The gendering of men, 1600-1750, Vol. 1 9780299197803, 9780299197841

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Figures (page ix)
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Note on Original Texts Quoted (page xiii)
Part 1: Publicity
Introduction: History before the Phallus? (page 3)
1. Positioning Men (page 20)
2. A Politics of Effeminacy (page 64)
3. Residual Pederasty and the National Body (page 89)
Part 2: Privacy
Introduction: History before the Look? (page 123)
4. The Eye's Castration, the Subject's Plenitude (page 132)
5. The English Phallus (page 167)
6. Embodying Mr. Spectator (page 201)
7. "There's difference in men": The Fop and the Politics of Pleasure (page 228)
Conclusion: The Promise of Gender (page 257)
Notes (page 263)
Index (page 355)

Citation preview

The Gendering of Men

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The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750 The English Phallus

Thomas A. King

The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street

Madison, Wisconsin 53711 ,

www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress / 3 Henrietta Street London WC2E 8LU, England Copyright © 2004 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved

D4321

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data King, Thomas Alan. The gendering of men, 1600-1750: the English phallus / Thomas Alan King.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-299-19780-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-299-19784-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and

criticism. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. English literature— 18th century—History and criticism. 4. English literature—Male authors— History and criticism. 5. Homosexuality and literature— England— History. 6. Masculinity—England—History. 7. Sexual orientation in literature. 8. Group identity in literature. 9. Body, Human, in literature. 10. Men—England—History. 11. Sex role in

literature. 12. Penisinliterature. 13. Meninliterature. I. Title.

PR428.M37K56 2004. 820.9'3521 —dc22 2003022357

For my parents

JAMES L. and GAIL E. KING with respect and gratitude

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Contents

Figures 1x Acknowledgments xi

Note on Original Texts Quoted xiii Part 1: Publicity

Introduction: History before the Phallus? | 3

1 Positioning Men 20 2 ! If dress became gendered only in the eighteenth century, as Wilson has claimed, then this is to say

that heterosociality and cross-gender eroticism have substituted for other ways of organizing social existence and experience. In this sense the “great masculine renunciation” made men and women by promoting an ideology of gendered complementariness that could be increas-

ingly appropriated by middle-class men and women as they, too, claimed privacy and the franchise.

Female Fops and the Erasure of Publicness Men and women at all levels of society have resisted the gendering of dress, choosing residual forms of display to signal their difference from the leveling categories of sex. Conspicuous Londoners spent spring

182 Privacy Sundays circling their coaches around the Ring on the north side of Hyde Park; cruising this fashionable drive, elite women, and those who emulated them, made spectacles of themselves. Pepys made quite a few

trips to Hyde Park for the sole purpose of catching a glimpse of the idiosyncratic Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: “That which we and almost all went for, was to see my Lady Newcastle; which we

could not, she being fallowed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her; only, I could see she was in a large black coach, adorned with silver instead of gold, and so with the curtains and everything black and white, and herself in her cap.”5* Cavendish’s centrality in the visual field stated her difference from the gendered performativity of men and women in the hegemonic public sphere. If Pepys’s objections, recorded in the textual space of the diary, appear to signal the primacy of his looking eye, his crowding of details into a single, fascinated sentence remarks instead his inability to transform gazing into a critical look. Meanwhile the women at court had been appearing in Hyde Park in masculine riding habits, a fashion that had been set by the queen. Pepys complained, “Walking here in the galleries [at Whitehall], I find the Ladies of Honour dressed in their rid-

ing garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just for all the world like men, and buttoned their doublets up the breast, with perriwigs and with hats; so that, only for a long petticoat dragging under their men’s coats nobody could take them for women in any point whatever—which was an odde sight, and a sight did not please me” (12 June 1666; 7:162).°° Discovering the petticoats beneath the men’s coats,

Pepys thought he had found the truth of sex beneath the surface display. But Pepys’s writing, as his eye, had first to follow the women’s bricolage, a combining of masculine and feminine, courtly dress that anticipated, indeed elicited Pepys’s look. Displaying the trace of a petticoat, these courtly women summoned a look that would search beneath

the unreliable surface for the true sign of sex—the petticoat—only to find that it, too, was a performance. The gaze recuperates the look. To ask whether these women were transgressing gender boundaries would be to relocate them within the very discourse of incommensurate and complementary genders that was then underwriting the performativity of the public sphere, that gradual equalization of all men by positioning them against, but at the same time alongside, all women in the visual field. Recuperating this gendered account of the spectacle, courtly

women displayed themselves as the symbol of a consolidated courtly identity. Aristocratic and gentlewomen’s conspicuous spectacularity

The English Phallus 183 could be a reassertion of the privilege of rank, the mark of their difference from the domesticated (if emulative) femininity that would later provide a central symbol of men’s privacy. Upwardly mobile families would follow suit, investing in the spectacle of female bodies. Pepys criticized the imitation of spectacularity by women who did not have the status to support it: “But that which I did see and wonder at, with reason, was to find Pegg Penn in a new coach, with only her husband’s

pretty sister with her, both patched and fine, and in much the finest coach in the park and I think that ever I did see, one or other, for neatness and richness in gold and everything that is noble. . . but to live in the condition they do at home, and be abroad in this coach, astonishes me” (1 May 1667; 8:196-97). Pepys connected conspicuous display by

women with their rejection of patriarchal authority; Pegg Penn, he noted, was circulating outside the visible control of her husband. The theater made such social desires and anxieties concrete. Directly embodying contested social codes in its panoply of characters, the theater put those bodies in motion to negotiate conflict, reproduce stasis, or propose new possibilities for social being.54 Thus John Dryden ridiculed his female fop Melantha (Marriage a la Mode, 1671, pub. 1673),

who goes so far as to assert publicly that the prince Leonidas had “made the doux yeux to [her]”; a former citizen, Melantha has pursued upward mobility by purchasing French words from her woman Philotis.°5 If Melantha’s foppishness is her residual desire for access to the sovereign body, if she claims the favor of being recognized by the gaze, she is tamed—and gendered—when the conditions of her visibility and access to the court are set by her fiancé, Palamede (5.524, p. 129). Palamede first contains Melantha’s courtly desire by imitating it, exposing the foppery of her French pose (5.103-90, pp. 111-15). His ridicule of

Melantha’s Francophilia nonetheless maintains the centrality of the court (and its French fashions) to gentle identities. But by controlling Melantha’s access to the court Palamede makes her gender the basis of his own capacity to straddle privacy and publicity, “a place at court” and his property in marriage (5.525, p. 129). As Palamede falls in love

with Melantha, transforming their arranged, financially based marriage into an ostensibly consensual, companionate one, his gendered desire marks his autonomy as a gentleman from the court. Rather than representing patriarchal authority as parallel to and reinforcing sovereign authority, the tragicomic form opposes gendered to courtly desires. Palamede’s patriarchal authority, which he inherits from his father along with the estate he gains when he consents to the marriage

184 Privacy with Melantha, becomes a vehicle for figuring the propertied man’s separation from the court. If the female fop’s display was a residual attempt to manifest publicly a set of powers (spatial, financial, corporeal) that set her apart from her sex, that very display could now be read in gendered rather than courtly terms, making the female fop all the more available for patriarchal containment. Susan Staves has noted, “though male fops are open to accusations of effeminacy, female fops are not thought to be mannish.”°6 But the comparison should not be made in gendered terms—the very terms in which foppery was contained. Fop-

pery was not a crossing or troubling of gender but an attempt—too late—at a publicity that could no longer bear public authority. Foppery made both women and men effeminate; this is why the reabsorption of the female fop into patriarchy was presented as both a loss of her eccentricity and a gain of authenticity and sociability. Discussing the apparent lack of unity between Dryden’s aristocratic (tragic) and private (comic) plots—invariably considered a problem in generic history and criticism— Michael McKeon has argued instead for

a “dialectical unity” that tentatively suggests “the breakdown in the separation both of literary styles and of social stations.”°” In my reading, Dryden’s presentation in this and his other tragicomedies of civil alongside courtly society, of private marriage arrangements alongside public negotiations of love and honor, likewise anticipates the radical separation among male roles and authorities—as property owner and head of a household, as husband and father, as national subject and bearer of the franchise—that Locke would soon make the basis of the private man’s participation in civil society. As Carole Pateman has shown, Locke’s social contract was underwritten by his tacit naturaliza-

tion of men’s political right in women’s bodies, creating a private sphere that was autonomous of the state only to the extent that the sex-

ual and economic subordination of women in the home space was understood as natural and apolitical.5§ Imagining being “shut up in a bed” with Melantha’s tongue, Palamede tells the audience, “I must kiss all night in my own defense, and hold her down like a boy at cuffs, nay, and give her the rising blow every time she begins to speak” (2.91-95, Pp. 34-35). But if Dryden founds the social contract concluding the private action of the play on the sexual “contract” between Palamede and Melantha, the proviso scene between Rhodophil and Doralice operates

conversely to assimilate the new companionate marriage to courtly fashions. Palamede must bring his citizen wife Melantha under a degree

The English Phallus 185 of patriarchal control that Rhodophil cannot exercise over his courtly wife Doralice. (Whereas Palamede denies Melantha the capacity to make conditions for their marriage, Doralice subsequently proposes a “proviso” to her renewed vows with Rhodophil [5.185-90, p. 115; 5.386, p- 123]). Around the opposition of the true court lady and the upwardly mobile female fop, Dryden staged the confrontation of two competing political and social economies of male authority. In the conclusion of Dryden’s Secret Love (1667), the Queen’s distri-

bution of justice and announcement of her decision not to marry (her anachronistic refusal of her private for her public body) is upstaged by the engagement and proviso scene between the nontitled, private characters Florimel and Celadon. An entertainment for the Town, Dryden’s tragicomedy staged the court, in Habermasian terms, as already a separate entity from the sovereign’s body; even the Queen and her favorites are displaced from the Presence Chamber (the ceremonial hall where the monarch dined in state and gave audiences) to the public walks of the park. Yet this relocation of the gentle body, first, from its proximity alongside the sovereign body to the court, and, subsequently, from the court to the town, was not yet underwritten by a domestic ideology. In their concluding proviso scene, neither Florimel nor Celadon sacrifice publicness to a privacy derived from conjugal intimacy. Rather they accomodate marriage to the enjoyment of residual publicity. Florimel reserves a right to her own will, distinct from her future husband’s, and to spend time “abroad” as she chooses.*? The elite husband’s and wife’s maintenance of separate spaces, friends, and networks of alliance distinguished the aristocratic and gentle marriages in the comedies of the 1660s from the conspicuous fondness and companionship marking the new domesticated marriage. In these terms Etherege’s Man of Mode was already looking forward to the eighteenth century, the play beginning after a self-interested and manipulative proviso scene between Dorimant and Mrs. Loveit and concluding in the postponement of a new contract between Dorimant and Harriet until he has first visited her in the retired space of her mother’s country house: HARRIET: When I hear you talk thus in Hampshire, I shall begin to think there may be some little truth enlarged upon. DoRIMANT: Is this all? Will you not promise me—

HARRIET: I hate to promise. What we do then is expected from us and wants much of the welcome it finds when it surprises. (5.2, p. 144)

186 Privacy Harriet notes the difference of her mother’s Hampshire house from both the open and extended households of a landed elite and the traffic of the town in her sardonic description of it, later, as “a great, rambling, lone house that looks as it were not inhabited, the family’s so small” (5.2, pp. 149-50). Authenticity requires a reduction of the networks of alliance and the claims of publicity; Harriet’s Hampshire house is al-

ready the setting for the sentimentalized intimacy of the eighteenthcentury domestic novel, her gendered body (and ability to gender the libertine) the vehicle for channeling Dorimant’s restless ambition and desire into a new agrarian entrepreneurship. If Harriet’s uninhabited and rambling house, like Dorimant’s inwardness, will be the locus of what Raymond Williams has called “the morality of improvement,” it will follow from an economic productivity represented as a sexual productivity: the increase of family. This prospect of gendered domesticity

in the drama mystifies the very agrarian capitalism that enabled the younger son’s, and libertine’s, consumption and provided the terms of his gentility.© Conversely, William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700) looked

backward with its by then anachronistic proviso scene in which Millamant demands to have her closet “inviolate” and insists, in the face of all companionate ideology, “I won’t be called names after I’m married....[A]s wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar.” Millamant joins the action of the play by choosing St. James Park as the public stage of the fashionable “airs” she will claim to have “denied” herself that day. She later articulates her consent to marriage through a heavily ironic redescription of her display, no longer as public, courtly, and French, but as private and gendered; nevertheless, she will insist on conditions of her own. Congreve set his proviso scene in Lady Wishfort’s house, private in its separateness from the court and in its exclusiveness, but public as a space traversed by the fashionable

set and identifying the town with “the world.” The action of the play having moved there from the chocolate house of act 1 and the walks of St. James Park in act 2, the traffic in Lady Wishfort’s house will map, for

the remaining three acts of the play, the relocation of publicity to the private spaces of the town. Within that space (behind one locked door) Millamant must negotiate with Mirabell her continued mobility after marriage. Her insistence that they be “as well-bred as if [they] were not matried at all” and her concluding salvo that she “may by degrees dwindle into a wife” comment on the inevitability of her “consent” to

The English Phallus 187 the gender difference through which Mirabell will contain and control her economic superiority —as indeed he does when he subsequently offers his own conditions, insisting on his right of surveillance over her tea-table conversation.®! Increasingly, a discourse of gendered complementariness would provide the vehicle through which all men qua men might enter into and claim their interests in “women’s spaces.” In the famous proviso scenes of Restoration and later-seventeenth-century comedies, elite women attempt to balance the companionate marriage, and its demands for gendered complementariness, against the autonomy provided by their economic status, to assimilate emergent privacy to residual publicity. Through the figure of the female fop, literary men displayed their distance from a spectacular economy of super- and subordination and their emergence, as men, from a boyish state of dependency. In a Spectator essay written eleven years after Congreve’s play, Addison contrasted a gendered and retired domesticity with the “the numberless Evils that befall the [female] Sex,” and by extension their male lovers, through the town woman’s concern “with every thing that is showy and superficial.” On the one hand, there is Aurelia, a woman of quality who “de-

lights in the Privacy of a Country Life” and has a husband as “her Bosom Friend, and Companion in her Solitudes.” Complementing each

other within the home space (they “are a perpetual Entertainment to one another”), Aurelia and her husband govern a family that “looks like a little Common-Wealth within it self.” By contrast, Fulvia rejects her gendered role within the home space as “little domestick Virtues, unbecoming a Woman of Quality.” Spending her time instead in the Ring, the

playhouses, and fashionable drawing rooms, she draws upon herself the “[mlJortification” of visibility and “grows Contemptible by being Conspicuous” (no. 15,17 March 1711, 1:66-69).° Recuperating women’s use of display, the literary convention of the female fop seems to have

displaced the power of the spectacle onto women’s bodies; but it was not male exhibitionism that was repressed and displaced onto women. This literary displacement constituted maleness by erasing the necessary

display by which men sought favor within a hierarchical society of super- and subordination. Rather than a displacement there was an erasure: the disappearing boy, who typified and concretized the subjection of all men within a pederastic society and the effeminacy that marked all men in specific places and occasions. If the spectacular woman has been a fetish in modernity, “she” is not so much the sign of men’s repression of exhibitionism but the scene of their erasure of the boy.

188 Privacy As if to register the ongoing and hegemonic nature of this project, the boy reappeared in the Spectator as a problem, no longer in men’s ex-

ercises of selfhood but in women’s. The boy appears precisely where we would expect him, as a captivating sign of courtly subjection, as the gaze. In the same number in which he gave the characters of Aurelia and Fulvia, Addison included another foppish French woman; and his account of her pederastic display makes clear the stakes, for men, involved in women’s consent to the gendering of the political nation: “When I was in France, I used to gaze with great Astonishment at the Splendid Equipages, and Party-coloured Habits, of that Fantastick Nation. I was one Day in particular contemplating a Lady, that sate in a Coach adorned with gilded Cupids, and finely painted with the Loves of Venus and Adonis. ... Just before the Lady were a Couple of beautiful

Pages, that were stuck among the Harness, and by their gay Dresses, and smiling Features, looked like the elder Brothers of the little Boys that were carved and painted in every Corner of the Coach” (1:66). The French woman dissolves into the boy beloved. Looking at the French

woman recalls both the residual mode of men’s gazing as passive astonishment and the classic locus of elite male admiration—the boy’s body. Should we read this as a psychic slip, the return of the repressed

within the Addisonian style, the homoerotic disrupting the homosocial? This happy sighting of the boy, rather, necessitates men’s circula-

tion of writing, requires their entrance into the public sphere of discourse. This fictive displacement backward into pederastic ravishment,

through the lens of a French femininity readable against an English manliness, is the theatricality of the text, its continual summoning of the spectacle as that place against which writing determines its own objectivity, liberality, and lack of placement. The female fop, invested with the festishistic power of the gaze, provided a scene for men’s renunciation of pederasty and their relocation of publicity from a concrete place, the court, to a virtual one, the written text.

The Fortunate, Phallic Fall Writing replaces the gaze. The hero of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671) describes himself as “ the scorn and gaze” of his enemies, as “a gaze, / Or pitied object” for those who will visit him “sit[ting] idle on

the household hearth.” Samson invokes the traditional association of male effeminacy with misplacement; enslaved, bound, and blinded by the Philistines, Samson must leave the military field for the domestic

The English Phallus 189 hearth, returning to a state of dependency (“as a child / Helpless”) in either his father Manoa’s or his wife Dalila’s houses (Il. 579-80, 914-27, , 942-43). Samson associates effeminacy, moreover, with spectacularity;

but the doubleness of his position is quickly apparent. As “a gaze” Samson may be the object of a seemingly more powerful look, one that “ask[s]” and “find|s] him / Eyeless” (ll. 40-41). But Samson’s ability to

occupy the place of spectacle—to pose as a cynosure drawing his enemies’ look—both drives the drama’s action in the first four scenes and constitutes one of its central thematic problems. The chorus of Hebrew men repeatedly gesture toward Samson’s occupation of the field of vision: See how he lies at random, carelessly diffus’d, With languish’t head unpropt, As one past hope, abandon’d, And by himself given over; In slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds O’re worn and soild; Or do my eyes misrepresent? (IJ. 118-124)

The text both constitutes the spectacle of Samson’s blindness and slavery and contrasts it to his earlier show of strength, producing a discontinuity in the given-to-be-seen that makes the eye, like the Cartesian look, mistrust itself. Stanley Fish has shown that this failure of the visual to provide evidence of continuity, order, and reason results in an “interpretive frenzy.”° For Fish, Milton’s dramatization of epistemological uncertainty troubles the closed narrative his characters, and his readers, expect; ultimately Samson will become free of the centered, self-possessed, and rational self.” I suggest that epistemological uncertainty produces the subject of discourse; the subject writes itself by deploying a lack in the visual field. The failure of the eye to know self and other—the problem of its passive registration of the gaze—is traded for the renewability of discursive exchange. The field of the question replaces, or spatializes, the place of the gaze. Interpretation has therefore been understood as a practice of freedom, abstracting the subject from the codes of embodiment that represent his subjection and enrolling him in the ostensibly disembodied, or neutral, space of the liberal public sphere. Milton presents Samson’s body as the residue of its former spectacular power, the trace of a show of strength now lost. That his body still

190 Privacy cannot escape the fascination of the gaze, cannot yet be sufficiently absent, is the predicament of the play and the impetus of Milton’s writing.

Samson’s body poses the problem of appearance and authenticity: From where did his strength originate? Where is it to be rediscovered?

Samson’s “capital secret,” the “part” in which his “strength / Lay stor’d,” the drama seems to show, is not his hair nor any other part of

his body but an inwardness he achieves despite, or because of, his shorn locks and physical blindness. Samson’s hair—shorn by Dalila in what Milton describes, misogynistically, as an act of conjugal betrayal made possible by Samson’s own effeminacy®?—is the place of a practice

signifying his covenant with god the father, a patriarchal contract waged, in the drama, against the snares of feminine and courtly duplicity. Milton’s Samson bears the burden of this vow in his hair precisely because men’s hair (like Alcibiades’s in Robert Burton’s 1621 reading) threatens to effeminate them. A practice and not just a natural component of the body, the hair mimes the gaze; it draws the eye. Taboo, the unshorn and potentially effeminate hair provides the vehicle of Samson’s

covenant: “God, when he gave me strength, to shew withal, / How slight the gift was, hung itin my Hair” (Il. 58-59).7? Samson aptly characterizes Restoration manliness; in English society, as in Milton’s drama,

the wearing, dressing, and cutting of men’s hair signified status, occupation, and affiliation. Long hair had identified the foppish cavalier, his lovelock displaying his status and his royalism; the Puritan William Prynne, his own hair worn shoulder length, had condemned long hair as effeminate and unnatural. After the Restoration the elaborate and costly periwig would be “an instant method of distinguishing the gentleman from the artisan.””! The cut—not a loss but a refusal of courtly embodiment—reformed the image of the male body; Milton insists on the differential practice of male bodies by repeatedly distinguishing the Hebrews and Philistines as the circumcised and uncircumcised races (Il. 144, 640, 975, 1100, 1364). Relocating the screen against which manly identity was projected from the court to the field of political privacy, the cut produced the phallus. Dalila’s cut does not effeminate Samson—he admits he was already effeminate—but incites his (manly) autonomy; unintentionally she frees him of the bond that would locate his identity on the surface of his body. In the end, masquerading as “thir fool or jester” he plays to the Philistine gaze “as a public servant brought, / In thir state Livery clad; before him Pipes / And Timbrels,” as if eliciting state favor through display (Il. 1338, 1615-17). In doing so Samson mimes

and repeats Dalila’s treachery, choosing discontinuity and rupture, as

The English Phallus 191 Fish has argued, in opposition to the certainty and fixity of an identity “written from the outside.”’2 If Samson can do so only by excluding, as “feminine,” the very self-division that now frees him, this gendering of inwardness naturalizes, as a problem of men’s heteroerotic desire, what was instead a rupture in history. It erases the very negotiation of mimesis, even duplicity, that had enabled men’s experience of interiority; it makes continuous, as subjectivity, what was discontinuous in practice. Samson is vested as a figure of oppositional man through the social problematic of the practice of the body. When he describes himself as a “Vessel... Gloriously rigg’d” (ll. 199-200), he is preparing a comparison with Dalila that registers ambivalence about gender as a signifying practice in the field of vision: But who is this, what thing of Sea or Land? Femal of sex it seems, That so bedeckt, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately Ship Of Tarsus, bound for th’ Isles Of Javan or Gadier

With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill’d, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play, An Amber sent of odorous perfume Her harbinger, a damsel train behind. ... (Il. 710-21)

Dalila’s self-presentation looks back to Sir Thomas North’s and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, sailing toward Anthony on the river Cydnus, as John Guillory has also noted, and anticipates Congreve’s Millamant, who arrives onstage “full sail, with her fan spread and her streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.””? But John Evelyn had also assigned the image to a foppish male “gallant” in his Tyrannus or The Mode of 1661: “A Fregat newly rige’d kept not half such a clatter in a storme, as this Puppets Streamers did when the Wind was in his Shroud’s. . . .”74

Femininity or courtly effeminacy? Fish reads in the Chorus’s speech their inability to identify the sex of the approaching individual, but this seems to me to misplace the point; the conventionality of this figure for a pride, duplicity, and seductiveness surpassing sexual difference prompts the epistemological uncertainty of the play and promotes the desire for

a (gendered) truth “beneath” the surface.”> Their “[fJemal of sex it seems” implies that Dalila’s femininity —her performance of gender—is

192 Privacy an act of duplicity (or seeming), a point reiterated in the Chorus’s sub-

sequent account of her weeping: “words addresst seem into tears dissolv’d” (1. 729). This inability of the Chorus to assign a sex to display might remind us that Samson has already applied this figure of wanton effeminacy to himself. Dalila’s public elicitation of the look, then, provides an image of men’s subjection before the gaze. Just as the Chorus

suspects and lays bare Dalila’s self-presentation (ll. 726-31), so the power Samson had possessed when he was “[g]loriously rigged” must be replaced by a new ocular authority. Display itself must be rejected as distinguishing courtly bodies and legitimating subjection. Being a gaze may yet be the power Samson will wield against his enemies’ look, dispossessing them, but it will be a highly ambivalent one.

Samson’s power returns with the return of a gaze that places him from outside himself and insists on his particularized embodiment, a return represented in the drama by the entrance of the officer bearing the command that Samson perform at the feast of Dagon. The return of his power, then, will require the (now illusory) loss of his phallociza-

tion; to the extent that he consents to be put on display his show of strength must finally effeminate (subject) his body. The drama proliferates this threat of effemination: Samson is effeminated by his father; by Dalila, who occupies the place of the gaze, drawing Samson’s eye; by his own spectacularity as the “gaze” of his enemies; and by the residual effeminacy of his words, not yet fully assimilated from courtly speech to the private sphere. He is effeminated, too, in his visualization by the reader—that is, in the residual theatricality of the closet drama’s manifestation of its characters in particular and concrete bodies. Thus Milton’s drama, as he asserts in his preface, is closeted, made to circulate across the privatized spaces of reading rather than the public places of the royal, patented theaters.” Had Milton’s play been performed on the stage, Samson would have been marked by the subjection and exhibitionism of the player, by the very historical embodiment that Milton’s poetry refused. While it could be argued that the play makes Samson’s suffering, and not his body per se, visually central, effecting a spectacle of Christian masochism, this in no way alleviates the problem of spectacularity itself. Milton’s drama, like Samson himself, has the task of disavowing male spectacularity and revising the public as a space of textual exchange rather than corporeal display. In the final action of the drama, accordingly, Samson throws down the pillars of the Philistine “Theatre,” where his subjection had been displayed (I. 1605), ironically

staging Milton’s claim that the theater was antithetical to moral and civic practice.

The English Phallus 193 The destruction of the theater, its protagonist Samson, and its spectators occurs offstage and is recounted by a messenger. Milton uses this neoclassic device not only to preserve decorum but to indicate the difficulty of countering the spectacle with words: O, whither shall I run, or which way flie The sight of this so horrid spectacle Which earst my eyes beheld and yet behold; For dire imagination still persues me. (Il. 1541-44)

The body—the sensate space of the imagination, passive to wonder—is

to be overwritten with words. But although Samson (like Milton the closet dramatist) must use words, he cannot simply trade his spectacularity for the speeches he shares with the Chorus. Speech is itself suspect,

never sufficiently distinct from the visual. The more it points to itself rhetorically, and the more it incorporates the forms of oratory, the more it approaches the power of the spectacle. Samson’s struggle recalls the ambivalence toward language of Christopher Marlowe’s, Shakespeare’s, or Ben Jonson’s great villains—masters of rhetoric and hyperbole, repulsive but fascinating, and fascinated by words. Samson’s was a vow Of silence “vanquisht,” he confesses, “with a peal of words (O weakness!)” by Dalila; he condemns his own “[s]hameful garrulity” in twice betraying his secret to women (Ill. 235-36, 491). Like Colonel Hutchinson, Samson notes that he had “[u]s’d no ambition to commend [his] deeds, / The deeds themselves, though mute, spoke loud the dooer” (Il. 247-48). Men’s actions are “authentic” to the extent they do not point to or ostend themselves as signifying practices through the vehicles of spectacularity or speech. By contrast Dalila frames her actions as she performs them, rendering them suspect as unauthentic, merely acted [“With doubtful feet and wavering resolution / I came,” she tells the blind Samson (Il. 732-33)], and opening herself to refutation: “[T]hese are thy wonted arts, / And arts of every woman false like thee” (Il. 748-49).

This problem of the inescapable reciprocity of the look and the gaze exceeds the biographical (Milton’s own blindness). It is a problem for gentlemen qua men at this time: How does one witness a class-specific manliness without making a spectacle of it? How does one designate a class-specific privacy except through imitative activity? By destroying the theater and its spectators, Milton promises an enlightened textuality that, like Habermas’s sphere of rational communicative exchange,

appears to be freed of the problem of particularized embodiments,

194 Privacy shorn of its irreducible ocularity. The speech act, from which Milton distances his drama in his preface, had the power to move the speaker closer to the spectacular body. Marking their proximity to her body,

Dalila’s words—“blandisht parlies, feminine assaults, / Tonguebatteries” —had drawn Samson into the place of the gaze and inscribed him as her “Bondslave” (Il. 403-4, 411). But it would not be precise to

claim, as Fish has done, that the text is a “feminized medium,” that words are feminine.”” Samson, rather, re-members (his own) baroque pub-

licity as feminine; in Milton’s misogynistic view, textuality cuts itself free from its proximity to place by rejecting corporeality and display as

feminine “arts.” Milton’s poem refuses to extend the autonomy of words to all bodies, however, excluding both women and “the common rout,” those men not “elected” to public work and therefore dismissed as “[hleads without name no more rememberd” (Il. 674, 678, 677). The franchise of manliness is limited; and so I cannot agree with Guillory’s argument that “the scene of castration” in Milton’s poem demonstrates “the peculiar victory of the private, the domestic, over the public, even the political.””8 Guillory’s gendering of privacy as feminine, and his lo-

cating the phallus prior to the scene of castration/privatization, assumes Samson’s possession of masculinity prior to the historical rupture that constituted phallic masculinity as a contested if natural group. The scene of castration marks the emergence of a privatized subject; but this private man is not simply opposed to publicness. Rather, his publicity naturally represents his privacy. Milton’s natural subject is the head of his household and of his wife, as Samson reminds Dalila, Being once a wife, for me thou wast to leave Parents and countrey; nor was I their subject, Nor under their protection but my own, Thou mine, not theirs: if aught against my life Thy countrey sought of thee, it sought unjustly, Against the law of nature, law of nations, No more thy countrey, but an impious crew Of men conspiring to uphold thir state By worse than hostile deeds, violating the ends For which our countrey is a name so dear. ... (Il. 885-94)

The patriarchalism of the private sphere naturalizes Milton’s citizen and vests him with a national identity representing his opposition to the state. For Milton, more so than the other writers I examine here, this private form of patriarchy excludes women and men without property

The English Phallus 195 from national subjectivity, thereby associating the state (unlike the nation) with femininity and enabling Milton’s displacement of effeminacy (a position within pederasty) onto femininity (a position within sexuality).”? [have suggested that this displacement occurred when the opposition erased its struggle against pederastic subjection by mapping the effeminacy and dependence of some men, and all boys, onto the female body as the latter’s unique possession, by gendering subjection to the gaze as feminine: “Is it for that such outward ornament / Was lavish’t on their Sex, that inward gifts / Were left for hast unfinish’t, judgment scant[?|” (Il. 1025-27). Writing about Samson Agonistes in a chapter succinctly and promis-

ingly titled “Gender,” Catherine Belsey did not, surprisingly, inquire into Samson's gender. Milton’s identification of marital sexuality with reason and discipline, opposing bodily lust, she has observed, insists on sexual difference;®° but in situating male authority as the subject, and femininity as the object, of sexual differentiation, Belsey left open the question of how discipline constituted a specifically masculine subjectivity. The project of Samson Agonistes is the performative production

of a classed form of manliness, the securing for literate and propertied men of a sexual difference that traditional patriarchy had neither required nor guaranteed. Samson Agonistes relocates manliness from the

materiality of male bodies, from their capacity to signal their own (self-)difference within a baroque economy of subjection, to an order of semiosis that ostensibly originates in and reflects inwardness. Reading Paradise Regained, Belsey has convincingly showed that Milton derived the authority of his poetry from the (ostensible) transparency of the lineuistic sign; she has accordingly countered his authority by insisting on the illusory character of signification. If at the time Milton was writing “\rjeality and signification ha[d] become independent of each other,” the solution for Milton was not a Hobbesian recognition of the arbitrariness of reference. Rather, Belsey has argued, Milton presented language as “no more than [the] instrument” of the extralinguistic event “in its meaning and truth.” Following Jacques Derrida, Belsey’s response has been to deconstruct the relation of the signifier to the truth it ostensibly reflects, locating the (self-)difference of Miltonic man in the “differance” of language as system.®! J have preferred to locate this difference in history as the very constituent of masculinity. The discontinuity of effeminate and private, of displayed and textualized male bodies must be repeatedly cited in order to constitute the phallus itself. The phallus is the ongoing linguistic performance of private men’s difference from the

196 Privacy materiality and tactility of their bodies within a political economy of subjection.

The task of a critical public sphere was to reverse the relation between words and spectacle, to move words away from the spectacle, and to recast speech, which locates bodies, as writing, which presents itself as circulating away from bodies, thereby occluding its own ocular desire. It is not that speech is irretrievably linguistic, its presence

always displaced by its own signifying operations, as Derrida has argued.82 What an optimistic figure deconstruction has provided for a fully objective critical agency! How thoroughly has it extended the

enlightenment fantasy of a fully abstract, fully disembodied public sphere! Rather, writing has never sufficiently eradicated itself of embodiment, the “play” of the referent being itself the trace of the discontinuous practices of agents as they have engaged spectacle and speech. Milton will not allow textuality to redeem Samson’s particular body, a vessel, gloriously rigged, that cannot for that very reason represent the pure and invisible “light” of his inwardness. That goal, indeed, is impossible. As the visual metaphor (“light” for pure inwardness) insists, language can never be sufficiently divested of the body. Samson must go down with the theater. But in a final irony Samson will be memorial-

ized by his father with a monument—the very “[vJain monument of strength” (1. 570) that Samson had earlier refused to become: Thither shall all the valiant youth resort, And from his memory inflame their breasts To matchless valour, and adventures high: The Virgins also shall on feastful days Visit his Tomb with flowers. . . . (Il. 1738-42)

Ultimately Manoa does effeminate his son. The monument, inscribing memory (and properly gendered performances), marks our inability to reject the gaze in favor of the “inward eyes” that constituted Samson’s ultimate strength, his capacity for transformation in the space of the text (1. 1689). Samson Agonistes insists on our failure, as spectators, to disclaim the gaze (which places or identifies us by allowing us to see ourselves seeing, fixing us in time and preventing change).® Milton’s national form of manly subjectivity is a closeted drama, an internalization and erasure of the historical struggle against the tactility of the spectacle and the seduction of the state. If there has been a “general

The English Phallus 197 dematerialization” of the image, and “a reduction of [its] ontological power,” what Régis Debray has called “[t]he history of the eye” has never been autonomous of political struggle.54 The eye has been a field of resistances and counterresistances. The gentleman’s inwardness and autonomy could be manifest only through the erasure of its own performative construction and the displacement of a longstanding and ubiquitous anxiety about male display onto the demonized figure of the foppish man and the fetishistic figure of the spectacular woman. For men since the mid-seventeenth century wearing the supplement—the rolling eye, the indolent gait, the lisp, the long hair that imitates the gaze—has elicited the spectator’s look; it has made the male body visible as body, as performance space.® From the mid-seventeenth century there would be something perverse—albeit unavoidable—about male personhood performed as spectacle rather than spectator; it would be an exhibitionism, a narcissism, a failure of depth, and a loss of authentic being and political utility. Male display would be held to disclose an innate masochism—a desire to be placed by the gaze rather than to separate oneself from it as a subject of visual pleasure.%

Yet by the eighteenth century the ocular residue of writing was no longer the problem Milton figured in Samson Agonistes. By the eighteenth century writing would transform the effeminacy of men’s words into the pleasures of gendered discourse. In these terms the fop’s excessive embodiment and enthusiastic consumption were not the other of manly (non)display; rather, the fop anticipated newly heterosocial forms of masculine embodiment, providing a transition from the resolutely patriarchal or libertine male to the man of feeling.” It would become possible in the (apparently) objective space of the text, and within a

public sphere understood as a virtual space of linguistic exchange, for one (man) to take another (man) as the gaze, to offer himself through writing to penetration by the spectacle. Consent to the reciprocity of seeing and being seen would identify newly classed bodies marked by the intensity of their consciousness of self and other. The spectacle of inwardness would represent the historical difference of classed bodies from the pederastic display of effeminacy. But to the extent that inwardness constituted the natural group of men, it would at the same time become the scene of competing claims to privacy, through which ever greater numbers of men would lay claim to their gender as the sign of their personal and political autonomy.

198 Privacy The Spectacle of Inwardness Thirty-eight years later, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, would recuperate the private, manly body for elite power. In the second treatise of his collected Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and

Humour (originally published in 1709), Shaftesbury posited a Whig public sphere that would distinguish itself from the publicity of the baroque state by aligning political liberty and civic participation with an aesthetic stance in which the citizen took himself as an object of sight.% If the liberal subject (for Shaftesbury, always a “landed patriotic gentleman citizen”®) derived his legitimacy from the place from which he looked, Shaftesbury located that place, not overtly in external criteria of

birth or property, but in a highly regulated inwardness that followed from and reinforced aristocratic privilege. An internalized look would maintain aristocratic hegemony while obviating artifice and display of the surfaces of the body. It would, in fact, surpass courtly spectacularity as the foundation of political stability by guarding against the changeability and arbitrariness that had been associated with the Stuart courts, providing a new solution to the Hobbesian problem of the unreliability of representation.

Shaftesbury began by positing a golden age in which “liberty” allowed each man to possess his own appearance just as he possessed his opinions, such that the visible self was a transparent, unmediated reflection of inwardness: “Every one took the Air and Look which was natural to him.’”%° Whereas Hobbes had understood the natural self as the incorporation of alterity, thereby anticipating the Lacanian account of identity as always in the field of the other, Shaftesbury understood the subject’s natural state as one of self-identity. Alterity, for Shaftesbury, was an indicator of subjection. But men had lost this liberty: “in process of time, it was thought decent to mend Mens Countenances, and render their intellectual Complexions uniform and of a sort. Thus the Magistrate became a Dresser, and in his turn was dress’d too, as he deserv’d; when he had given up his Power to a new Order of Tire-Men” (1:49).7! In imposing

from without a way of appearing, state authority was also imposing a way of seeing, the ultimate reference of which was always the courtly body. But identity was made discontinuous, and the subject rendered anxious, by political upheavals, which Shaftesbury represented as changing fashions for marking identity from the outside. The subjected self, dependent on display, was unsuitable as a vehicle of social order.

The English Phallus 199 In response, Shaftesbury proposed a model of privacy as a selfregulating, inwardly turned look. Ostensibly reflecting the legitimacy of the property owning and educated classes, this inward turn of the

look represented elite authority as derived from a praxis of selfdiscipline—that is, as originating in classed bodies.” To find civic virtue in self-awareness, Shaftesbury posited “Two Persons in one indi-

vidual Self,” the second censoring the first. By securing the moral continuity of one’s actions, the censor constituted personal identity.”

Artists and critics were to be responsible for inscribing this selfresolution by providing “looking-glasses” in which subjects might find

themselves, so that “by constant and long Inspection, the Partys accustom ’d to the Practice, wou’d acquire a peculiar speculative Habit; so as virtually to carry about with ‘em a sort of Pocket-Mirrour, always ready, and in use” (1:105). The critic would offer his spectator-readers a

technology of seeing such that in looking at the text they were more properly looking into themselves. By means of this “speculative Habit,” the subject “shall know where to find himself; be sure of his own Meaning and Design; and as to all his Desires, Opinions, and Inclinations, be warranted one and the same Person to day as yesterday, and to morrow as to day” (1:101). The educated man’s way of seeing had a synecdochic

relation to his identity over time; the way he appeared to others was predicated on the way he looked within. Shaftesbury’s system for rehabilitating the aristocracy—as a “civicminded, classically cultivated” oligarchy responsible for the promotion of political liberty and public virtue through the patronage of the arts

and letters—required that they embody their legitimacy by joining “manners” and “morals.”°4 While the philosophical regimen of the inwardly turned mind guaranteed the moral autonomy of the gentleman, the natural claims of the affections guaranteed his sociability. Mediating inwardness and sociability, and reinforcing the identification

of moral leadership with gentlemanly breeding and education, was “taste,” the sense of the fitting or the becoming: “the TASTE of Beauty, and the Relish of what is decent, just, and amiable, perfects the Character of the GENTLEMAN, and the PHILOSOPHER. And the Study of such a TASTE or Relish will, as we suppose, be ever the great Employment and Concern of him, who covets as well to be wise and good, as agreeable

and polite.” Taking it as (self-)evident “[t]hat in the very nature of Things there must of necessity be the Foundation of a right and wrong TASTE” (Soliloquy 1:173), Shaftesbury argued that taste allowed the (male) philosopher to “ascend beyond his own immediate Species, City

200 Privacy or Community, to discover and recognize his higher Polity, or Community (that common and universal-one, of which he is born a Member)” (Miscellaneous Reflections 2:204). Taste, in other words, was the mechanism. of the ideological equation of classed bodies with humanity in general. The “ideology of the aesthetic” was its alignment of gentlemanly pleasures with the cultural authority of the elite;?° the gentleman could represent himself as deriving his authority from the moral value of his superior aesthetic sensitivity: “By Gentlemen of Fashion, I understand those to whom a natural good Genius, or the Force of good Education, has given a Sense of what is naturally graceful and becoming” (Sen-

sus Communis, 1:73-74). Founded on an innate and fully embodied “moral sense” aligning the Cartesian passions and the social affections, and thereby represented as natural, the eighteenth-century category of

taste mystified the relations among corporeal sensation, knowledge, and social power that had been explicit in earlier absolutist (or what Shaftesbury frequently called “gothick”) discourses of the management of the body.°”

The aristocracy would restore its cultural hegemony through its matriage of courtesy literature and conduct books, complementing the skill of the performer with the surveillance of the spectator. The gentleman joined critical spectatorship to a residual politics of display, man-

ifesting taste as a sign of his coordination of inner moral and outer sociable virtues. Through this duality of looking and appearing, the political nation in the eighteenth century would recuperate oppositional rhetoric toward a rehabilitation of the aristocratic and gentle classes, stabilizing from both directions a new joint hegemony of manners and morals in the space of polite society. The Shaftesburian project thereby equated the eye and the gaze—an ideological coup aligning the spectator and the spectacular, such that the gentlemen of feeling might see himself seeing in the mirror of discourse.

Embodying Mr. Spectator As lama great Lover of Mankind, my Heart naturally overflows with Pleasure at the sight of a prosperous and happy Multitude, insomuch that at many publick Solemnities I cannot forbear expressing my Joy with Tears that have stolen down my Cheeks. For this reason I am wonderfully delighted to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock; or in other Words, raising Estates for their own Families, by bringing into their Country whatever is wanting, and carrying out of it whatever is superfluous. Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 69

Within the circle of visibility staged by the Spectator essays, earlyeighteenth-century writers and readers assented to the pleasures and assurances of specularity. Locating self-knowledge in social practices of

perceiving and “knowing with” another, the Spectator made visual pleasure the foundation of a “conscious” selfhood. If the Spectator, in Michael G. Ketcham’s words, “embrace[d] an expanding readership while it create[d] the illusion of an intimate community,” it enabled a reciprocity of privacy and publicity Jurgen Habermas’s “audienceoriented subjectivity”) that represented autonomy from aristocratic display while it recuperated the leveling implications of privacy for the recognition of classed bodies.! The Spectator essays mapped a historically specific formation of the visual field—the public articulation of private being, the social surveillance of inwardness—onto (what it represented as) the intimate circles of men and women of feeling and their mutually constitutive enactment of gendered difference. The Spectator

thereby naturalized the particularly conscious embodiment of the propertied and educated elite as the sign of their legitimacy, offering 201

202 Privacy the class body as the public representative of private interests.” It did so, I will argue, by locating national subjectivities among conscious men and women, enabling the recognition of citizenship through the private

self’s gendered experiences of ease, feeling, and pleasure and, it follows, the (mis)recognition of class difference as gender complementari-

ness. By privileging writing and reading as the vehicles of this consciousness (this duality of inwardness and sociality, realized in the experience of gender), the Spectator both equated the particular embodiment of educated, propertied subjects with membership in civil society per se and appeared to extend that membership, liberally, wherever such a readership might be constituted. Recent critics have offered two divergent readings of the Spectator essays, either tracing (and frequently celebrating) the dual ethical projects

of self-knowledge and social feeling promulgated by Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and their collaborators, or critiquing the coercive and regulatory gaze underwriting the essayists’ moral stance.* While I want to analyze the ideological and regulatory function of the essays, I suggest that the critique of the visual pleasures they promote as coercive, voyeuristic, and masculinist neither accounts for the reciprocity of the gaze as it is understood in the essays nor explains its hegemonic function. The field of vision in the essays is neither that of mastery nor does it have the fixity of a gendered subject-object distinction. Spectatorship in the earlier comedies of manners, by contrast, was indeed coercive. There spectatorship had the power to make others display themselves affectedly or in front of audiences they do not choose, as Dorimant makes Mrs. Loveit and Sir Fopling perform for his, and our, look in Etherege’s Man of Mode. Spectatorship in the Spectator essays would also be powerful, but there it would have the hegemonic form of the reciprocal, mutually constitutive regard of men and women of sympathy. As Robert Markley has noted, Addison and Steele appropriated Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s aristocratic conjunction of manners and morals “for their own ideological purposes—

expanding the social parameters of politeness, virtue, and moral leadership.”> Thereby the Spectator seized access to the visual field for the display of a new class body. Whereas many scholars today read the visual field as oppressive and unauthentic,® the Spectator construed specularity as an intersubjective performance in which bourgeois social actors could recognize certain forms of public display as natural and unaffected expressions of inwardness.

Embodying Mr. Spectator 203 In his fine study of the Spectator, Ketcham has emphasized the role of pleasure in the essays’ model of social life; the essays proposed an exchange of pleasure enabling an “ideal symmetry between the behavior

of the actor and the responses of an observer” such that “the pleasure the observer feels in the presence of the agreeable man derives from a similar delicacy of sentiment,” while “the agreeable man pleases because he is pleased by others.”” Ketcham has shown how the formal exchanges between reader and writer constitutive of the “social act” of the Spectator’s rhetoric extended this duality of observer and observed.®

Defining such keywords as “good-nature,” “good-manners,” “pleasure,” and “humanity” operationally through their textual proximity to one another, the Spectator’s systemic use of synonymy produced a selfreferential circle of associations among affects and gestures. Assenting to this proximity of keywords and the “cluster of values” they indicate, readers likewise assented to the forms of social enactment and embodiment they entailed; accordingly they could both experience and dis-

play good nature, cheerfulness, and sympathy.? I would emphasize that the Spectator thereby produced the very classed bodies it represented itself as regulating. Where Ketcham has posited a “polarity between public and private, outside and inside” that is “mediated” by “The Spectator’s ideal form of community,”!° I want to show that the pri-

vate and the public are mutually constitutive; there is no privacy or inwardness preceding its social enactment. By linking visual pleasure to self-knowledge and reflection, the Spectator essays represented classed bodies as having authored their own display, manifesting inwardness through shared public signs and at the same time reading accurately the signs of others’ inner lives. Steele and Addison invested their commentator Mr. Spectator—the ostensible author of their influential essays on contemporary manners and morals—with a “Skill... in Speculation,” a power (posing as a pleasure) in spectatorship by which he would “endeavour to make both Sexes appear in their Conduct what they are in their Hearts.”!! The pleasures of visual reciprocity would be

, a primary vehicle for equating the exclusive forms of intimacy belonging to educated property owners with public feeling in general. It would be a mistake, then, to equate the particular mode of looking enacted by Mr. Spectator with (modern) masculinity per se—that is, with a masculinity prior to the circulation of writing. Although he was not concerned with gender, Ketcham has nevertheless argued that in the Spectator essays “the conditions for personal

204 Privacy happiness have become located in the family”;!2 he has thereby represented the family as mediating privacy and publicity. But if we do not assume the innateness of conjugal intimacy or the inevitability of heterosexual desire, we must ask why (and against what) a gendered domesticity emerged as the carrier of a new personal and political privacy. Rather than aligning Mr. Spectator’s look with a masculinity unmarked by class, I want to stress his complex negotiations between citizenship and domesticity, political privacy and the effeminacy of the home space, politeness and retirement. The civility that Anthony Fletcher has called “\t]he crucial new ingredient in English masculinity between 1660 and 1800,” like the heterosociality emphasized by G. J. Barker-Benfield, may

be understood not as characterizing the quality of being male, but as a fully classed tactic for limiting membership in the political nation, potentially leveled by expanding claims to domesticity and privacy, to the elite.1s

seeing Mr. Spectator By focusing on pleasure as hegemonic and embodied, I mean to question recent accounts of Mr. Spectator as disembodied and his gaze as coercive. In Scott Paul Gordon’s analysis, Mr. Spectator derives his power from his dislocation from any specific human or social relation; he represents himself as an objective observer or “unprejudic’d eye.” “A successful ‘character’ denies its own rhetoricity,” Gordon concludes, “putting itself forward as seen rather than wanting to be seen.”'4 But a more specific account of representational practices is necessary here. Assent to the gaze—its reconstruction from a baroque structure of subjection to the specular structure of subjectivity depended on its reformulation as a textual practice. Writing, as I have argued, had displayed its placement within a hierarchical and pederastic visual field, enabling the movement of status-bearing bodies toward the place of the gaze. By the early eighteenth century, by contrast, the space of writing was no

longer one of proximity to the particular body of the aristocratic or gen- , tle patron. The Spectator instead represented writing as an open, egalitarian, and expansive public space modeled on an emergent market economy it was simultaneously redescribing as free and benevolent re-

lations among propertied men. By disclaiming its proximity to the gaze, writing displaced the spectacle of status bodies. J. G. A. Pocock has linked privatization to “the absence,” in capitalist theory and practice, “of a formal framework for defining civic virtue, and accordingly

Embodying Mr. Spectator 205 civic personality,” arguing that “if indeed capitalist thought ended by privatizing the individual, this may have been because it was unable to find an appropriate way of presenting him as citizen.”!6 I would add that notions of personal and political virtue, and accordingly citizenship, have been linked to the relocation of the gaze, and the pleasures of identification it offers, within the field of writing, which, like capitalist exchange, appears to expand the boundaries of privacy but only by disallowing any “outside” to the text. Reading and writing became the sentimental scene of virtue under capitalism. Mr. Spectator’s ostensible disavowal of display was instead a displacement of male exhibitionism from the concrete places of a hierarchical society into the virtual and ostensibly egalitarian space of the text. His apparent disembodiment was rather a dislocation of writing from the place of the writer, his anonymity a display of the objectivity, expan-

siveness, and privacy of the space of writing. Through the use of this phrase I mean to call attention to writing’s own recapitulation, its own

graphic registration, of the circuits of its exchange and expansion within a capitalist economy. In contrast I use the place of writing to emphasize the residual rhetoric by which an act of writing claims its proximity to the gaze, by which it derives its status and its authority as an enunciation from its location alongside the spectacle. It is true that Mr. Spectator’s public performances seem to erase their own performative constitution within any specific place—to erase, that is, the gaze. He does not even sign his essays from any specific coffeehouse or club, as Gordon has noted.” But to characterize this erasure of the place of embodiment as a “disembodiment,” and therefore as masculine, is to gender the body, placement, and subjection, retrospectively, as feminine; as a consequence, this characterization both mystifies the history of men’s subjection within pederasty by displacing it onto the field of gender and ignores the very investments in men’s embodiment made by the Spectator essays. As objects of Mr. Spectator’s look, Sir Roger, Sir Andrew, Will Honeycomb, and the other members of the club who appear as characters in the essays mark the capacity of the look (on its way to becoming writing) to move across the specificity of social and geographical divisions (the court, the town, the city, and the country) and to appropriate party and religious affiliations to a (Whiggish) view

of the unifying “good nature,” ease, and sociability of the propertied class. Addison, Steele, and their collaborators represented writing as extending across the multiplicity of coffeehouses rather than placed within any one:

206 Privacy There is no Place of general Resort, wherein I do not often make my Appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s [Coffee-House, in Covent Garden]. . . . Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child's [Coffee-House, in St. Paul’s Churchyard, predominantly Tory]; and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the [Whig] Post-Man, overhear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday Nights at St. James’s Coffee-House [near St. James’s Palace, frequented by Whig politicians]... .

My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian [in the Strand, frequented by scholars and lawyers], the Cocoa-Tree [Tory, in Pall Mall], and in the Theaters both of Drury-Lane, and

the Hay-Market [at this time presenting plays and (generally Italian) operas, respectively]. I have been taken for a Merchant upon the [Royal] Exchange [in the city] for above these ten Years, and sometimes pass for a Jew in the Assembly of StockJobbers at Jonathan’s [Coffee-House, in the city, frequented by merchants]. (no. 1, 1 March 1711, 1:3-4)!®

Only in the space of the text could Mr. Spectator be dislocated from, or multiplied across, the particular locations that might have placed and thereby identified him. By idealizing the look and writing as disinterested and as crossing, liberally, all the categories of embodiment, Mr. Spectator represented the public sphere as superseding the inevitable display or theatricality of its particularized, constituent members, dis-

plays it could then countenance with the tolerant irony so often remarked, appreciatively, by readers of the essays.!? One might compare the Spectator’s stance to Habermas’s account of “communicative rationality” as nonrepresentational; but in fact what identified the collectivity of spectators, across the corporeal differences among them, was the mutuality of their consent to reproduce their distinct embodiments as conscious. The public sphere of spectators enjoined the contradiction between being and display, between self and the social contract, as the ethical problematic of privacy, requiring a continuous and intensified self-awareness. Within the limits maintained by reading and writing, this displacement of the gaze into the textual exchanges organized under capitalism constituted the phallus as the (gendered) sign of the subject’s mobility of semiosis. By offering the essays to be read both in coffeehouses and at tea tables, and by men and women both, the Spectator located privacy in the complementariness of the domestic home space to such civic and homosocial spaces as the coffeehouses and clubs. Domestic intimacy,

Embodying Mr. Spectator 207 accordingly, would be a key constituent of the gendered subjectivities that, for men, were beginning to supersede (and mystify) their traditional power as heads of the household.*° Privacy was (and continues to be) represented as originating and experienced in gendered scenes of reading and writing belonging most fully to educated property owners and, above all, in the capacity of men to move, as producers and consumers of writing, between civic and domestic spaces. Reading and writing have thereby contained the leveling potential of capitalism (and reinforced the colonialist project) by representing commercial exchange, within the exclusive domain of the literary, as sympathetic relations among gendered bodies and political interest as the reciprocity of domestic and civic spaces. As the classed body, the gendered body (male and female, albeit in different ways and to differing extents) could be deferred—or better, proliferated—across the space of writing. As Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen, following Lawrence Klein, have noted, “women were central to the sociability and conversation constituting the main practices of this ‘public’ sphere.”2! In complicating the familiar gendering of the private-public distinction, [do not mean to suggest that gentlewomen and middle-ranked women could move easily between domestic and public spaces outside the supervision of men. As Lisa L. Moore has put it, bourgeois women reading eighteenth-century novels (or the Spectator essays) could not hope “to extend their privilege” by overturning patriarchal distinctions of sex. Rather, they had to “attempt to extend the domestic sphere itself.”2 Men would increasingly represent this expanded space as complementary to such public spaces as alehouses and coffeehouses and accordingly central to their identities as

men. Increasingly for men the divide between domestic and public space was no longer regulated by the sign of effeminacy, but by a gendered complementariness naturalized in women’s right to domesticity. Nowhere is the misrecognition of market relations as private feeling clearer than in the famous passage (given as the epigraph for this chapter) in which Mr. Spectator offered his readers the spectacle of his own inwardness, displayed in that space so paradigmatic of the publicness of private interests, the Royal Exchange. Looking down onto the concourse of brokers from the gallery above and weeping tears of joy for a nation of consumers, Mr. Spectator performed both his dependence on and his disidentification from the world of commerce. Pocock has read this issue of the Spectator as mystifying the transition from real to mobile property, representing speculation as the face-to-face exchange of real goods by merchants through the medium of money. If “Augustan

208 Privacy political economies mark[ed] the moment when the trader—and, still more pressingly, the financier—was challenged to prove that he could display civic virtue in the sense that the landed man could,” the Spectator recuperated capitalist exchange to the display of virtues traditionally associated with the landed classes. (Mr. Spectator was himself, as we learn in the very first issue, “born to a small Hereditary Estate” belonging to an ancient family and, through the stability of primogeniture and entailment, never divided [1 March 1711, 1:1]).24 Assimilating mar-

ket exchange to the visual and linguistic pleasures belonging to the polite, Addison represented capitalism as an extension and utilization of fully sensate bodies. Capitalism proliferated the embodiment of the propertied.® In the space of market exchange Mr. Spectator could “try on” various embodiments considered absolutely external to himself — the Jesuit, the Jew, the tradesman— without becoming other to himself,

without incorporating alterity. Whereas mercantilist Robert Burton, writing within an account of ocular pleasure as driven by the desire to subject oneself to the spectacle, could make his claim for the privacy of male bodies only by removing them from the field of vision, the com-

modity status of Mr. Spectator’s writing transformed his dispersion across the visual field into a continuous and conscious subjectivity. Mr. Spectator’s famous tour of the city of London and its scenes of private production and consumption, for example, replicated by a young James Boswell in 1763, offered his readers the spectacle of a class body recognizable by his visible distance from, but pleasurable response to, the productive labor he observed. Mr. Spectator’s “[b]enevolence” for the laborers, shopkeepers, and consumers that he represented as “Objects of [his] Speculation” signaled his own inwardness, represented textually as continuous across the discontinuous scenes of trade. His apparent disinterest in the scenes he observed marked him as the legitimate bearer of public feeling.” The Spectator constituted its subjects as the possessors of an inner space of pure subjectivity that could be suffused across social spaces and encounters with others without being mapped

in turn by the historicity of those encounters. Reading and writing could contain the threat to civic personality posed, in Pocock’s analysis, by the rise of credit and John Locke’s founding of human personality on mobile forms of property (rather than land): “Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the foundations

of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows. ...”27 The ostensibly privatized

Embodying Mr. Spectator 209 acts of reading and writing, however, could elicit consent to a mutuality of looking and being seen that made the display of inwardness the criterion of citizenship. In these terms Steele criticized those readers of the essays who were (mere) spectators, gazers (in the earlier sense) content only with novelty and failing to transform sensation into reflection: “These are Mortals who have a certain Curiosity without Power of Reflection, and perused my Papers like Spectators rather than Readers” (no. 4, 5 March 1711, 1:18). If it surprises us that Mr. Spectator is not to be a “spectator” but a reader, the distinction here is important. The model of spectatorship Steele imagined was properly that of reflection, in both senses of the term: an inwardness in which we would see ourselves seeing and being seen simultaneously. Spectatorship would not be the immediate pleasures of sensation but the secondary and social pleasures of judgment. For this reason Mr. Spectator possessed “a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing,” as he noted in the same issue; he was able to look into “the inmost Thoughts and Reflections of all” even when removed from direct conversation with them (1:20). This was a penetration he derived

not simply from his maleness but from his economic and cultural standing: “A Man of a Polite Imagination,” Addison distinguished, “is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving” (no. 411, 21 June 1712, 3:538). While Addison could argue that taste

required only that “a Man should be born with a good Imagination” and then acquire the skill of discrimination, he also admitted that “[s]uch Advantages” as acquaintance “with the Pomp and Magnificence of Courts,” painting, statuary, and “great Works of Architecture” (that is, the grand tour) helped to enlarge the mind’s eye (no. 416, 27 June 1712, 3:561; no. 417, 28 June 1712, 3:564). The art of reading others, as it was imagined in the Spectator essays, depended upon and had as its counterpart, then, the art of presenting oneself to be seen by such an acute and sensible spectator as Mr. Spectator. For this reason reading and reflection as they were presented by Mr. Spectator were not private

acts in the senses of “solitary” or “set apart” but civic performances enacted by the propertied and establishing the identity of men and women of feeling. The reciprocity of the look and the gaze in the Spectator may be considered an ethical practice, a practice of the self productive of social distinctions. Of particular importance was the transformation of the Carte-

sian passions—still indicators of the susceptibility of the body to baroque power—into private feeling. In a later issue of the Spectator

210 Privacy often attributed to Alexander Pope, a correspondent aligned the passionate body with subjection and the rational body with subjectivity and liberty: “The Strength of the Passions will never be accepted as an Excuse for complying with them; they were designed for Subjection, and if a Man suffers them to get the upper Hand, he then betrays the Liberty of his own Soul.” The ideal embodiment regulated the passions by making them socially useful, as in the writer’s hegemonic formula: “we must govern them rather like free Subjects than Slaves, least while we intend to make them obedient, they become abject, and unfit for those great Purposes to which they were designed” (no. 408, 18 June 1712, 3:524, 526). Steele wrote that “refining our Passions to a greater Elegance, than we receive from Nature” contributed to the ease and pleasure of life (no. 71, 22 May 1711, 1:304).78 The apparent polarity between “the private” and “the public” —so commonplace in academic commentary — dissolves in this ethical practice of the self; inwardness, as Habermas understood it, is a public act. The essays insisted on visual pleasure as a collective performance. In

what Ketcham has described as the theatrical and “triangular” scenes staged in the essays, one or more spectators observe the interactions of two or more social actors (who will themselves, I will show, ideally be conscious that they are, or might be, observed) “while participating in the scene through a movement of heart.””? Moreover, from the famous opening of the very first issue, the readers of the essays are positioned not simply as objects of a regulating gaze, but as spectators themselves: “T have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ‘till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like Nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author. To gratify this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader, I... shall give some Account . .. of the several Persons that are engaged in this Work” (no. 1, 1 March 1711, 1:1). Here it is the reader who is imag-

ined as disembodied but concerned with the differential embodiment of the writers he reads. Subsequently the terms will reverse, and an authorial voice will present readers with mirrors of their own multiple embodiments. Spectatorship, then, is the very mode of social feeling; but to be an affective spectator one must first be an effective reader. Addison suggests as much in his account of the histories of Livy, reinforcing the

social role assigned to critics by Shaftesbury: “He describes every thing | in so lively a manner, that his whole History isanadmirable Picture,and touches on such proper Circumstances in every Story, that his Reader

Embodying Mr. Spectator 211 becomes a kind of Spectator, and feels in himself all the variety of Passions, which are correspondent to the several Parts of the Relation” (no. 420, 2 July 1712, 3:574). Ina reciprocal relationship of spectatorship and consciousness, the reader projects the author as a distinct and separate person and the author projects the reader as an autonomous subject. Mr. Spectator was not simply a viewing position or a pure authorial voice; he was also a character in the essays and an object of his own and others’ observations. Consider, for example, Mr. Spectator’s introduc-

tion to his readers in the first issue as that most problematic of characters, the virtuoso—a gentlemanly dilettante, dabbling in arts and sciences both, and an idiosyncratic collector of rarities: “[T]o such a De-

gree was my Curiosity raised, that having read the Controversies of some great Men concerning the Antiquities of Egypt, made a Voyage to Grand Cairo, on purpose to take the Measure of a Pyramid; and as soon as [had set my self right in that Particular, returned to my Native Country with great Satisfaction” (1:2-3). As Donald F. Bond commented in his note on this passage, all editors of The Spectator have considered this a satire of John Greaves’s Pyramidographia: or a Description of the Pyramids in /Egypt (1646); the subject, Bond added, retained perennial interest. But the stakes were higher than Bond allowed. In Edward Ward’s more contemporaneous account “Of the Vertuoso’s [sic] Club,” in his Satyrical Reflections on Clubs of 1710, a “merry Traveller” devises a trick to punish the assembled virtuosi, or “cabal,” for their useless experi-. ments and transgressions against status and gender hierarchies. He offers for their analysis a rare commodity, “plugs” that the inhabitants of

“Egypt, ... by eating much Manna, and other Purgative Diets, were forc’d, when they went to Bed, to wear . . . in their Fundaments, to keep

their Laxative Bum-fiddles from Dishonouring their Sheets... .” The virtuosi enthusiastically smell, lick, nibble, and debate these “stinking Suppositories” until the witty gentleman discloses the trick: “With that one began to Spit, another Keck, a third Spew, a fourth, in a Passion, crying, Z----s, Sir, I hope they did not wear them in their Arses! As sure, reply’d the Gentleman, as you have had them in your Mouths.” Circulat-

ing in popular discourse the year before the first Spectator appeared, Ward’s account linked the virtuoso, and his Egyptian enthusiasm, with sodomy. Ward’s contemporary Mr. Spectator, in his first essay, would accordingly limit the public sphere to educated, propertied men by regulating the space of his articulations, “never open[ing his] Lips but in [his] own Club” (1:4). Why make a spectacle of Mr. Spectator occupying this highly fraught character? By displaying himself as the object of his

212 Privacy readers’ spectatorship, Mr. Spectator formulated display and inwardness as reciprocal obligations, as “conscious.” Mr. Spectator is not only to know himself; he is to know himself with and through another. His consciousness therefore depends on his own complaisant participation, however mystified, in the visual field. Mr. Spectator’s generous and

good-natured, but critical judgment of his own self-presentation thereby provided a model of the split subjectivity readers themselves were to develop.*!

The Knowing Eye and the Circle of Politeness The Spectator’s Will Honeycomb salutes the conscious beauty: “’Behold,

you who dare, that charming Virgin. Behold the Beauty of her Person chastised by the Innocence of her Thoughts. Chastity, Good-Nature, and Affability are the Graces that play in her Countenance; she knows she is handsome, but she knows she is good. Conscious Beauty adorn’d with conscious Virtue! ... How is the whole Woman expressed in her Appearance! Her Air has the Beauty of Motion, and her Look the Force of Language” (no. 4,5 March 1711, 1:20-21). By way of contrast Mr. Spectator turns to “the thoughtless Creatures who make up the Lump of that Sex, and move a knowing Eye no more than the Portraitures of insignificant People by ordinary Painters, which are but Pictures of Pictures” (1:21). Mr. Spectator reserves the proper display of gender complementariness to the polite; what seems at first the regulation of gender is in fact the regulation of class. Conscious display was the imitativeness of the elite body, dependent on an exclusive semiotics, through which the elite projected themselves to be seen within the circle of politeness. The failure of conscious display was like the pathetic attempt of the upwardly mobile to imitate the gendered display of the elite, a class passing that could be seen through, precisely because it lacked access to the exclusive circle that would recognize and validate its performance. The proliferation of the text, threatening the leveling of distinction, could be recuperated to earlier forms of representation reproducing conditions of access and relations of proximity to powerful bodies. This is why class passing was so regularly presented in comedies of manners as foppish. It was not that fops were less “authentic” or more conscious of an audience for their presentations of self but that they mistakenly took anyone who could read the signs of status as their audience. The complementary gendering of appearance and spectatorship, it

might be thought, has not only regulated women’s gendered and

Embodying Mr. Spectator 213 classed behaviors, distinguishing the propertied woman, but has simultaneously promoted an ideological equivalency of male spectators. But it seems to me that the Spectator does not fully make this move; in fact it makes conscious display the property not of a gender but of the propertied. Will Honeycomb’s salute to the conscious beauty certainly works within a gendered economy. But gendered complementariness, in contrast to the patriarchal regulation of sex difference, cannot be disentangled from the performative production of class. Reading Mr. Spec-

tator’s look as a male look regulating gender difference ignores the propertied man’s (at times cross-dressed) investment in and appropriation of English women’s own interests in ocular exchange. For the conscious woman, as represented by Steele, Addison, and the other writers and correspondents of the Spectator, distinguished herself from the leveling category of her sex. Her gendered self-presentation drew not the gaze of the rabble, but the knowing eye that everywhere in the essays

was identified with the economic and cultural elite and that, accordingly, could recognize her as significant. Recall the slippage in which early-seventeenth-century spectators (both male and female) read the boy actors’ performances as not simply imitating women but imitating public women, or prostitutes. Consider the problem Ben Jonson had explored, through Celia, in Volpone; that Aphra Behn had explored in the Restoration comedy The Rover; and that had concerned Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage:

simply entering the field of vision had made a woman (just as it had made boys, pages, and some other men within a society of subjection) sexually available, wanton, “public.” If Mr. Spectator produced and. regulated women’s gendered performances by making them visible he also provided them a mechanism for entering the field of vision. Ideally the elite woman’s knowledge of herself would be so visible in her personal manner that she need not use words (or, like Florinda in Behn’s play, a ring) to communicate her status to others; even the silent spectator, removed from conversation with her, would be able to write her character. Her conscious display of gender, then, was a classed act. By contrast, the “thoughtless” woman who made herself available to be seen by the unreflecting crowd foppishly demonstrated her own failure of self-reflection and self-possession. Let me return to the last two sentences of Will Honeycomb’s salutation: “How is the whole Woman expressed in her Appearance! Her Air has the Beauty of Motion, and her Look the Force of Language.” Has the male spectator identified female subjectivity with “appearance” —with

214 Privacy an “air” (posture and gait) opposed to motion itself and a “look” (aspect or countenance) opposed to language? Rather than reading this passage as equating display and femininity I would consider its historical difference from an earlier economy of display still anxiously remembered as a problem for men, as a vehicle of effeminacy and subjection. In these terms Shaftesbury, contemporaneously with the Spectator, had both deployed and disavowed display in his comparison of sumptuary fashions and political subjection, as had Jonathan Swift in his satire on Catholicism as vestmental absolutism, and Alexander Pope in his portrait of Lord Hervey as a courtly “Butterfly” “with gilded wings,” a

“painted Child of Dirt.”°* Display is neither historically nor innately

feminine; but its paradigmatic if not complete displacement onto women erases and mystifies its historical function in producing differences among men. The “surface” produces its “depth”; and so it is important to recognize that the “air” and “look” of the conscious woman are in fact motion and language—“air” describing the gestural articulation of the body and “look” indicating both display (how she presents herself to be seen) and countenance (how she looks on others). Just as the propertied man who is the object of another propertied man’s look and who shares with him the pleasures of vision has ceased to effeminate himself before the gaze, so Mr. Spectator, aligning his patriarchal authority with the classed interests of private life, assigns agency to a woman’s management of display: her interpellation into privacy as an individual and, simultaneously, her consolidation of the natural group of class. Hannah Cowley’s character Doricourt (The Belle’s Stratagem, 1780), just returned from his grand tour, extemporizes on his own ideal of gentle femininity: Give me a woman in whose touching mien A mind, a soul, a polished art is seen; Whose motion speaks, whose poignant air can move. Such are the darts to wound with endless love.

Suiting her behavior to her lover’s expectations, Letitia Hardy will represent a sprightly English femininity, but one veiled by an “innate mod-

esty” or consciousness and therefore capable both of reforming the Francophile tastes of young Englishmen and defending their honor from the invariable cuckoldry following from marriage to the more con-

spicuously charming Frenchwoman. But Letitia has another nationbuilding task as well. Her own father’s background being in trade and speculation, Letitia’s air and motion must move her up the social ladder,

Embodying Mr. Spectator 215 assimilating her commerce to her lover’s courtliness, English morals to French manners.°3 In his earlier—and more anxious— gendering of domestic and public life, Pope had given men authority to move between the two domains while restricting women to the first. In “To a Lady” (written 1732-34, pub. 1735), Pope instructed Martha Blount to shun the vain pleasures other women pursued in the Ring or at cards, in displays of spleen and vapors, and by associating with fops: But grant, in Public Men sometimes are shown, A Womans seen in Private life alone: Our bolder Talents in full light display’d; Your Virtues open fairest in the shade. Bred to disguise, in Public ‘tis you hide; There, none distinguish ‘twixt your Shame or Pride. .. 54

Here Pope associated manliness with a differential and disciplined display of civic personality and womanliness with the refusal of public display and, it follows, citizenship. Women, rather, should reveal themselves only within the scenes of domestic intimacy (“in the shade”). Both manliness and womanliness were performative ideals that few men or women adequately achieved (“men sometimes are shown”). But

manliness was a civic practice requiring public performance while womanliness revealed itself in private to men, to the fathers, husbands, and elder brothers who benevolently “shade[d]” women from the indecipherableness, in public spaces, of their “shame or pride.” Whereas manliness crossed the private-public divide intact, womanliness was located in “virtues” that public display “disguised.” Reinforcing the double standard that Behn had parodied in The Rover, Pope advised Blount that a woman’s virtue was secure only if she circumscribed her mobility (the very course that Burton had once proposed for men): “To

raise the Thought and touch the Heart, be thine! / That Charm shall grow, while what fatigues the Ring / Flaunts and goes down, an unregarded thing” (Il. 250-52, p. 568). In the famous passage on “the Privacy of a Country Life,” discussed

in the previous chapter, Addison made a similar distinction between Aurelia, whose country domesticity was “the Envy, or rather the Delight, of all that know [her],” and the female fop Fulvia, who would be mortified “if she knew that her setting her-self to View is but exposing her self, and that she grows Contemptible by being Conspicuous.” Although less conspicuous, Aurelia was not less visible than Fulvia.

216 Privacy Rather, Fulvia’s display was that of the particularized body in the residually aristocratic spaces of the Ring, theaters, drawing rooms, or opera house. Pulvia’s was that “false Happiness” flourishing “in Courts and Palaces, Theatres and Assemblies” and, like the courtier, having “no Existence but when she is looked upon.” Aurelia’s visibility, by contrast,

was derived from her relationship with her husband and limited to those “that know them”; her happiness was derived “in the first place, from the Enjoyment of ones self; and, in the next, from the Friendship and Conversation of a few select Companions” rather than “from Multitudes of Witnesses and Spectators.” The intimacy of the reader-author relationship promoted in the Spectator was modeled on the ease that Aurelia, grounded in the intimate circle of domestic (country) retirement, maintained even during her visits to town, whereas Fulvia, like those more mannerist forms of writing displaced by the “natural,” “easy,” and “spontaneous” style of the Spectator essays themselves, “live[d] ina perpetual Motion of Body, and Restlessness of Thought, and [wa]s never easie in any one Place” (no. 15, 17 March 1711, 1:68-69). Seventy years later Cowley’s Sir George Touchwood, not yet reformed of his jealous possessiveness of his own country wife Lady Frances, would

repeat Addison’s description of Fulvia in his peevish account of a “Fine Lady”; but the town woman Mrs. Racket would reject the charac-

ter emphatically as a “libel.” Her fine lady will be an Aurelia, whose manners and morals govern her movement between public (civil) and private (domestic) spaces: “In her manners she is free, in her morals nice. Her behavior is undistinguishingly polite to her husband and all mankind;—her sentiments are for their hours of retirement” (434-35). If the unblushing anecdotes of the Spectator essays would be considered, by the standards of the later eighteenth century, too indecorous and the gaze too impolite, this only signals the success of the very gendered project [have described.* By the later eighteenth century, politeness would

require both the hardening of gender roles and the increased heterosocial reciprocity of social relations. The work produced by the performance of gendered complementariness— its production of a reciprocity of private and civic spaces, its constitution of class distinction—was accordingly mystified as greater numbers sought access to its privileges. If, superficially at least, Pope’s insistence on a sexed private-public division seems to anticipate the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to

read this position back onto either his poems or the Spectator essays would be to occlude the historical production of that gendered reciprocity which, more overt and less mystified in the Spectator essays, would

Embodying Mr. Spectator 217 make those essays increasingly impolite. What would remain important of Steele’s and Addison’s projects, nevertheless, would be the comple-

mentariness of looking; and thus I have emphasized that the gaze in modernity is not simply characterized by male aggression and female passivity. The far more entrenched, and less easily resisted, gaze is the mutual but compulsory looking of heterosexuality. It was not just women who were to display themselves to the gaze. The contrast drawn by Mr. Spectator and Will Honeycomb between the conscious and the thoughtless woman was part of a scene in the theater in which Mr. Spectator not only looked but prided himself on his absolute transparency to his friend’s observing eye: “I have indulged my Silence to such an Extravagance, that the few who are intimate with me,

answer my Smiles with concurrent Sentences, and argue to the very

Point I shak’d my Head at without my speaking.” The exchange between Mr. Spectator and Will Honeycomb played on the duality of looking: “When I threw my Eye towards the next Woman [in the audience], WILL. spoke what I looked” (1:20). Will Honeycomb could translate the visual into the verbal because the visual had already been trans-

lated from a (primary) field of kinetic sensation to a (secondary) field of (ostensibly) shared social values and affect. To see was to appear to others; to gaze was to make oneself transparent. Mr. Spectator is never simply the (absent) sign of masculine surveillance. Like the conscious reader he posits, that reader who displays herself for knowing eyes, Mr. Spectator is internally divided; the condition of his subjectivity is his ability to take himself as one of the many objects of his gaze. This duality, within the subject, of the observer and the

observed—in which Mr. Spectator the author evaluates Mr. Spectator the character, and the conscious subject displays to the penetrating eye her own state of self-reflection—is therefore requisite to the ethical pleasure the essays assign to vision. It cannot even be said that the man is seen as active while the woman is seen as reflective; subjectivity itself will be the display of an oscillation between these two positions. Does this mean that eighteenth-century subjectivity was itself an appropria-

tion of “femininity,” understood in John Berger’s formulation as the internalization of a split between “the surveyor and the surveyed” in which a woman comes to see herself in terms of her image for another?6

Is privatized subjectivity, as Nancy Armstrong has argued, properly feminine?” To make either claim is to ignore that the duality of seeing and being seen has been claimed by competing formations of power. Likewise it ignores that men’s power has not always been exercised

218 Privacy through spectatorship rather than display, or even in support of men’s identification with masculinity as a capacity inherent in male bodies regardless of distinction or discipline (and therefore to be distinguished from manliness). I want to be very clear, nonetheless, that I do not mean

to suggest that there has not been a continuous spectacle made of women’s bodies (as indeed, I would argue, of all bodies capable of bearing status or marking class). But this apparently gendered continuity in the field of vision masks those discontinuities which are in fact the history of gender, among them, the negotiation of patriarchy and reciprocity, sex difference and consent to gender complementariness, alliance and the gendering of class identities. Mr. Spectator’s conscious eye was his solution to the problem of dif-

ferentiating his legibility among intimates from his visibility among strangers without erecting barriers in the field of vision (as did, say, the

progression of antechambers and presence chambers at courts) and while preserving the appearance of the openness and accessibility of the liberal public sphere. Much has been made of Mr. Spectator’s complaint

that “the greatest Pain I can suffer, is the being talked to, and being stared at” as evidence of his masculine identification with spectatorship and erasure of his own exhibitionism (no. 1, 1 March 1711, 1:6). Ketcham has argued, for example, that “[h]e deliberately leaves the private self hidden behind appearances.”°° But Mr. Spectator’s dislike of being seen did not extend to his most intimate circle. Rather, he disliked making himself available to impolite starers or to those who might use display

as a mechanism of upward mobility and “to make a figure.” Among friends Mr. Spectator was transparent; but in crowds he was opaque. When Mr. Spectator indicated that he had “affected Crowds” ever since his taciturnity caused him to be mistaken as a Jesuit (no. 4,5 March 1711, 1:19), he was not so much deriving his privacy from anonymity and the absence of display as posing his opacity in the unseeing crowd against the risk of failed transparency inherent in social interaction—a choice that Boswell would also make when, invariably imitating Mr. Spectator, he began dining in a beefsteakhouse in the city.9? Mr. Spectator’s looking was not a repression of his own exhibitionism and displacement of

spectacularity onto women; the split between the eye and the gaze, between looking and presenting oneself to be seen, was not the divide of gender but a classed negotiation of social space. The male subject of capitalism could preserve his personality precisely by dividing himself, according to his property rights, across the spaces of intimacy (privacy)

and the spaces of anonymity (publicity). By disallowing his public

Embodying Mr. Spectator 219 encounters a gaze, he divested those encounters, and subsequently himself, of alterity. Simultaneously he relocated the mutuality of the regard in intimate space. As the continuation of the passage makes clear, Mr. Spectator’s relation to the gaze was neither that of the courtier, for whom visibility was

an important mode of social advancement, nor that of the upwardly mobile, who appropriated forms of display and thereby devalued their utility as signs of inwardness: “He who comes into Assemblies only to gratifie his Curiosity, and not to make a Figure, enjoys the Pleasures of Retirement in a more exquisite Degree, than he possibly could in his Closet. ... To be exempt from the Passions with which others are tor-

mented, is the only pleasing Solitude. ... As I am insignificant to the Company in publick Places, and as it is visible I do not come thither as

most do, to shew my self; I gratify the Vanity of all who pretend to make an Appearance, and have often as kind Looks from well dressed Gentlemen and Ladies, as a Poet would bestow upon one of his Audience” (1:19). Identity, as Robert Burton and Thomas Hobbes well knew, is always in the field of the other; here Mr. Spectator assigns the gaze to the “well dressed Gentleman and Ladies” to whom “it is visible” that he need not “shew [him] self.” Mr. Spectator’s restriction of the gaze to circles of intimacy and politeness followed from an awareness that the varying ways in which he was seen as he moved from place to place, and among different degrees of persons, produced a discontinuity of

personal identity. By not allowing himself to signify “in publick Places,” Mr. Spectator maintained self-knowledge and self-possession. He maintained consciousness, which would reveal itself fully among his friends—the circle of intimacy that the Spectator essays offered to equate with the ever widening space of textuality. Within the literary public sphere, writing transformed the permeable male body into a vehicle of linguistic exchange: “since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die” (no. 1, 1 March 1711, 1:5). Simultaneously this writing contained the diffusiveness of actual market exchanges within the circle of intimacy: “I never

enter into the Commerce of Discourse with any but my particular Friends, and not in Publick even with them. Such an Habit has perhaps raised in me uncommon Reflections; but this Effect I cannot communicate but by my Writings” (no. 4, 1:21). If the threat to the self of the temporality of the marketplace required the continuous generation of writing, the classed body could be demarcated by the circle of reading. For

220 Privacy gentlemen, the expansion of the literary public sphere, constituting and bridging both privacy and publicness, would generate, as its corollary fiction, authenticity: the sense of an inward self maintaining its integrity across the spaces of its interactions and defined by its absence of overt imitation. By 1780, Cowley’s reformed and companionate husband Sir George, consenting to attend a masquerade in a domino, could declare, “I can’t take the trouble to support a character” (454). Where a Boswell would have modeled his own presentation, as he recorded in his London Journal, on “Mr. Addison’s character in sentiment, mixed with a little of the gaiety of Sir Richard Steele and the manners of Mr. Digges,’”4° Sir George would be himself under the domino, naturalizing and thereby occluding the project of the Spectator.

The Gendering of the Eye and the Gaze The reciprocity of privacy and publicness through which the identity of the class body would be consolidated was imagined most fully in the Spectator essays through the reciprocity of men and women on the one hand, and of domestic and civil spaces on the other. In his character of

Aurelia, Addison described the country gentlewoman’s husband as “her Bosom Friend, and Companion in her Solitudes” and celebrated their family as “under so regular an Oeconomy, in its Hours of Devotion and Repast, Employment and Diversion, that it looks like a little Common-Wealth within it self.” Aurelia and her husband moved easily between country retirement and town publicity, the domestic space and “{clompany” (no. 15, 17 March 1711, 1:68). A century earlier, Francis Bacon had differentiated men’s interests in domestic and public spaces and described sexual and domestic reproduction as inferior to cultural reproduction. Similarly, Robert Burton had understood the family as an “Oeconomicall body” in contrast to the “Politicall” body of the male homosocial commonwealth; he was concerned only with the national and public problem of too much conspicuous consumption wasting the great landed families.*! By contrast, the essayists and correspondents of the Spectator made publicity representative of men’s—and, notably, women'’s—private familial interests. Burton and Shaftesbury, among others, had made the space of writing coextensive with male homosocial exchange; Mr. Spectator, by contrast, identified “[t]he Moral World” as composed not of one sex, but “of Males and Females” and therefore “of a mixt Nature.” Addison argued that “Man would not only be an

unhappy, but a rude unfinished Creature, were he conversant with

Embodying Mr. Spectator 221 none but those of his own Make” (no. 433, 17 July 1712, 4:21); and accordingly Steele, as I noted in chapter 3 of this volume, represented his essays as bringing the coffeehouses and the tea tables into conversation. Like (heteroerotic) love—“that noble Passion, the Cement of Society” — writing itself would join men’s domestic and public interests within the unified, heterosocial space of civil society (no. 4, 5 March 1711, 1:21, 22).42 The Spectator essays represented the public interests of private men not as originating in their shared relations to property, and not as the contingent outcome of their historical struggle against subjection, but as reflecting and supporting the gendered subjectivities of men and women of feeling. If the Spectator presented cross-sex conversation as bridging the differences of town, city, and country and restoring the naturalness and unity of personal, economic, and political relations, it did so, then, by vesting each domain with a new and expansive heterosociality. The essays have a privileged place, accordingly, in Habermas’s demonstration that the collapsing of status differences through the public exercise

of reason and the subsequent development of the bourgeois public sphere depended on the remapping of social space to grant legitimacy to the practices of consumption particular to the conjugal home space. Consumption could be mystified as the display of inwardness; and as the scene of consumption the family could provide an original and ap-

parently natural “audience” for the private subjectivities that might subsequently be presented as objects of exchange in the coffeehouses, salons, and reading societies. Reading Habermas through Michel Fou-

cault, I argue that the family did not mediate between public and private but reproduced both as mutually supportive, reformulating (against the divide in Bacon and Burton) cultural reproduction as familial reproduction.* The “feminization” of eighteenth-century society so often noticed by literary critics and historians may be reconsidered not as men’s appropriation of attributes that were essentially feminine, but

as men’s laying claim to body and social spaces (the heart and the hearth) they had once devalued as effeminate, assigning a new moral value to domesticity and conjugality as the grounds of liberty.“4 Men were not so much feminized as privatized. They were no longer boys; they were becoming men. If the gendering of men required an elevation of the moral value of domesticity, however, it did not necessarily expand the civic roles of women, still bound by the very patriarchal hierarchies from which men were extricating themselves. Mr. Spectator approached the tea tables,

222 Privacy traditionally governed by women, only to “lead the Young through all the becoming Duties of Virginity, Marriage, and Widowhood” (no. 4,5 March 1711, 1: 21). The gendering of men required that women ground personal and civic identity both in their erotic relatedness to men, a sexual contract that would naturalize the social contract of male privacy. For this very reason, Steele, while specifying women’s roles as virgin, wife, and widow, vested each with a greater range of agency (albeit gendered) than had been required for the proper functioning of traditional, status-based patriarchy. This innovation, in which the Spectator and other forms of popular writing of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries derived

private subjectivity from the relations of family life, will be made clearer through a comparison to Shaftesbury’s derivation of civic personality from the intimacy of literary and philosophic conversation among men. Although contemporaneous with the Spectator, Shaftesbury’s men, engaged in mutual displays of inwardness, seem in comparison archaic, mannered, and sexually suspect. As did Steele and Addison, Shaftesbury staged the duality of observer and observed in his Moralists (first published in 1709), a “philosophical rhapsody” on nature as the scene of self-contemplation. This treatise, the fifth in Shaftesbury’s collected Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711),

is a quasi-Socratic dialogue between Philocles and Theocles, two men alone together on a hill having left the heterosocial conversation of the dining table. Just as the Socratic dialogues reversed pederastic positions, such that the beloved became the lover of wisdom, exhorting the older man to speech, so Philocles “conjure[s]” Theocles, the philosopher filled with “Divine Thoughts,” to rhapsodize in his presence. After “exert[ing] those Faculties with which [Nature] hast adorn’d [him]” in praise of retirement, Theocles turns back to his friend: “Now, PHILO-

CLES, said he, inform me. How have I appear’d to you in my Fit? Seemd it a sensible kind of Madness... or was it downright Raving?”* Shaftesbury’s male lovers (of wisdom), recalling Burton’s philosophers, attain and display self-knowledge in the space they share together as educated men. Their relation is constituted neither in their shared desire for a woman nor through their shared relation to domestic space and heterosocial conversation, but through their mutual, if fully textual, penetration by the sublime, a highly sensate response to the world, or “a sensible kind of Madness,” that gives rise to particularly vivid and fully embodied ideas. Philocles declares in a letter to a third man,

Palemon, for whom the entire dialogue has been retold and whose

Embodying Mr. Spectator 223 readerly gaze represents that of Shaftesbury’s (male) readers, “I was not a little rejoic’d to hear that our Companions were to go away early the next Morning, and leave THEOCLES to me alone. For now (PALEMON!) that Morning was approaching, for which I so much long’d”

(2:76). But if Shaftesbury’s classical vision of male friendship reads queerly, it is because of the historical success of Steele’s and Addison’s heterosocial model of male subjectivity. Addison began issue 128 of the Spectator by claiming a natural and innate difference between men and women: “Women in their Nature are much more gay and joyous than Men; whether it be that their Blood

is more refined, their Fibres more delicate, and their animal Spirits more light and volatile; or whether, as some have imagined, there may not be a kind of Sex in the very Soul, I shall not pretend to determine. As Vivacity is the Gift of Women, Gravity is that of Men” (27 July 1711; 2:8). Addison here expressed a confidence in natural sex difference that Burton, among many others writing within and against a pederastic

economy, could not assume. Having declared that men and women may have different physiologies and differently sexed souls, however, Addison added that both must “therefore keep a Watch upon the particular Biass which Nature has fixed in their Minds” so as not to fall into extremes of what was (presumably) natural behavior (2:8; emphasis added). Gendered embodiment was an active and ongoing practice, a conscious formation the ideal of which was not the fixity of sex difference but, as Addison commented, the management of natural inclination within “the Paths of Reason”: “Where these Precautions are not observed, the Man often degenerates into a Cynick, the Woman into a Coquet” (2:8-g). As a set of sociable practices, gender complementariness substituted for earlier, aristocratic or rationalist ways of relating to the self and located the legitimacy of privacy in the public utility of gendered reciprocity. In later issues Addison explored the “mutual Regard between the two Sexes [which] tends to the Improvement of each of them” (no. 433, 17 July 1712, 4:21) and located the origin of civilization in cross-gender desire (no. 434, 4:26).

The Spectator asked its readers to experience sex difference as gendered reciprocity, to revise patriarchy as a natural complementariness of distinctly different genders, in the private sphere, that could provide a model for an ethics of mutuality between same and other in the public sphere as well. (By contrast, mollies and other sexually suspect men would be construed as “woman-haters,” as narcissists incapable of regarding the other and thus ineligible for membership in the political

224 Privacy nation.) The point may be made clearer by contrasting a somewhat earlier text, “The Lady’s New Year’s Gift, or Advice to a Daughter” (1688), in which George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax had informed his daughter, “You must first lay it down for a Foundation in general, That there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Oeconomy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Lawgivers, had the larger share of

Reason bestow’d upon them; by which means your Sex is the better prepar’d for the Compliance that is necessary for the better performance of those Duties which seems to be most properly assign’d to it... . Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection; Ours wanteth your Gentleness to soften, and to entertain us.”* The Spectator essays revised Halifax’s distinction, offering not so much a feminization of society as an increase of latitude within the categories of gender. For Addison it was precisely because of innate propensities to sex difference, which led naturally to the homosocial extremes that Burton and Halifax had proposed, that society required the enactment

of gender complementariness and made the companionate family the symbol of equilibrium: “By what I have said we may conclude, Men and Women were made as Counterparts to one another, that the Pains and Anxieties of the Husband might be relieved by the Sprightliness and good Humour of the Wife. When these are rightly tempered, Care and Chearfulness go Hand in Hand; and the Family, like a Ship that is duly trimmed, wants neither Sail nor Ballast” (no. 128, 27 July 1711, 2:9). “[R]ightly tempered,” gender described a relation between terms and was mobile within that relation; the “silent” and uneducated wife of patriarchal idealization fell short of the companionate ideal. Nature had given women charms sufficient to entice their husbands to provide for their children; but “[t]his however is not to be taken so strictly, as if the same Duties were not often reciprocal, and incumbent on both Parties; but only to set forth what seems to have been the general Intention of Nature, in the different Inclinations and Endowments which are bestowed on the different Sexes” (2:9).4” Likewise, Steele’s preface to The Conscious Lovers (1722), a moral

comedy offering Bevil Junior as the exemplary man of feeling, suggested that the passions were not so easily distinguishable as the property of a specific sex: “men ought not to be laughed at for weeping till we are come to a more clear notion of what is to be imputed to the hardness of the head and the softness of the heart.” Referring to the song he

had written for Bevil Junior’s entertainment of Indiana, Steele noted, “{It] may be a fit Entertainment for some small critics to examine

Embodying Mr. Spectator 225 whether the passion is just or the distress male or female.”48 Although the song appears to assign a modest refusal of looking to the female virgin, Steele has asked us to consider whether each stanza in fact indicates a single gendered subjectivity: I

From place to place forlorn I go, With downcast eyes, a silent shade; Forbidden to declare my woe; To speak, till spoken to, afraid. U

My inward pangs, my secret grief, My soft consenting looks betray: He loves, but gives me no relief: Why speaks not he who may? (221)

In fact both Bevil Junior and Indiana are unable to declare themselves. During the scene for which the song was written (the lack of a singer required a last-minute change to a violinist) it is Bevil Junior, and not

Indiana, who casts down his eyes and whose looks betray him, as Indiana’s aunt Isabella observes: ISABELLA: I saw the respectful downcast of his eye when you catcht him gazing at you during the music. . . . Oh, the undissembled guilty look!

INDIANA: But did you observe any such thing, really? I thought he looked most charmingly graceful! ...So0 tender a confusion! (2.2, p. 245)

The desire both to look and to be seen circulates between the men and

the women (as do the conscious blushes). Steele’s moral vision depended upon the necessary failure to secure an absolute polarity of the

sexes, thereby consolidating in the domestic relations of men and women a classed body that would be the bearer of moral legitimacy. The Conscious Lovers embodied a new hegemony of gentle and capitalist

interests in the marriage of Sir John Bevil’s son and Mr. Sealand’s daughter. So too the Spectator proliferated the pleasures of vision, both in its “passive” and “active” forms, as the satisfactory (rather than failing) mechanism constitutive of privacy.

In this complementary relation, men may look and women may “connote to-be-looked-at-ness,” as Laura Mulvey famously put it;

226 Privacy but reversing the positions does not fracture the mirror that constitutes the mutuality of the genders. Rather, this gendered play constitutes normative heterosexuality as the complementary masquerade of two or more subjects who play to the look. Heterosexuality is not innate in individuals but provides the field of identifications onto which the gaze has been displaced since the emergence of a privatized society. That this play does not fracture the mirror of gendered identifications indicates that gender does not inhere in female or male bodies per se, but in the social performances that locate women’s bodies vis-a-vis men’s bodies and insist on the proximity and complementariness of the two sexes (rather than the proximity of subjects to the sovereign body). It follows that to interrogate looking as male does not necessarily get us beyond the field of gender. Indeed, considering the look as male can occlude the historical struggle whereby the gaze of the spectacle, formerly located in courtly aristocracy, was brought under control and subjected to interpretation. It can ignore that gender has both operated to naturalize the reciprocity of self and other in the visual field and provided a vehicle for interpellating private women and men as the legitimate subjects of the public sphere. Ridiculing admiration of conspicuous display as a particularly feminine fault, and thereby gendering the emulative consumption that has been considered a driving force in the expansion of a consumer society in the eighteenth century,°° Addison failed to explain why men should “adorn” themselves with the “pretty Trappings” that draw the (female) eye in the first place (Spectator no. 15; 17 March 1711; 1:69). By arguing

that male display draws women’s eyes, and not those of other, dependent men, Addison revised visual reciprocity as gendered, where gender has become (as it remains today) a hegemonic formation that is shared between private male and female subjects who derive their subjectivities jointly from that relation. Gender is therefore capable of includ-

ing within itself a great degree of oscillation among positions and is not simply an opposition of immutable differences.>! (This hegemonic capacity of gender to include, even exploit, contradictions underwrites what Ketcham identifies as the “tolerant irony” of Mr. Spectator as well as the popular cross-dressing of commercial masquerades or the frequently cross-gendered authorial stances of popular writing.)>? “Lack” or “castration,” represented in The Conscious Lovers by male silence, modesty, and feeling, can therefore be fully incorporated within normal heterosexual masculinity. The Spectator’s incessant vigilance of men and women who failed to enact this reciprocity of affect within the domestic

Embodying Mr. Spectator 227 space (the virago and the effeminate, the coquette and the fribble) worked not so much to mandate specific gender performances as to provide a limit to the normalizing oscillation of gendered reciprocity. Gender as a modern ideological formation derives power not from coercion, but from the way it interpellates us simultaneously as authentic subjects and as social actors participating in a public sphere ostensibly reflecting our private, autonomous interests.°4 Gender is not so easily dissolved, despite feminist and queer critiques, because there has been little space outside of heterosexuality for liberal subjectivity — which is to say, in modern class societies, no room outside heterosexuality for class mobility. This is not to say that conjugal desires among men and women or affectionate relations among parents and children were “invented.” Competing political formations have claimed privacy and conjugality, making heteroeroticism and domestic intimacy “conscious” so that it might provide the scene for the propertied classes’ experience of themselves as possessors of free and full subjectivities. Through the affective bonds of husband and wife, Steele informed a woman correspondent, each affirmed that they were valued, not for “Show or Pomp,” but in themselves only (no. 149; 21 August 1711; 2:88).

For this reason no other institution can be substituted for the companionate family in its ideological function, specifically its reproduction of the ideologies of personal authenticity and political autonomy. In the England of Locke’s “testimony of the senses,” populated by men and women of wit, sense, taste, and feeling (affective and intellectual traits retaining their bodily orientations), the English Enlightenment man was characterized not by his abstraction from a body deni-

grated as feminine, but by the proliferation of his body, his sensate experiences, and his practices of pleasure.°> The sheer expansiveness of

the pleasures of looking and appearing linked privacy to classed bodies, making privacy and pleasure the specific mark of an educated, landed, property-owning elite. This fully sensate body—and not an “objective” or abstracted embodiment, as Habermas has argued—is in fact that body, free from the necessity of labor and possessed of leisure

and economic, educational, and literary capital, that has emerged within capitalism and, through the market, been able to equate its interests with those of human beings in general. Masculinity in eighteenth-

century England, then, is the contested scene of an increasing alignment of national identity and citizenship with full male embodiment. The history of masculinity is the history of men’s—and women’s— struggles for access to these proliferating embodiments.

“There’s difference in men” The Fop and the Politics of Pleasure SIR WILLIAM WISEWOUD: Can’t any Man bea Fop... that has a mind to’t?

SiR NoveELtTy FASHION: No, faith, Sir; .. . ‘tis not Sir John Wou'dlook’s Aversion to Dress; but his want of a fertile Genius, that won’t let him look like a Gentleman: Therefore, in Vindication of all well-dress’d Gentlemen, I intend to write a Play, where my chiefest Character shall be a downright English Booby, that affects to be a Beau, without either Genius or foreign Education, and to call it, in Imitation of another famous Comedy, He Wou'd if he Cou’d: And now, I think, you are answer’d, Sir. Colley Cibber, Love's Last Shift: Or, The Fool in Fashion

Equating the gaze with mimetic objects themselves—mirrors, gestures,

ornaments—the fop reduced sovereign presence to its sumptuary traces. At the same time he refused to displace the gaze from those traces—vestiges of a visual field once resolved by a sovereign law— onto the social field of language located among classed bodies. The fop enacted instead a residual desire (not his own: foppery is a name for discursive struggle) for the publicity of bodies and places. Foppery named the subject’s refusal to locate the gaze beyond his own particular embodiment, whether externally, in the social code of politeness, or inwardly, as consciousness. Whereas the polite recognized and granted each other legitimacy, consolidating the connections among classed bodies through a mutual regard, fops could get by with a mirror—just not the specular mirror of Shaftesburian inwardness: 228

“There’s difference in men” 229 SIR FOPLING: Prithee, Dorimant, why hast not thou a glass hung up here? A room is the dullest thing without one. YOUNG BELLAIR: Here is company to entertain you. SIR FOPLING: But I mean in case of being alone. In a glass a man may entertain himself— DoORIMANT: The shadow of himself, indeed.

SIR Fopitinc:—Correct the errors of his motions and his dress. MEDLEY: I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember the saying of the wise man, and study yourself. Str Fop.ince: “Tis the best diversion in our retirements.!

Foppishness was not simply a problem of excessive display; it was rather one of self-sufficiency. Fops delighted in the spectacle of themselves, eliding within themselves the gaze and the eye. As Moe Meyer has argued, queerness requires publicity; here [understand publicity — whether the representative publicness of the sovereign body or the residual display of the fop—as a projection of the techniques of occupy-

ing (bodily) space. Colley Cibber’s Elder Worthy remarks that Sir Novelty Fashion is “so fond of a publick Reputation” that he is as pleased when his fopperies don’t take as when they do, “because it then obliges the Town to take the more Notice of him.”? Playwright, actor-manager, poet laureate, and memorialist, Cibber would encourage his public to apply the same character to himself.

The literary trace of the transition from publicness to privacy, the fop’s corporeal presence (always threatening to return from the text into practice) has occluded the very struggles against spectacularity that produced him. As readers and spectators, our delight in fops has rewritten social history as the difference among individual psychologies. At the same time the increasing representation of foppery, by the mid-eighteenth century, as a distinctly other subjectivity recapitulated and elicited consent to that history. The Restoration comedies of manners and the transitional comedies of Cibber emphasized the fop’s residual publicness and disregard for an increasingly privatized, if not yet domesticated, heterosociality, achieving a complex satire on structural change. Later eighteenth-century writers, by contrast, demonized the fop for his personal failure to straddle what had become by then a fully gendered private-public split; the later eighteenth-century fop mistakenly occupied the home space and the domestic arts in ways

that threatened the reciprocity of gender within heterosocial and

230 Privacy heteroerotic relations. Any sketch of the literary and stage history of fops will do a disservice to the variety of fops and related figures in the eighteenth century.4 Nevertheless, across the formal and temporal discontinuities in the representation of fops their disregard for privacy was consistently at stake. If late-seventeenth-century fops rejected politeness—the sign of a new elite’s autonomy from the publicity of the court—eighteenth-century fops would imitate, grotesquely and impotently, the gendered roles and heteroerotic desires through which the literate and theatergoing classes represented the legitimacy of their participation in the political nation. That the fop’s domesticity would be construed as an insult to women, an appropriation of spaces, manners, occupations, and feelings that were increasingly assumed to be the property of women, indicates the increasing problematization of gender and gendered desire as the sign of privacy. Foppishness lacks authenticity not because it lacks mastery, and not because the fop is, in any anecdotal or symbolic sense, castrated. Foppishness, rather, is a refusal of the castration that constitutes privacy. The fop rejects the constitutive rupture dividing the self as subject from the visual field in which the self poses as an object; foppishness is the resist-

ant claim to embody the gaze directly. It is masculinity and femininity that are castrated. Men and women must continually write their privacy within and against the return of the gaze enacted by the fop—the memory he embodies of an other history of political subjection.

Fops in Space This is the satirical point of George Etherege’s Man of Mode: where is the

line between Dorimant’s and Sir Fopling Flutter’s appeals to the gaze, between the man of sense and the fop?> The man of mode may be recognized by his attention to dress; but then it takes the entire first act for Dorimant to have his clothes hang “just.” The man of mode may be recognized by his Francophile, courtly habit of kissing his male friends upon entering a room; but the men of sense, representative of the Town, kiss as well. When they do, the orange-woman, representative of the city’s commerce and morality, ejaculates, “Lord, what a filthy trick these men have got of kissing one another!” and she spits, warding off the evil eye—the gaze—of courtly foppery (1.1; p. 83). Perhaps the man of mode may be recognized by the foppish verses he writes; but then Dorimant writes verses too, and we know he is meant to be Harriet’s

partner when she completes one of the Waller couplets he quotes.

“There's difference in men” 231 Whereas Sir Fopling recites his verses on demand, indiscriminately allowing himself to be put on display, the private exchange of Dorimant and Harriet, and the complementariness of their relation to the precursor text, relocates the publicness of verse from its proximity to courtly bodies to a civil society representing itself as distinct from court and commerce both, to the polite world of the town.® Dorimant and Harriet appropriate the publicness of verse to publicize their own status bodies. The privacy they claim and enjoy in the context of a selective and impromptu gathering at Lady Townley’s house (representative of polite society in general) was a relaxation of those courtly forms of display still operative in public spaces like the parks and theaters. The proviso scenes of such Restoration and late-seventeenth-century tragicomedies and comedies as John Dryden’s Secret Love or William Congreve’s The Way of the World likewise showed young men and women of the town insisting, as a condition of their consent to marriage, on a distinction of manners at home and abroad, a formulation that did not depend on or locate a private self or space of inwardness in either domain. This claim to a decorum of space, through which the gentility might negotiate the differences of display in private and in public, was a vehicle for managing the presentation of one’s status within a hierarchical society of subjection. This privacy was not yet coextensive, then, with a domestic or nucleated familial space. Nor was it yet the inwardness that the readers of the Spectator would enjoy in public as the result of their self-reflection within the circle of conjugal intimacy. If this privacy, a matter of the organization of social space first and of inwardness second, represented an architectural space hidden from the gaze of the public—from the

court on the one hand and from the rabble on the other—it did not however lack its own modes of display. Privacy was rather the absence of courtly conduct; Sir Fopling interrupts this privacy when he brings, uninvited, an entourage of masquers to Lady Townley’s home, transforming her intimate gathering into a more courtly (and Frenchified)

milieu: “I thought foppery had been left off, and people might have been in private with a fiddle,” Harriet complains (4.1; p. 124).”

Fopling’s performances are staged to call attention to themselves qua displays, not of what the self may be, but of what the performer can do. Dorimant embraces the necessity of display “unwillingly”; his self-

presentation enacts an ostensible antipathy to the social demands of display: “That a man’s excellency should lie in neatly tying of a ribbon

or a cravat!” he complains after his man Handy has put the finishing touches on his dress. (“That’s a mighty pretty suit of yours, Dorimant,”

232 Privacy Young Bellair replies |1.1, p. 89].) It is because Harriet sees through this— EMILIA: Mr. Dorimant has a great deal of wit.

HARRIET: And takes a great deal of pains to show it. (5.2, p. 142)

—that she consents to continue her courtship of Dorimant in the country, schematically the location of self-knowledge because it requires less

publicity than the town (5.2., pp. 149-50). In town even Harriet and Young Bellair must engage a Baconian simulation, masquerading as lovers in front of their parents (3.1; pp. 105-6). The play’s final challenge to Dorimant and Harriet to find mutual support in country retirement hints at a new possibility for the maintenance of privacy in the public spaces of the town, founded on gendered reciprocity and companionate domesticity and providing the terms of a new and gendered model of civic virtue. The gestural overlap between Fopling and Dorimant makes Dorimant himself (and, to a lesser extent, Harriet in her own more foppish moments) an object of satire; the play must not only excise Sir Fopling from center stage (from private space) but must also show Dorimant and Harriet the way to the country. This is not to say

that the denouement replaces “pretense” with “emotional, natural desire”; the text cannot be recuperated to the legibility of sentiment.® Richard Steele would later condemn Dorimant for his dishonesty with women, finding him even “more of a Coxcomb” than Sir Fopling, and

judge Harriet unfit both as daughter and spouse.’ Steele’s critique would get around the difficulty of drawing a line between the man of mode and the fop by locating both outside the companionate relations of the two sexes (men and women, boys having been erased as distinct objects of desire) and therefore outside the “good Manners, good Sense,

and common Honesty” that “Characters of Greatest Consequence” should demonstrate in order to secure the hegemony of the classed formation of privacy (1:280, 278).

The Francophilia of the Restoration and late-seventeenth-century fop, an anxious satire on the feared alignment of the Stuart and French courts, identified the residual source of his imitations. On the one hand, the fop’s gestures, speech, and sartorial display signaled his appropri-

ation of the visual centrality of courtly bodies. Cibber’s Sir Novelty Fashion, for example, replaced the public interest with the publicness of his own body, arguing that his Frenchified dress benefited the English economy by putting to work ribbon weavers under supported

“There's difference in men” 233 “since the late Mourning” (Love’s Last Shift, act 2, p. 18). If lateseventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century English oppositional gentry distrusted luxury and emulative consumption, redefining gentlemanliness (as David M. Kuchta has shown) as modesty in dress and manners,

the fop anticipated Bernard Mandeville’s proposition that “private vices” could be “public benefits.” J. G. A. Pocock has shown this emphasis on historical change, rather than virtue, to be compatible with court ideology of the period.!° Reinscribing publicity into the field of commodities through his advocacy of emulative consumption, Sir Novelty threatened to reassert a courtly internationalism within the economic interests of the emergent nation. He thus functioned as an object of satire. Against the internationalism of Etherege’s Sir Fopling—his residual traffic in sovereign courts—John Dennis posited the national identity of the private man: “What true Englishman is there, but must be pleas’d to see this ridiculous Knight made the Jest and the Scorn of all the other Characters, for shewing, by his foolish aping foreign Customs and Manners, that he prefers another Country to his own?”! On the other hand, Sir Fopling’s publicity refused legitimacy to the elite’s attempt to expand its own interests in privacy by consolidating status and class, land and capital. The fop’s faulty performance signaled his failure to reproduce successfully the increasingly obsolete, internationalist courtly ideal he imitated. These are the terms in which Dorimant’s circle describes Sir Fopling: YOUNG BELLAIR: He thinks himself the pattern of modern gallantry.

DORIMANT: He is indeed the pattern of modern foppery. ... YOUNG BELLAIR: Whata pretty lisp he has! DoRIMANT: Ho, that he affects in imitation of the people of

quality of France. ... He is a person indeed of great acquired follies. (1.1; p. 89)

Invariably, the fop has purchased his title as he has acquired his clothes, manners, and equipage on the grand tour; his title accordingly represented the grossly emulative practices of the upwardly mobile rather than the stability of landed values or the claims of an educated elite to a cultural hegemony of politeness and good sense. A would-be courtier,

the fop’s emulative consumption nevertheless threatened the very specificity of the courtly bodies he emulated, dispersing consumption from its centralized location and across the gentry. The fop’s greatest threat, then, may not have been his imitation of the courtly aristocracy

234 Privacy but his proximity to the gentry, his exposure of the increasing availability of consumption as an index of private subjectivity. The fop’s difference from the protagonist is his ostension of residual display; otherwise he has his spectacularity thrust upon him. His oppositional corporeal style marks him as residually public, but not because he is more conscious of display than men and women of sense, because display was inimical to inwardness, or because social power resided in spectatorship and required no exhibition of itself as power. All of these are incorrect assessments of late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century selfhood, which was ideally “conscious” and derived power and legitimacy from public enactment. Dorimant and Harriet make spectacles of their own spectatorship, displaying, through their violent visualization of the fop, their capacity to reconcile status and class, display and taste. The fop fails, in short, to display privacy; foppery exposes the ideological

masquerade that a civil society grants privacy equally and benevo| lently to all. Supposedly a direct reflection of inwardness and therefore ostensibly objective and universal, the particular modes of privacy— sense, feeling, reason, taste, consciousness—are the signal distinctions of the classed bodies emergent in the play’s negotiation of publicity. The line between Dorimant and Sir Fopling Flutter is finally drawn by Harriet’s agency; according to these male-authored representations, the woman achieves agency in the recuperation of a man. It is the future wife who is responsible for differentiating a man of sense from a fop, for clarifying the line between residual pederasty and hegemonic heteronormativity, and thus for identifying her interests with the production of the gendered formation of class. How does Harriet do this? If Dorimant uses the authority of his look to regulate her performance of gender, she returns his look. She performs Dorimant back to him: DoRIMANT: As I followed you, I observed how you were pleased when the fops cried “She’s handsome, very handsome, by God she is!” and whispered aloud your name— the thousand several forms you put your face into; then, to make yourself more agreeable, how wantonly you played with your head, flung back your locks, and looked smilingly over your shoulder at ’em. HARRIET: I do not go begging men’s, as you do the ladies’ good liking, with a sly softness in your looks and a gentle slowness in your bows as you pass by ’em. As thus, sir. [Acts him.] Is not this like you? (3.3., p. 114)”

“There's difference in men” 235 By parodying Dorimant’s corporeal style, she enables him to see himself and thereby to trade those aspects of his manner which blur into residual pederasty for a mode of presentation more in line with the mu-

tual regard of a gendered privacy. Her ability to do so requires her own | positioning as a spectator; one of the first things we learn about Harriet

(other than that she is new in town, handsome, and “a hugeous fortune”) is that she has looked first.13 From the start of the play, the reforma-

tion and reproduction of men of sense is presented as the responsibility

of women. Put into discourse, here, by a man, the heteronormative form of patriarchy will invest women with agency.

Performing the Heterosocial Nation In an influential essay published in 1982, Susan Staves argued that, there being no necessary connection between effeminacy and homosex-

uality, the Restoration and eighteenth-century fop should be understood as asexual rather than homosexual.!4 1 want to reconsider what seemed, to late-twentieth-century Anglo-American readers, a highly sensible and intuitive claim. Staves’s proposal reflected the hegemony,

in 1982, of the heterosexual-homosexual binary and the distinction made by gay and lesbian activists at that time between homosexual orientation and gender variance. But to apply this historically contingent distinction to the early modern period is to explain historical change in terms of an ever more objective classification of genders and sexualities; such a claim, moreover, downplays the semiotics of effeminacy, discounting those signifying practices that have accrued historically to queerness and within which queer agents have located their practices. The semiotic overdetermination of male effeminacy and male homosexuality may be read instead as the trace of the struggles that have constituted the history of modern sexual and gender identities. By rejecting these associations as statistically unfounded, even such wellintended demonstrations as Staves’s locate homosexuality as innate in individuals and outside the ideologies both inscribing subjectivities and providing, in Judith Butler’s formulation, the “scene of agency.” The fop’s effeminacy—in my reading, a rejection of privacy and the properly manly relation to domesticity —has been inseparable from the historical construction of sexuality as paradigmatic of privacy itself. To

the extent that male homosexuality has emerged within and against political claims to privacy,!© the fop’s effeminacy has represented a

236 Privacy rejection of sexuality. As an explanatory tool, the term asexuality takes sexuality as a given; the fop refuses the emergent regime of sexuality itself. It is the association of sodomy with effeminacy—long understood as the failure or absence of manliness and accordingly civic virtue—and not sodomy itself that has excluded men who have sex with and love

other men from personal and political privacy. What we call “male homosexuality” —an innate pyschological unity—has invariably been construed as a practice: the rejection of privacy. In the absence of sexual encounters of any sort, foppery is still queerness. Foppery thus continues to mark problematic desires and misoccupations of social and body

spaces in all social subjects and cannot be assigned to any particular sexual subjectivity.

The pleasures that point, for Kristina Straub, to the fop’s suspect sexuality do indeed constitute a joke pattern running from the laterseventeenth- through the mid-eighteenth-century theater. Aphra Behn’s character Sir Credulous Easy, in Sir Patient Fancy (1678), is more in love with his horse than with any woman,!” and Cibber’s Sir Novelty Fashion declares he has had no sexual relations with women: “Prithee, name but one that has a favourable Thought of me; and to convince you that I have no Design upon her, I'll instantly visit her in an unpowder’d Periwig” (Love's Last Shift, act 2, p. 1:19). Likewise Cibber’s Clodio, in Love Makes a Man (1700), is a great promoter of same-sex kissing, which the plays of the era continually depict as a French, courtly mode, the other of the English national body: “T love to kiss a Man, in Paris we kiss nothing else.”!8 It would be anachronistic to ask, however, for the Restoration and late seventeenth century, “What was the sexuality of the fop?”

The seventeenth-century fop has a different economy of pleasures: international rather than national, residually public rather than privatized, pederastic rather than gendered. He plays both sides of the pederastic equation. A fribblish libertine, he displays himself as the object of desire for women and men both; he attempts to ravish others with, and desires to be ravished by, the gaze. Disassociating the fop’s effeminacy from male homosexuality, Straub has contrasted John Vanbrugh’s Lord Foppington (in The Relapse, 1696) to his Coupler, “an overt ‘sodomite’” who is not, however, effeminate.!? But Coupler’s libertine pederasty is not the same thing as homosexuality. Coupler is not an emergent homosexual subject but “old Sodom”; and Young Fashion plays precisely to this, displaying himself, teasingly, as the beloved and calling Coupler his “dear dad.”2° If Lord Foppington is not a Coupler, it is because he puts himself in the position of Young Fashion, the object of desire in the

“There's difference in men” 237 field of vision. As with Etherege’s Dorimant and Sir Fopling Flutter, the

problem is not one of distinguishing the fop and the sodomite but of distinguishing the fop and the man of fashion, Lord Foppington and Young Fashion; and the line is drawn according to each man’s capacity to enter into heterosocial and heteroerotic relations. Fops may be suitors themselves, and in the eighteenth century may even “champion” marriage; these later fops may be “energetically recuperated by the marriages that reclaim them as heterosexual,” as Straub (following Staves) has argued.2! But fops across the period invariably mingle, even con-

fuse, sexual and domestic reproduction with a residual economy of cultural production, that of publicity; the earlier fops defer domesticity altogether. Sir Credulous Easy denies that he has already been married: “Married before! incomparable, Sir! not so, neither, for there’s difference in men, Sir” (2.1; p. 51). The fop’s declaration of difference, satirized in the theaters as a folly to be corrected, supported the specification of hegemonic and emergent forms of manliness; but his embodiment of difference also provided the modes—publicity, queerness— of other, offstage resistances to the normalization of gender and privacy as the bases of male identity. Upon his denunciation before the gentry by Mrs. Loveit and in a spectacle Dorimant has arranged to demonstrate his own mastery, Etherege’s Sir Fopling, in The Man of Mode, insists

on his capacity to regenerate his own spectacularity: “An intrigue now would be but a temptation to me to throw away that vigour on one which I mean shall shortly make my court to the whole sex in a ballet... . No one woman is worth the loss of a cut in a caper” (5.2, p. 149).

Instead of concluding—because his intrigues with women are never consummated —that the fop is asexual, we might say that for private pleasure he substitutes a public spectacle, a mad leap into mimesis, a caper. Sir Fopling has, indeed, been called “a senseless caper” by Dorimant, who thereby locates his Francophile mannerisms outside social meaning altogether (2.2, p. 101). In Cibber’s Love's Last Shift, Sir Novelty imagines his conquest of Narcissa in terms that recall Young Worthy’s earlier account of his own strategy for winning her: “[S]he immediately rejects Young Worthy, and gives

me free access to her! Good! What follows upon that? Opportunity, Importunity, Resistance, Force, Entreaty, Persisting!—Doubting, Swearing, Lying,—Blushes, Yielding, Victory, Pleasure!—Indifference:—” (act 3, p. 31). Cibber’s fops were typically residual libertines, rakes that could

not be reformed or assimilated to domestic marriage and certainly could not be counted on to uphold men’s patriarchal authority in the

238 Privacy companionate household. Their “asexuality,” as Lois Potter and Straub have also noticed, was really an effect of their affected if fribblish liber-

tinism and not at all a problem of absent desire. Having failed to please Narcissa—he maintains that commending himself is the best flattery of the woman he courts—Sir Novelty nevertheless proceeds (or so he thinks) to have sex with her; in fact, he has had sex with his for-

mer mistress, Mrs. Flareit, in a comic inversion of the bed trick that brings about the reform of Loveless in the main plot. Exposed (and boxed on the ear) by Mrs. Flareit, he good-naturedly pays her off. But if he ends the play joyfully he has not been—cannot be—recuperated to

the sentimental heteroeroticism worked out in the play’s final act.” Likewise, Cibber’s Lord Foppington sends his wife home to London “for she is positively of no manner of Use in my Amours.” Like the play’s protagonist Sir Charles Easy, Lord Foppington agrees that other men may see his wife’s charms, but he only wants to be rid of her.”4 In Cibber’s plays foppery is not yet a divergence of erotic object but of erotic efficiency.

Andrew P. Williams, concentrating on the Restoration fops, has emphasized their “sexual inadequacy” or “inadequate sexuality” in relation to “the more masculine libertine whose sexual prowess and appetite is considered a natural condition of true manhood.” Indeed, it has become commonplace to oppose Lawrence Stone’s account of the emer-

gence of the companionate marriage with evidence of the continued centrality of libertinism to (gentle)manly identity.*° But the sentimental representation of male and female desire as mutual, if a mystification of actual practice, would nonetheless increasingly determine the range of meanings that men could assign to their pleasures. Just as the historical

emergence of a symbolic structure of homosexuality and heterosexuality does not so much record a pure and fixed division between men

who have sex with men and men who have sex with women as construct the range of possible meanings to be assigned to practices, pleasures, and identities, so the symbolic structure of sentiment, reformation, and companionate desire cannot be disregarded because of documentary evidence of continued male libertinism. Accordingly, I have located the libertine, whose erotic practices were organized according to the aim of penetration rather than by desire for a particular gendered object, within the residual economy of pederasty. Sexuality, as a set of discourses constituting personal privacy and insisting on the reciprocity of gendered desires, was what the libertine’s aggressive pursuit of the penetrable opposed. Sexuality, moreover, provided the terms for the invariable reform of the libertine in manners comedies

“There's difference in men” 239 and, accordingly, his distinction from the fop, who could not be recuperated to the economy of sexuality. Sir Fopling’s attempt to recuperate privacy to residual displays of publicness stemmed from his refusal to take the emergent formation seriously. As his residual economy of pleasures became increasingly unthinkable, even nonsensical, well outside the fashioning of private

sexualities, later fops, pursuing domesticity at the expense of the reciprocity of public and private life, would accrue a fribblish sexuality. The increasing proximity of these effeminate fops to privacy would be reinforced, as Laurence Senelick has shown in what remains one of the

finest articles on representations of sodomy on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage, by their “embourgeoisement”; across this change from status to class, “[t]he effeminate beau or pretty gentleman was to assume the fop’s dramatic function in the early eighteenth century.”2” Located outside of privacy and lacking pleasure, fribbles visited

women, admiring their dress or handwork and flaunting their own knowledge of the domestic or “feminine” arts while failing, or refusing,

to consummate those relations sexually in marriage. While David Garrick’s fribbles, like Cibber’s fops, were ostensibly heterosexual in the action of the farces, their failed or impotent heteroeroticism was coded as sodomitical through rather explicit allusions to the mollies.” Fribble, in Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens: Or, The Medley of Lovers (1747), is

called “Miss Margery,” a name identical to “Miss Molly,” while a farce that appeared following Garrick’s performance as Fribble, The Pretty Gentleman, assigned such names as “Lord Molly” and “Molliculo” to the fribbles it depicted.”? A signifying practice, rather than a real entity

who was or was not homosexual, the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury fop represented the increasing specification of effeminacy, spectacularity, and sodomy as individual traits rather than modes of power. It is helpful to compare the fop’s attitude toward women with that of

the man of sense. It is not at all certain that Dorimant (any more than Horner’s male friends in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife [1672])

likes the women he pursues; it is only clear that he takes pleasure in their bodies. By contrast, it is not at all certain that Sir Fopling enjoys women as erotic objects; Mrs. Loveit defends fops instead because “they really admire” women: DORIMANT: They commonly, indeed, believe too well of themselves—and always better of you than you deserve. Mrs. LoveEitT: You are in the right: they have an implicit faith in us, which keeps ‘em from prying narrowly into our

240 Privacy secrets and saves us the vexatious trouble of clearing doubts which your subtle and causeless jealousies every moment raise. DoORIMANT: There is an inbred falsehood in women, which

inclines ‘em still to them whom they may most easily deceive. ... You mistake the use of fools: they are designed for properties and not for friends. (5.1; pp. 137-38)

Cibber’s Elder Worthy and Hillaria repeat this exchange in Love's Last Shift:

Ext. Wor.: [A] fool recommends himself to your Sex, and that’s the reason Men of common sense live unmarry’d.

H1u.: A Fool without Jealousy, is better than a Wit with ill Nature. (act 2, p. 20)

Dorimant’s and Elder Worthy’s shared misogyny is intrinsic to their assumption of patriarchal authority, their suspicion of an alliance of women and fops a mechanism for maintaining the hierarchy of sex difference within an emergent, consumer-based economy of gendered reciprocity that threatened to level and proliferate male and female subjectivities both. The fop, increasingly identified in the eighteenth century with femininity and domesticity, marked the limits of this gendered

complementariness. He who desired women could not identify with | them; he who identified with women could not desire them.2° Within these limits men and women had room to negotiate their actual, joint practice of gender. The fop’s refusal appears, from this perspective, to be a denial of the subjective freedom of men and women, a rejection of their claims to possession in themselves. Staves has argued that “fops appear the avant-garde of sex role change. Their refinement, ridiculed by satirists, comes to seem admirable to later, more sentimental eyes.” What Staves described as the resulting “effeminization of the masculine role” I have described as privatization.*! If Cibber’s fops, in particular, can be described as the vanguard of a softened or more feminine society, it is because he has so carefully deployed foppishness as the other of privacy and the “tool” with which a new companionate heteroeroticism may be fashioned.

Begone! You Have No Power Here As in Restoration and late-seventeenth-century drama generally, what we would call heteroerotic desire in Cibber’s comedies is still a problem

“There's difference in men” 241 to be negotiated, bound up in the patriarchal and economic problems of marriage. Is marriage primarily a financial relationship or does it satisfy a desire for companionship? Does the woman submit to the man or

give herself freely to him? Is monogamy required of the husband? What privileges will each partner give up or reserve? How does each partner weigh homosocial commitments against marital duties? At stake in these comedies, to borrow Carole Pateman’s terms, is the relation of the sexual contract to the social contract. Cibber’s Elder Worthy gives voice to the difficulty for those men empowered by traditional patriarchy in moving from homosocial values to heterosocial ones, from a public (manly and aristocratic) model of true happiness to a private, domestic one: “How hard is it to find the Happiness which our shortsighted Passions hope from Woman!” (Love's Last Shift, act 1, p. 7). Amanda reforms Loveless and manages their private, domestic bonds by masquerading as a “public” woman. That wife who can “pass upon [her husband] as a new mistress,” as Young Worthy instructs her, keeps him; she reconciles her husband’s homosocial publicity to the couple’s privacy. This is one of the most important reasons why latitude within the gendered norm was necessary. Amanda must negotiate pleasures that, as Young Worthy’s management of the affair suggests, are finally homosocial: “I have a Trick shall draw him to your Bed; and when he’s there, faith, e’en let him cuckold himself” (act 1, p. 13). Restoration and late-seventeenth-century drama staged the negotiation of men’s plea-

sures; the virtuous wife redefined companionate domesticity as the support of men’s homosocial and civic bonds and thereby tied her husband’s public life to his private life.s2 By contrast, the fop failed to make his publicity representative of his privacy, and his privacy paradigmatic of public interests and civic virtues. Rather than repressing the rake’s sexuality, the new domestic marriage channeled it to productive purposes. But the fop’s pleasures—rakish in the earlier comedies, domestic in the later—served only as the other of sexuality. In his fop roles, Cibber’s corporeal style acquiescently marked the limits of the Whig project of sociability, in which his own comedies

were so deeply invested. His fops, outside heterosocial desire, exceeded the forms and degrees of the oscillation possible within normative gender complementariness—the companionate domesticity that Cibber’s plays, long before “the domestic novel,” had done so much to advance.* Cibber’s fops were pawns in the aggressive negotiations by heroes and heroines to define their roles vis-a-vis one another within matrriage—an institution increasingly under surveillance not only for

242 Privacy its economic and status-consolidating potential but in its constitutive pleasures. Narcissa and Hillaria use Sir Novelty Fashion to negotiate their relations with Young and Elder Worthy; and Hillaria later assures Elder Worthy, “You know I hate this Wretch [Sir Novelty Fashion], loath and scorn him” (act 2, p. 20). Lady Betty Modish uses Lord Foppington to get Lord Morelove under her thumb, later admitting, “I us’d him but as a Tool of my Resentment” (Careless Husband, act 5, p. 1:400). As in The Man of Mode, the fop serves the woman as a tool to make her

real lover jealous, while her acquiescence to her lover must be staged through her disavowal and exposure of the fop. The fop is always a “tool” or “property” with which the hero and heroine move from the fundamentally homosocial worlds of their upbringing and education toward (albeit not yet fully achieving, or perhaps even desiring) the complementariness of the eighteenth-century domesticated marriage. Accordingly Cibber’s fops ceded the social center to the normatively gendered men and women who represented the class body. “You see I am. good-natur’d,” Sir Novelty Fashion declares following his own public exposure (Love's Last Shift, act 4, p. 43).°4

I have argued, counterintuitively, that men’s occupation of the domestic sphere in the eighteenth century and their participation in activities formerly considered effeminate constituted the phallocization (rather than softening) of masculinity, marking the derivation of new civic personalities from men’s interest in privacy. Failing (or refusing) to occupy private space in a way that made it representative of civic virtue, the eighteenth-century domesticated fop demystified the interpellation of citizens as gendered and heteroerotic. Consequently, he was cast out of the very privatized society that had enabled his emergence, his body

made the sign of that very (disavowed) history against which privacy had been constructed and continued to be defended. Reading against the text, Staves has imagined the benefits, for women, of marriage to a “sensitive” man like Garrick’s Fribble; but I would emphasize the extent

to which Garrick’s play deployed (fictive) women’s disgust for the fop.°5 Even as Garrick’s female characters continue to use the fop as a tool they consider effeminacy to be a misappropriation of femininity, an encroachment on the domesticity through which they have claimed political rights; and on these grounds they encourage the fop’s humiliation and punishment. Far from being impressed that Fribble will “make the tea, comb the dogs, and dress the children” after they are married,%6 Garrick’s Biddy stage manages a comic duel pitting Pribble against his

ostensible rival. (I will return to this duel shortly.) The play makes

“There's difference in men” 243 fribblishness responsible for the violence directed against it, bringing Fribble onstage after a queer-bashing in which he was the victim:

Fris.: As I was coming out of my Lodgings,—Says [a hackney-coach driver] to me, Would your Honour have a Coach? —No, Man, said I, not now, (with all the Civility imaginable)—I'll carry you and your Doll too, (says he) Miss

Margery for the same Price.—Upon which, the masculine

Beasts about us fell a laughing; then I turn’d round in a great Passion, curse me, (says I) Fellow, but I’ll trounce thee.— And, as I was holding out my Hand in a threatning Poster,—thus;—he makes a cut at me with his Whip, and striking me over the Nail of my little Finger, it gave me such exquisite Torter that I fainted away; and while I was in this Condition, the Mob pick’d my Pocket of my Purse, my Scissars, my Mocoa Smelling-Bottle, and my Huswife.

Biddy punctuates Fribble’s story with conspiratorial asides to the audience: “I shall laugh in his Face” (1:20). Such representations made the “difference in men” that Behn’s and Cibber’s fops had celebrated a problem not among men, but between fribbles and women.°” By the mid-eighteenth century, male and female writers both could represent the English gentlewoman as reproducing civil society through

her management of the household and support of men’s public endeavors. Female and male writers converged, if for divergent reasons, around representations of the gentlewoman’s moral superiority, positioning the domestic and the feminine as supports of the public interest.3° But while gentlewomen certainly acted, as Felicity A. Nussbaum has put it, “to sustain certain class identification,”°? such representations of women’s agency could also operate to mystify transformations in patriarchal power. To understand the historical tension between fem-

inists and effeminate men, we might look to the erasures on which claims to gender identity have been founded. Arguing that constructs of femininity allowed women to participate in the production of the public sphere, Lawrence E. Klein has pointed out that “the enhanced stature of sociability and politeness” in the eighteenth century “involved a normative enhancement of the feminine.” But the attributes that he has designated as “feminine” —“sweetness,” “complaisance,” “civility,” and ornamentation—may all be claimed as well for disavowed courtly, and in particular cavalier bodies, both male and female.*? Appropriating such attributes toward an enhanced role for women in civil society, early feminists recited an already mystified

244 Privacy construction of gender, replicating the very erasure of effeminate bodies (the boy, the courtier) on which the ideal of gender complemen-

tariness depended. In doing so they erased as well the effeminate man’s other half, the unruly and foppish woman.*! Constructed as proximate, effeminacy and (gentle) femininity were made to wage battle in the same turf—the space of the private household, increasingly domesticated as the home space, increasingly natu-

ralized as the scene of intimacy. If the fop and the fribble occupied gentlewomen’s spaces and enjoyed a proximity to the mimetic objects constitutive of the masquerade of gentle femininity—“Playing with your fan, smelling to your gloves, commending your hair, and taking notice how ‘tis cut and shaded after the new way,” as Dorimant complains in The Man of Mode (5.1; p. 137)—the hegemony of an increasingly domesticated and privatized form of patriarchy has required that they be punished for doing so and that the women who defend or use them should be the instruments of their punishment. In his Life of David Garrick (1801), Arthur Murphy celebrated his hero’s successful satire in Miss in Her Teens—Fribble was “laughed out of society” —and credited it with the nearly genocidal power to eradicate the fribble’s apparently innate hermaphroditism: “A single instance of the effeminate character appeared some years since at a village in Surry, and having no appearance of either the masculine or feminine gender, all who saw this motley being, agreed to give to such a phcenomenon the name of The It. That was the last of the puny race.”# The stability of gender required the extinction of Fribble’s queer articulations.

In late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century comedies, heteroeroticism, domesticity, and the reform of the libertine were all problems to be negotiated publicly, onstage. By the time of Garrick’s midcentury farcical afterpieces, however, the male protagonists move easily between public and domestic spaces. Positioning the economic and political public spheres offstage (and accordingly outside the action represented onstage), the farces present domesticity as the symbolic center of the private interests shared mutually by propertied men and women. Captain Loveit’s movement, in Miss in Her Teens, from a street in Town, where he and his servant Puff plot their means of access to Biddy, into her home space reconstitutes Biddy’s domesticity as a feminine property in which the male characters take a possessive—and competing — interest. Loveit’s masculinity is characterized by his mobility, by his power to enter into and reconstitute the domestic sphere as a scene of public interest. By contrast, Fribble’s domestic skills, superior to those

“There's difference in men” 245 of the heroine, signal an identification with the home space that cannot be recuperated to the gendered reciprocity of privacy and publicness. As Hans Turley has argued, following Nancy Armstrong’s analysis in Desire and Domestic Fiction, the eighteenth-century sodomite had to be excluded from “the gendered model of the transmission of capital”: “The desire displayed by the sodomitical subject has no place in this paradigm because he has no economic value in a world centered on desire between the genders.” The fribble’s self-appointed role as arbiter

of taste and authority on domestic management—Fribble even instructs Biddy in a properly feminine curtsey (1:22)— threatens to expose the gendered reciprocity indicative of gentility as an artificial and contingent construction. With the hero and heroine already committed to the ideal of a companionate marriage, Miss in Her Teens accepts heteroerotic fulfillment as a given. In the first act, Biddy tells her servant Tag that she is expecting

two suitors, Fribble and Captain Flash, an effeminate and a braggart fop, respectively. The hero Captain Loveit arrives first, however; tellingly, he achieves his success as a suitor offstage and between the acts. The second act focuses instead on the conventional satirical aim of exposing and correcting foppery, a comic, if violent, disciplining represented as necessary for the security and happiness of women. But unlike Flash, whose false bravura is exposed and punished, Fribble is not reformed; he is simply made invisible. “Thou art of a Species too despicable for Correction,” Captain Loveit tells him; “therefore be gone, and if I see you here again, your Insignificancy shan’t protect you” (1:32). That sentiment marked the limits of satire is not just a matter of generic

history. Satire, ridicule, and raillery all became potential vehicles of queerness. Garrick’s The Male-Coquette (1757) follows a similar pattern. Sophia Sprightly has two suitors, Tukely and George Daffodil. She disguises as the Italian nobleman “Il Marchese di Macaroni” (a doubled al-

lusion to the macaroni and the Italian sodomite“) to test Daffodil’s interest; but before she can do so, Tukely arrives. Sophia reveals herself to Tukely and they join forces to lay bare the impotency of Daffodil’s flirtations, Tukely undertaking the task “for the sake of the whole [female] sex.”4° Tukely and Sophia represent Daffodil’s failure to follow through on his flirtations with women as an act of deception. Daffodil, in Sophia’s words, “assume|s] passions he never feels” (2:35). Whereas Cibber used his fops as foils to the main action of achieving proper marriages, Garrick’s farces reversed main plot and subplot

so that the traditionally central action of the negotiation (if not the

246 Privacy resolution) of cross-sex desire occurred offstage. In doing so these farces

naturalized companionate heteroeroticism; it was simply no longer a problem to be negotiated at centerstage. As Tag notes, “Not Art, but Na-

ture now performs her Part, / And every Word’s the Language of the Heart” (Miss in Her Teens, 1:15). Violence toward the fop produced hetero-

sexuality as we know it, as a companionate relationship between the sexes, on the one hand, and a masculine altruism toward the weaker sex, on the other, that could both constitute and mediate the relationship of private and public interests. But the performativity of heterosexuality operates under erasure. The display of gender and cross-gendered desires seems merely the unfortunate consequence of doing battle against the fops and fribbles who refuse personal and political privacy.

The Female Spectator By mid-century it had become possible for women to assert a look—to assert, that is, their own activity as spectators—so long as their looking signaled their consent to the gendered reciprocity characteristic of the emergent, heteroerotic form of patriarchy. An extant engraving of the

duel between the effeminate Fribble and the braggart Captain Flash orchestrated by Biddy in Garrick’s Miss in Her Teens is extraordinary

for what it reveals about the politics of gender and vision in the mid-eighteenth century. “The Modern Duel,” an engraving published in 1747, shows Garrick as Fribble retreating against Mrs. Pritchard (Tag), who turns him back toward Flash. “We shall certainly do one another a prejudice,” he whines, as Mrs. Hippisley (Biddy) eggs on his opponent: “Do stick him, stick him Cap. Flash.” Of prime interest is the engraver’s depiction of the audience in the boxes flanking the stage, for the circu-

lation of looking constitutes gender difference in strictly heterosexual terms. The engraving situates Fribble and Flash downstage of Biddy and Tag, with Biddy’s position at the apex of the triangular composition marking her symbolic centrality during the duel and situating her as the proper object of desire of the men for whom she has arranged this spectacle—not only her lover in the play, who is in fact offstage at this point, but the men in the audience as well. Biddy’s centrality in the visual field also positions her as the point of identification for the women

in the audience. The male spectators are shown uniformly looking downstage at Fribble and Flash, and they are laughing hysterically — one of them wipes his eyes with his handkerchief. The women specta-

tors, by contrast, are looking upstage at Tag and Biddy; instead of

“There's difference in men” 247

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