamela Censured had objected that she seemed less afraid of being Mr. B.’s mistress than of becoming a cast-off mistress” (Pamela, ed. Sabor, 519 n. 29). 47. Famously, Pamela borrows from Fantomina—whose protagonist repeatedly transforms herself into the new object of one rake’s desire—during the scene when Pamela “trick’d myself up” in her country attire and is, possibly, taken by the lustful Mr. B as “a lovelier Girl by half than Pamela” (2: 63, 66; EK 60–61). Despite Pamela Censured’s commentary (“The Instruction here then is to the Ladies, that by altering their Appearance they are more likely to catch their Lover’s Affections than by being always the same” [36]), Richardson does not substantially revise this scene. 48. Warner suggests that with Pamela’s refusal of Mr. B’s offer of “a pretty Story in Romance,” “Richardson asserts the fundamental difference of his project from that of his (notorious) antagonists—Behn, Manley, and Haywood— who continue to circulate in the market as threatening rivals” (Licensing Entertainment, 182). Henry Giffard’s approving theatrical take-off Pamela. A Comedy (London, 1742) opens by inserting Richardson himself into a romance plot: As in the airy Regions of Romance, Th’adventrous Knight sets out with Shield and Lance . . . Thus dares our Author-Errant of to-Night In Virtue’s Aid romantically Wght; Sacred to Her, the Champion Pen he draws, Enough rewarded—to support her Cause.

49. In the 1801 edition, Pamela’s eight-thirty Thursday letter concludes: “Courage, Pamela! Fie upon it! My heart begins to Xutter again! Foolish heart, lie still! Never sure was any maiden’s heart under so little command as mine!” (1801 2: 127; S 372–73). The redacted Xuttering of Pamela’s “maiden’s heart” retains its Humean linkage to her virginity. 50. Pamela Censured, 62. 51. See Pateman’s neat gloss of Hobbes’s account of women’s conversion from naturally equal individuals into legally subject wives: “All [women] are ‘servants’ of a peculiar kind in civil society, namely ‘wives’” (Sexual Contract, 50). 52. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 231–32. Emphasis Pateman’s. 53. See McKeon’s important discussion of progressive ideology: “‘Honor’ now fails to unite internals and externals. Progressive ideology requires that it resolve itself into virtue on the one hand and aristocratic rank on the other, a discrimination that repudiates the automatic aristocratic signiWcation of internals by externals” (Origins, 155). 54. McKeon, Origins, 379–80. 55. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 32.

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56. Mr. B offers remarkably graphic testimony to his “domineering” older sister’s capacity to operate as the standard of his capacity for conjugal dominance: “I used to tell her, she would certainly beat her Husband, marry whom she would” (2: 269; EK 341). 57. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents: Afterwards, in her exalted Condition (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1929), 3: 1. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 58. For an astute assessment of the cultural status of pregnancy as “my Malady, if I may call it one” (3: 413), see Dolores Peters, “The Pregnant Pamela: Characterization and Popular Medical Attitudes in the Eighteenth Century,” EighteenthCentury Studies 14, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 432–51. 59. McKeon, Origins, 358. 60. Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 324. 61. For surveys of Pamela II’s critical reception, see Terry Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986) and Betty Schellenberg’s The Conversational Circle: Rereading the English Novel, 1740–1775 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel’s magisterial Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) remarks that “[i]n every way, the second part of Pamela shows Richardson at his worst— pompous, proper, proud of himself, and above all dull” (153). In a chapter entitled “The Sequel that Failed,” Margaret Doody remarks that because such satires as Fielding’s Shamela showed “what a revolutionary book Pamela could seem,” the sequel “seems over-eager to placate the higher classes and assert the status quo” (A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], 74, 79). Castle similarly argues that “with his second Pamela Richardson set out to efface the carnivalesque aspect of the Wrst” (137). Betty Schellenberg, while suggesting that Castle “skirts the possibility that the author sets out deliberately to ‘insult’ and ‘affront,’ to frustrate reader desire” (36–37), nonetheless afWrms Castle’s diagnosis of the sequel’s anti-carnivalesque agenda: “the sequel takes the Wnal step of resolving into tableaux and maxims that convert the narrative past tense into a transcendental present” (47). See also Perry’s suggestion that “the last half of Pamela is not only an education for the heroine in her new status, but also for Richardson’s class-conscious readership, interested in what changing one’s class literally entailed” (Women, Letters, and the Novel, 59). 62. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded: In A Series of Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents; And Afterwards, in her Exalted Condition, upon the Most Important and Entertaining Subjects, in Genteel Life, vol. 3 (London, 1741), Preface, n.p. This prefatory disclaimer is absent from the Shakespeare Head Press edition of Pamela. 63. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (London, 1673), part 2, 44. Allestree’s assertion of the strictly nonremunerative dimension of nursing participates in the shift, argued by Ruth Perry, of breast-feeding “from being paid labor to being unpaid reproductive labor” (“Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16 [February 1992]: 195). Randolph Trumbach’s The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Academic Press, 1978) offers an illuminating discussion of breast-feeding, nursing, and hand-feeding practices in eighteenth-century English aristocratic families. See also Marilyn

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Notes to Pages 111–114

Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine, 1997), for discussion of breastfeeding’s biblical mandate and its subsequent appropriation. In The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Toni Bowers documents contemporary defenses of maternal nursing to demonstrate that “Mr. B mouths stereotypical attitudes toward breastfeeding, attitudes that Augustan conduct books unanimously disparaged” (171). 64. Man Superior, 23. 65. Pamela Censured, 44. Here the author comments, speciWcally, on Mr. B’s rejoinder to his servant that “I wish, I had thee as QUICK ANOTHER WAY, as thou art in thy Repartees” (1: 44; EK 72). As something of a concordance documenting Pamela’s latent obscenity, Pamela Censured aims entirely to debunk the novel’s claim to exchange body for the medium of mind. 66. Ibid., 23. 67. The full entry proceeds: 1. Not noble; not ingenuous; not liberal. To look into letters already opened or dropped, is held an ungenerous act. Pope. 2. Ignominious. The victor never will impose on Cato Ungenerous terms. His enemies confess the virtues of humanity as Caesar’s. Addison.

68. Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. Johanna Meehan (New York: Routledge, 1995), 97. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook’s Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996) makes the representative claim: “Habermas does not acknowledge, however, that while the Enlightenment public sphere was ostensibly accessible to every literate human being, it functionally excluded subjects who were not white upper-class males” (10). 69. Nancy Fraser, “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?,” in Feminists Read Habermas, 36. Meehan states in this volume’s introduction that “Habermas’s account suffers from a gender blindness” (7). 70. Iris Marion Young, “Impartiality and the Civic Public,” in Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 66. 71. Paula McDowell importantly refutes the presumption of women’s political disenfranchisement against which Habermas asserts the alternatively inclusive activity of female reading. McDowell powerfully deWnes Habermas’s public sphere “as a re construction of something that existed earlier,” a mid-seventeenth-century print public sphere sustained in part by “middling and lower-class women’s political activity through print” (The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 9). For further discussion of eighteenth-century women’s public activity, see Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona O’Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, eds. Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 72. See Watt’s Rise of the Novel for a now-classic discussion of the democratization of the eighteenth-century literary sphere, marked by its inclusion of women as well as “apprentices and domestic servants, especially footmen and waitingmaids” (47). J. Paul Hunter qualiWes Watt’s thesis in Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), suggesting

Notes to Pages 114–122

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that “the steepest acceleration in literacy occurred early in the seventeenth century, at least three generations before the novel began in any meaningful sense to emerge” (66–67). 73. Landes, “Public and the Private Sphere,” 99–109; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 115–16. My point is not to mitigate the historical or theoretical urgency of what Fraser designates “competing counterpublics” (115) but rather to point out that “competing” or critical discourse might also exist, in the form of the domestic novel, within the Habermasian medium of bourgeois publicity itself. 74. Landes, “Public and the Private Sphere,” 98; Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 211. 75. Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) powerfully illustrates this analytic impasse. Warner evokes the printed Constitution as a threat to “the voice of the people,” its operation Wgured in the “existence of the written text ceaselessly representing a silent people” (113). By positing the relentlessly abstracting capacities of a public sphere from which no literate subject can articulate dissent, a public sphere that masks embodied differences not only of gender but class and race, Warner can deWne political difference only as voice and embodiment, as the “intense localism” of “popular assemblies” (212). 76. As I suggest in my introduction and in Chapter 2, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, and others agree with Habermas on the topic of domestic literature’s pacifying and sentimentalizing assistance to bourgeois ideology. See, for example, Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which argues that Frances Burney’s novels “fuel the fantasy of an inner self that might operate independent of relations of social exchange” (201). 77. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 80–81. 78. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 50, 114. Pocock’s genealogy of “commercial humanism” (50) asserts the centrality of passionate appetite to actors in the market. 79. The claim that Mr. B was “in full health” is deleted from the Shakespeare Head Press edition. 80. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 36, 105. 81. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1985), 1431. 82. Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2: 261. 83. See Louis A. Chaber’s suggestion that “[Locke’s] Thoughts can be seen in the context of that rivalry in the anti-Stoic campaign between the more selfcentered and public-oriented classical virtues and the speciWcally Christian ones, a rivalry that Richardson most deWnitely fostered” (“From Moral Man to Godly Man: ‘Mr. Locke’ and Mr. B in Part 2 of Pamela,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 [1988]: 234). I am not sure whether Mrs. B’s defense of eldest sons’ retention of infantile passion constitutes a discernably Christian revision of Locke’s advice. 84. Locke, Thoughts, 56–57.

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85. See Ruth Perry’s important claim that “what changed by the middle of the eighteenth century were not only the legal rules governing inheritance, restructured so as to concentrate rather than redistribute wealth in families—usually in the male line—but also a psychological downplaying of this bilateral, cognatic kindred system. It was gradually replaced with a kin system that favoured afWnal bonds (bonds of marriage) over consanguinal bonds (bonds of blood)” (“Women in Families: The Great Disinheritance,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700– 1800, ed. Vivien Jones [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 112). Chapter 4. Eliza Haywood’s Philosophical Career 1. Eliza Haywood, Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze, in Popular Fiction by Women, 1660–1730, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 227. 2. Ibid., 243, 233, 243. In this tally of Wve women, I include the original “Young Lady.” 3. Ibid., 239. 4. In Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), Ros Ballaster cites “some sixty-seven works directly attributable to [Haywood’s] authorship” (159). Jerry C. Beasley credits Haywood with “more than thirty novels . . . a biography, and four translations within a brief frenzied period of ten years [after her Wrst novel, Love in Excess, 1719–20] . . . Throughout the 1730s she was heavily engaged in theatrical work as a playwright and performer . . . [and] she produced a major work of literary history titled The Dramatic Historiographer; or, The British Theatre Delineated (1735) . . . and she published a substantial political romance, The Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736) . . . In the 1740s Haywood resumed her career as a novelist full steam, producing about a dozen separate works in Wfteen years” (“Introduction,” in The Injur’d Husband and Lasselia, ed. Jerry C. Beasley [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999], xi-xiii). 5. Haywood, Fantomina, 232. 6. Eliza Haywood, The City Jilt; or, the Alderman turn’d Beau, in Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93. 7. Eliza Haywood, The Wife (London, 1756), 204. 8. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 119–20. Citations are from the 1728 edition. See Ros Ballaster’s helpful discussion of Haywood’s appearance in “all the versions of the Dunciad from 1728 to 1743”; she states that “[t]he ‘two babes of love’ are not, as commentators of Haywood have generally assumed, her two children, but rather her two scandal novels,” Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1725) and The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1727), both of which Pope cites in his explanatory footnote. Ballaster warns against the critical “overestimate” of the effect upon Haywood “of a single text which included, after all, attacks on nearly every other popular writer of the day” (Seductive Forms, 160, 166 n. 28). 9. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, Appendix D in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, by Eliza Haywood, ed. Christine Blouch (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), 643. 10. Paula Backscheider, “The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and

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Questions,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work, ed. Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 33. 11. Ibid., 42, 33. 12. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34, 32. 13. See Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), which suggests that “though the body of sensibility is deWned by reference to a feminine standard, that body offered only conWning possibilities for the Wctional expression of women’s experience” (xiii). My account of Hobbes’s and Astell’s unsexed physiology diverges from Van Sant’s claim for a “feminine standard.” In Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), John Mullan importantly states: “Even comparatively late in the century, there is scarcely a separation between vocabularies of ‘feeling’ and ‘passion,’ on the one hand, and of anatomically considered mechanism, on the other” (220). 14. Haywood, The Wife, 31. 15. Eliza Haywood, ReXections on the Various Effects of Love (London, 1726), 55. 16. See The Female Spectator, bk. 15 (July 1745), in which one of Haywood’s epistolary authors, Philo-Naturae, states of female education: “I would not advise them [young women] to Wll their Heads with the Propositions of an Aldrovandus, a Malebranche, or a Newton” (Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, part 2, vol. 3, ed. Kathryn King [London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002], 83). Certainly, Haywood seems comfortably to have Wlled her own head with moral philosophy. I am indebted to Kathryn King for this reference. 17. John W. Yolton writes of Descartes’s materialist physiology of thinking and acting that “[t]he perceptive faculty is located in the sensorium” (Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983], 155). 18. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 386. 19. Ibid., 130. 20. Haywood, ReXections on the Various Effects of Love, 55–56. 21. See George S. Rousseau’s evocation of Thomas Willis’s “texts on the brain” as the “next such paradigmatic works” after “Descartes’ Discourses and treatise on The Passions of the Soul.” Rousseau states that “Willis was Locke’s tutor at Oxford, that Locke is known to have sat at Willis’ feet and enthusiastically copied into notebooks everything he (Locke) thought he might use later on.” Rousseau concludes: “Willis’ paradigmatic leap . . . was the regionalization of the soul to the brain,” which enabled “a radically new assumption . . . about man’s essentially nervous nature” (“Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards DeWning the Origins of Sensibility,” The Blue Guitar [Messina] 2 [1976]: 134, 135, 139). 22. See John Yolton’s Thinking Matter for an invaluable account of eighteenthcentury British materialism in which the animal spirits, mobilized either by intention or by “the mechanism of the body,” “[mark] the fragility of the connection between mind and matter” (185). In The English Malady (1733), George Cheyne expresses this problem in terms of Xuid mechanics: “But how any Fluid at all, of what Kind soever, can be suppos’d or imagin’d to go backwards and forwards in the same indivisible Instant almost, (to convey Pain, for Example, to the sentient Principle, and muscular Action at the same Instant, to shut the Eyes

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upon Appearance of Danger . . .) seems very hard to explain from the Nature of Fluids known here below” (The English Malady [Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1974], 57). 23. Thomas Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock: In Which Convulsive Diseases Are Treated Of (London, 1681), 71–72. 24. Eliza Haywood, The British Recluse; or, The Secret History of Cleomira, Supposed Dead, in Popular Fiction by Women, ed. Backscheider and Richetti, 165. 25. Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, ed. David Oakleaf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), 77. 26. Haywood, Love in Excess, 61. 27. Haywood, The Injur’d Husband and Lasselia, 42. 28. Eliza Haywood, The Unequal ConXict; or, Nature Triumphant (London, 1725), 8–9. 29. Haywood, Unequal ConXict, 38. 30. Willis, Pathology of the Brain, 81. 31. Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 170–71. 32. Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 46. Emphasis in original. 33. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 30. 34. Haywood, Unequal ConXict, 43. 35. Haywood, British Recluse, 200. 36. Haywood, ReXections on the Various Effects of Love, 56. 37. Haywood, Fantomina, 234. 38. See, for example, Haywood’s Life’s Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (London, 1748), for its representation of feminine erotic “insensibility” (106). In this explicitly Lockean narrative of masculine development, the hero Natura enters the wrong box at the opera to Wnd a woman “too much taken up with the music” either to notice him or to conceal from him “the thousand charms she was mistress of.” Driven into “extacy” by a particular passage, she throws her arms around Natura; “he pressed her close, and in this trance of thought, this total absence of mind, stole himself, as it were, into the possession of a bliss.” Haywood excuses this event, sustained by a woman of strict virtue, as follows: “As this false step was meerly accidental, wholly unpremeditated on either side . . . was no more on her part than a surprize on the senses, in which the mind was not consulted, and had not the least share, I know not whether it may not more justly be called a slip of unguarded nature, than a real crime” (104–7). Toni Bowers states that such scenes relay a “problem of sexual agency” which, in the case of Haywood’s Love in Excess, is resolved by “a heroine whose active, transgressive sexual desire operates in concert with her virtue by means of a paradox that we might call ‘collusive resistance,’ a kind of submission that is itself ultimately a form of agency” (“Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess,” in The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood, ed. Saxton and Bocchicchio, 51, 58). Bowers situates this “form of agency” in the context of Haywood’s “defense of Tory practice [which] offers a rubric for the recuperation of partisan identity and integrity in the wake of thirty years of collusion—since the compromise of 1689—with principles many Tories could not subscribe to, yet dared not oppose” (55). I am more inclined to align Haywood’s articulation of Tory allegiance with the wifely practice of passive obedience. Inadvertent sexual mechanism might instead, in its refusal to admit the agency

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of the will, open a fantastically extramoral space in which “virtue” cannot be gauged at all. See Haywood’s attempt to mediate sexual volition and sexual passion in her directions for new brides’ ingenuous sexual assent: “a modest yielding, a soft compliance with what he has a right to expect” (Wife, 7). 39. Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Miss Shamela Andrews, ed. Douglas Brooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 334. 40. Ibid., 330, 313. 41. Ibid., 341, 318. 42. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton MifXin, 1971), 375. 43. Fielding, Shamela, 319. 44. Eliza Haywood, Anti-Pamela: or, Feigned Innocence Detected, in The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” 1740–1750, vol. 3, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2001), 6–7. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 45. Alexander Stuart, Three Lectures on Muscular Motion, Read before the Royal Society, in the Year 1738 (London, 1739), 40: i. 46. Ibid., ii. 47. George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion: Containing the Elements of Natural Philosophy (London, 1705), 9. 48. Ibid., 31–32. 49. Ibid., 32. 50. Ibid., 35. 51. Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 65. 52. Cheyne, English Malady, 53. 53. Thomas Willis, Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, Being all the Medical Works of that Renowned and Famous Physician (London, 1681), 111. 54. Ibid., 120. 55. Ibid., 110. 56. Ibid. 57. Cheyne, English Malady, 47. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 60. 60. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 79. Joseph Roach remarks of a person’s successful assumption of imagined passion that “the expression of an emotion is itself a ‘mechanistic necessity’ of the actor who calls it to mind” (Player’s Passion, 80). 61. Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 185–86. 62. Haywood, Fantomina, 235. 63. Ibid., 234, 235. 64. Richardson, Pamela, 44. 65. In Fantomina, Haywood writes of Beauplaisir’s enjoyment of Celia: “[he] held to his burning Bosom her half-yielding, half-reluctant Body, nor suffered her to get loose, till he had ravaged all” (235). In The Masqueraders, the ravisher Dorimenus surprises his sleeping object to achieve “a Rack of Extasy on both sides, she more faintly denying, he more vigourously pressing, half yielding, half reluctant, she was wholly lost” (cited by Ballaster, Seductive Forms, 184). In The Mercenary Lover, the devious Clitander seduces his sister-in law “in this Hurry of her Spirits, all unprepar’d, incapable of Defence, half yielding, half reluctant,

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and scarce sensible of what she suffer’d” (in Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, ed. Backscheider, 135). 66. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 64, 64, 186. 67. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom, trans. George Stanhope (London, 1729), 22. 68. Ibid., 1321. 69. Malebranche, Search After Truth, 360. 70. Ibid., 368. 71. Ibid., 348. 72. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 37. 73. Ibid., para. 52. 74. Ibid., para. 56. 75. Ibid., paras. 35, 35, 69. 76. Haywood, Life’s Progress Through The Passions, 8–9. 77. Eliza Haywood, The Adventures of Eovaai, ed. Earla Wilputte (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 117. 78. Haywood, History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 27. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 79. The name Trueworth is of Lockean derivation. Locke repeats the moral mandate so obviously Xouted by Betsy: “we should take pains to suit the relish of our Minds to the true intrinsick good or ill, that is in things. . . till, by a due consideration of its true worth, we have formed appetites in our Minds suitable to it, and made our selves uneasie in the want of it, or in the fear of losing it” (Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 53). 80. My reading of the novel’s plot differs from Richard Barney’s recent synopsis of Betsy Thoughtless: “That book . . . successfully adopts supervisory elements in representing a young woman’s reformation as a gradual, evolutionary process of self-reXection” (Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999], 285). Deborah J. Nestor’s “Virtue Rarely Rewarded: Ideological Subversion and Narrative Form in Haywood’s Later Fiction,” SEL 34 (1994) suggests that “Haywood’s novel subtly subverts the ideology of virtue rewarded, an ideology which its happy ending only appears to afWrm” (588). Nestor locates the source of this subversion in Munden’s obviously “improbable, even providential” demise (588). 81. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres,” 128. 82. Haywood, Wife, 181. 83. Eliza Haywood, The Husband: In Answer to the Wife (London, 1756), 94. 84. Haywood, Wife, 184. 85. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1969), 634. George Berkeley takes the radical step of claiming sensation as the truth not only of the perceptible world but, at the same time, of an immediate God: “everything we see, hear, feel, and anywise perceive by sense, [is] a sign or effect of the Power of God” (Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, ed. Howard Robinson [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 91). By rejecting primary qualities as “some inert unperceiving substance, or substratum” (57), Berkeley reclaims the phenomenological or bodily contingency of secondary qualities as itself a person’s experience of divine will. 86. Haywood, Wife, 116–18. 87. Ibid., 186. 88. Hume, Treatise, 658.

Notes to Pages 144–154

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89. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 130. 90. Haywood, Husband, 112. 91. Locke, Thoughts, 34. Emphasis Locke’s. 92. Haywood, Husband, 5. 93. Locke, Thoughts, 34. Emphasis Locke’s. 94. Haywood, Husband, 14. 95. Ibid., 5. 96. Richardson, Pamela, 367. 97. Haywood, Wife, 158–59. 98. Haywood, Husband, 14. 99. Haywood, Wife, 83. 100. Haywood, Husband, 112. 101. Haywood, Wife, 88–89. 102. Haywood, Husband, 7. 103. Ibid., 13. 104. Ibid., 88. 105. Eliza Haywood, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (London, 1753), 1: 2– 3. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by volume and page number. 106. Willis, Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physic, 92. 107. Cheyne, Natural Religion, 36. See David Hume’s evocative description of Willis’s “Cells”: “the mind is endow’d with a power of exciting any idea [for Hume, a stored sensory impression] it pleases; whenever it dispatches the spirits into that region of the brain, in which the idea is plac’d; these spirits always excite the proper traces, and rummage that cell, which belongs to the idea” (Treatise, 109). 108. Haywood, Husband, 240. 109. Eliza Haywood, Love-Letters on All Occasions Lately passed between Persons of Distinction (London, 1730), 176. Chapter 5. Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance 1. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. Among the “bad” translators of French heroic romance is Katherine Philips, who “Englished” “A Pastoral of Mons. de Scudery’s in the Wrst volume of ‘Almahide’” (1667); reprinted in Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, ed. George Saintsbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 604–9. 2. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 1, chap. 2, para. 15. 3. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford, 1673), part 2, 9–10. 4. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 288. 5. Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 65. 6. Ibid., 62. For strong statements of the feminine powers of romance (as opposed to the novel or, more broadly, to “patriarchy”), see also Richard A. Barney, Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire

242

Notes to Pages 154–156

and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), and Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 7. Thomas Salmon, A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage (London, 1724), 73. 8. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988), 231. Emphasis Pateman’s. 9. Langbauer, Women and Romance, 85. 10. Margaret Doody, “Introduction,” in The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox, xxxii. 11. François Fénelon, Traité de l’education des Wlles, trans. H. C. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 6. 12. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 74, 83; McKeon, “Watt’s Rise of the Novel Within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (January–April 2000): 254. 13. McKeon, Origins, 1. 14. See McKeon for a cogent gloss of Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1937): “The gradual emergence of the novel coincides with the gradual development of class consciousness in the early modern period. . . As the experience of status hierarchy is challenged by the authority of material labour—coalescing in an abstract category of existence that subdivides individuals into different classes of labour— what is produced is not only a new categorical consciousness (not status but class) but also a new difference between categorical consciousness itself and the personal or ‘individual’ experience that it subsumes but cannot efface” (“Watt’s Rise of the Novel,” 258). For Watt’s own discussion of his indebtedness to Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Max Weber, see “Flat-Footed and Fly-Blown: The Realities of Realism,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (January–April 2000): 149–53. Watt states of The Rise of the Novel: “It is . . . [a] synthesis of two great but very different traditions of thought: Wrst, of the empirical, historical, and moral elements of my Cambridge training; second, of many other theoretical elements in the European tradition—formalism and phenomenology in a minor way, and Marxism, Freud, and the Frankfurt School in somewhat larger part” (153). 15. Maximillian E. Novak, “Gendered Cultural Criticism and the Rise of the Novel: The Case of Defoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12, nos. 2–3 (January–April 2000): 251. 16. Lennox is not mentioned by the following materialist or “political” histories of the novel: Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); McKeon, Origins; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and only in passing (on two lists of “didactic,” “serious,” or “moral” authors; or named as a midcentury novelist) in J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels (New York: Norton, 1990). 17. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 79. 18. Descartes, Passions, 17. See Ioan Williams’s The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1979), which argues that the Cartesian opposition of passion and will (“volunté”) enables “the same combination of rationalism and social orthodoxy that motivated the romances of the period” (30). 19. Descartes, Passions, 25.

Notes to Pages 156–162

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20. René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2003), 34. 21. Descartes, Passions, 26. 22. Ibid., 44. 23. Ibid., 34. 24. See Susan James’s suggestion that “there is a close resemblance between the opening of the causal sequences in which the passions are embedded and the sequences issuing in sensory perceptions” (Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997], 96). 25. The editor of Passions of the Soul, Stephen Voss, cites this insight (Passions, 50–51 n. 2.), for which he credits Ferdinand Alquié’s Oeuvres philosophiques de Descartes (Paris, 1973), vol. 3, 975–76 n. 1. I have preserved the sequence while slightly revising its terminology. 26. Descartes, Passions, 23. 27. Artamenes, or The Grand Cyrus, an Excellent New Romance: Written by that famous Wit of FRANCE, Monsieur de Scudery Governour of NOSTRE-Dame. And now ENGLISHED by F. G. Gent (London, 1653), part 1, bk. 2, 50. 28. Descartes, Passions, 34. 29. Ibid., 82. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2, para. 135. See also Locke’s claim that “for no Man, or Society of Men, having a Power to deliver up their Preservation, or consequently the means of it, to the Absolute Will and arbitrary Dominion of another . . . they will always have a right to preserve what they have not a Power to part with” (Two Treatises, 2, para. 149). In The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1998), Wendy Motooka argues that Locke “presents a case no more authoritative than Arabella’s own” (135). Because Lennox relentlessly parodies Arabella’s case for the passionate surrender of masculine amorous (or political) life, it is difWcult to see how she represents Arabella’s defense of romance as no less “authoritative” than Glanville’s rationalizing invocation of Locke. 32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 233. 33. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9. 34. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 376–77. Malebranche notes his debt to “the books on the Passions and Man by Descartes” (108). 35. Aphra Behn, Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, in The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 40–41. 36. Thomas Willis, Dr. Willis’s Practice of Physick, Being all the Medical Works of that Renowned and Famous Physician (London, 1681), Preface, n.p. 37. Ibid., The Anatomy of the Brain, 109–10. 38. Eliza Haywood, The Unequal ConXict; or, Nature Triumphant (London, 1725), 28, 8. Catherine Gallagher suggests that a suppressed referent of Lennox’s antiromance might be the Restoration and early eighteenth-century scandal writers later referred to in Clara Reeves’s The Progress of Romance (1785): Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Gallagher states: “Lennox was not only foreshortening the history of the novel to emphasize its innocence but also

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Notes to Pages 162–169

placing her book in a competitive, antagonistic relationship to the libelous parodies” (Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670– 1820 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994], 181). I am arguing for Lennox’s dialectical rather than “antagonistic” engagement with such authors as Haywood (an engagement also evident in Lennox’s Wrst novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart). 39. Haywood, Unequal ConXict, 28. 40. Charlotte Lennox, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself, ed. Susan Kubica Howard (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 213, 73, 123, 133. 41. Ibid., 126, 242. 42. Ibid., 226. Lennox’s Wrst novel is a remarkable tissue of romance and antiromantic parody: it contains spoofs of romantic absolutism, coquettish duplicity, and daughterly disobedience (induced by “horrid romances” [76]) while at the same time basing the integrity of its heroine’s true love upon her own and her lover’s amorous reXex. The novel concludes by rescuing Harriot from a dutiful but loveless marriage and restoring her to her faithful suitor, who has had to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism, inherit a large fortune, and avoid a preordained marriage to his cousin in order to become an eligible husband. In Lennox’s Wrst novel, passionate mechanism supersedes these lesser obstacles. 43. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth Grant and Nathan Tarcov (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1996), 62. 44. Ibid., 56. 45. Lennox, Harriot Stuart, 16. 46. Locke, Two Treatises, 1, para. 47. 47. Mary Astell, Some ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52. 48. Allestree, Ladies Calling, part 2, 20. 49. On the increasingly retrograde form of cousin marriage and its utility to an aristocratic practice of patrilineal succession, see Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in EighteenthCentury England (New York: Academic Press, 1978). Trumbach writes: “The typical cousin marriage was conceived as one in which a woman married her father’s brother’s son [as is Arabella’s case] . . . This . . . kept her estate in her father’s family” (19). 50. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4, in The Major Works, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 175. 51. Lennox, Harriot Stuart, 113. 52. We might, indeed, anticipate this outcome in Arabella’s other authentic swoon. In a move that authenticates her Wlial devotion, Arabella faints on her father’s deathbed: “Her Spirits, which the Desire she had of being useful to him, had alone supported, now failed her at once; and she fell upon the Bed, without Sense or Motion, as soon as she saw him expire” (58). Here we Wnd a classically Cartesian explanation for the languor that results from frustrated desire: Arabella’s “Spirits” can no longer usefully sustain her duty to her father. Lennox has thus already anchored the truth of Arabella’s Wlial virtue in her body. 53. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, a Guide to the Female Sex (London, 1675), 95–96. 54. The following histories of the early novel make strong claims for the explicitly Foucaultian agency of the eighteenth-century novel in instantiating a modern political subject who is discursive, transparent, and either “supervisory,” susceptible to disembodied modalities of supervisory discipline, or both:

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Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction; John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Davis, Factual Fictions; Deidre Lynch, the second half of The Economy of Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) (the Wrst half of Lynch’s book advances a far “denser” articulation of the continuity of novelistic character with automata, semi-mobile objects, animals, curios, and money). 55. See Ian Watt’s stress on the novel’s representational mandate, which renders the romance irrelevant to “psychological reality, notably to marriage and the family” (Rise of the Novel, 136). Following Watt, Davis makes the most aggressive claims for the literary-historical discontinuity of romance and novel: “there was a profound rupture between novel and romance” (Factual Fictions, 41). 56. The most recent effort dialectically to implicate romance and novel in The Female Quixote does not take up the topic of masculine conjugal power. In “The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote,” SEL 38 (1998), Scott Paul Gordon argues that romantic delusion has the capacity to “Wgure a space insulated from the world of self-interested dissimulation” (511). However, Arabella’s choice of her cousin is not wholly disinterested, even if the interest sustained is not wholly her own; her surprised heart facilitates the preservation of patrimony commanded in her father’s will. 57. On the Carte de Tendre, see Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Les Héros de Roman, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1902). Crane notes that the abbé d’Aubignac’s Histoire du temps, ou relation du royaume de coqueterie (1654), published the same year as Clélie, also contains such a map. 58. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 57. DeJean adds that “at least Wfteen imitations and parodies appeared in the next decade.” 59. Ibid. 60. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 151. 61. Langbauer, Women and Romance, 73. It is, ironically, the profound incompatibility of these two gestures (Wrstly, the personalized or individualized diagnosis; secondly, the poststructuralist reference to the determination of the subject by language) that compels Jacques Lacan to repudiate the insistence of American ego psychology on a “true subject of the unconscious” (Lacan, “The Freudian Thing,” Ecrits, 128). Earlier in this essay, Langbauer notes Lacan’s claim for the capacity of Freudian psychoanalysis “to precipitate a whole casuistics into a map of Tendre” (119). One could go further in stressing the radical incompatibility of the Freudian unconscious (aligned by Lacan with the differential structure of linguistic signiWcation advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure) and any individualizing treatment of the subject, as Lacan himself most ambitiously states of “a society founded in language,” permeated and interlaced by the agency of the symbolic: “this society may no longer be deWned as a collection of individuals, when the immixture of subjects makes it a group with a quite different structure” (127). 62. The phrase “the agency of the signiWer” is found in Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter,” 162. 63. Barney, Plots of Enlightenment, 259. 64. Spencer, Rise of the Woman Novelist, 187. 65. Langbauer, Women and Romance, 85. 66. Doody, True Story of the Novel, 288. 67. Doody, “Introduction,” in The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox, xxxii.

246

Notes to Pages 171–174

68. Todd, Sign of Angellica, 160. 69. McKeon, “Watt’s Rise of the Novel,” 253. 70. Spacks, Desire and Truth, 29. 71. Ibid., 14. 72. Deborah Ross, “Mirror, Mirror: The Didactic Dilemma of The Female Quixote,” SEL 27 (1987): 472 n. 18. Here Ross states that she synthesizes the position of Langbauer and Spacks. On the topic of an inevitably compromised eighteenthcentury women’s subversive authorial intention, I can adduce only a limited number of examples. For some recapitulation of this trend in Austen studies, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). For a general discussion of feminine authorship that thematizes late eighteenth-century women’s writing as conciliation to a unilaterally oppressive discourse, see Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). On Poovey and Wollstonecraft, see Janet Todd, Feminist Literary History (London: Routledge, 1988). For an invaluable discussion of the effect of Virginia Woolf’s ideal of incandescence upon this strand of feminist diagnosis, see Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Chapter 6. Frances Sheridan’s “disingenuous girl” 1. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 186. 2. In his introduction to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, Lawrence E. Klein notes that “[i]f there is a Lockean resonance in Shaftesbury’s thinking, it can be traced not to Locke’s more famous works but to his views on mentorship and cultivation, crystallized in Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)” (“Introduction,” Characteristics, xxvii). See also Blakey Vermeule, The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), which argues that eighteenth-century “moral psychology . . . picks out deep facts about the source of morality, facts that the evolutionary synthesis is now able to explain and contextualize” (4). 3. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 183. 4. Ibid., 172, 173. 5. Ibid., 183, 172, 191, 191. 6. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense, ed. Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2002), 33, 76. 7. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 187. 8. Ibid., 202, 212. 9. Ibid., 198. 10. Ibid., 212. 11. In Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Lawrence E. Klein states of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry that “[w]hat was required for virtue was a pure and autonomous motion” (56). The autonomy of masculine virtue is assisted, however, by the Shaftesburian women who vindicate its extension into even the most private recesses of the domestic sphere.

Notes to Pages 174–179

247

12. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 204. 13. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. MacWe (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1982), 163, 165, 165. 14. Ibid., 162. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 165–66. 17. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 209. 18. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents: Afterwards, in her exalted Condition (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1929), 3: 172. 19. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston: Houghton MifXin, 1971), 336. 20. The event of the Memoirs’ success is narrated by Sheridan’s granddaughter Alicia Lefanu in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1824). Not only did the novel establish Sheridan’s “meridian celebrity” (110) in England but it was “immediately” translated into French by the Abbé Prévost, “the translator of Richardson” (111). A play entitled L’Habitant de la Guadeloupe, based on the return of Sidney’s cousin Warner from the Caribbean, was adapted for the French stage. Lefanu states that “though it has at length been in some measure superseded by more modern favourites, ‘Sidney Bidulph’ continued for a succession of years to be read and admired by all persons of true taste” (112). She recounts the deWning anecdote of this novel’s reception: “Among Mrs. Sheridan’s contemporaries, none admired her novel more warmly than Dr. Johnson, whose compliment to her upon its publication has been more frequently repeated than any other. ‘I know not, Madam! that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much’” (113). 21. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 219. 22. Frances Sheridan, Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, ed. Sue Townsend (London: Pandora Press, 1987), 9. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. See Eve Tavor Bannet’s The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) for an illuminating discussion of how the Hardwicke Marriage Act (1753) transformed the substance of masculine amorous commitment from verbal troth to legal discourse. Bannet reads the engendering dilemma of Sheridan’s plot relative to the newly instituted act: whereas Sidney’s suitor Faulkland must, according to her mother, marry the woman whom he has previously ruined, Sidney, Bannet argues, is torn by a newly juridical understanding of masculine obligation that would deWne the same man as “perfectly free” (Domestic Revolution, 113). However, Bannet does not note that Sheridan sets her novel during “queen Ann’s reign.” This is not to detract from the novel’s stress upon the archaism of Sidney’s mother’s position as that would be evident to readers of a novel published in 1761, but to suggest that by placing her novel at the beginning of the century, Sheridan divests Faulkland’s claim to be free to marry Sidney of juridical and, possibly, moral sanction. The binding power of verbal pledges is even more explicitly stressed by Sheridan’s Continuation. 23. Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in EighteenthCentury England,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16 (February 1992): 206. 24. Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 161. See also Bannet’s Domestic Revolution, which states: “If Sheridan demonstrates anything unequivocally . . .

248

Notes to Pages 179–186

[it is that] it does women no service to teach them that submission to the will of a mother, a husband, or an uncle is the standard of virtue and right” (115). 25. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 173. 26. Ibid., 163, 164. Emphasis Shaftesbury’s. 27. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 78. 28. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 184. 29. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 65. All emphasis Hutcheson’s. 30. Ibid., 179. 31. Ibid., 179, 180. 32. Ibid., 181. 33. Ibid., 173. 34. Ibid., 7, 25. 35. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin, 1985), 531. 36. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 177, 174. 37. Ibid., 175. 38. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 16–17. 39. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), bk. 1, chap. 2, para. 15. 40. Mary Astell, ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 39. 41. Astell, ReXections, 40. 42. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 89. 43. Astell, ReXections, 15. 44. Locke, Essay, bk. 1, chap. 1, para. 3. 45. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 189. 46. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 177; Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 90. 47. Elizabeth GrifWth, The Delicate Distress, ed. Cynthia B. Ricciardi and Susan Staves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 98. See also Elizabeth GrifWth, Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (London, 1782), which broaches the topic of masculine inWdelity in the same terms: “We have hitherto looked only on the pleasing side of the tapestry, and seen Marriage in its most favourable light. Let us now turn the canvas, and take a view of its defects” (26). 48. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 155. 49. Lefanu, Memoirs, 202. In The Discovery (London, 1763) (Wrst performed at Drury Lane on February 5, 1763, to “obstreperous thunders of applause” [Lefanu, 266]), an arbitrary father stops forcing his son into a loveless marriage only when he “discovers” that the projected wife is in fact his natural daughter. This precipitates his instant “metamorphosis” (57) to enlightened governance, the equitable redistribution of money to his legitimate daughter (also on the brink of a forced marriage), and the vindication of his virtuous and longsuffering wife, who has never once uttered a “reproach” (87). David Garrick played the secondary comic role of a romantic, addled old suitor. In The Dupe (London, 1674; apparently produced in the winter of 1763–64, Sheridan’s second play “was ill-received” [Lefanu, 235]), Sheridan stages two reciprocal metamorphoses: that of the dupe, a vain and foolish rake who marries his corrupt mistress, and that of the mistress, whose abrupt conversion from a loving paramour to a “Wendish” (50) wife magically reforms the dupe.

Notes to Pages 187–195

249

50. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 160, 145. 51. Hume, Treatise, 530, 531. 52. Ibid., 568, 570. 53. Ibid., 569. 54. Ibid., 571. 55. Ibid., 575. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 576. Emphasis Hume’s. 58. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 20, para. 2. 59. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 3, para. 13. 60. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 82–83. 61. Ibid., 119. 62. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 215. 63. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 20, para. 4; bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 35. 64. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 25. 65. Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2: 244–45. 66. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 21, para. 21.1. 67. Ibid., para. 8. 68. Hutcheson, Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, 15. 69. Sheridan dedicates her novel to Samuel Richardson, taking “this opportunity of paying the tribute due to exemplary Goodness and distinguished Genius, when found united in One Person.” Of the Sheridans’ friendship with Richardson, Lefanu relates that “Mr. Sheridan has sometimes called, and found poor Richardson (to use his own expression) dull ‘as a drowning Xy,’ and vainly struggling with the oppressive weight of melancholy that oppressed him” (Lefanu, Memoirs, 197–98). 70. Locke, Essay, bk. 1, chap. 3, para. 22; bk. 2, chap. 1, para. 10. 71. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 1, paras. 1, 9. 72. Ibid., para. 19. 73. Ibid., para. 25; bk. 2, chap. 3, para. 1. 74. [Reverend William Webster,] “To my worthy Friend, the Editor of Pamela, &c.,” in Richardson, Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 6. 75. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 173. 76. Jean Baptiste de Freval, “To the Editor of the Piece intitled, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded,” in Richardson, Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 4. 77. Richardson, Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 9. See Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), for a discussion of the indebtedness of Aaron Hill’s “‘system’ of acting,” found in “a number of journal articles, essays, letters, and poems” (including “An Essay on the Art of Acting” [1755]), to Cartesian mechanism (78). 78. Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 208. 79. Richardson, Pamela, ed. Eaves and Kimpel, 115. 80. Locke, Essay, bk. 2, chap. 1, para. 12. 81. Hume, Treatise, 300. 82. Helene Moglen, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8. 83. See Lefanu’s Memoirs for a brief account of the sequel’s production. Lefanu remarks that “by many persons the second part of Sidney Biddulph [sic] was preferred to the Wrst” (290). 84. Frances Sheridan, Continuation of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, 5th ed.

250

Notes to Pages 195–200

(London: Dodsley, 1796), 5: 280–82. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by volume number 4 or 5 and page number. 85. Ruth Perry’s “Women in Families: The Great Disinheritance,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) discusses the “unresolvable dilemma between duty and desire” (120) focused by the conXict of love and money. Perry takes Richardson’s Clarissa as “a kind of everywoman, standing for woman-kind under siege” (124): “the position of daughters in English society is represented by Clarissa in miniature” (127). In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, ed. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), Jürgen Habermas isolates “the conXict between marriage for love and marriage for reason, that is, for economic and social considerations” (47) as central to eighteenth-century “literature” (as I suggest in Chapter 3, Habermas represses this “conXict” to argue for the sentimentalizing and humanizing form of the domestic novel). In “The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge,” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Michael McKeon suggests that “the conXict between marriage for love and marriage for money may be the most profound and pervasive legacy of absolutist politics to the sexual politics of domesticity” (183). Yet “love” in Memoirs does not demarcate a zone of sentimental interiority distinct from the conjugal application of force or coercion (that is, “money”). 86. GrifWth, Delicate Distress, 182. 87. Ibid., 178. 88. Plutarch’s Lives: The Translation called Dryden’s: Corrected from the Greek and Revised, ed. A. H. Clough (Boston: Little, Brown, 1891), 1: 107–8. Cited in Delicate Distress, 262 n. 51. 89. See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Nonsense of Common-Sense, no. 6 (24 January 1738), which reiterates Astell’s ironic claim for the heroism of unhappy wives: “as much greatness of Mind may be shewn in submission as in command, and some Women have suffer’d a life of Hardships with as much Philosophy as Cato travers’d the Desarts of Affrica. . . A Lady who has perform’d her Duty as a Daughter, a Wife, and a Mother, appears to my Eyes with as much veneration as I should look on Socrates or Xenophon” (cited by Harriet Guest in Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 34). 90. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992), 31. Conclusion 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 155. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 2. Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 4, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York: New York University Press, 1989), 9, 23, 23, 24. Wollstonecraft seems to prefer the word “active” to “ingenuous.” She uses the latter in Vindication to endorse “that frank ingenuousness of behaviour, which young people can only attain by being frequently in society where they dare to speak what they think” (252).

Notes to Pages 201–204

251

3. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 214, 213. 4. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, ed. Patricia Springborg (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), 120, 80. 5. Ibid., 159. 6. Ibid., 214. 7. Ibid., 188, 126. 8. Barbara Tayor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 17. Cora Kaplan importantly elucidates the competing tendencies of Vindication’s reference to a species of “desire” constituted, Kaplan suggests, as licentious appetite: “A Vindication’s women’s excessive interest in themselves as objects and subjects of desire is theorized as an effect of the ideological inscription of male desire on female subjects who, as a result, bear a doubled libidinal burden. But the language of that sober analysis is more innovatory, less secure, and less connotative than the metaphorical matrix used to point and illustrate it. As a consequence, there is a constant slippage back into a more naturalized and reactionary view of women” (“Wild Nights: Pleasure/ Sexuality/ Feminism,” Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism [London: Verso, 1986], 43). I mean instead to suggest that Wollstonecraft’s analysis of women’s slavishness is exhaustively connotatively secured by her recourse to Lockean pedagogy, which assists Vindication’s diagnosis of a servility that is not essential but acquired. From our critical vantage, as Kaplan shows, it may be difWcult not to read Vindication’s remarkably visceral indictment of women’s pedagogical corruption as “naturalizing.” Yet Vindication argues that “the whole female sex are . . . in the same condition as the rich” (132), and it is the rich who afford her truly revolting Wgures for stupidity which passes as virtue: for example, aristocracy is perpetuated by “the apprehensive timidity of indolent slugs, who guard, by sliming it over, the snug place, which they consider in the light of an hereditary estate” (253). While, indeed, “slime” may constitute a feminized aptitude to inspire revulsion, I would instead suggest that such images afford a genealogy of Wollstonecraftian disgust which detaches this reaction from naturalized anatomy. 9. Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 1992), 7. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 10. Wollstonecraft, Education of Daughters, 9. 11. Astell, Serious Proposal, 68, 144. 12. Johnson continues: “For Wollstonecraft . . . women should be encouraged to be manly—sturdy, rational, independent, and self-responsible” (“Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 199). But as Astell and Wollstonecraft insist, active virtue is not inherently “manly”—the point of both of their indictments of marriage is that men themselves do not essentially embody or consistently practice it. 13. Barbara Taylor’s important Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination invokes Astell only brieXy to remark that Wollstonecraft’s claims for women’s intellectual and physical aptitudes “were hardly new insights: Mary Astell, for example, had made the same points very forcibly almost a century earlier” (51); later, Taylor writes that “Astell’s theological and feminist writings, very inXuential in her lifetime, were barely remembered by Wollstonecraft’s day” (110). Yet George Berkeley’s The Ladies Library (London, 1714) excerpts large, philosophically

252

Notes to Pages 204–206

ambitious portions of both parts of Astell’s Serious Proposal in its chapter 13 on “Ignorance” (for this information, see Serious Proposal, ed. Springborg, 64 n. 2 and 144 n. 4). As Patricia Springborg importantly remarks, these excerpts were “unacknowledged,” but “The Ladies Library was a work widely circulated in eight impressions up to 1772” (“Astell, Masham, and Locke: Religion and Politics,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 124 n. 91). It seems highly probable that Wollstonecraft, who compiled the anthology The Female Reader; or, Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads; for the Improvement of Young Women (1789), would have read Berkeley’s text. While Taylor states that the “trope” of women’s slavery was “a commonplace in pro-woman’s writings since at least the mid seventeenth century” (226), she ascribes it to “the classical citizen/slave opposition” (240) without noting its centrality to Locke’s qualiWcation of ingenuous as opposed to servile practices of virtue. Because this opposition, so crucial to Locke’s derivation of contractarian liberty, grounds Astell’s equation of wives and slaves, its centrality to Wollstonecraft’s explicitly Lockean defense of properly educated women’s capacity to become active citizens can hardly be overstressed. 14. One could read Wollstonecraft’s appropriation of the aptitude of swooning as a jibe at Richardson’s own exploitation of this reXex to innovate the codes of feminine modesty which Wollstonecraft declaims. Her Vindication angrily rejects the contingency of feminine chastity upon masculine sexual agency: “When Richardson makes Clarissa tell Lovelace that he had robbed her of her honour, he must have had strange notions of honour and virtue. For, miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being, who could be degraded without its own consent!” (149–50) Mary Hays elaborates Wollstonecraft’s repudiation of male-authored feminine honor in her representation of a virtuous victim of rape, The Victim of Prejudice (1799). 15. Tayor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 55, 12. Taylor helpfully remarks that Vindication “appears almost to lose interest in the question of rights, dwelling much more upon women’s duties than their entitlements” (55). Mary Poovey’s The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) maks a representative claim for Wollstonecraft as an “individualist” by arguing for Vindication’s defense of “the individual’s absolute autonomy” (60): Wollstonecraft “is allying herself with the individualistic values of middleclass men and heaping scorn on the posture of helplessness, which she can see only as weakness as personal failure” (63). For both Locke and Wollstonecraft, “weakness” signals not “personal failure” but the arbitrariness of a form of domestic government that breaks or enervates its objects. 16. Astell, Serious Proposal, 156. 17. Rather than championing feminine nature, Vindication argues that women must achieve civil autonomy before becoming actively sexed, because, for example, “men are unwilling to place women in situations proper to enable them to acquire sufWcient understanding to know how even to nurse their babes” (273). Wollstonecraft’s Education of Daughters likewise revives the Hobbesian Wguration of a female body that is not innately maternal. 18. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (Dublin, 1774), 5–6. 19. Jane Collier, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, ed. Audrey Bilger (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), 90.

Notes to Pages 206–209

253

20. Thomas Marriott, Female Conduct: Being an Essay on the Art of Pleasing (London, 1759), 18. 21. Wollstonecraft, Mary and Maria, 114. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text by page number. 22. Gregory, Father’s Legacy, 3. 23. Mary Astell, ReXections upon Marriage, in Political Writings, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43. 24. Gregory, Father’s Legacy, 36–37. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. Frances Burney and Jane Austen, among other contemporaries of Wollstonecraft, are suspicious of both the moral virtue and the efWcacy of women’s attempt transitively to modernize men. Burney represents horriWc conditions of domestic tyranny (or incompetence) in all of her novels, but rather than repudiating masculine conjugal authority across the board, she imagines her protagonists’ Richardsonian recuperation of a rigorously selective subset of men who do realize legitimate domestic power. But Burney’s novels prove willing to redeem the authority of only increasingly fossilized species of masculine value. Notably, when Burney’s second protagonist Cecilia surrenders her independent fortune to marry an aristocrat who cannot assume her patronymic (the condition attached to her estate), her “voluntarily made” “compliance” compels her designation as “the ingenuous Cecilia” (Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Peter Sabor and Margaret Anne Doody [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988], 803). Here Cecilia (1782) claims the agency of Cecilia’s ingenuous compliance as her defense of the inconvertibility of one aristocrat’s value into money. For further discussion of “the ingenuous Cecilia,” see my “The Agency of Cecilia’s Money; or, A Reassessment of Frances Burney’s Conservatism” (forthcoming). My “How the Wanderer Works: Reading Burney and Bourdieu” ELH 68 (Winter 2001): 965–89 discusses how Burney’s novel The Wanderer; or, Female DifWculties (1814) envisions a French emigrée’s capacity to convert aristocratic status into the anonymous but easy and inimitable practice of distinction. Jane Austen alternatively spoofs the discourse of domestic tyranny and represents conjugal power’s excruciating effects, often in the same novel—for example, the truth of Eleanor Tilney’s Wlial misery is shielded from Northanger Abbey’s (1818) otherwise wholesale equation of tyranny and romance. Like Burney, Austen does not represent husbands who are susceptible to large-scale correction; some of her marriages are ideally dialectical, as Slavoj Êiêek states of Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1813), while others are simply hopeless (The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], 62).

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Index

Abridgment of Morals, Dr Henry More’s (Henry More), 36 Adventures of Eovaai, The (Eliza Haywood), 141 Agamben, Giorgio, 26–27, 34 Allestree, Richard, 5, 6, 9, 30, 48–51, 53, 77–79, 153, 164 Amussen, Susan, 218 n.43, 228 n.108 Anatomy of the Brain, The (Thomas Willis), 132–33, 148–49, 161–62 animal spirits, 36, 43–44, 68, 100, 126–29, 132, 148, 158–59, 161, 200–202, 204, 237 n.22 Anne (queen of England), 83, 178 Antigone, 16 Anti-Pamela (Eliza Haywood), 22, 130–38, 167 Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, An (Henry Fielding), 102, 108, 130–31, 133–34, 136, 138 Armstrong, Nancy, 18–20, 83, 93, 98, 230 n.30, 231 n.35, 242 n.16, 245 n.54 Artamenes (Madeleine de Scudéry), 158–59, 161, 168 assent. See compliance Astell, Mary, 5, 10, 12, 15, 20–21, 24, 28–30, 35–48, 51–55, 57–60, 63–67, 70–71, 75, 77, 86, 101–2, 163, 168, 173, 182–83, 200–205, 207–9; asceticism of, 42–43; feminism of, 12, 15, 35–48, 58–60, 182, 200–204; husbands and, 5, 43–48, 58–60, 101, 163; obedience and, 42–48; Tory allegiance of, 41–42, 44–45; wives and, 5, 30, 43–48, 58–60, 182, 207; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209; women’s education and, 35–39, 46,

201–2, 205. See also feminist physiology; speciWc works by title Austen, Jane, 253 n.26 Backscheider, Paula, 125 Ballaster, Ros, 129, 236 n.8 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 18, 214 n.61, 247 nn. 22, 24 Barney, Richard, 218 n.45, 240 n.80 Behn, Aphra, 5–10, 24–26, 65, 161. See also speciWc works by title Bender, John, 245 n.54 Berkeley, George, 240 n.85, 252 n.13 Berkeley, Lady Henrietta, 10 body. See animal spirits; desire; feminist physiology; passion Bordo, Susan, 12–13 bourgeois public sphere, 113–19 Bowers, Toni, 68–69, 234 n.63, 238 n.38 Bride-Bush, A (William Whateley), 79–80 British Recluse, The (Eliza Haywood), 129 Brown, Gillian, 32, 218 n.45 Brown, Laura, 70 Burney, Frances, 1–4, 17, 253 n.26 Butler, Judith, 13, 15–16, 26–27, 40, 73, 125, 226 n.82 Carte de Tendre (Madeleine de Scudéry), 169–70 Castle, Terry, 230 n.34, 233 n.61 Cecilia (Frances Burney), 253 n.26 Chaber, Lois A., 235 n.83 Charles I (king of England), 27, 45, 61 Charles II (king of England), 24, 41 Charron, Pierre, 138–40, 145 Cheyne, George, 131–33, 148–49

270

Index

Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, The (Mary Astell), 30, 42–45 City Jilt, The (Eliza Haywood), 124 Civilizing Process, The (Norbert Elias), 49 Clarissa (Samuel Richardson), 121, 228 n.114 Cleland, John, 138 Clélie (Madeleine de Scudéry), 169–70 Collier, Jane, 206 Companion for the ladies-Closets, A (Aphra Behn), 5–9 compliance: daughters and, 33–35, 39–40, 51–56, 76–77, 84, 122, 164–69, 195–98, 200–203; Evelina and, 1–4, 17–18; feminist literary history and, 3, 16–20, 153–54, 169–71, 179, 208–9; slavishness and, 28, 31–32, 38–40, 43–47, 49–51, 101–6, 142–47, 172–73, 200–201; social contract theory and, 5–9, 27–35, 87–90, 120–23, 140–47, 172–73, 189–90, 200–201, 208–9; sons and, 6, 27–29, 30–34, 85–86, 120–23, 162–63; wives and, 5–9, 13–14, 24–30, 38–40, 45–51, 77–83, 87–90, 101–13, 142–51, 173–95, 198–99, 200–209. See also ingenuous subjection; passive obedience conduct books: A Bride-Bush (William Whateley), 79–81; A Companion for the ladies-Closets (Aphra Behn), 5–9; Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (Elizabeth GrifWth), 248 n.47; The Family Instructor (Daniel Defoe), 83–86; A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (John Gregory), 205, 207–8; The Female Reader (Mary Wollstonecraft), 252 n.13; gender and, 13–16, 207–8; The Gentlewomans Companion (Hannah Woolley), 168; The Husband (Eliza Haywood), 125, 143–47, 149–50; ingenuous subjection and, 5–9, 49–51, 77–81, 142–46; The Ladies Calling (Richard Allestree), 5, 49–51, 53, 77–79, 153, 164; The Ladies Library (George Berkeley), 252 n.13; The Lady’s New-years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter (George Savile, Lord Halifax), 39–40, 49, 76, 79; Matrimoniall Honour (Daniel Rogers), 78–81; political contradiction and, 7–9, 48–51, 77–82, 142–46, 147; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (Mary Wollstonecraft), 200, 202; Traité de l’education des Wlles (François Fénelon),

155; The Wife (Eliza Haywood), 13–15, 124–26, 142–46; The Young Ladies Conduct ( John Essex), 51, 54 conjugal power: Astell and, 5, 39, 43–48, 58–60, 101, 163, 182; Behn and, 6–9, 24–26; Davys and, 51–56, 57–59; Defoe and, 59–61, 66–75, 83–86; Filmer and, 4, 28, 64; Haywood and, 125–26, 138–51; Hobbes and, 64–66; Hume and, 87–90; Locke and, 4–5, 27–29, 30–34, 44, 47, 89–90, 162–63; Lennox and, 160–69; Richardson and, 77–83, 90–113, 119–23; Shaftesbury and, 173; Sheridan and, 178–98; Smith and, 174–77; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209. See also conjugal right; husbands conjugal right, 47, 87–96, 106–7, 111, 154, 206–9. See also fraternal patriarchy; Pateman, Carole Continuation of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, The (Frances Sheridan), 178, 195–98 Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn, 234 n.68 Critical Essay Concerning Marriage, A (Thomas Salmon), 154, 166 Davis, Lennard J., 134–35, 223 n.136, 231 n.38, 242 n.16, 245 nn.54–55 Davys, Mary, 21, 30, 48–56, 57–59, 66, 76 Declamation on the Subject of Early Liberal Education for Children, A (Desiderius Erasmus), 30–32 deconstruction, 20 Defoe, Daniel, 21, 59–60, 66–76, 83–86. See also speciWc works by title DeJean, Joan, 169 de La Mettrie, Julien Offray, 61 De la Sagesse (Pierre Charron), 138–40, 145 Delicate Distress, The (Elizabeth GrifWth), 183–84, 198–99 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 20 Descartes, René, 9, 28, 35–36, 38, 46, 127, 132–33, 155, 156–59, 161, 167–68 de Scudéry, Madeleine, 158–59, 161, 169, 223 n.136 desire: Astell and, 29–30, 35–39, 42–48; Descartes and, 28, 35–36, 159; Haywood and, 124–30, 138–51; Locke and, 6–7, 27–34, 36–37, 67, 87–88, 140–41, 188–90, 230 n.28; political subjection and, 5–6, 7, 27–34, 36–37,

Index 172–73; wifely subjection and, 5–9, 45–56, 67–71, 87–89, 96–102, 108–13, 138–51, 173–77, 178–95; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209 Dictionary of the English Language, A (Samuel Johnson), 28–29, 113 Directions for Obedience to Governours in dangerous and doubtfull Times (Robert Filmer), 45 Discovery, The (Frances Sheridan) 186, 248 n.49 domestic novel: feminism of, 9, 13, 17–20, 55–56, 70–76, 81–83, 118, 150–51, 168–71, 183, 194–98; Foucaultian power and, 18–20, 125; Habermas and, 20, 91, 113–19, 183; ideology and, 18–20, 113–19, 170–71, 183; romance and, 54–56, 98–101, 152–71, 184–88; Wollstonecraft and, 202–9 domestic power. See conjugal power Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes), 152 Doody, Margaret Anne, 18–19, 153–55, 169 –70, 211 n.5, 233 n.61 Dunciad, The (Alexander Pope), 125–26, 236 n.8 Dupe, The (Frances Sheridan), 186, 248 n.49 Eaves, T. C. Duncan, and Ben D. Kimpel, 91, 230 n.24, 233 n.61 education: Astell and, 35–39, 46, 201–2, 205; Locke and, 6–7, 27–29, 30–35, 37, 39, 45, 47, 81–82, 105, 144, 162–63; Smith and, 174–76; Wollstonecraft and, 200–203 Education of a Christian Prince, The (Desiderius Erasmus), 31 Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 27, 29, 45, 61–64, 74 Elias, Norbert, 49 Émile (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), 205 Engels, Frederick, 116 English Malady, The (George Cheyne), 133, 237 n.22 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, An (David Hume), 88 Epicurus, 159 epistolary form, 22, 77–83, 97, 100, 107, 109, 117–18, 134–37, 177–95, 199 Epstein, Julia, 17–18 Erasmus, Desiderius, 30–32 Essay Concerning Human Understanding , An

271

(John Locke), 3, 36–37, 67, 87–88, 140–41, 152–53, 181–82, 188–90, 192, 194 Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock, An (Thomas Willis), 127 Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, An ( Jane Collier), 206 Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, An (Francis Hutcheson), 162, 179–83, 185, 187, 188–89, 192 Essays Addressed to Young Married Women (Elizabeth GrifWth), 248 n.47 Essex, John, 51, 54 Evelina (Frances Burney), 1–4, 17–18 exclusion crisis, 10, 41 Ezell, Margaret J. M., 17, 214 n.49, 218 n.43, 246 n.72 Fair Way with the Dissenters, A (Mary Astell), 41, 64 Family Instructor, The (Daniel Defoe), 83–86 family-state analogy, 4, 9, 40–48, 64, 76, 83–86, 110, 144, 173 Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (Eliza Haywood), 99, 124–27, 129–30, 135, 137, 144, 150 Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, A ( John Gregory), 205, 207–8 Fausto-Sterling, Anne, 226 n.79 Female Conduct (Thomas Marriott), 206 Female Quixote, The (Charlotte Lennox), 18, 22, 152–71, 184–85, 187, 204 feminism: Astell and, 12, 15, 35–48, 58–60, 182, 200–204; category of gender and, 13–17, 72–74, 207–8; category of woman and, 16; Defoe and, 68–75; domestic novel and, 9, 13, 17–20, 55–56; genealogy of, 11–13, 47–48, 72–74, 125–26, 200–209; Haywood and, 125–26, 150–51; Lennox and, 168–71; mind-body split and, 11–13, 37–39, 113–15; Richardson and, 81–83, 118; Sheridan and, 183, 194–95; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209. See also feminist physiology feminist literary history: compliance and, 3, 16–20, 169–71; Evelina and, 1–4, 17–18; The Female Quixote and, 153–56, 169–71; Habermas and, 113–19 feminist physiology: Astell and, 10–12, 20–21, 35–39, 42–43, 182, 200–203;

272

Index

Davys and, 57–59; Defoe and, 68–72; GrifWth and, 198–99; Haywood and, 125–30, 138–51; Richardson and, 81–83, 103–5; Sheridan and, 180, 188–95; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209, 252 n.17 Fénelon, François, 155, 164 Fielding, Henry, 102, 108, 130, 133–34, 136 Filmer, Sir Robert, 4, 27–28, 32, 33, 45, 64, 105, 220 n.77. See also speciWc works by title Fletcher, Anthony, 19, 49 FolkenXik, Robert, 98, 231 n.43 Foucault, Michel, 19, 125, 231 n.35 Franklin, Aretha, 15 Fraser, Nancy, 114, 235 n.73 fraternal patriarchy, 5, 20, 47–48, 89–90, 102–3, 109, 120, 154, 163, 208, 221 n.115. See also Pateman, Carole freedom. See liberty Freud, Sigmund, 20, 129 Gallagher, Catherine, 243 n.38 gender, 13–17, 72–74, 207–8 Gentlewomans Companion, The (Hannah Woolley), 168 Gordon, Scott Paul, 245 n.56 Grant, Ruth, 217 n.25 Gregory, John, 9, 205, 207–8 GrifWth, Elizabeth, 183–84, 198–99, 248 n.47 Guest, Harriet, 212 n.22, 250 n.89 Habermas, Jürgen, 11, 20–21, 35, 91, 113–19, 183, 196, 250 n.85 Halifax, Lord, George Savile, 39–40, 49, 76, 79 Harvey, William, 36 Hays, Mary, 252 n.14 Haywood, Eliza, 13–15, 20–22, 99, 124–51, 154, 204. See also speciWc works by title Hill, Aaron, 193, 249 n.77 History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, The (Eliza Haywood), 147–51 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, The (Eliza Haywood), 138–47, 204 History of Sir Charles Grandison, The (Samuel Richardson), 121, 190 History of the Nun, The (Aphra Behn), 24–26 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 10–11, 21, 30, 58–75, 77, 85–86, 97, 161, 194; individual and, 10–11, 21, 58–60, 62–66; liberty and,

74–75, 85; marriage and, 59, 64–65; maternal dominion and, 66; political subjection and, 6, 10, 62–64, 161; sexual difference and, 6, 72–74. See also speciWc works by title Hume, David, 9, 87–90, 97–100, 132, 143–44, 180, 187–88, 194, 214 n.48, 241 n.107. See also speciWc works by title Hunter, J. Paul, 234 n.72, 242 n.16 Husband, The (Eliza Haywood), 125, 143–47, 149–50 husbands: Astell and, 5, 43–48, 58–60, 101, 163; Defoe and, 66–67; Haywood and, 13–15, 124, 142–51; Hobbes and, 64–65; Locke and, 4–5, 44, 47, 89–90, 163; “master” as synonym for, in Astell, 45–46, 101; “master” as synonym for, in Richardson, 101–5; sexed dominance of, 4–5, 44, 47, 58–60, 64–66, 89–90, 103–5, 119–23, 163, 208; Shaftesbury and, 173; Smith and, 174–77; Wollstonecraft and, 203–4, 205–8. See also fraternal patriarchy Hutcheson, Francis, 9, 162, 173, 174, 176, 177, 179–85, 187, 188–89, 192 Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom, An (Mary Astell), 41 individual: abstract, 9–13, 26–28, 38, 47–48, 82–83, 114–16, 203; history of the novel and, 82–83, 104, 163; Hobbesian, 10–11, 21, 58–60, 62–74, 82–83, 85–86, 194 ingenuous subjection: Allestree and, 5–6, 30, 49–51, 77; Astell and, 29–30, 42–43, 182; Behn and, 5–9; Davys and, 30, 51–56, 57–58; Defoe and, 75, 83–86; Haywood and, 13–15, 135–38, 142–47; Lennox and, 163–69, 171; Locke and, 6–8, 27–29, 30–34, 36–37, 45, 140–41, 162–63, 189–90; Richardson and, 75–83, 96–106, 108–13, 118, 122–23, 177, 190; Shaftesbury and, 172–74; Sheridan and, 177, 183, 194–95, 197–98; Smith and, 174–77; Wollstonecraft and, 204–9. See also compliance; desire Injur’d Husband, The (Eliza Haywood), 128 Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, An (Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper), 172–77, 179, 181, 189, 193 Irigaray, Luce, 20, 215 n.73

Index James, Susan, 38, 219 n.61, 243 n.24 James II (king of England), 10, 41 Jameson, Fredric, 20, 48–49, 54 Johnson, Claudia, 203, 251 n.12 Johnson, Samuel, 28–29, 55, 113, 166, 247 n.20. See also speciWc works by title Jones, Vivien, 18 Kahn, Victoria, 11, 212 n.27 Kant, Immanuel, 179 Kaplan, Cora, 251 n.8 Kay, Carol, 9, 212 n.22, 223 n.12 Kibbey, Ann Louise, 72 Kimpel, Ben D. See Eaves, T. C. Duncan Klein, Lawrence E., 246 nn. 2, 11 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, 219 n.56 Lacan, Jacques, 169–70, 245 n.61 Ladies Calling, The (Richard Allestree), 5, 48–51, 53, 77–79, 153, 164 Ladies Library, The (George Berkeley), 252 n.13 Lady’s New-years Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter, The (George Savile, Lord Halifax), 39–40, 49, 76, 79 Landes, Joan, 113–15 Langbauer, Laurie, 154, 155, 169 Laqueur, Thomas, 15, 73–74 Lefanu, Alicia, 177, 186, 247 n.20 Lennox, Charlotte, 18, 22, 152–71, 184, 204. See also speciWc works by title Leslie, Charles, 40–41 Letter Concerning Toleration, A ( John Locke), 4 Letters Concerning the Love of God (Mary Astell), 30, 42–43 Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes), 10, 12, 63–67, 74, 161 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 48, 54, 222 n.124 liberty: Astell and, 29–30; Hobbes and, 74–75, 85; Hume and, 88–89; Locke and, 3–5, 36–37, 67, 88, 98, 140–41, 189–90; Richardson and, 101–3, 190; Willis and, 148–49; Wollstonecraft and, 202–5, 209 Life of Harriot Stuart, The (Charlotte Lennox), 162–63, 167, 244 n.42 Life’s Progress Through the Passions (Eliza Haywood), 141, 238 n.38 Locke, John, 3–6, 7–9, 19, 21, 27–29, 30–39, 44–45, 47, 51, 58, 60, 67, 71, 80–83, 85, 87–90, 92, 98–99, 105, 118,

273

120–22, 127, 136, 138, 140–45, 151–53, 160–63, 172–73, 176, 181–82, 188–90, 192, 194–95, 197, 200–203, 205, 208–9, 219 n.48, 230 n.28, 237 n.21; conjugal power and, 4–5, 27–29, 30–34, 44, 47, 89–90, 162–63; consciousness and, 192, 194–95; desire and, 6–7, 27–34, 36–37, 67, 87–88, 140–41, 188–90, 230 n.28; education and, 6, 7, 27–29, 30–35, 37, 39, 45, 47, 81–82, 105, 144, 162–63; Indians and, 35, 219 n.48; liberty and, 3–5, 36–37, 67, 88, 98, 140–41, 189–90; masculine superiority and, 4–5, 44, 47, 89–90, 163; political power and, 27–37, 71, 160–63. See also speciWc works by title Love in Excess (Eliza Haywood), 125 Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (Aphra Behn), 9–10, 161, 225 n.50 Love-Letters on All Occasions (Eliza Haywood), 150 Lukács, Georg, 155, 163, 242 n.14 Lynch, Deidre, 235 n.76, 245 n.54 Machine Man ( Julien Offray de La Mettrie), 61 Macpherson, C. B., 11, 74 Malebranche, Nicolas, 9, 43–44, 98–99, 126, 140–41, 161, 243 n.34 Man Superior to Woman, 89–90, 110–11 Maria (Mary Wollstonecraft), 206–9 Marriott, Thomas, 206 Mary (Mary Wollstonecraft), 199, 202–5 Masqueraders, The (Eliza Haywood), 137 Matrimoniall Honour (Daniel Rogers), 78–79 marriage. See conjugal power; fraternal patriarchy; husbands; wives marriage contract, 5, 89–90, 117, 154, 164 Marx, Karl, 116 Mason, John E., 217 n.32 Mazarine, Hortense Mancini, Duchess of, 24–27, 216 n.6 McClure, Kirstie M., 217 n.25 McDowell, Paula, 213 n.43, 234 n.71 McKeon, Michael, 20, 55, 82–83, 104, 107, 155, 171, 215 n.70, 223 n.136, 227 n.102, 232 n.53, 242 n.14, 250 n.85 mechanism. See animal spirits; desire; passion Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure ( John Cleland), 138 Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (Frances Sheridan), 22, 177–99, 204

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Memoirs of the Dutchess Mazarine (César Vichard de Saint-Réal), 24–27 Mercenary Lover, The (Eliza Haywood), 137 Moglen, Helene, 69, 195 Moi, Toril, 13, 72–73, 226 n.82 Monmouth, Duke of, 10 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 250 n.89 moral sense philosophy, 172–77, 179–95 More, Henry, 36, 221 n.91 Motooka, Wendy, 243 n.31 Mullan, John, 237 n.13 Nestor, Deborah J., 240 n.80 New Association of Those Called ModerateChurch-Men, The (Charles Leslie), 40–41 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15 Northanger Abbey ( Jane Austen), 253 n.26 Novak, Maximillian E., 155 novel: history of, 82–83, 104, 108, 153–56, 163, 169–71, 195; romance and, 54–56, 96–101, 136–37, 152–71, 184–88. See also domestic novel Observations upon Aristotles Politiques (Robert Filmer), 27 Oedipus, 16 On the Citizen (Thomas Hobbes), 30, 62–64, 161 On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Samuel Pufendorf), 30 Pamela I (Samuel Richardson), 21, 61, 75–83, 90–106, 107, 126, 130, 133–38, 145, 167, 168, 177–78, 180–81, 185, 191–95, 198, 204; conjugal right and, 90–96; Hobbesian individual and, 80–83; ingenuous subjection and, 77–83, 96–106; liberty and, 101–3; Lockean education and, 80–82; mind-body split and, 93–96; revisions of, 61, 91–96, 102, 104–5; slavishness and, 101–6; masculine superiority and, 103–6 Pamela II (Samuel Richardson), 105–23; conjugal right and, 106–7, 111; ingenuous subjection and, 108–13, 118, 122–23; Lockean education and, 120–23; masculine superiority and, 119–23; mind-body split in, 106–7, 111–12 Pamela Censured, 99–100 Pandora Press, 3 parental power: Davys and, 51–56; Defoe and, 66, 68–70, 83–86; Halifax and, 40;

Haywood and, 148; Hobbes and, 66; Lennox and, 164–69; Locke and, 6, 7, 27–29, 30–35, 37, 39, 45, 47, 81–82, 105, 144, 162–63; Richardson and, 81, 105, 110–11, 120–22; Sheridan and, 178, 197; Wollstonecraft and, 200–203 passion: Descartes and, 28, 35–36, 156–60; Hobbes and, 6, 10, 62–64, 67, 161; Hume and, 87–90, 187–88; masculine conjugal power and, 103–6, 121–22, 143–44. See also animal spirits; desire Passions of the Soul, The (René Descartes), 28, 35–36, 133, 155–59 passive obedience, 39–42, 45–47, 84, 142–45, 200–201, 208 Pateman, Carole, 5, 11–12, 20, 47–48, 65–66, 89–90, 97, 102, 120, 154, 163, 173, 208, 221 n.115, 232 n.51 Patriarcha non Monarcha ( James Tyrrell), 32 performativity, 15–16 Perry, Ruth, 40, 42, 43, 122, 179, 216 n.6, 221 n.107, 230 n.33, 233 nn. 61, 63, 236 n.85, 250 n.85 Philips, Katherine, 241 n.1 Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (George Cheyne), 131–32, 148–49 Plutarch, 199 Pocock, J. G. A., 11, 116, 212 n.26, 219 n.45 political power: Filmer and, 4, 27, 64; Hobbes and, 10, 62–64, 161; Locke and, 27–37, 71, 160–63; Shaftesbury and, 172–73; Smith and, 176 Pollak, Ellen, 214 n.47 Poovey, Mary, 18–19, 211 n.5, 228 n.106, 246 n.72, 252 n.15 Pope, Alexander, 125–26, 236 n.8 power. See conjugal power; parental power; political power Pride and Prejudice ( Jane Austen), 253 n.26 Progress of Romance, The (Clara Reeve), 125 public sphere, 113–19 Pufendorf, Samuel, 30 Rambler, The (Samuel Johnson), 55, 166 Reeve, Clara, 125 ReXections on the Various Effects of Love (Eliza Haywood), 126 Reformed Coquette, The (Mary Davys), 21, 30, 48–56, 57–59, 66, 76 resistance: Evelina and, 1–4, 17–18; The Female Quixote and, 164–65, 170–71; feminist literary history and, 17–18,

Index 170–71, 214 n.49; feminist theory and, 16–17; Maria and, 208–9 Richardson, Samuel, 21, 61, 77–83, 87–123, 126, 138, 177, 190, 194–95, 198, 204, 228 n.114, 249 n.69, 252 n.14. See also speciWc works by title Rizzo, Betty, 3, 23 Roach, Joseph R., 132, 239 n.60, 249 n.77 Rogers, Daniel, 78–81 romance, 54–56, 99–100, 152–71, 184–88 Rousseau, George S., 142, 237 n.21 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 205 Roxana (Daniel Defoe), 21, 59–60, 66–76, 82–83, 86, 194 Royal College of Physicians, 131, 135 Royal Society, 131 Salmon, Thomas, 154, 166 Schochet, Gordon, 218 nn. 35, 43 Scott, Joan Wallach, 11–12, 26–27, 38, 114, 213 n.33, 226 n.79 Scott, Sarah, 225 n.58 Search After Truth, The (Nicolas Malebranche), 43–44, 98–99, 126, 140–41, 161 Serious Proposal to the Ladies, A (Mary Astell), 29–30, 35–39, 43, 201–3, 205, 252 n.13 sexual difference, 9–16; Astell and, 37–39, 44, 47–48, 58–59; Butler and, 73, 226 n.82; Davys and, 57–59; Defoe and, 71–74; Haywood and, 126–30, 147–51; Hobbes and, 64–65; Moi and, 72–73; Richardson and, 104–5; Wollstonecraft and, 200–209, 251 n.8 Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, third earl of, 9, 172–77, 179, 181–82, 189, 193, 201 Sheridan, Frances, 22, 177–99, 204, 247 n.20. See also speciWc works by title Siskin, Clifford, 220 n.64 Smith, Adam, 9, 22, 174–77, 179–82, 184–85, 191, 198–99 Smith, Hilda L., 38, 220 n.62 Some ReXections upon Marriage (Mary Astell), 5, 24, 28, 30, 35, 39–48, 51, 54, 58–60, 63, 70–71, 86, 163, 168, 173, 182–83, 207 Some Thoughts Concerning Education ( John Locke), 6–7, 28–29, 31–35, 45, 47, 51, 81–83, 105, 120–22, 144, 162–63, 190, 200

275

Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 18, 171, 211 n.5 Spivak, Gayatri, 20 Springborg, Patricia, 41, 47–48, 222 nn. 120, 122, 130, 252 n.13 Stallybrass, Peter, 63 Staves, Susan, 212 n.15 Stone, Lawrence, 216 n.20 Straub, Kristina, 17 Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The ( Jürgen Habermas), 91, 113–19 Stuart, Alexander, 131 Tarcov, Nathan, 217 n.25 Taylor, Barbara, 14, 201, 204–5, 251 n.13, 252 n.15 Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Adam Smith), 174–77 Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (Mary Wollstonecraft), 200, 202 Todd, Janet, 18, 98, 170–71, 179, 231 n.43 Traité de l’education des Wlles (François Fénelon), 155 Treatise of Human Nature, A (David Hume), 87–90, 97, 143, 180, 187–88 Treatise of Man (René Descartes), 156 Trumbach, Randolph, 216 n.20, 244 n.49 Turner, James Grantham, 225 n.45 Two Treatises of Government ( John Locke), 4–5, 29, 32–33, 47, 160–61, 163 Tyrrell, James, 32, 224 n.19 unconscious: amatory Wction and, 128–29; epistolary form and, 178, 194–95, 198 Unequal ConXict, The (Eliza Haywood), 128, 129, 162 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 237 n.13 Vermeule, Blakey, 246 n.2 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A (Mary Wollstonecraft), 22, 200–206, 208–9 virtue. See compliance; desire; ingenuous subjection Wanderer, The (Frances Burney), 253 n.26 Warner, Michael, 235 n.75 Warner, William, 99 Watt, Ian, 155, 163, 169, 229 n.23, 234 n.72, 242 nn.14, 16, 245 n.55 Webster, William, 192–93 Weil, Rachel, 41–42, 45, 47–48, 49, 222 n.120 Whateley, William, 79–81

276

Index

Wife, The (Eliza Haywood), 13–15, 124, 125, 126, 142–46 Williams, Ioan, 242 n.18 Willis, Thomas, 9, 127–29, 132–34, 143, 148–49, 161–62, 237 n.21 wives: difference of, from women, 8–9, 13–15, 44, 58–59, 64–76, 81–83, 103–5, 147–51, 174–77, 200–209; sexed subjection of, 4–5, 44, 47, 58–60, 64–66, 89–90, 103–5, 119–23, 163, 208; slavishness of, 39–40, 46–47, 49–51, 101–6, 112–13, 142–47, 200–201. See also feminism; feminist physiology; ingenuous subjection; sexual difference; women Wollstonecraft, Mary, 2, 22–23, 199–209. See also speciWc works by title women: bourgeois public sphere and, 113–19; brains of, 44, 126–27, 148–50;

critical utility of the word, 16; difference of, from contractual citizens, 3–13, 26–27, 38–39, 45–48, 51–56, 65–66, 138–51, 160–63, 173–78, 200–209; education and, 35–39, 46, 174–76, 200–203, 205; moral sense philosophy and, 173–77, 179–95. See also feminism; feminist physiology; sexual difference; wives Wood, Neal, 219 n.45 Woolley, Hannah, 168 Yolton, John W., 237 n.22 Young, Iris Marion, 114 Young Ladies Conduct, The ( John Essex), 51, 54 Êiêek, Slavoj, 253 n.26

Acknowledgments

Space does not permit me to enumerate the ways in which the generosity of others has sustained me throughout the alternately melancholy and joyful process of writing this book. I hope these readers can imagine how much their insight, patience, and encouragement continue to matter: Richard Barney, Tita Chico, Helen Deutsch, Natania Meeker, Marilyn Morris, Joel Reed, Bethel Saler, Regina Schwartz, James Thompson, and James Turner. Loren Glass, Jennifer Snead, and Mary Visconti read multiple drafts in close succession, for which I am hopelessly and happily in their debt. Loren’s implicit faith in my work has enabled me, it feels, from the beginning. Lawrence Lipking perused many chapters and intervened in the construction of many sentences; I thank him for his consistent support of my ideas. I am indebted to Robert Markley’s unstinting and always correct advice. Ruth Perry asked some of the most important questions, and even if I remain unable to answer them, they have crucially directed my thinking. Cora Kaplan’s help and provocation assisted me more than I can say. I thank Fredric Jameson for stimulating my Wrst concerns about the eighteenth century and encouraging the conjunctions that followed. I am grateful to my parents, whose scholarly example taught me the value of books. Finally, I must acknowledge Jennifer Thorn’s incomparably generous guidance. Of all the gifts whose persistence makes them hard to parse into sentences, hers remains the most vital. For Wnancial assistance, I am grateful to the Arizona State University Department of Women’s Studies for funding to work at the New York Public Library in the summer of 1998; to the Huntington Library for a Fletcher Jones Foundation fellowship in the summer of 1999; and to the Northwestern University Research Grants Committee for funding to travel to the British Library in the summer of 2004. I am especially grateful to the Newberry Library for a Mellon/National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship during the year 2002–3, which invaluably

278

Acknowledgments

facilitated my pursuit of this project. I will forget neither the delight of reading Mary Astell in my carrel nor the vibrant conversation of the year’s fellows. Last but not least, I thank the readers for the University of Pennsylvania Press, whose incisive and sympathetic comments substantially aided my Wnal revisions of the manuscript. A version of Chapter 5 appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 43, 2 (Summer 2002).